Much More Serious

The problem of child migrants who find themselves detained by immigration authorities in the United States is much more serious than what, on the surface, is simply considered “youth who try for the American dream.”

Traditionally, migration toward the northern country has been a fundamental reason for breaking apart family units, and therefore seriously affects society itself. We have been witness to a scandalous amount of families in which the formal structure loses the father figure and then assigns to the mother all responsibility for education and child rearing, while the father’s contribution to the home becomes monetary support achieved through admirable effort made in a labor market with much more opportunities than ours; but one that doesn’t stop being racist or classist in that often, undocumented workers are discriminated against.

There are experts who think that, in the case of minors, it’s no more than a logical effort to go and look for that same “better future” that their parents are living and, with that, try to forge that future outside Guatemalan borders. For that future, they pay the high prices that the human traffickers charge to “pass them” from border to border.

But the main problem is the internal one: A society that doesn’t maintain economic conditions which allow children and adolescents to be educated, because it requires them to work shifts in the fields so their families can eat and survive. We are a society that doesn’t give opportunities to talent and effort, but thinks that the poor do not have talent and that their effort will never be sufficient in a culture that doesn’t value citizens, but uses them up.

We are a country in which these same young people are at risk of being absorbed into gangs for their “territory control” jobs, in which they make more income than any honorable adult who wants to work to sustain his family; but these are also the same adolescents directly in the line of fire, liable to be killed on the streets of a country where life or death is decided by cents.

The topic of child migrants, for which U.S. Vice President Joe Biden will come to reprimand Guatemala with the intention of putting a stop to it, is more serious than we thought. This is evidenced by the fact that now, the age at which people lose hope and prefer to begin again outside our country is dropping.

This migratory flow is an accusing finger toward a society that provides no opportunity.