Racialized Dispossession and the Third Exile Honduran Garifuna Asylum Seekers

Abstract

Over the last decade Honduran Garifuna have increasingly appeared among the millions of Central Americans arriving at the US/Mexico border to claim asylum. This is striking because unlike other Hondurans, Garifuna have a long history of largely documented US-bound migration. Recently, however, they have been transformed from transnational migrants into asylum seekers by being caught between “accumulation by racialized dispossession” accelerated by the expansion of agribusiness, tourism, and other extractivism in Honduras, and a US racialized immigration regime that has progressively closed the doors to legal migration, leaving asylum as one of the only options for those seeking refuge from direct persecution and structural violence. Garifuna are subjected to racialized rightlessness throughout the migration circuit, stripped of their right to land and dignified work in Honduras, persecuted for defending their land as Afro-Indigenous peoples, denied safe passage to the US, and forced to apply for asylum which they are unlikely to receive.