Children in the Crossfire

What really hurts is seeing the public turning its attention away from the biggest problems and hoping that they don’t explode. Child migration became front-page news precisely because its exponential growth exceeded its ability to remain invisible, not because it started yesterday. Now the issue has exploded. Between October 2013 and June 2014, the Border Patrol detained 51,000 minors, an unprecedented number. Reports calculate a 50 to 100 percent increase in the flow of immigrants from Central America and Mexico into the United States since the previous year. The children are migrating to flee violence and poverty or to reunite with their families. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees study “Fleeing Children” reports that 39 percent of the Mexican minors interviewed fled Mexico because of criminal recruitment and exploitation (cited in an independent statement coordinated by the Institute for Women Migrants, 2014.)

Honduras could represent a typical example of a state’s progressive collapse because of its increased number of child emigrants, 14,000 of which have entered the United States illegally from October 2013 to June 2014. I listened to experts on the issue affirm that this crisis can no longer be explained by the allure of the American Dream, but instead by their home countries’ collapse and the children’s resulting displacement. Increasingly, reports are identifying combined structural causes that simultaneously force an exodus, and incentivize entering our neighbor to the north.

The arrival en masse of children and adolescents is bringing the controversy surrounding immigration policy in the United States to a head. As we know very well, this controversy did not start yesterday, either. There has been testimony of serious human rights violations against child immigrants at the hands of the Border Patrol and other authorities. Stories from repatriated minors interviewed by reporters include long detentions in extreme overcrowded conditions, use of handcuffs and insufficient food. There is evidence that shows immigrant children without adequate legal assistance. Crises polarize people. The state governments of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, along with Republican lawmakers, have requested that the National Guard intervene to stop people from crossing the border.

The Directorate of Migration and Human Rights of Insyde has been documenting the migratory phenomenon for seven years. Part of the information collected is being systemized and published on the website of the Citizen Observatory of Human Rights, http://www.observatoriodemigracion.org.mx. At Insyde we sustain that the biggest weakness of Mexico’s migration policy comes from its framing as a national security issue. This is a political concept that has been derived from the same negative political connotations originally created in the United States and then imposed on Central America.

I recently said to Ambassador Anthony Wayne, that there is no security policy or strategy that can sufficiently address the complexity and dimensions of migration. The politicians’ proposal is to receive at gunpoint those immigrants who are fleeing at gunpoint. They want to put out the fire with gasoline. The increase in the flow of migrants is nothing more than the latest phase of a sub-regional structural crisis where governments shrink, real powers grow, and the threat of having to leave home becomes widespread. If the sub-region does not know how to do anything besides put its children in the crossfire—whether the guns belong to the authorities or to criminals—the humanitarian crisis of today will be nothing compared to the one that is to come.