CHAPEL HILL - The assumptions that inform future discussions on immigration are intrinsic to the outcome, for they will serve to fix the parameters of policy. Premise will determine purpose.

Two seemingly contradictory assumptions must be reconciled. First, to acknowledge that the United States -- like all countries -- reserves the right to determine who it admits into its national territory. This is self-evident in principle and self-confirming in practice. Second, to endorse the proposition propounded in the U.N.'s "International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" that the "liberty of movement is an indispensable condition for the free development of a person."

The prospects for an effective and enduring policy remedy to the issue of migration, moreover, also depend on correctly identifying the nature of the problem, that is, to understand the phenomenon of Latin American immigration at the points of departure rather than at the sites of destination, within communities in disarray and households in despair, among families facing diminished prospects of livelihood and the loss of the means of subsistence.

The U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimated in 2004 that 224 million people in Latin America -- almost 45 percent of the population -- live daily life in circumstances of poverty.

These are circumstances with deep antecedents in the past. They are historical, they are structural, they are cultural. But they are not irrevocable.

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ALL THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY, repeated Latin American efforts to remedy injustice and inequality -- to ameliorate the conditions that impel people to emigrate -- have encountered formidable obstacles, not the least of which have been U.S. policies. Unlawful Latin American migration is not unrelated to unlawful U.S. foreign policies.

Early in the past century, U.S. interests in Latin America became deeply invested in the defense of the status quo. Populist reform projects that challenged the status quo also threatened U.S. interests, and were opposed by the United States, often through the use of illicit means and illegal methods. Duly elected constitutional governments were subverted. Political leaders were targeted for assassination. Armed intervention and military occupation removed governments deemed hostile to U.S. interests.

All in all, the United States has been eminently successful in defending its interests in Latin America. But at a cost, for short-term successes have had long-term consequences.

The defense of the status quo has contributed to the very conditions that make the logic of emigration as inexorable as it is irreversible. Poverty no longer remains contained within national borders. Remedies made impossible at home are pursued elsewhere.

Free trade policies have further wrought havoc in Latin American communities. Cheap food imports, for example, contribute to the demise of local agriculture. Any increase in the price of foreign commodities means that communities dependent on food imports face calamity. The United Nations calculates that the annual 15 percent rise in food prices will plunge nearly 16 million Latin Americans into destitution, with an equal number falling below the poverty line. Recent food riots in Haiti serve as ominous portents.

Migration must be thus understood both as symptom of and solution to circumstances of dislocation and displacement, a wholly rational response from people who face the future as an endless descent into indigence and insecurity.

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REMITTANCES FROM IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES IN 2006 totaled nearly $46 billion and sustained thousands of communities in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Peru. By 2010, the Inter-American Development Bank predicts, total remittances reaching Latin America will surpass $100 billion.

Migration from Latin America to the United States and remittances to Latin America as a means of livelihood and source of subsistence operate as survival strategies upon which the well-being of entire communities depend. The United States has vital interests at stake in the uninterrupted flow of such remittances.

Set within a Hemispheric security context, migration functions as something of a safety valve, providing the minimum conditions for the maintenance of social order and political stability.

Policies that presume to solve the issue must also include support for social justice projects in Latin America. Central to all assumptions that inform the discussion on migration is the proposition that the men and women who traverse vast expanses of deserts at great peril, and who choose to live in the shadows of illegality in a foreign country, are convinced that these hardships are preferable to conditions at home.

A solution of the issue of migration in United States must contemplate the amelioration of conditions that produce emigration in Latin America. The failure to address the latter dooms the former. This is the larger context in which the discussion must begin.

(Louis A. Perez, Jr. is the J. Carlyle Sitterson professor of history and the director of the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC-Chapel Hill.)

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