July 18, 2014
The “border
children” crisis has arrived in North County.
After initial
hearings, Escondido will soon be making its final decision about converting
a former nursing home for the elderly into a group home for unaccompanied
minors. Today, on the great late Nelson Mandela’s
birthday, I am reminded that true freedom rests on being able “to live in a way
that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”
I support
efforts to provide safe and fair shelter for the youth and adults refugees
seeking sanctuary. As a Sociology
professor, I have a social justice / human
rights framework on immigration and rely on data to understand social
problems, such as the current surge of immigration to our borders.
This is a
humanitarian issue. Many are fleeing violence and extreme poverty, according to
the Immigration Policy Center.
The largest sending municipalities are from Honduras and one of them is
currently the world’s murder capital due to gang and drug trafficking violence.
The Pew Research Center reports “this
year, more than 13,000 unaccompanied Honduran children were apprehended at the
U.S. border compared with the 968 children apprehended five years ago.” Violence
Observatory at the National Autonomous University of Honduras
reports that child murder is
up 77 percent from last year in Honduras.
It is clear from
the United Nations’ recent report, Children on the Run, youth
coming to the border do not know about federal or state legislation that
recently granted more rights to undocumented youth. However, globally speaking,
they do know about the United States being “the land of opportunity.”
(Incidentally, this is precisely what my great grandparents believed when they
migrated from Ireland on boats to Ellis Island.) A majority of the
unaccompanied minors have family already in the United States. Asylum seekers
from Central America, in particular, have a permanent federal injunction (Orantes-Hernandez
v. Gonzales), which protects
their legal process as they seek sanctuary in the United States. For more on
this topic, see the amazing work of Lauren
Heidbrink who wrote an extremely compelling book called, Migrant
Youth, Transnational Families and the State: Care and Contested Interests (2014,
University of Pennsylvania Press).
Some hold on to
a belief about immigrants and crime. Immigration and undocumented immigration
lowers crime or at least does not increase it. Please reread this sentence. Research
conducted by Bell and colleagues (2010) from the London School of Economics, along
with sociologists such as Robert Sampson
(2008) and Jamie
Longazel (2013), consistently find an inverse
relationship between crime and undocumented immigration.
As to the
arguments about “spreading disease,” the youngsters coming here are from
countries with higher rates of immunization than the United States. According
to the World
Health Organization, the countries associated with the unaccompanied minors
are El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico and each had higher measles vaccination rates than the United States. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador reported no cases of
measles since 2008, while the United States has reported 50 to 250 annually.
Our immigration
courts system is being greatly tested. The system
was designed for 8,000 unaccompanied minors and it currently experiencing over
50,000 this year. According to a report analyzing Homeland Security data on
unaccompanied minors, immigration Court juvenile cases make up of 11 percent
of the courts’ backlog; in real terms there are 41,641 pending juvenile cases
out of the total backlog of 375,503 cases. In a review of psychiatric studies
conducted by Michael Dudley and his colleagues (2012), children housed in
detention experience the exacerbation of existing mental health conditions and
also new ones are created, such as depression and anxiety.
How will we
achieve the gold standard of the United States justice system: due process? The
government is always represented by an attorney and only about 50 percent of
children are in proceedings without one. And, it makes a difference. When
children have legal representation, about half of the time they are allowed to
stay in the United States.
Inevitably, the
issue of “legality” and if someone is “breaking the law” usually comes into
discussions of undocumented immigration and certainly in the current border
crisis.
First, a person
cannot be “illegal,” only actions. So, please drop the “i” word.
Second, the law
can be unjust. From slavery to child labor to civil rights for women and
others, history shows us that laws change to account for the innate dignity and
humanity of all members of society.
I want to be on
the “right side of history.” The opening of a group home for the unaccompanied
migrant youth in Escondido is a way to show our belief in the inherent dignity
and alienable rights for all.
