From its beginnings in 1979 to its negotiated peace settlement in 1992, the Salvadoran civil war was one of the most violent and protracted conflicts in the world. Almost immediately, the war transformed from a vicious local struggle to a key episode in the Cold War. Although American journalists, politicians, and activists focused heavily on the numerous atrocities committed by both leftist guerrillas and government-sponsored right-wing paramilitaries, caught amid the chaos and seemingly endless violence were the hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans displaced from their homes. In the 1980s, more than five hundred thousand of these displaced persons gradually moved northward, first into Mexico and ultimately toward the United States border. This migration en masse of Salvadorans sparked an intensely politicized debate over U.S. refugee policy and consequently helped to shape the legal contours and political culture surrounding immigration.

The key to understanding the Salvadoran refugee crisis in the United States lies in two areas: the Carter administration’s reconfiguration of refugee policy in 1980 and the Reagan administration’s subsequent implementation of the new law. Throughout most of the Cold War, the ideological orientation of one’s nation of origin largely determined who qualified as a refugee. In general, federal law privileged individuals fleeing communist governments in Eastern Europe.Footnote ¹ Yet a series of international refugee crises in the late 1970s and an emerging human rights ethos, embodied in President Carter, led to policy changes that reflected both new geopolitical circumstances and new conceptions of human rights and foreign affairs. The Carter administration and its allies in Congress crafted a revised version of refugee law, the 1980 Refugee Act.Footnote ² The new policy eliminated nationality as a qualification for refugee status and in its place proposed to identify refugees individually.Footnote ³ Accordingly, under the new law displaced Salvadorans, like all potential refugees, would be reviewed on an individual, case-by-case basis.

Yet this legal change rendered displaced Salvadorans without recourse for claiming refugee status as a national group in the United States. For throughout much of the 1980s, the Reagan administration publicly classified Salvadoran refugee claimants as “economic migrants” seeking personal gain, not political safe-haven. Institutional rules established in the act afforded the State Department the right to adjudicate the validity of refugee claims, which gave the executive branch penultimate power over refugee policy. Thus as war waged on, the Reagan administration, a constant supporter of the Salvadoran government, legally withheld refugee status from fleeing Salvadorans. Even as the hundreds of thousands of displaced Salvadorans trudged northward in 1983 and the “economic immigrant” argument became untenable, the Reagan administration maintained its exclusionary stance by reframing refugee questions around a new imperative: winning the war in El Salvador. Providing a stable and secure nation, the administration argued, was the best path toward aiding displaced Salvadorans. The unintended legal consequences of the 1980 act, then, allowed foreign policy concerns, the search for a stable, noncommunist El Salvador, to dictate an exclusionary refugee policy.

Indeed, only by granting a special executive mandate called Extended Voluntary Departure (EVD) could all forcibly displaced Salvadorans receive universal amnesty in the United States. The 1980 law and its subsequent implementation resigned displaced Salvadorans to a precarious legal position throughout the entire decade. The Salvadorans’ plight generated fierce political debates as well. A movement of nongovernmental supporters, later dubbed the Sanctuary Movement, offered safe haven for refugees and lobbied Congress for EVD while a vitriolic anti-immigration, antirefugee coalition protested the Salvadoran presence in nativist terms and opposed any resolution providing sanctuary for the displaced in the United States. Only through a series of contingent developments in American immigration law and alterations in the Reagan administration’s tactics for achieving victory in El Salvador at the end of the Cold War did displaced Salvadorans receive legal protection in the United States.

Recently historians have begun to examine the relationship between American foreign policy and domestic immigration and refugee policy. A growing body of scholarly work looks at American refugee policy in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, with particular focus on Eastern European and Indochinese refugees.Footnote ⁴ Historians of immigration policy have highlighted important developments over the course of the 1970s and 1980s with regard to immigration from Central America, but these scholars have as of yet neglected to fully contextualize domestic political developments within broader discourses of forced migrations or American foreign policy.Footnote ⁵ Only very recently has any historian attempted to explore the systematic interactions between refugee policy, foreign-policy imperatives, and domestic political and cultural considerations.Footnote ⁶ On the Salvadoran crisis, much of the historiography focuses on the Reagan administration’s stringent anticommunism, and not on the interpretations and implementations of the 1980 Act.Footnote ⁷ This article adds to this emerging scholarly intersection of American foreign, refugee, and immigration policy by using the Salvadoran refugee crisis of the 1980s to elucidate how foreign policy influences refugee policy and how legal structures both enable and constrict the ability of refugees to seek sanctuary.

