Children Flooding the Border: A Geo-Political Perspective (original) (raw)
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Although children migrating from Latin America have always been a constant part of the migration fluxes towards the U.S, since 2012 the number of unaccompanied minors began to dramatically and historically surge. Beyond the fracas of politics and sensationalism of newspapers, this paper seeks to thoroughly understand and critically analyze the current crisis of undocumented minors at the southwestern border. To understand what is currently unfolding, it is necessary to dive into the causes of the problem that most of the literature and facts roots in Central America. Indeed for the fiscal year 2014 through September 30 Honduras made about 27.10 % of the apprehended Unaccompanied Alien Children, Guatemala 25.33% and El Salvador 24.36%.i Drug related gang violence seems trigger this migration. Also, this exodus is very much linked to dire poverty resulting of decades of socio-political instability, which in a non-negligible way was a byproduct of U.S. international politics. A third variable brought in to explain the crisis is the macro economical approach. It focuses on globalization and its push for ultra-liberal economies in these countries, which ultimately crushes local subsistence economies and leave populations to seek better opportunities elsewhere for them and their children. Consequently, the crisis at the U.S. borders is just part of a bigger problem that requires – if to be understood and properly tackled – a multilateral and international approach
HUMANITARIAN CRISIS: UNACCOMPANIED MIGRANT MINORS FROM CENTRAL AMERICA TO THE US – MEXICAN BORDER
In June 2014, the border between Mexico and the United States (US) witnessed the arrival of more than 50,000 unaccompanied children from Central Amer- ica trying to get to the US in order to join their parents, escape from diferent types of abuse and violence, or ind new opportunities. he growing number of children in the border has developed a humanitarian crisis involving many actors, such as the children, the American government, the US border state gov- ernments, the Mexican government, the governments of Central America and many nGos concerned by the problematic situation. he current paper seeks to analyze the origin and development of the crisis, as well as its consequences, and the actions that the actors mentioned above have taken, or not.
Journal of the Southwest, 2018
On June 5, 2014, the right-wing website Breitbart News released photos of South Texas detention facilities overflowing with women and children (Darby, 2014). The headline, “Leaked Photos Reveal Children Warehoused in Crowded U.S. Cells, Border Patrol Overwhelmed,” demonstrates the role of contestation in shaping border policies. The photos show dirty cells, full of young children and women, often sleeping on the floor or with standing room only. While the surface message was apparently humanitarian, the evident agenda was to mobilize fear about a migrant invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border (henceforth, the “border”). Although the source of the photos was anonymous, it must have been taken by someone inside the Border Patrol or Immigration and Customs Enforcement since photography is not allowed and few people gain access to processing centers (hence, the term “leaked”). Reported by Brandon Darby, a controversial FBI informant who infiltrated the 2008 Republican National Convention and sent two protestors there to jail, the article has limited text, but asserts that “thousands of illegal immigrants have overrun U.S. border security and their processing centers in Texas.” This publicity sparked an important turn to strengthening border enforcement and provided a nationally significant political symbol, both at the time and in the 2016 election. Understand ing the full impact of this event and the surrounding maelstrom of humanitarian and anti-immigrant responses to the increase in Central American refugee families requires a holistic and multiscalar analysis of contending actors and how they changed and reproduced that which we call the “border.”
The present document constitutes an overview of the facilitation of irregular migration on the US Mexico border from a human rights perspective. The result of an NGO-academic partnership, it specifically outlines the contexts and challenges faced by boys, girls and adolescents who work in the migrant smuggling market in the Ciudad Juárez-El Paso corridor. Most discourses involving US-bound migration focus on the experiences of adult migrants. Furthermore, the majority of these experiences are described as inherently clandestine or even criminal in nature. This has facilitated on the one hand the dissemination of a discourse framing adult migrants as “illegal” or “criminal,” while on the other, the propagation of narratives that define their journeys as the result of the actions of powerful mafias or organized crime. As scholars and community activists, we acknowledge and condemn the criminal acts committed against migrants. Our work on the US Mexico border has made us keenly aware of the vast range of violations to the most basic rights of people on the move, and to their targeting by criminal organizations not only in our region but around the world. However, the predominance of an organized crime perspective in migration facilitation has often led to the role of states at creating unsafe conditions for migrants to be obscured, and for migration facilitators to be monolithically described as evil predators who take advantage of the vulnerability of migrants. In the pages that follow, we offer a critical view into the migrant smuggling market on the US Mexico border by documenting the experiences of a specific group of actors: the minors who work as agents of mobility processes, and who are known in policy circles as circuit boys, girls and adolescents, or CBGAs. Our report does not pretend to provide a complete or definite account of one of the most stigmatized markets of contemporary discourses of migration and security. Instead, it is an invitation to acknowledge the impact of smuggling facilitation within border communities, and a call to articulate solutions that may reduce the incidence and risk levels faced by the children and youth of the US Mexico border.
The US-Mexican Border and Contemporary American Immigration Policy
Politeja
There have been several periods in American history that are referred to as turbulent times. They were characterized by a wide range of changes that happened to respond to issues that brought anxiety, threat, discontent, or trouble. Donald Trump’s presidency and the Covid‑19 pandemic significantly influenced American immigration policy and the lives of immigrants. The present article pays special attention to the Mexican‑American border. This area plays a crucial role in migration studies focusing on the Americas for at least two reasons: international relations between Mexico (and the Latin American region) and the United States, and homeland security issues related to irregular and regular migrant flows. This study aims to determine what changes have been implemented in border policy, investigate why they occurred, and finally, discuss their results. The article analyzes the most challenging issues characteristic of the situation of unaccompanied minor migrants, the concept of Tru...
Violence, Migration, and the Perverse Effects of Gang Repression in Central America
Media, Central American Refugees, and the U.S. Border Crisis: Security Discourses, Immigrant Demonization, and the Perpetuation of Violence, 2019
In the summer of 2014, an increase in the number of unaccompanied children migrating to the United States unleashed a media backlash against immigration from Central America and Mexico, despite illegal immigration to the country being at a historically low level. At the same time, the hype served to shed light on the humanitarian crisis fed by chronic violence that had been building up in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Indeed, in 2017, El Salvador and Honduras were among the countries with the highest rates of asylum-seekers in the world. Instead of considering the influx of refugees as a humanitarian crisis and addressing the root causes of out-migration from the Northern Triangle, the U.S. government response emphasized a strategy of “aggressive deterrence” of immigrants, engaging Central American governments to take security measures to stop migrants at their own borders. This transnational policy response has fed into a repressive approach toward migrants, increased gang conflict, and moved further away from potential resolutions to violence. Aggressive deterrence does not address underlying causes of conflict, and is contributing to aggravate the dynamics of armed violence in the region, rather than attending to humanitarian needs for international protection.
Recently, a series of so-called "crises" along the United States-Mexico border have drawn significant attention to bordering practices, immigration enforcement, and international migration in the U.S. In Summer 2014, thousands of women and children from Central America arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border along the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. While many of these arriving migrants voluntarily turned themselves over to immigration authorities to claim asylum, the Obama administration was quick to declare "an urgent humanitarian situation" and "crisis on the border", requesting more than $3.7 billion to expand detention facilities, increase surveillance efforts, and hire additional Border Patrol agents (USBP) and immigration judges (Shear & Peters 2014; Rose 2019). This emphasis on deterrence, rather than aid or assistance, exposed not only the federal governments' inability to respond to the sudden increase in migration