No Central Americans Need Apply : Immigration: Asylum-seekers don’t get even close to our shores, thanks to Mexico’s help.

All along Mexico’s border with Guatemala, one sees blue plastic boxes hanging from the trees. Mexicans explain that these are traps to catch killer bees. They proudly tell their North American visitor of cooperative efforts with the United States to stop the bees along Mexico’s 500-mile southern border with Guatemala rather than at its 2,000-mile northern border with the United States.

A similar rationale has led to stepped-up efforts on Mexico’s southern border to stop the northward migration of people. In 1990, more than 110,000 Central Americans were arrested and dumped across the border into Guatemala; that is 30% more than were deported in 1989, which saw a 500% increase over 1988.

The Mexican authorities’ efforts have been encouraged and assisted by Washington; the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, for instance, provides training and shares intelligence on the movement of undocumented aliens.

The INS has long been criticized for its bias against Central American asylum-seekers. Asylum approval rates for Salvadorans remained below 3% throughout the ‘80s; the approval rate for Guatemalans was even lower. In April the INS implemented a new system for asylum claims, raising hopes that the agency might right itself. That was reinforced by a new law allowing temporary safe haven for Salvadorans, as well as by an INS agreement to give Salvadoran and Guatemalan claims a rehearing. (Salvadorans have only to the end of June to register for safe haven.)On paper, these look like important improvements. But refugee-rights advocates worry that while the asylum adjudicatory system may become more equitable within the United States, such reforms may be accompanied by renewed efforts to interdict asylum seekers before they ever reach U.S. borders.

Central Americans fleeing persecution in their homelands have virtually no option for being admitted legally to the United States as refugees. A program for admitting refugees from overseas has brought hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Soviets and East Europeans to the United States, but it has been used in only the most token fashion for Central Americans. In fact, not a single Guatemalan has ever been admitted to the United States through our refugee program, despite mass human-rights abuses in that country.

Our government has branded Central American asylum claims as frivolous and asylum seekers as opportunists and queue-jumpers. But there is no queue. The notion of an orderly process for admitting refugees from Central America has been a disingenuous fiction.

Central American refugees who attempt to enter the United States as legal visitors and then apply for asylum also have their way blocked, usually before they leave home. Asylum seekers, almost by definition, are poor risks for visas. Seeking to flee their countries, they are unable to establish evidence guaranteeing their return. Since 1980, the United States has been stamping passports of denied visa applicants with the misleading code words “Application Received”--thereby prejudicing future applications.

INS efforts in Mexico are the newest element in this decade-long, general trend to keep potential asylum seekers from ever gaining access to the U.S. asylum process. Discussions involving the new free-trade proposal reveal a multilayered relationship involving deals, trades, favors and understandings. Among them stands an unspoken, but clearly understood, quid pro quo: You stop these Central Americans, says the United States, and we will be sympathetic toward you on matters like trade barriers and debt.

People are not killer bees and cannot simply be eradicated without regard for the consequences. The nearly 200,000 Central Americans deported in the past two years were denied any meaningful opportunity to apply for asylum in Mexico. In addition, the Mexican police and immigration officials frequently engaged in brutality and extortion in the process of arrest, detention and deportation.

A free-trade agreement may help to create mutual benefits for the U.S. and Mexican people. But the building of links between our two countries should not come at the expense of nationals of third countries, dispossessed and in need of our protection. Our treatment of refugees--citizens of neither country--will be the truest gauge of our societies’ commitment to the principle that all people have rights grounded in their humanity, and that the welfare and freedom of the most vulnerable is the mark of our own humanity.