HUMANS RIGHTS AND REFUGEES: THE 1980 REFUGEE ACT

In a speech commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed that he “sought to rekindle the beacon of human rights in American foreign policy.” Governments, Carter claimed, had a special responsibility to protect their citizenry. Every government derived its legitimacy from its capacity to uphold the human rights of all its citizens, including refugees. “Refugees are the living, homeless casualties of one very important failure on the part of the world to live by the principles of peace and human rights,” Carter said. “To help these refugees is a simple human duty. As Americans, as a people made up largely of the descendants of refugees, we feel that duty with special keenness.”Footnote ⁸

In his speech and many times afterward, Carter defined refugee issues in terms of human rights. His policies reflected this inclination. Backed by the administration’s most fervent advocates of human rights, assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian and Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, the Carter administration worked in close concert with liberal Democratic senator Edward Kennedy to reform existing refugee law. Specifically, the administration sought to create a new legal definition that reflected the United Nations’ individualistic definition of a refugee, without regard to specific national origin.Footnote ⁹ After a two-year battle in Congress, the Carter administration succeeded in reforming refugee policy in the 1980 Refugee Act.Footnote ¹⁰

This new policy offered a number of key legal and institutional innovations, but two in particular warrant close attention. First, the document formally defined a refugee as “any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality, or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person habitually resided, and who is unable or unwilling to return to, and is unable or unwilling to avail himself or herself to the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social, or political opinion.”Footnote ¹¹ Since the 1950s, federal law had defined a refugee in terms of national origin. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and State Department officials did not confer refugee status necessarily on a case-by-case basis; rather, only persons leaving certain countries deemed to be sufficiently dangerous could receive “refugee” status and hence protection in the United States. Also, the law mandated that the attorney general create procedures for foreign nationals living within the United States to apply for “asylum” status in the midst of refugee crisis, a legal category that had previously been managed in an ad hoc fashion.Footnote ¹² The old formulation privileged above all else persons from fleeing communist governments in Eastern Europe.Footnote ¹³ The new definition of 1980, borrowing language from the United Nations, eliminated the national-origin qualification. The 1980 law placed the locus of legal rights within the individual, not upon a group.

Second, the 1980 act also required the State Department to provide oversight and advice to the INS regarding the merits of each individual application. Often, the INS deferred to the State Department, as numerous cases, such as Haitian Refugee Center vs. Civiletti, ruled that the INS was incapable of making an informed decision on the international context for immigration in a particular case.Footnote ¹⁴ To supplant the INS, the State Department advisory committee therefore assumed the position of expert to interpret the meaning of the “fear of persecution” clause in particular cases. The law conferred upon the department legal power in determining the validity of an applicant’s claim for refugee protection. The inclusion of this advisory stipulation reinforced significant institutional linkages between the bureaucratic bodies governing domestic immigration and the making of foreign policy. The task of interpreting the meaning of “fear of persecution” thereby fell squarely on the shoulders of officials in the State Department. From its start, the law thus opened a set of tensions that would soon be put to the test.

The first massive flow of refugees came from Nicaragua amid intensifying conflict within the country in the late 1970s. In response, in the summer of 1980 the Carter administration chose to offer Extended Voluntary Departure (EVD) to more than three thousand Nicaraguan refugees (out of an estimated 10,000–20,000 who entered the country the previous year).Footnote ¹⁵ EVD is a legal category identified in the Immigration and Nationality Act that confers special legal power on the attorney general to permit all persons from a given nation to remain in the United States, so as long as the attorney general agrees that such people would be physically endangered if they were to return to their home nation. EVD, in short, provides temporary legal protection for all foreign nationals who exist outside the bounds of national citizenship law. The Carter administration granted EVD to all Nicaraguans residing in the United States on July 3, reiterated on August 29, for a period of fifteenth months, just as the Sandinista Revolution crested in Nicaragua. This protection came as Carter’s efforts to negotiate a settlement between the Somoza regime and the Sandinistas foundered. Under the leadership by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the administration adopted a hard-line position vis-à-vis the Sandinistas.Footnote ¹⁶ In this context, extending EVD to Nicaraguans reflected the administration’s political objectives of undermining the Sandinistas. EVD and refugee policy were both tools of foreign policy.

This politicization of EVD was also apparent in American policy vis-à-vis El Salvador. Like Nicaragua, El Salvador was in the midst of a burgeoning conflict, and the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 coincided with a rapid escalation of violence in El Salvador. Following the consolidation of the multiple guerrilla groups into a single political entity, the FMLN, and the reemergence and rapid dispersal of repressive paramilitary groups, widespread violence ensued. Massive emigration and forced migrations from El Salvador soon followed. Although violence escalated throughout 1979 and 1980 and thousands of Salvadorans applied for refugee status and others pressed for EVD, the Carter administration did not offer EVD and deported twelve thousand Salvadorans back to El Salvador in 1980 alone.Footnote ¹⁷ Instead, it scrambled to put together a $5.7 million military aid package to the Salvadoran government, in the hopes of preventing another Nicaragua.Footnote ¹⁸ With the United States funding the government in El Salvador and officials claiming that the government was doing no wrong in waging war against guerrillas in the countryside, the administration made no mention of a looming refugee crisis and instead focused on the displaced Nicaraguans.

