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No easy solution for Central American refugees
SCOTT PIEPHO
Cases and Controversies
Published: August 22, 2014
The current reality of thousands of unaccompanied minors from Central America attempting to cross the Mexican border is being treated as a part of the immigration problem facing the United States. But while our response to the crisis is bound up in the politics of immigration, this is not an immigration crisis; it is a refugee crisis.
That is to say, the crisis is fundamentally different from the garden variety undocumented immigrants crossing the border to earn better wages than they can in their home countries. In many cases, the youths who have travelled the treacherous smuggling routes to the border have been specifically targeted by local gangs.
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are failed states with among the highest homicide rates in the world. Cities and towns are battlefields on which rival gangs battle for turf and control of drug transit routes. Police are often either helpless or on the payroll of either the gangs or the drug cartels that they work for. In Guatemala nearly three quarters of homicides go unpunished.
Boys are threatened with death if they do not become foot soldiers in the gang – a position with a high mortality rate in itself. Girls are recruited to be “girlfriends” within gangs, meaning they become sex slaves who are often killed when gang members lose interest in them.
The first is sheer numbers. Since October of last year, over 50,000 unaccompanied minors have been apprehended at the border. According to numbers released earlier this year by the Migration Policy Institute the total number of people settled as refugees or granted asylum in 2012 was around 87,000. If the minors in detention represent the numbers of children and youths who have claims for refugee status based on the violence in Central America, the country would have to significantly expand its refugee resettlement program to accommodate them.
The other problem is definitional.
According to the website of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “A refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence. A refugee has a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group . . . War and ethnic, tribal and religious violence are leading causes of refugees fleeing their countries.”
The situation faced by youths being targeted by gangs is similar but does not fit neatly into the traditional definition of a refugee. The only place they fit is by identifying them as belonging to a social group, that group being nonmembers of a gang.
That said, the reasons for their flight are very 21st century. This increasingly seems to be the era of the failed state. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute argued in the Washington Post recently that the governments of these countries must “establish a monopoly on violence.” But if, as political science wonks like Strain put it, governments function by maintaining a monopoly on violence, the fact that modern munitions technology can put the tools for mass-scale violence in the hands of drug lords and street thugs, that monopoly becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.