Salvadoran Americans ( or ) are Americans of full or partial Salvadoran descent. As of 2024, there are 2,770,000 Salvadoran Americans in the United States, the fourth-largest Hispanic community by nation of ancestry. According to the Census Bureau, in 2021 Salvadorans made up 4.0% of the total Hispanic population in the United States.
Salvadorans are the largest group of Central Americans of the Central American Isthmus community in the U.S.
The largest Salvadoran populations are in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., which have been established since the 1970s and currently number in the hundreds of thousands, as well as other Central Americans such as Guatemalan and Honduran Americans.
Salvadorans are concentrated in California (32% of the nationwide Salvadoran population), Texas (15%), Maryland (8%) and New York (8%).
History
The first Salvadorans immigrants began arriving in the early twentieth century, mostly in San Francisco where they worked as shipyard employees. Salvadorans that came during this period were mostly economic migrants, as El Salvador was affected by economic turmoil during the Great Depression and slow growth after World War II ended. In the 1960s and early 1970s, most of the immigrants were women; they found work as housekeepers or in childcare.
During the ongoing civil war for about 12 years, approximately 1 million Salvadorans fled the country seeking refugee in neighboring countries, and about 50 percent of them immigrated to the United States. Over the past 20 years more Salvadorans have abandoned their homeland and immigrated to the United States due to social inequality, disputes over social and political issues, and an increase in violence in the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America .
El Salvador created a new system similar to the Mexican case called United for Solidarity to take advantage of the remittances and invest the money well in projects for the community. However, the United for Solidarity project did not stop the waves of violence by gangs and political corruption that haunt the country in the past twenty-eight years, increasing in the past ten years, forcing people to emigrate to the United States looking for a better lifestyle and safety.
Increased migration (1980s-)
While Salvadoran migration to the U.S. remained low throughout the first several decades in the 20th century, it spiked at the onset of the Salvadoran Civil War, where many fled to the United States seeking sanctuary from the devastation that plagued the country. Some scholars have argued that the economic devastation wrought by the conflict is a greater factor in migration than political violence. At least half of the refugees—between 500,000 and one million—immigrated to the United States, which was home to less than 10,000 Salvadorans before 1960.
All this movement and shift was due to the fact that the Spanish wanted to increase the productivity and profitability of coffee cultivation, therefore the government sold off communal lands, where a large number of indigenous Salvadorans resided. Despite community organizing against land privatization, the government moved forward with turning these lands into coffee plantations, favoring affluent European immigrants and local ladino (or mestizo) families who were establishing the nation. Coffee exports were controlled by a small group of local elites, and the labor force was made up mostly of displaced peasants who were indigenous in origin. This left them to choice but to leave since they were taken as a minority.Menjívar, Cecilia, and Andrea Gómez Cervantes. El Salvador: Civil War, Natural Disasters Migration Policy Institute, 29 August 2018. Retrieved 10 November 2023.
The proximate causes of migration have been studied by analyzing spatial origins. One method is to compare maps of political violence with maps of the origins of Salvadoran migrants, though this type of aggregate analysis could not state with certainty the motivation of any individual migrant. According to William Stanley, this massive migration to the U.S. was a result of political violence as much as it was the deteriorating economic conditions in El Salvador, but this is disputed by other scholars. Stanley wrote that political violence was an "important and probably the dominant motivation" driving Salvadoran migration to the U.S., but in 1990 Richard Jones argued that "...this statement is too strong. It implies that migrants to the United States were directly uprooted from their places of origin by political violence. However, other scenarios are possible. The migrants may have been persons from nonconflictual zones who were forced to emigrate when refugees from elsewhere in the country displaced them or because of general economic deterioration."
Organizations including the ACLU, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and various church groups have argued that the cause of migration is political violence and persecution, but the U.S. State Department and Justice department believe it is the deteriorating economic conditions. The strict standard applied to petitions for asylum has reflected the view that asylum seekers must show a "clear probability of persecution." These standards were so strict that 97% of asylum applicants during the 1980s were denied. There was some hope though when the U.S. government granted extended voluntary departure to Salvadorans who had entered the country illegally since 1982. Almost a decade later this issue was brought up in the 1990 class action lawsuit, American Baptist Church v. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh. ABC v. Thornburgh challenged the mass denial of asylum applications which occurred under the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The Department of Justice, which INS worked under, accepted responsibility for these denials in December 1990. This case opened the door for asylum seekers and forced the INS to look at thousands of petitions on a case-by-case basis. Despite the win, limited resources of the INS has left these people in limbo, though they were granted protected from deportation.