DOTTING “I’S” AND CROSSING “T’S”: THE REAGAN ADMINISTRATION AND REFUGEE POLICY

The intensifying conflicts in Central America and the burgeoning refugee crises became a focal point of the 1980 presidential election in the United States. Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made confrontation with perceived communist influence in El Salvador a hallmark of his foreign policy platform. “Must we let Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador all become additional ‘Cubas,’ new outposts for Soviet combat brigades?” he asked rhetorically on the eve of the Illinois Primary in March.Footnote ¹⁹ Reagan posited that the Cubans and Soviets had facilitated the civil war in El Salvador. Speaking before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago on August 18, 1980, Reagan declared that “Soviet-inspired trouble” in the form of “Cuban-trained guerrilla bands” in El Salvador threatened American security.Footnote ²⁰ Throughout the fall campaign, he lambasted the Carter administration for diplomatic weakness in Central America. He inveighed against Carter’s approval of an economic aid package to Nicaragua and El Salvador in early September as weak and ineffective.Footnote ²¹ Reagan’s attacks on Central American policy raised awareness about the Salvadoran issue leading up to the election, which he won in a landslide.

As Reagan began to govern in the early months of 1981, the war in El Salvador intensified and tens of thousands of Salvadoran refugees started to flee the country. In March 1981, INS officials reported a surge in Salvadoran detainees along the Mexican border. Many of these detainees offered tragic stories about being coerced from their homes, explaining that they found no choice but to flee from the threat of increasing civil strife, which followed the reports of a number of a brutal “Christmas murders” by the armed forces around the holiday.Footnote ²² According to the refugee law, since the State Department had not designated El Salvador as dangerous or violent enough to warrant conferring temporary refuge status upon its expatriated aliens, the INS deported thousands of Salvadorans back to their homes.Footnote ²³ The vague “fear of persecution” phrase had been invoked to justify keeping Salvadorans out.

The increase in immigration coincided with the Reagan’s administration formal adoption of a hard-lined approach to El Salvador. Although the Reagan administration spoke with more bellicose rhetoric and the Carter administration had emphasized human rights, the policies of the administrations demonstrated more continuity than change. On February 23, 1981, the State Department, now under the direction of Alexander Haig Jr., issued a “White Paper” on communist influence in El Salvador. Presented to the public by the new Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, Thomas O. Enders, who had previously been the State Department’s charge d’affairs to Phnom Penh in the early 1970s, the White Paper declared that communist forces, directed under tutelary supervision by Cuba, had besieged the government of El Salvador. The White Paper argued that the United States should increase military aid to the Salvadoran government to combat this communist subversion.Footnote ²⁴ The Paper built upon an initial $5.7 million aid package passed in the last year of the Carter administration. It placed El Salvador within the framework of a broader regional strategy premised on countering communist insurgencies throughout Central America. The policy sought to defend perceived threats to American security interests in the Western hemisphere and to promote values more compatible with the Reagan’s administration’s ideological platform. In this sense, it confirmed the rising importance within the administration’s overall foreign policy of revising what they called the Carter administration’s weakness and overcoming the “Vietnam syndrome,” which made foreign interventions seem undesirable and less direct means, such as military aid, preferable. The Paper also brought increased attention to the rapidly warming Cold War ideological struggle in Central America, a region that Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, called “the most important place in the world for the United States.”Footnote ²⁵

Yet the Paper also stood in direct contrast to other reports on El Salvador, including a congressional fact-finding mission from January 1981. The mission had determined that U.S. military aid was bypassing the Salvadoran government altogether, moving directly to members of the armed forces and paramilitary groups committing massacres in the countryside, which stood inimical to the United States’ human rights proclamations.Footnote ²⁶ Nonetheless, the White Paper became the official policy statement for the administration. In so doing, the declaration had three main effects: it formally defined the terminology of the Salvadoran civil war, cast as a battle of communist guerrillas versus a center-right liberal government; it connected the Salvadoran guerrillas to a global communist network, thereby de-localizing the conflict; and finally, it formally linked the United States to the Salvadoran government through military aid.Footnote ²⁷

While implementing the White Paper, the Reagan administration operated in a political climate hostile to Latin American immigration and refugees as a whole. In the 1970s, a group priding themselves as “white ethnics” had become a powerful element in American politics (and the Reagan’s coalition of political support). They criticized racial activism and immigration while promoting a particular segment of white culture. Bolstered in popular culture by television shows celebrating working-class whiteness such as All in the Family and framed by political manifestos such as Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, the white ethnic movement suffused national anti-immigrant, antirefugee sentiment with a particular definition of American identity bound to a specifically “white” cultural heritage.Footnote ²⁸

Although not a leader of the white ethnic movement, one influential figure who helped make normative definitions of “American”—who could be included legally and assimilated culturally—an issue in national immigration politics was Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). Helms had publicly responded to three highly publicized incidents, the Indochinese refugee crisis of the 1970s, the prolonged Haitian refugee crisis of the 1970s, and the Mariel boatlift of 1980, that brought to the fore of domestic politics issues of increased nonwhite immigration and refugee assimilation.Footnote ²⁹ While many leaders in Congress and the wider population at large acknowledged the humanitarian dimensions of these crises, vocal opponents of wide-scale refugee acceptance such as Helms questioned the cultural and social consequences of admittance. Helms claimed in response to the Indochinese refugee problem that the United States had “experienced more and more problems as a result of the melting-pot theory.” He explained that “there is the feeling that the traditions of our ethnic groups are being undermined, as well as the sense of identity and community. . . .There is the widespread concern over the adaptability of such a group to American values. . . .There is the language question.”Footnote ³⁰ Helms would later use these arguments against Salvadoran refugees.

