The violence and economic devastation of the 1980 1992 civil war
in El Salvador drove as many as one million Salvadorans to enter
the United States, frequently without authorization. In Nations of
Emigrants, the legal anthropologist Susan Bibler Coutin analyzes
the case of emigration from El Salvador to the United States to
consider how current forms of migration challenge conventional
understandings of borders, citizenship, and migration itself.
Interviews with policymakers and activists in El Salvador and the
United States are juxtaposed with Salvadoran emigrants' accounts of
their journeys to the United States, their lives in this country,
and, in some cases, their removal to El Salvador. These interviews
and accounts illustrate the dilemmas that migration creates for
nation-states as well as the difficulties for individuals who must
live simultaneously within and outside the legal systems of two
countries.
During the 1980s, U.S. officials generally regarded these
migrants as economic immigrants who deserved to be deported, rather
than as political refugees who merited asylum. By the 1990s, these
Salvadorans were made eligible for legal permanent residency, at
least in part due to the lives that they had created in the United
States. Remarkably, this redefinition occurred during a period when
more restrictive immigration policies were being adopted by the
U.S. government. At the same time, Salvadorans in the United
States, who send relatives more than $3 billion in remittances
annually, have become a focus of policymaking in El Salvador and
are considered key to its future."
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