The Darien Gap and the Truth about Migrants

By now, most Americans know what the Darien Gap is. It’s a sixty-mile broken trail through rotten, poisonous-snake-infested jungle between Colombia and Panama. It’s full of animal and human predators, including real coyotes, paid human ones that call themselves “guides,” robbers, highwaymen, and rapists.

But for migrants seeking refuge or asylum, it’s a far gateway to the US. It’s a portal to North America from Central and South America.

Migrants trek through this dangerous portal, or through similarly dangerous routes in Guatemala, just to trek another thousand miles on foot to get to the United States. They do this in the hope of sneaking across the border and, if caught, claiming asylum.

Migrants who come this way are not just from Central or South America. They come from all over the world. They come from places like Bangladesh, China, Congo, Haiti, Malawi, Sudan, Venezuela, and Zambia.

They can’t just get on planes or trains to come. Why? Officials will ask for papers at the other end, and they can’t even board the plane or train to begin their journeys.

So they come on foot. They wend their weary and dangerous ways from gateway cities in Latin America, through the Darien Gap and Guatemala, along the torturous thousand-mile trail, up to Greg Abbott’s razor wire at the Texas border. They come in droves, knowing full well how hard their thousand-mile “hike” will be, what dangers await, and how criminals will be lurking along the way.

Our Demagogue wants us to believe that these migrants are coming to prey on us. He says they are “poisoning our blood,” taking a phrase directly from Hitler’s racist lexicon. Earlier, he said they are bringing crime, drugs, disease and violence.

But all that’s so wrong. Crime, drugs, disease and violence—particularly from organized gangs—are what these migrants are fleeing.

They come, by and large, from failed states that can’t protect their remaining middle classes, let alone people at the bottom. Where migrants come from, their lives and families mean nothing. Gangs, violence and corrupt “mobocracies” rule. Haiti today is just one particularly bad example. Venezuela is another.

All these migrants seek is a peaceful life of work and family, unthreatened by gangs, drug cartels, predatory oligarchies, or organized criminals in league with corrupt governments. They seek fair wages for hard work, peace, and tranquility.

The truth and the anti-migrant propaganda are day and night. Statistics show that when migrants move into a community, the crime rate goes down. (More recent statistics are inconclusive because it's difficult to disentangle the effects of the pandemic—a sharp rise in crime during the early years, then a precipitous fall as it came under control—from the effects of migration.)

Why is this so? It’s simple cause and effect. The migrants have come a thousand miles on foot, over painful weeks and months, often in semi-starved condition, just to get here. Without papers, every single one knows that he or she can be deported back to the origin with a single phone call. All that thousand miles of hardship can be reduced to nothing in a single day.

So all keep exceedingly low profiles. None wants to stand out in any way, let alone be accused of or apprehended for criminal activity. The thought of having that thousand-mile nightmare reduced to naught with a single deportation is one of the most powerful disincentives for crime that any human being can feel.

Anyway, the idea that they came to prey on us makes absolutely no sense. If they were criminals, why not stay in their own countries, where law enforcement is sketchy and corrupt and a simple bribe avoids jail time? They know that our police and law enforcers are less corrupt than where they came from; that’s part of why they come.

But the truth gets even worse. The right-wing migrant bashers want it both ways. They want to bash migrants as criminals and blood-poisoners to dupe voters and win elections. But at the same time, they want them here as cheap and docile labor. This has been the GOP’s dirty little secret since Ronald Reagan first reformed our immigration laws 48 years ago.

Here’s how it works. Undocumented workers are not just cheap labor. They are also docile. They don’t complain of low pay. They don’t complain of lousy working conditions. They don’t complain of working 60 to 80 hour weeks isolated on small farms, where sometimes their bosses give them only rotten shacks with leaky roofs and black mold to live in. Even parents don’t complain about their children being forced to work in adult jobs and being maimed or killed because they are too small or weak or improperly trained to do adults’ work.

Migrants also don’t form or join labor unions, at least not since the bracero and other “guest worker” programs expired. Why? Without a legal presence in this country, they can be deported with a single phone call. And the bosses know they don’t have to have all their low-paid workers deported, just a few. Deport the “ringleaders” and “trouble makers,” and the rest fall into line.

But all this is mostly secret stuff. This is just one way—the secret way—that the right wing exploits undocumented migrant labor. It uses cheap, docile migrant labor to lower production costs and make greater profit. This is the traditional way that the GOP, as the “party of business,” serves the bosses that support and fund it and helps them compete with rising low-labor-cost nations like China, Mexico and Vietnam.

The other way the GOP exploits migrant labor is more open. In fact, it’s flagrant. Quite publicly, the GOP blames migrant labor for rising crime (even, as now, when crime isn’t rising), for an “invasion” at our border, and for disorder and lawlessness in our cities and small towns. It has no statistics to back these claims up because statistics point the other way: to lower crime rates for migrants than the native population.

But the truth doesn’t matter. What the GOP can get voters to believe is what matters. And so far it’s been able to get many voters to believe the worst. It did that during President Biden’s recent State of the Union Speech, citing a single anecdote of a female jogger killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant.

Citing a single horrific event instead of comprehensive data makes no scientific or practical sense. But it makes perfect emotional sense.

And it makes absolutely brilliant propaganda sense for the oligarchs who drive and fund the GOP. What they get is a whole class of eleven million or so undocumented serfs, who work for low wages and under miserable conditions for fear of instant deportment. This makes the oligarchs’ plants and factories more competitive on a global scale. At the same time, they get a middle class afraid of migrants who make cheap stuff and so is willing to let the oligarchs break unions with anti-dues laws, so-called “right to work” laws and anti-union pressure tactics that border on the illegal even under current lax labor laws.

What puzzles me is why native American factory workers don’t see the connection between migrants’ yearning for better pay and working conditions and their own. The only tried-and-true means to those ends is not a mythical “socialist workers’ paradise.” That failed miserably, after a fair trial, in both Soviet Russia and Communist China. In a thriving capitalist economy like ours, the path to workers’ welfare is strong and honest labor unions. They succeeded brilliantly from FDR’s day until Ronald Reagan started bashing them and government in the early 70s.

It’s just common sense that labor unions float all worker’s boats. But migrant workers can’t form or join labor unions unless they have some sort of legal status to protect them against arbitrary deportation.

The great César Chávez and his Farmworkers Union showed the way. But the oligarchs countered by letting the guest-workers statutes expire, and by demonizing migrants, thus splitting workers’ labor-union movements. Divide and conquer: it’s a strategy that has worked marvelously for the oligarchs and demagogues ever since Julius Caesar, but not so well for working people.

As for me, I’ve known for most of my life that migrants are sources of our nation’s strength and continuing national renewal. I’ve known that since my second year in college, in 1963, when I first met Man Hoo Kwong.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Permalink to this post