In the summer of 1981, as violence increased throughout El Salvador, thousands of refugees began moving northward, through war-torn Guatemala, through Mexico, and into the United States. Finding residence through kin networks, mostly in Southern California, many Salvadorans began employing nonstate actors to make claims to the federal government for refugee or asylum status. As more and more Salvadorans entered the country, the lines between “refugee” and “asylum” status became blurred, and many groups began filing asylum petitions for Salvadorans now residing in the United States. Aided by organizations such as the National Council of Churches, the United States Catholic Conference, and the American Civil Liberties Union, Salvadorans began to file requests to the State Department asking for refugee status, a plea that soon extended to a series of petitions and letters to Congress, the State Department, and the White House.Footnote ³¹ Moreover, American officials at the border increasingly detained and deported the displaced Salvadorans. The State Department did not include Salvadorans on the list of countries with refugee exemption, which permitted the INS to deport detained Salvadoran migrants at unprecedented rates. In August 1981, an official with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) stated that 305,000 Salvadorans had either fled violence or had been coerced from their homes during the previous year, with many entering the United States illegally. Of those captured by the INS, many were deported. The total number of Salvadoran deportations for FY1981 was 10,473; with the financial cost of each individual deportation averaging above $300, the total amounted to over $3 million in U.S. taxpayer money.Footnote ³²

Despite the staggering number of refugees captured at border crossings, the Reagan administration continuously defined Salvadoran refugees as “economic” migrants. In January 1982, a Senate subcommittee on immigration reform discussed the potential of revising immigration law to respond more flexibly to the recent influx in Central American immigrants.Footnote ³³ Central to these hearings was the wording of the 1980 Refugee Act, and, in particular, whether El Salvador constituted a situation dire enough to warrant extension of refugee rights to detained aliens. The Reagan administration, throughout the early 1980s, argued that the Salvadoran government, under the leadership of José Napoleón Duarte, was continually improving its human rights record, a caveat that Congress had installed for the continuation of military aid.Footnote ³⁴ Accordingly, since the continuing military aid implied ongoing progress within El Salvador, no major reforms passed regarding the status of Salvadoran migrants, and opponents in Congress, such as Senator Edward Kennedy, could find no legal recourse for deeming as “political refugees” the displaced Salvadorans.

The administration did not waver on this point. When asked by a reporter in the summer of 1981 about whether Salvadorans qualified as “economic” refugees seeking personal gain or “political” refugees with a legitimate “fear of persecution” in their home country, Secretary of State Alexander Haig replied, “You’ve asked me to dot some ‘i’s’ and cross some ‘t’s’ that would not be appropriate.”Footnote ³⁵ Similarly, the State Department explained in early 1982 to worried UN officials that the Salvadorans entering the United States were “economic refugees” and hence beyond the legal bounds for federal protection.Footnote ³⁶ The ability of the administration to contort the phrase “fear of persecution” toward political ends allowed officials to create a legally sound policy of exclusion.

Yet evidence compiled by other organizations suggested that financial gain was far from the minds of most Salvadorans. An immigration attorney who had worked on refugee and asylum cases in the late 1970s and early 1980s recalled, “We started to file asylum applications [for Salvadorans, and] we started to see that they were being denied. Even though these cases were stronger than anything I had ever seen from any country. . . . In El Salvador at that point in time the government was, you know, on a terror campaign. . . . They would go and wipe out a village and then cut off people’s heads and then put them on stakes so that people would see them and be terrorized.”Footnote ³⁷ A report from an autumn 1981 investigation performed by the UNHCR, leaked to the Washington Post in early January 1982, offered similar conclusions. The report stated that the United States had followed a “systematic practice” of deporting nearly all displaced Salvadorans back to their home country regardless of the merits of their refugee claims, even though the totals were below the annual quota of fifty thousand set by the 1980 act. The UNHCR report also claimed that the United States was in violation of a number of UN statutes on refugee treatment. A lawyer working on behalf of Salvadoran refugee and asylum claimants stated that the United States’ actions were entirely political in nature, arguing that the Salvadorans migrants were “fleeing U.S. bombs and bullets” and they were “refugees spawned by U.S. foreign policy.” Ted Kennedy, a ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Policy, referred to the report as “sad, and without precedent.”Footnote ³⁸

