The United States faces an unprecedented surge in the number of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America. Specifically, the children are fleeing El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; a region called the “Northern Triangle.” The political and social response to this crisis shows all the subtlety of a jackhammer, signals a staggering cultural amnesia, and demonstrates a despicable failure of moral courage.
To put the crisis into context, the Northern Triangle region is under siege from virtually unchecked criminal violence. Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have some of the highest murder rates in the world. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2013 Global Study on Homicide indicates that, in 2012, Honduras leads the world with over 90 murders per 100,000 people. The rate in the U.S. in 2012 was 4.7 per 100,000. The police forces and court systems, where not corrupt, are woefully underprepared to take on organized gang violence.
The children seeking escape into neighboring countries and the U.S aren’t just looking for a better economic life, despite what much of the so-called public debate claims. They are trying to escape the very real possibilities of sexual slavery, forced membership in gangs and the drug trade. Yet, while we might recognize the inherent pain of those problems, in the abstract, it’s hard to comprehend the human factor.
Imagine the level of unbridled desperation that would make parents decide that sending a child, alone, hundreds or thousands of miles away, based on the mere possibility that the child might find safe haven, seem like the best solution. How far would you need to be pushed to make that seem like the only sane course of action? How dangerous would it need to become before you were ready to do that?
The political response has been to call this an illegal immigration problem. On a surface reading, sure, it’s an illegal immigration problem. To stop at that level is to ignore the deeper reality that this influx of unaccompanied children is a humanitarian crisis and raises deep questions about human rights. Even taking life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as the basic human rights that the U.S. is willing to acknowledge in law, sending these children back to the Northern Triangle violates all three.
The willingness of our elected officials to say that we need to treat these children like any other illegal immigrants and send them back where they came from is just a cheap way of sidestepping the truth. One of the objections to allowing the children to stay is that it places an unacceptable financial burden on the U.S. This position seems especially hypocritical in light of the $1.7 trillion we’ve already spent on the Iraqi War.
While public attitudes toward how we should manage the tens of thousands of immigrant children have softened somewhat recently, that there was ever a question suggests that Americans have forgotten our own history. The original Pilgrims arrived on these shores as immigrants and, if we’re honest, illegal immigrants to boot. This country was founded by people who showed up and hijacked land from the rightful inhabitants. To act as though illegal immigration is somehow a new problem or one that we have any right to complain about is to embrace cultural amnesia. It probably exposes some serious questions about how we teach history in this country, as well.
Equally important, while the mythology of the pilgrims holds that they were seeking religious freedom, they were not subject to any particularly violent persecution. The move to the New World was more pragmatic than political, as the core group of pilgrims was seeking a way to preserve and grow their religious community, which was proving difficult in Europe. Compared to the children streaming across our border, the Pilgrims had an easy time of it in Europe.
The most distressing part of the whole situation is the enormous gap between our moral principles and our actions. The U.S. presents itself as a moral leader on issues like democracy, human rights, and freedom. In some ways, we hew to these principles. Earlier this year, the U.S. government called for new elections in Bangladesh after initial election results appeared to be fraudulent. We also contribute financially, militarily, or both to U.N. Peacekeeping missions, such as the ones in Sudan and Somalia. In other ways, such as racial and gender equality, unencumbered voting and equal educational opportunities for everyone, we fail spectacularly.
The push to deport these children, en masse, demonstrates the failure of our elected representative to stand by our supposed principles and exposes their moral cowardice. Neither Democrats nor Republicans get to take a pass on this one. The Right has been more strident in its calls for deportation, but the only substantive difference between the Left and the Right is the timetable for deportation.
If our elected officials had the strength of their human rights convictions, or even a sense of shame, they would not be calling for deportation. If the public had any sense of history, its initial reaction would not have been so vehemently negative. As a culture and a nation, we should be horrified by what these children are fleeing from and offer them the sanctuary and security we strive to provide our own children, however imperfectly. Doing any less makes us all moral failures.