Harvest of Empire: Interview with Juan Gonzlez

Sometimes it's the simple idioms or popular sayings that can best help us understand even the most complicated topics. For instance, you reap what you sow (derived from a Biblical proverb), can help us understand immigration, the highly inflammatory and divisive topic that periodically ignites national debates and is once again a current topic of political discussion. It works like this: First-world countries such as the United States that plant seeds of economic and political interests in other, mainly third-world countries, will eventually reap the fruits of their self-serving efforts. In addition to building massive corporate wealth and international political power, their unintended and most bountiful harvest is the migration of millions of men, women and children that have followed the economic bloodlines from their own countries back to the US.

Journalist Juan Gonzalez's Harvest of Empire puts Latin American migration to the US into a historical perspective that spans hundreds of years and contains the modern world's most complex issue into the simple, yet profound metaphor. The documentary (airing Wednesday on KCET), is based on Gonzalez's book that traces major waves of immigration from Mexico, Central American and the Caribbean to the U.S.' economic, political and military interventions in each of these regions. Harvest of Empire incisively reveals the forces behind immigration that continues to play out today.

In this interview, Juan Gonzalez shares his perspectives on current immigration issues including mass migration of undocumented Central American children to the US, as well as how this and other migratory movements are part of a larger worldwide immigration crisis.

Juan Gonzalez, Demoncracy Now!

What do you think is the most pressing issue or challenge facing undocumented Latino immigrants in the US today?

Clearly for the undocumented, the issue is when their status will be regularized because the reality is that migration is a worldwide issue. We're seeing it obviously with Syrian and Libyan refugees in Europe. We're seeing millions of people leaving their home country as a result of the forces of war, oppression, or economic globalization. Migration is becoming a bigger problem. People being considered undocumented unauthorized or illegal in different countries is a worldwide phenomenon now and the economies of these countries are going have to deal with the fact that labor, like capital has become much more mobile in the 20th and 21st century. Migrants to the US are driven here by a variety of forces yet once they get here they're in the shadows of this world, being perceived by the rest of American society as not wholly legal. If we can regularize migrant labor in this country it'll be a lot better for the 11 and a half million people who are in this shadow world today.

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What are your thoughts on the huge wave of unaccompanied Central American minors that's taken place in the last several years, and its aftermath?

There's been an explosion of violence and criminality in Central America. To a large degree, it comes as a result of the fact that in the 90's and the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. basically ships young Latinos raised in this country but that have gotten into drugs, crime or gangs, back to their countries of origin as soon as they get out of prison. In every major city in the United States, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, you have daily or weekly flights of people who are taken right out of prison and shipped back to their home countries. This new criminal element is neither from that country nor from the US. They're in this world of not being integrated into either society and they have fueled a lot of the rise in crime and violence and terrorizing of the working class and peasant Central American community. To some degree, our policy of directly deporting so many of these young people has led to this new wave of violence, which is not some sort of political guerilla war. It's more of a festering rise in crime in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Young people who don't want to be a part of crime and don't want to be forced into these gangs are fleeing here for safety but now they're being punished and held in detention or sent back. At least there are some presidential candidates who are recognizing that and are saying that we have to provide some kind of method to determine which of these children that are fleeing here have a well-founded fear that their lives are going to be in danger if they're sent back to their country.

How do you think that these surges in immigration from Central America fit into larger worldwide conversations about refugees and asylum seekers?

They are not fleeing political violence as did the refugees from the region in the 1980's when the civil wars were raging in all those countries. But they are fleeing violence and trying to save their lives. So I do think that each of their cases has to be adjudicated properly and according to our own asylum laws and we can't treat children in the same way we might treat adults. I can't understand why we continue to detain so many of these children and deport them.

It's clear to me that first-world western countries including the U.S. are in a state of crisis in dealing with migration from war-torn, economically ravaged third-world countries. Is there a moment of reckoning at hand in which these countries are going to have to make some hard decisions?

If you look at the migrations for all these European countries in France

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/departures/harvest-of-empire-interview-with...
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