Still, the Reagan administration remained firm in its objection to offering refugee status to Salvadorans. For FY1982, the State Department appropriated only $6 million to service all of Latin America’s refugees, compared to $107 million for Africa and $50 million for Indochina alone.Footnote ³⁹ Indeed, the INS arrested over more than eight hundred thousand individuals on the Mexican border in 1982, a high since the 1954 Operation Wetback, and an official, though he did not know exact nationality breakdowns, claimed that Salvadorans accounted for a “significant number” of the arrests.Footnote ⁴⁰

Domestic political culture reinforced the perception of Salvadoran refugees as self-interested economic migrants and linked their arrival in the United States to widespread xenophobia and questions of cultural assimilation. Although a 1984 CBS News Poll revealed that only 25 percent of Americans could identify which faction the United States supported in El Salvador, public political culture remained highly charged with anti-immigrant rhetoric.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, polls in the summer of 1984 showed that more than half of respondents believed too many Central and Latin Americans were being allowed in the country, and a 1985 poll held that a plurality of respondents did not believe preferences should be given to migrants fleeing their countries for “political reasons.”Footnote ⁴²

Jesse Helms took the lead in raising the alarm about refugees. Defending a more militant, aggressive policy of anticommunism in Nicaragua and El Salvador, Helms warned that “if Central America falls, we’re going to have 10, 15, 20 million refugees flooding across our borders who do not speak English and do not have jobs.”Footnote ⁴³ Helms tied cultural concerns to socioeconomic stereotypes to engender a fear that future refugees could not be assimilated into the nation and would drain the country’s economy. In this line of reasoning, the only way to aid the refugees themselves was to intensify pressure on their home country, which made a more muscular, anticommunist foreign policy the solvent for potential immigration problems. The Reagan administration would soon echo Helms’s logic.

Indeed, as reports continued to surface that Salvadoran refugees numbered in the hundreds of thousands, the administration subtly and gradually shifted its antirefugee message away from the economic argument toward one of priorities—helping to stabilize El Salvador above all else. “People do not flee free, prosperous countries,” Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams told the Tiger Bay Club in Florida in the summer of 1982. “The largest refugee flows of recent years have come from . . . where, quite simply, people are fleeing communism.” He continued, “I am always amazed when people come to me to voice their concern about refugees from El Salvador, yet who oppose the Administration’s effort to avoid enlargement of that refugee problem by giving El Salvador the aid it needs to defeat Communist-led guerrillas.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Abrams described a clear dichotomy: free countries and communist countries, with refugees only logically emerging from the latter. In this calculus, only communist countries could produce refugees. El Salvador’s displaced persons deserved aid not upon their arrival at America’s borders, but rather, the antiguerrilla forces deserved aid to bolster the war effort. Abrams hence defined the relationship between foreign policy priorities and immigration, arguing that only by resolving the former could the administration redress the latter.

Reagan himself made clear this new line of argument for alleviating the Salvadoran situation through increasing aid to El Salvador. In a remarkable speech before a special joint session of Congress in April 1983, Reagan called for more American military officials in the country and a rise in funding for the Salvadoran government. He roundly denounced the guerrilla forces, which he cited as the sole perpetrators of violence in the country. The president also applauded the actions of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran battalions, skirting any question of human rights abuses committed by the armed forces. But most ironically, he ended by posing a series of rhetorical questions: “Are democracies required to remain passive while threats to their security and prosperity accumulate? . . . Must we wait while Central Americans are driven from their homes, like the more than four million who have sought refuge out of Afghanistan or the 1½ million who have fled Indochina or the more than one million Cubans who have fled Castro’s Caribbean utopia? Must we, by default, leave the people of El Salvador no choice but to flee their homes, creating another tragic human exodus?”Footnote ⁴⁵

The speech emphasized Reagan’s continued commitment to the Salvadoran war effort. Soon after the speech, Reagan appointed Henry Kissinger to chair a commission to comment on the administration’s Central American policy. The Kissinger Commission ultimately argued for a similar method of mixing military and economic aid to El Salvador as long as the administration deemed the human rights situation as constantly improving.Footnote ⁴⁶ By 1983, then, the focus of all American aid to Salvador would be on fighting the civil war to an end. The administration’s policy vis-à-vis Salvadorans remained the same, but the argument for doing so had now expanded. Not only did the Reagan administration classify Salvadoran migrants as “economic” in motivation, but Reagan stated that funding the war effort in El Salvador was the key method for solving refugee issues. In short, the administration articulated a vision for aiding refugees that excluded the refugees themselves. This line of reasoning would dictate the Reagan administration’s policies for the next three years.

