Central American youth migrants

Tim has a good overview of what we think is happening surrounding the flood of Central American youth migrants northward.

Youth minors from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are increasingly being apprehended at the US southern border. Obviously, unaccompanied minors are heading north for a variety of reasons - little economic opportunity in the region, violence and the threat of violence, one or more parents already live in the US, and the perception that the minors will receive preferential treatment if/when captured in the US.

One related reason that I heard on TV the other night was that coyotes were making a sales pitch to their potential customers. They were telling Central Americans that now might be their last best time to send their children to the US. Even though the minors won't be able to take advantage of last year's Senate immigration bill or from Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, coyotes might be telling Central Americans the opposite.

Here's what President Salvador Sanchez Ceren said during his inauguration:

Quoting Pope Francis on his recent trip to Brazil, he urged El Salvador’s youth, “not to be afraid to dream big.” Young adults are one of the country’s largest demographics; nearly 50% of the population is under the age of 24, due in part to high migration rates out of El Salvador. “To the youth: I invite you to be participants in this government. Not only because you are the present and the future but because you should be the dynamic force in the work of public policy. The well-being of the children and the youth is the well-being of all of society, ” said Sánchez Cerén.

And just the other day, Sanchez Ceren said that his government will prosecute coyotes involved in taking Salvadorans north and provide opportunities so that they do not feel that they will have to leave the country.

We are nearly twenty-five years into the end of the region's Cold War conflicts and thousands of Central Americans still need to leave their homes each day in search of safety, opportunity and family in the US. Some minor reforms might make things better but until the US seriously reforms its immigration laws to facilitate the freer movement of people from Mexico and Central America to the US and supports some form of drug decriminalization and/or regulation and the Central American governments somehow surprise us with good governance and an economic plan, I'm just not optimistic that things are going to get much better anytime soon. Ask me again in ten or twenty years.