The humanitarian case for large-scale immigration from Latin America isn't what it used to be.

The large-scale deportation of illegal immigrants is well underway, including deportation to Colombia. But who is being deported?

According to Tom Homan, director of ICE, the deportees at this stage of the process are almost entirely illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes in the U.S. In addition, though, some illegals who do not fit this description are being caught in the process of rounding up criminals.

As Homan explained to Kaitlin Collins on CNN (and as he has tried to explain to mayors of sanctuary cities), these “collateral” arrests occur in jurisdictions where the local authorities don’t cooperate with ICE. In these cities and towns, ICE must operate less discriminately. Thus, the dragnet is wider.

There is no case for allowing major criminals to remain in the U.S. Those who enter America illegally should at least have the decency not to murder, rob, rape, and extort people.

The “collaterals” don’t have much of a case either. There is no right to be in the U.S. illegally.

However, I do sympathize with those who have obeyed the law and lived respectable lives here. In their cases, I can’t help thinking about the conditions they will face in the countries to which they are being returned. Will they be persecuted upon return? Did they have a case for obtaining asylum here?

The standard for obtaining asylum is this: Asylum seekers must be able to demonstrate that they are unable or unwilling to return to their home country due to persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution. This persecution must be based on one of five "protected grounds": race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and membership in a particular social group.

I doubt there many illegal immigrants from Colombia who have reason to fear persecution based on any of these grounds. Colombia is not run by a right-wing military dictatorship that “disappears” people for speaking their mind or on suspicion of what they would say if they spoke it. Nor is it run by an authoritarian leftist regime. Colombia is not El Salvador, circa 1980. Nor is it Castro’s Cuba or Maduro’s Venezuela.

Colombia’s president, Gustavo Perez, is a left-winger. In fact, he’s a former guerilla group member who fought against the conservative government that governed Colombia when he was young. But he’s not a communist or a dictator.

In today’s democratic Colombia, Perez has twice been elected president on a leftist agenda that includes supporting universal health care, public banking, rejecting proposals to expand fracking and mining, promoting green energy over fossil fuels, decreasing economic inequality. and promoting land reform. He also backs progressive proposals on women's rights and LGBTQ issues.

At the same time, Perez is committed to Colombia’s democracy. Indeed, he negotiated with centrist and conservative parties in an attempt to build a majority in Congress. He is not Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez.

I gather that Colombia is a violent place. It’s homicide rate is about four times that of the U.S. (though about the same as Chicago’s). But widespread violence is not a basis for granting asylum.

It seems unlikely, then, that even the non-criminal illegal immigrants we are deporting to Colombia have a case for remaining in the U.S.

I should add that even El Salvador is not the El Salvador of circa 1980. On the contrary, it is now quite safe and a full-fledged democracy.

Its president, Nayib Bukele, started out on the left, but can now best be described as a radical centrist with populist tendencies. He says he does not adhere to any specific political ideology and has criticized the left and the right for dividing El Salvador after the civil war.

Bukele is wildly popular. In fact, his approval rating has never dipped below 75 percent.

For good reason. El Salvador, once rife with violence, has become one of the safest countries in Latin America. The number of murders fell from almost 4,000 in 2017 to less than 80 in the first few months of 2024. The homicide rate is significantly lower than that of the U.S. El Salvador has become a tourist destination.

Bukele declared war on the country’s notorious gangs, and appears to have won that war. Even Jonathan Blitzer, whose pro-immigration book Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here documented the extremely dangerous conditions that caused waves of immigration from El Salvador in the past, quotes a local news outlet that stated, “The gangs do not exist at this moment as El Salvador knew them for decades.”

With a democracy in place, violence curbed, and gangs virtually non-existent, only would-be gang members have anything much to fear if they are deported from the U.S. to El Salvador. There seems to be no basis for fearing persecution

The Biden administration’s approach to stemming the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America was to improve conditions in those countries. This is what Kamala Harris focused on.

It’s absurd to think that conditions in these countries can improve to the point where the U.S. won’t draw immigrants hoping for a better life. But in much (though not all) of Latin America, the kinds of conditions that might make their quest to get here highly sympathetic have already been largely remedied.