CONGRESS FIGHTS BACK: THE SANCTUARY MOVEMENT, JOSEPH MOAKLEY, AND EVD

As the Reagan administration maintained its position on Salvadoran refugees in 1983, a movement for federal protection for Salvadorans began to strengthen in Washington. In April 1983, Massachusetts Democratic congressman Joseph Moakley sent a letter with the backing of eighty-eight other members of the House to Secretary of State Haig urging the State Department to offer Extended Voluntary Departure status for all Salvadorans, in the same manner that Carter had done for Nicaraguans. EVD would suspend deportations and allow Salvadorans, defined as a national group, to remain in the country for a set length of time until Congress deemed the situation in El Salvador safe enough for return. Senator Ted Kennedy first proposed a congressional action on EVD for Salvadorans in early 1981, following Carter’s declaration of EVD for Nicaraguans, but the Reagan administration roundly repudiated Kennedy’s claims. No congressional bill passed, nor did any initial support mobilize, and efforts at reform faced staunch resistance from both the State Department and congressional foes like Senator Helms. When Moakley reintroduced the EVD question in 1983, he crafted a bill, H.R. 4447, which demanded that the attorney general cease all Salvadoran detentions and deportations for three years.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the bill sought to provide for temporary suspension of deportation for Salvadorans by creating a congressional mandate that could supersede the attorney general’s authority to grant EVD. This time around, Moakley’s bill resonated with a larger community that had coalesced around the issue of Salvadoran refugees.

Over the course of the early 1980s, support for displaced Salvadorans attempting to find asylum in the United States grew among two specific groups: international humanitarian organizations and religious foundations that emphasized human rights. Dubbed the “Sanctuary Movement,” the movement included groups such as Amnesty International, the Red Cross, and a variety of churches in the Southwest, Southern California, and the mid-Atlantic. The movement built upon the foundations of those groups who had attempted to aid the first wave of displaced Salvadorans in 1980 and 1981. Groups associated with the Sanctuary Movement made numerous appearances before congressional committees to testify on behalf of displaced Salvadorans.Footnote ⁴⁸ While lobbying Congress and the UNHCR for special legal protection, the Sanctuary Movement provided safe haven for potential deportees, attempted to increase public awareness of the refugee crisis, raised bail money for detainees, and, most important, linked together impromptu legal offices in Latino communities across the country with a variety of law firms to help detainees apply for protection and contest through the courts the existing federal law.Footnote ⁴⁹

Although the Sanctuary Movement helped Moakley’s bill gain more traction than Kennedy’s earlier proposal, it was met with staunch resistance from administration officials. By virtue of the advisory committees created under the 1980 act, the State Department still held preponderant power over refugee decisions. Elliott Abrams disparaged the larger portion of Salvadoran refugees who had entered the United States illegally and only ex post facto demanded asylum status, the equivalent of refugee status for foreign nationals living in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁰ Moreover, Abrams and other State Department officials repeatedly claimed that Moakley’s bill would render the 1980 Refugee Act illegal by including a stipulation using national origin as a qualification for refugee status. Echoing earlier comments by Secretary of State Haig regarding the nature of Salvadoran immigration, State Department officials listed three mains reasons for rejecting the bill: because it would “encourage illegal immigration,” because “Salvadorans were welcome as refugees in neighboring countries,” and finally, because the bill would “conflict with U.S. foreign policy.”Footnote ⁵¹ The bill languished in committee hearings and ultimately failed.

Unfazed by the bill’s defeat, the Sanctuary Movement and its congressional allies soon found support from a series of new reports throughout 1983 and 1984 that lent credence to their pro-refugee arguments. According to a special fact-finding mission convened by members of the AFL-CIO in early 1983, many intranation refugees, living in ramshackle camps throughout San Salvador, stated that the Salvadoran armed forces had burned their homes to the ground, often razing entire villages.Footnote ⁵² Indeed, the deplorable conditions of the camps in Central America forced many refugees to move northward.Footnote ⁵³ A variety of religious organizations on missions to aid internally displaced Salvadorans reported similar stories, of Salvadoran military ordering raids and unprovoked attacks on rural villagers.Footnote ⁵⁴ Individual testimonies from displaced Salvadorans told similar stories to Congress, although in more vivid and compelling language. One man, a sixty-three-year-old from the village of Guazapa, submitted a recorded recount of his experiences:

Such testimony intended to show that not only was the situation in El Salvador deteriorating because of the United States’ involvement, but that refugees such as this were purely political in nature.

