Yates-Doerr is an associate professor anthropology at Oregon State University and the author of “ Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm.” She is also a fellow with The OpEd Project.
Immigration is a hot-button topic in the presidential election, with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both promising to crack down hard at the border. But neither candidate is talking about a root cause of immigration: the long history of U.S. meddling, which has directly resulted in displacement. If our politicians really wanted to address immigration, they would look not at the border but at past actions of the U.S. government, which have directly produced so much of the immigration we see today.
Consider the case of Guatemala, the origin point of 11 percent of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Over the past 20 years, I have worked as an anthropologist in a region with one of Guatemala’s highest rates of exodus to the United States. Twenty years ago, it was mostly men who would migrate. Now women and children migrate regularly too. They are leaving conditions of extreme poverty and oppression for low-paid farm and factory labor. Though political discourse focuses on the “deterrence” of migrants at the border, this ignores the open secret that the U.S. economy relies on the labor force that migrants provide.
To secure this labor force, the U.S. government has destabilized Guatemala for decades. People familiar with U.S. history will know that in the 1950s, the government helped to topple Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, who was implementing modest land reform. Powerful American politicians had financial ties to the United Fruit Company, which ran banana plantations throughout the country. Because Árbenz’s support of farmworkers interfered with company profit, the U.S. government worked to violently depose him.
What started as a terror campaign and coup in the 1950s became an outright strategy of Indigenous massacre by the 1980s. Military and paramilitary forces with U.S. training targeted Indigenous leaders, including mothers and midwives because they were skilled at caring for and nourishing their communities. Mercenary armies, operating a scorched earth campaign, razed and deforested communities with the goal of depopulating entire regions. The U.S. and Guatemalan governments worked together so that Guatemalans would starve.
A less familiar history is that the U.S. government's destabilization of Guatemala also took a form more covert than military violence, and that these activities continue to the present day. As the United Fruit Company was withdrawing from Guatemala in the second half of the 20th century, the U.S. Agency for International Development set up a headquarters in Guatemala’s capital. Under the pretense of encouraging development, USAID promoted monoculture farming. Many of the genetically hybridized seeds the agency distributed were ill adapted to Guatemalan climates and required industrial fertilizers and pesticides — several of which were banned as too dangerous for use in the United States. Meanwhile, cancer rates, miscarriage and neurological problems all began to spread.
In parallel to USAID’s development interventions, in the 1970 and ‘80s the U.S. government helped fund scientists to develop a synthetic protein powder, ostensibly meant to solve malnutrition. The powder was licensed to Guatemala’s largest beer corporation to mass-produce at scale and branded as a healthy alternative to traditional staples of corn, beans and squash. Guatemala has since seen decades of U.S.-backed nutrition interventions reliant on cheap, mass-produced powders. These can be found all across the country, and still Guatemala has one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in the world. Health workers frequently blame so-called uneducated mothers for being inept at feeding their families, pushing more packaged nutrients as the solution to their problems. If mothers object, they risk losing access to care.
But the challenges Guatemalans are experiencing are the result of cruel policies — not women’s ignorance. The forced reliance on agrochemicals has damaged soils and landscapes; the forced replacement of protein powders for traditional foods has damaged entire ways of life. Many Guatemalans who migrate today are looking for modest wages to care for family members sick with cancer, kidney failure or other diseases associated with living in a poisoned environment. Guatemalan soils used to be among the richest in the world; today crop failures are common and deforested hillsides are susceptible to deadly landslides. People are desperate. They are willing to work for pennies and they are willing to risk dying — which has been the point.
The narrative that immigrants are stealing jobs from people in the United States has the story backwards: The U.S. government has been complicit in destabilizing the livelihood and labor of Guatemalans for decades. Until this is addressed, people living in poverty and oppression will continue to migrate, no matter the obstacles put before them. If politicians were serious about addressing migration, they would stop talking about policing the border and instead work to reverse the harm that U.S. interventions have caused.
