By Scott
Nicol
We are
confronted with a refugee crisis, as thousands of children, mostly from
Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, run for their lives, coming to the United
States in the hope of finding safe haven.
Children
have been crossing the southern border for years, skirting $3 billion worth of
border walls and dodging the Border Patrol, but as violence in these three
countries has reached epidemic levels the number of refugee children has
overwhelmed federal agencies and become impossible for the press or the public
to continue to ignore.
Honduras has
the world’s
highest murder rate: in 2011, 92 people out of every thousand residents
were murdered. El Salvador ranked
second, with 70 murders per 1,000 people.
Guatemala came in fifth. For
comparison, the U.S. murder rate that year was 5 per 1,000.
Last March
the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) released a report,
titled “Children on the Run,”
on the underage refugees streaming out of Central America. UNHCR interviewed 404 children who had been
apprehended at the U.S. border, and most said that they were fleeing gang
violence.
A seventeen
year old boy from Honduras said that, “My grandmother is the one who told me to
leave. She said: ‘If you don’t join, the gang will shoot you. If you do, the
rival gang or the cops will shoot you. But if you leave, no one will shoot
you.’”
A fifteen
year old girl from El Salvador told the UNHCR, “I am here because I was
threatened by the gang. One of them “liked” me. Another gang member told my
uncle that he should get me out of there because the guy who liked me was going
to do me harm. In El Salvador they take young girls, rape them and throw them
in plastic bags. My uncle told me it wasn’t safe for me to stay there and I
should go to the United States.”
The Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released
a map that shows the point of origin for Central American kids who arrived
at the border in the first few months of this year. By far the largest number, more than 2,500,
came from San Pedro Sula, the most violent city in the most violent country on
the planet.
The text on
the DHS map says, "We analyzed these locations to determine the factors
pushing child migration to the US Southwest Border. […] Salvadoran and Honduran
children… come from extremely violent regions where they probably perceive the
risk of traveling alone to the US preferable to remaining at home."
Notably
absent from both the DHS document and the UNHCR report is a false belief on the
part of these kids that United States laws had changed to allow them to stay
here. Republicans have made this a key
talking point, a way to blame President Obama for the current crisis.
In a recent
FOX news op-ed, for example, Senator John
Cornyn wrote, “Two years ago, the president stood in the Rose Garden and
announced a unilateral change to U.S. immigration policy regarding children.
Between that policy change and his broader refusal to uphold our immigration
laws, he created a powerful incentive for children to cross into the United
States illegally.”
Like the
false idea that border walls stop desperate migrants in their tracks, it may
sound plausible, but there is nothing to back Cornyn’s claim up. The children interviewed by the United
Nations described fleeing for their lives, not responding to a rumor that the
United States’ convoluted immigration laws had become more favorable.
What’s more,
nearby countries other than the United States – Mexico, Belize, Nicaragua,
Costa Rica, and Panama – have seen a 432% increase in applications for asylum from
Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans over the last five years. Nothing that President Obama may or may not
have said caused that.
The
politicization of this crisis that Senator Cornyn’s statement epitomizes may
doom these children. While both parties
call the situation a “crisis,” Republicans shy away from using the word
“refugee” to describe children fleeing violence. Their knee-jerk response to any situation on
the border is to call for more militarization, starting with the mobilization
of the National Guard.
Governor
Perry has announced that $1.3
million per week will be spent to send in the Department of Public Safety. The DPS sniper that shot and killed Central
American migrants from a helicopter, and the Highway Patrol speedboats with
machine guns mounted on their prows that prowl the Rio Grande, have had no discernible
impact on the number of people who come across the border, but in Perry’s mind it
is important to look tough when faced with an influx of desperate children.
Democrats,
from Representative
Pelosi to border Representative Filemon Vela, have been more willing to
face the fact that the children fleeing violence in Honduras, El Salvador and
Guatemala are refugees who deserve better than being locked in a bus garage or being
forced to sleep on a concrete slab.
But President Obama seems unclear on the idea of refugees. One the one hand, the President has pledged millions to assist these countries in shoring up their courts and combating gangs. At the same time he is asking Congress for greater authority to speed up deportations. Far from compassionate, making it harder for a child to plead his or her case before an immigration judge would inevitably cause many to suffer and die as they are thrown back into the grip of their persecutors, their tormentors, and ultimately their murderers.
On Thursday
members of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold a field hearing in
McAllen to discuss the refugees who are coming across our southern border. Hopefully the assembled members will set
aside the election year desire to blame the other political party and score
political points, and will instead focus on the suffering of children who have
traveled more than a thousand miles, and who have endured unspeakable abuse
during their journeys, in a desperate effort to simply survive.
These
children are not aliens, they are not invaders, they are refugees.
If we reject them, if we deport them, if we put them on planes and send them back to the countries that they fled, or if the only response that we can muster is to line the border with more “boots on the ground” and machine guns pointing south, we will show ourselves to be no more humane than the gangs whose brutality prompted their flight.