Central to the debate over EVD, too, was the question of whether the warring groups in El Salvador targeted deportees upon their return home. The Sanctuary Movement, along with congressional fact-finding groups and the AFL-CIO, advocated that the INS and U.S. Embassy conduct a study on what happens to deported Salvadorans upon their return. The Red Cross attempted multiple times to pursue such a project but failed because of the difficulty of tracking individuals through war-torn regions of the country, especially given that these individuals were often displaced upon their return. Although the congressional fact-finding subcommittee nonetheless supported another attempt at such an endeavor, they too recognized the quixotic nature of the project: “The displacement of people caused by the conflict will make it difficult to follow returning Salvadorans, and many are likely to ‘disappear’ as they move to new areas of the country.” The subcommittee suggested that in light of the difficulty of learning the nature of deportees’ returns, it was necessary in the meantime to grant EVD. “It would seem only prudent and fair,” the committee wrote, “to give Salvadorans the benefit of the doubt—to suspend deportations until the results of such a study are available.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Yet no suspension of deportations occurred, and the Reagan administration remained steadfast in its interpretation of the 1980 Refugee Act. In the summer of 1984, Moakley, now head of the Committee of Rules in the House, co-sponsored a revised H.R. 4447, which called for a halt in Salvadoran deportation. In response to the new bill, Elliott Abrams responded that under the Refugee Act and the individualistic definition of refugee, the State Department was not only legally justified in rejecting EVD attempts, but actually was following the law as specifically as possible by not creating a “national” refugee policy for a national group, such as Salvadorans. “All suspension of deportation decisions require a balancing of judgments about their foreign policy, humanitarian, and immigration policy implications,” Abrams continued. Since El Salvador had a “history of large-scale illegal immigration to the United States,” an extension of EVD would surely elicit an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants arriving at American borders for personal economic reasons.Footnote ⁵⁷ Salvadorans, in essence, were just repeating the patterns established by those in the prewar years, of economic migrants, despite the marked increase in immigration numbers. In 1983, the State Department claimed that 8,010 Salvadorans submitted asylum applications, of which they granted asylum to only 205, about 2.5 percent, with hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran refugees scattered throughout Central America and Mexico with no legal protection.Footnote ⁵⁸ For the entire decade, the refugee review committees denied 97 percent of the Salvadorans who applied for refugee. The figure stands in stark contrast to other refugee seekers, such as people fleeing Poland, who had around 40 percent success rate in asylum application in the 1980s, or especially Nicaragua, who, from the years 1979 to 1983, had a success rate for receiving refugee protection of above 50 percent.Footnote ⁵⁹

Throughout the debates, a clear political delineation thus emerged over the issue of EVD, with the administration routinely denying any requests for EVD extension and using allies in Congress to argue for their stance. Representatives from the administration, such as Abrams, continually reiterated that EVD would actually stand against the established refugee law by creating a nationality-based mandate for federal protection. Within the administration, there was indeed unanimity against EVD. In the summer of 1983, Secretary of State George Schultz and Attorney General William French Smith oversaw separate investigations concerning the fate of deported Salvadorans. Both men concluded that deportees faced no consistent “fear of persecution” per the key clause of the 1980 act, and therefore Salvadorans had no legal standing to earn EVD. Footnote ⁶⁰

In the mid-1980s, as Congress debated the state of EVD, Central American immigration, legal and illegal, had become an issue of national significance. Nowhere were the political and cultural aspects of the Salvadoran crisis more apparent than in the 1984 Senate campaign of Jesse Helms. Helms, a conservative Republican senator from North Carolina, quickly became a leading figurehead of the resurgent political Right.Footnote ⁶¹ The senator had taken to refugee issues in the 1970s, launching vituperative attacks toward the Indochinese refugee assistance. He became one of the foremost restrictionist voices in the Senate.Footnote ⁶² In 1984, Helms focused heavily on Central America during his reelection campaign. Always vociferous in his restrictionist platform, Helms rebuked the Reagan administration for supporting a centrist government, which, in strained logic, Helms condemned as a capitulation to leftist forces. Calling the Salvadorans “Feet People” (a play on the common description of the Indochinese “boat people”), Helms lambasted Ted Kennedy, the Reagan administration, and the Salvadoran government alike. “They [Salvadoran refugees] will come over our border with impunity,” he stated in a campaign rally to his supporters. “Do you really want communism to take over your front yard?”Footnote ⁶³

Helms outmaneuvered his opponent and secured his reelection. Helms’s campaign, run an on anti-immigration, anti-amnesty platform, used the feelings engendered by immigration, refugees, and anticommunism as rhetorical tools to politicize the Salvadoran issue. His public promulgations attest to the fact that by the mid-1980s the Salvadoran crisis had infused American politics with a revived sense of restrictionism and xenophobia. As Carl Bon Tempo has noted, the question of who is an American has always been politicized, especially in refugee affairs.Footnote ⁶⁴ The public reawakening of vitriolic anti-immigrant sentiments in the wake of the Salvadoran civil war is one of the enduring legacies of the refugee and EVD debates of the 1980s. And it was evident by 1984 that the refugee crisis was now inexorably tied in public discourse to broader sentiments regarding Latin American immigration.

