Center for American Progress' 5 Things You Need to Know About Unaccompanied Children

Philip E. Wolgin, a Senior Policy Analyst for Immigration at the Center for American Progress and Angela Maria Kelley, the Vice President for Immigration Policy at CAP as well, have a good overview on 5 Things You Need to Know About Unaccompanied Children. I put some comments in parentheses.

1. Violence is causing these children to flee: "Interviewing more than 400 unaccompanied minors, researchers found that many of them had fled forcible ‘join or die’ gang recruitment or gang threats against themselves and their families." (Of course. However, the increase in unaccompanied minors began in 2012 - another year in which the murder rate decreased in Guatemala and was cut nearly in half in El Salvador. I don't quite see a sharp increase in violence in 2011 or 2012 that would explain the sharp increase in unaccompanied minors.)

2. Smugglers and traffickers prey on these children, who are increasingly younger and female: "While some of these children do have relatives in the United States, reuniting with family was the primary goal for less than one-third according to researcher Elizabeth Kennedy." (Smugglers and human traffickers are encouraging the migration of the region's youth. Over 90 percent of the children have family members in the US. However, when asked only one-third or so say that family reunification is a reason for emigrating. The violence in Central America is bad and there is no need to minimize it. However, I wouldn't take the escaping violence number at face value compared to the family reunification. I don't think that there is much of a question that youth migrating to the US get treated differently if they say that they are escaping recruitment into gang violence (asylum worthy) versus family reunification.)

3. This is a regional crisis. "According to the UNHCR, asylum requests from Honduran, El Salvadoran, and Guatemalan nationals have increased 712 percent in the neighboring nations of Mexico, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Belize since 2009."

4. There are no free passes into the United States as unaccompanied minors can be deported. "...every child who arrives in the United States is put into deportation proceedings. They are not given a green card or granted any kind of legal status."

5. Some in Congress are playing politics with a humanitarian issue." The uptick in the number of children fleeing for their lives began well before DACA’s creation and has been due solely to their exodus from the violence-stricken countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras." (I don't think that there's too much evidence for this statement. The following chart from Mother Jones shows that the surge in unaccompanied minors from Central America was flat from 2008 through the end of 2010 before increasing in 2011. Yes, that was months before DACA's creation but the surge in unaccompanied minors seems to be relatively recent and not driven by a surge in violence.

The authors are correct in arguing that we need to work on both short- and long-term solutions although they really only focus on the short-term. As I said the other day, we need to be thinking in terms of decades. However, I'm not that optimistic (I'm still trying to be) that things are going to get too much better until the US reforms its immigration laws to facilitate the freer movement of people from the region and supports some form of drug reform and the Central American governments somehow surprise us with good governance and an economic plan.