Salvadorans confront deportation.

• Author: Zielinski, Mike
• Position: Temporary US amnesty program ends

Washington, D.C.

The anti-immigrant backlash sparked by California's Proposition 187 struck Salvadoran refugees in December, when the Clinton Administration ended an amnesty program sheltering some 200,000 Salvadorans from the violence that continues to rack their homeland.

Since 1990, Salvadorans have benefited from a temporary amnesty allowing them to live and work in the United States. U.S. officials maintain that refugee-protection programs are no longer needed because El Salvador's human-rights situation has "improved significantly."

"Many of the agreements have been broken and the military continues to abuse human rights," says Mario Davila, a Salvadoran organizer in the American Friends Service Committee's New England office. "The army gets away with murder."

Davila's charges are backed by a recent U.N. report documenting forty-nine "arbitrary executions" and seventy death threats in the first half of 1994.

Ironically, the immigration issue has forged a rare unity between Salvadoran government officials and former rebels in that country. Both groups fear that mass deportations from the United States will further destabilize a country where less than half the population has full-time work. Salvadorans in the United States are the mainstay of El Salvador's economy. Refugees working at low-wage, service-sector jobs sent more than $800 million home last year, surpassing El Salvador's income from coffee, the nation's largest export.

Organizers from the Salvadoran National Network, a coalition of more than forty community groups, are working to...