FMLN National Assembly Pronouncement

Since the approval of House Resolution 4437 by the House of Representatives in the United States of America, there is a strong public and legislative debate about a proposal to reform the immigration laws of that country.

This rule contradicts the International Human Rights of Immigrant Workers and their Families fostered by the United Nations, because:

٭ It denies children’s rights to have a family, education, health, housing, as well as a safety present and future.

٭ That rule criminalizes all Salvadoran, Latin American and Caribbean undocumented immigrant workers in the United States. These immigrant workers have arrived to your country because of the very economic policies that the US government fosters in our continent: privatization and asymmetrical free trade agreements, which only favors big business.

Given this situation, we respect and support the pacific, civic mobilization that millions of immigrant workers and U.S.A. citizens, in solidarity, have organized in the United States throughout this year, defending their workers rights, whose efforts sustain the economic and social development of the United States and our countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Mr. Antonio Elias Saca’s position on this matter —and that of the ARENA’s government— is a hypocritical, demagogic deceiving one, because:

*The promotion of family remittances by the ARENA government in El Salvador is their easiest way to obtain U.S.A. Dollars.

* This is a criminal policy, because it promotes family disintegration; and it forces out our citizens away from our national territory, exposing them to be assaulted, mutilated, raped, or killed in their journey from El Salvador to the U.S.A.

* Mr. Saca and the ARENA government is a demagogue one. One the one hand, he and his government claim to have solidarity with our brothers and sisters abroad, and on the other, it furthers massive deportations and raids against our expatriates; to this date it has not publicly denounced these deportations.

* Salvadoran and Central American citizens are deported, and the treatment they receive when they return to their countries of origin is that of criminals. They return without anything, handcuffed, a situation that results in a feeling of defeat amongst our migrant citizens, and shame amongst their families, thus, many of them do not go to wait for their relatives at the airport.

* Family remittances is the main safety net of dollarization and neoliberal economic policies in El Salvador, policies that also foster money laundry from organized crime, which roots the ARENA government does not combat.

* The majority of our citizens who emigrate to the United States come from the rural areas, where agrarian bankruptcy, due to 17 years of ARENA policies, have resulted in the lack of jobs and opportunities, a situation that compels the rural masses to emigrate.

* We reject and condemn Mr. Saca’s position, which supports the militarization of the southern border of the United States. We already know that this measure does not resolve the economic, social and political problems that the ARENA’s neoliberal economic policies foster in El Salvador; on the contrary, it will intensify the human rights violations against undocumented immigrant workers, their families, including children.

Given the situation that our fellow Salvadoran citizens, the same as Latin American and Caribbean undocumented workers, currently experience, along with the threats against their economic, social, physical, psychological and emotional safety and integrity, we appeal for the following:

1. That the Congress of the United States approves a new Immigration Law, taking into account the enormous positive input that immigrants provide to your country, including the enhancement of your economy, a new Law that allows for the Salvadorans and other millions of eligible Latin American and Caribbean immigrants, already working in the United States, to become permanent documented workers.

2. To approve an Immigration Law consequent with the international right to work promoted by the United Nations.

3. If a new Law, coherent with human rights is not approved, we appeal for a moratorium of deportations and a halt to the militarization of the southern border of the United States, because it will aggravate the human conditions of immigrant workers, and in the end does not resolve the problem.


San Salvador, May 16, 2006