Where Is the Homeland?

Throughout human history, people have migrated, usually to find better conditions under which to survive. As the human race mastered agriculture, they stopped being nomads in favor of creating more stable communities. Nevertheless, migration has continued to exist for thousands of years, and the reasons for relocating continue to be diverse.

Although we became sedentary, we lived for thousands of years without the concept of a “homeland” and always had the freedom to emigrate. Based on the theory that the human race emerged from North Africa, all of humanity migrated from there to the rest of the world. Almost all of us are where we are as the result of a migration.

One of the human rights is “free movement, migration, leaving, relocating,” of course within the constraints provided by international agreements. That is, one can move from one country to another pursuant to the established legal framework. Of course, that legal framework has exceptions, and chief among them is the right to move for the purpose of survival and for “humanitarian” reasons.

In our country, as recently as 2011 the Migration Act was ratified. Extremely interesting and advanced reforms were made in June 2013, removing the characterization of “criminal conduct” from the act of crossing our territory without papers and guaranteeing the same humanitarian treatment for foreigners that we demand for our compatriots when they go to the United States undocumented, especially children, women with children, and the elderly.

There was a great deal of consistency in that law, and the former legislature should congratulate themselves for that. In Article 37-III, Section E, applicants for refugee status or those applying for humanitarian reasons are exempted from the requirements to enter the country. It is further stipulated that the immigration checkpoints will provide them temporary assistance while their cases are being reviewed. This is theoretically a good step, but in practice the conditions of immigrants are dreadful. The Mexican government has neither sufficient resources nor infrastructure to respond to the immigration crisis that broke out this year, all the worse because the emigrants are not adults but children.

Children traveling alone, are on their own and at their own risk, or placed in the hands of mafias that take them, for a hefty price, to where their parents are. Many will fall into the hands of human trafficking mafias and will never reach their destination, even if they have paid. Others are not headed anywhere, they are simply running away from the horror of regions dominated by criminal gangs such as the Mara Salvatrucha, The Knights Templar or Los Zetas. This wave of migrant children comes mostly from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and our very own Mexico. Many minors are traveling with the intention of crossing the well-fortified U.S. border in order to reunite with their parents. Others don’t even have a destination, but are only running away from violence or from being recruited into the mafias of failed states in one of the countries that I mention here. These are minors whose parents and relatives have been murdered by mafias.

So far this year alone, Mexican authorities report that 45,000 unaccompanied migrant children have traveled from these four countries. Today, they find themselves detained at the American border and stuffed in shelters.

The crackdown by Obama’s government and the U.S. Congress to halt the border crossings impedes many adults from visiting their families and children because it will be almost impossible for them to re-enter if they do not have papers. Some may casually think: So why do they go? I am certain that no one who has minimal living conditions leaves behind their children. It is hard to be an immigrant. In most cases, being an immigrant is heroic.

We must use all of our imagination and solidarity to form a solution that returns to these children, helplessly trapped in the cruel world of borders and international agreements, a “homeland.” These children are abandoned to chance because of the indifference of those of us who do have a homeland, that is, those of us who have the luxury of being close to our loved ones and in a place where we can live and work in peace. Otherwise, where — as my dear sister asks in her blog this week — is the homeland?