By 1985, debates over EVD continued in earnest, but it became increasingly clear that Moakley could not generate enough support to pass the bill through Congress. The Reagan administration and State Department’s steadfast intransigence on the issue inhibited the passage of any lenient legislation. According to relief agencies, more than five hundred thousand displaced Salvadorans had entered the United States seeking sanctuary. The majority of those displaced persons remained outside the protective bounds of the law.Footnote ⁶⁵

A PYRRHIC VICTORY: IRCA, THE END OF THE COLD WAR, AND ARMISTICE

The Salvadoran plight experienced an unanticipated boon in 1986 with the passage of an omnibus Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) in 1986.Footnote ⁶⁶ The passage of IRCA proved to be a watershed moment for Salvadorans. Although when IRCA successfully proceeded through Congress in 1986, it presented hope for Salvadorans seeking refuge, the language and meaning of the law created new challenges. To document illegal immigrants, IRCA called for the creation of an employment authorization document (EAD), which would confer legal status upon those working within the United States. Moreover, IRCA offered an amnesty program, which allowed for undocumented immigrants who had been living in the United States since 1982 to apply for permanent residency. This afforded legal citizenship status upon the first wave of displaced Salvadorans who entered the country during the first few years of the civil war. Yet for Salvadorans who entered the United States after January 1, 1982, the EAD stipulation was specious. In the mid-1980s, many Salvadorans who had entered the country illegally during their refugee plight were working in industries that did not request proof of work authorizations, such as restaurants, hotels, and factories. IRCA also emphasized sanctions for employers who hired undocumented workers. These sanctions made it more difficult for undocumented workers, such as the hundreds of thousands of undocumented Salvadorans, to find paying jobs. After IRCA, too, the number of refugee and asylum seekers increased as Salvadorans now facing unemployment and potential deportation resorted to makeshift legal consultancies in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods throughout the country.Footnote ⁶⁷

Yet IRCA’s implicit threat of mass deportation alarmed Salvadoran president José Napoleón Duarte. In the midst of negotiating a first wave of peace settlements, Duarte sought to strengthen the position of Salvadorans residing in the United States. He recognized that El Salvador’s fledgling domestic economy had come to rely on remittance payments sent from expatriated Salvadorans to family members back home. Keeping those individuals, many of whom did not have legal citizenship status, within the United States became an imperative for maintaining capital inflows to the country and preventing a massive exodus of repatriated Salvadorans coming back into the country. Duarte outlined this fact in explicit detail in a public April 1987 letter to President Reagan. Instead of arguing that displaced Salvadorans still faced a “fear of persecution” upon return, Duarte argued that the remittance economy necessitated that displaced Salvadorans remain in the United States and earn legal status therein. It was an ironic turn of argument, given that it helped gain State Department backing for a revised version of Moakley’s original EVD bill.Footnote ⁶⁸ In mid-October 1987, Reagan cordially invited Duarte to the White House, where he publicly praised the Salvadoran leader for going “the extra mile” to achieve peace and stability in El Salvador. Recognizing a new path toward achieving final victory against leftist forces, Reagan, whose Central American policies had been battered over the summer by congressional hearings over the Iran-Contra affair, publicly voiced support for displaced Salvadorans, whose protection now benefited the foreign policy considerations of the United States.Footnote ⁶⁹

Salvadorans seeking legal status in the United States also derived encouragement from a resolution to a major court case in early 1988. Church groups and other NGOs had brought suit against the attorney general and INS in American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh. The suit claimed that the administration made Salvadoran refugee decisions based on the ideological orientation of the Salvadoran government and that international refugee law, not the 1980 Refugee Act, should decide such cases. Accordingly, Salvadorans deserved refuge. The decision also mandated that the INS and the State Department consider social-group identity, such as young males, when reviewing refugee or asylum decisions. It also permitted third-party groups, such as churches or nongovernmental organizations, to litigate further, which resulted in a number of new court cases that in effect halted most wide-scale deportations. This new avenue for litigation culminated in a 1991 settlement that afforded erstwhile and future asylum-seekers the right to de novo interviews.Footnote ⁷⁰

Events in El Salvador further facilitated a transformation of Salvadorans’ legal standing in the United States. Peace negotiations broke down in late 1988, after which the guerrillas launched a final offensive against the government in 1989. The offensive failed, and once again major peace negotiations began in 1990.Footnote ⁷¹ Amid the international condemnation of the guerrilla offensive and with Democratic control of Congress, the Senate pushed through a final revised version of Congressman Moakley’s bill that conferred Temporary Protected Status (TPS) upon Salvadorans in the Immigration Act of 1990. TPS allowed Salvadorans a stay of deportation for eighteen months as well as the ability to openly seek work and obtain drivers’ licenses.Footnote ⁷² The act nonetheless represented a drastic change in U.S. federal policy toward displaced persons, since it afforded, for the first time since the 1980s, large-scale protection to a national group.Footnote ⁷³ After a year and a half of negotiations, El Salvador’s civil war finally ended in early 1992. By that time, too, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Cold War dissipated, and the intense and virulent rhetoric over Central America that had characterized the 1980s waned considerably. In 1991, the State Department estimated that twenty-seven thousand Salvadoran refugees returned home safely under the guidance of the UNHCR.Footnote ⁷⁴ The conflict over Salvadoran refugees transformed as the war ended. The 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA) bolstered the claims against deportation won by cases such as American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh. In the 1990s, many Salvadorans still living in the United States found themselves with a new set of choices, though enlarged by the new legal changes that afforded greater freedom of action: whether to stay in the United States, where they had been residing, and pursue legal protection, or whether to return home to a war-ravaged nation and attempt to rebuild their lives from the ashes of war.