“For Fear of Persecution”: Displaced Salvadorans and U.S. Refugee Policy in the 1980s

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.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.² The new policy eliminated nationality as a qualification for refugee status and in its place proposed to identify refugees individually.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...