In respect to the debate surrounding the Salvadoran diaspora and the unwillingness of the Justice and U.S. State Department to grant refugee status, one must acknowledge the implications this status for Salvadoran migrants has on the U.S. government itself as well. There is a distinct difference in being an immigrant compared to a refugee, not only in a legal sense, but also in societal perception. Holding the status of an immigrant is characterized by being influenced by economic push or pull factors, not necessarily by life-threatening events. Refugee status is specifically for those fleeing from persecution and violence, and therefore are more promptly welcomed into the country. During the Salvadoran civil war, the Salvadoran government and the opposing guerilla forces were absolutely perpetuating violence in the country that directly affected and involved civilians. Elana Zilberg addresses these happenings in her writing, even children were not exempt from horrible events, "They[youth] had seen tortured corpses and severed body parts...boys no more than twelve years old were forcefully conscripted into the army. Children joined the guerrillas". With this violence in mind, the fact that more Salvadorans were not granted temporary protected status or asylum has to do with the part the U.S. played in the Salvadoran civil war. The Cold War sentiments were still existent in the 1980s- and El Salvador became the stage to a proxy war between the U.S. and the USSR. The USSR was financially supporting and training guerilla forces to aid them in achieving a communist government, therefore the U.S. funded weapons and training for the Salvadoran government army to maintain their idea of democracy as well. However, the Salvadoran government and army, besides forcefully using children as soldiers, were also the perpetuators of other human rights violations against their civilians. To put the U.S. as a supporter of this political group was to implicate them as a supporter of a government guilty of violence and oppression against their people if it was decided that there were necessary reasons for them to be fleeing their country, "Salvadorans were thus left out of the refugee policy of United States and its system-a kindness calculated firmly within the Cold War interests".
Salvadorans that came to the United States undocumented applied for asylum and/or work permits in order to legalize their status. Many of these Salvadoran refugees came to the city of Los Angeles, which today holds the largest population of Salvadorans in the country. A large population of Salvadorans also arrived in Washington, D.C.; which by 1989, an estimated 150,000 Salvadorans resided in the nation's capital.
In comparison to their rural, working class, and often undocumented counterparts migrating to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston; wealthy Salvadorans also found refuge in the U.S., migrating to Coral Gables and Key Biscayne in Miami. They numbered over 1,000 individuals and many of them are temporary exiles, who planned to go back after the end of the war. By the end of 1989, more than 250,000 Salvadorans migrated to the U.S. Unofficially, there were one million Salvadorans that came to the U.S.
The migration of Salvadorans was a result of both economic and political problems. The largest immigration wave occurred as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s, in which 20%–30% of El Salvador's population emigrated. About 50% percent, or up to 500,000 of those who escaped the country headed to the U.S., which was already home to over 10,000 Salvadorans, making Salvadorans Americans the third-largest Hispanic American group, after the Mexican American majority and Cubans (when not including Stateside Puerto Ricans). Salvadorans however are predicted to replace Cubans as the largest population by the next census.
The country of El Salvador was subjected to economic, political difficulties and wars, creating few opportunities in the country to grow economically for citizens, which impacted many Salvadoran citizens looking for new lands to settle for better opportunities.
The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that affected El Salvador, including the January 2001 and February 2001 earthquakes and Hurricane Mitch. Gang warfare, which made El Salvador one of the dangerous countries in the world, also contributed to the surge of immigrants seeking asylum in the late part of the 2000s and the first four years in the 2010s. By 2008, there were about 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. Salvadorans are the country's fifth largest immigrant group after Mexican, Filipino, Indian, and Chinese foreign born.
Another issue why Salvadorans migrated to the United States was when the horrific earthquake happened, and the program known as "TPS" stands for Temporary Protected Status, opened. The program was judged by ex-President Trump and wanted to take off the program. This means many Salvadorans who still are on the program were going to be dealing with illegal status, and they were not going to be allowed to work in the United States lawfully, meaning most of them were going to lose their jobs. This brought sadness and scariness to many families who thought they would be deported and sent to El Salvador.
Documented Salvadorans in the U.S. Years # of Salvadorans entering the U.S. 1931–1940 673 1941–1950 5,132 1951–1960 5,895 1961–1970 14,992 1971–1980 34,436 1981–1990 213,539 1991–2000 215,798
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