Should the US deport unaccompanied minors?

I have a new post up at Al Jazeera on Should the US deport unaccompanied minors? Let's just say that I answer "no" and that we should look to big picture items to manage the flow of people between Central American and the United States. Here's the concluding paragraph:

The problems in Central America are immense. We need to consider deepening our already close economic relations, craft policies that facilitate migration between the US and the region, jointly invest billions of dollars in development projects, and enact drug policy reforms. I am afraid reforms short of these will probably just help at the margins. 

Basically, I went with more freedom. The US and Central America, as well as Mexico, should look to policies that give Central Americans more freedom to move in search of labor. We should design policies that allow people to move more freely in search of family. Approximately four million people of Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran descent live in the US while only thirty million remain in the region. Economic and family reunification pressures are not going to become any less important over the coming years. Finally, we need to tackle regional drug policy and give people more freedom to access what is today an ultra-violent, multi-billion dollar corrosive industry.

I don't see all these reforms happening overnight but I do see the US, Mexico, and Central America becoming more fully integrated in the future, let's say by 2050 or 2100.

It was a difficult op-ed to write. There were so many ways to go addressing the current crisis. At one point, my submission was over 1,800 words before I managed to bring it back to 1,203. Obviously, there was a lot of material left on the cutting wrong floor.