English 110 - Immigration Reform and the Inefficacy of the U.S. Border

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Beginning in the late 1970s and lasting through the 1990s, civil wars and communist revolutions erupted in Central America. The United States feared that communist forces would threaten the Panama Canal and thus isolate South America from the U.S. (Coleman 7) When the U.S. involved itself in these wars and the casualty rates began to soar, millions fled their native countries; one in five Salvadorans and over a million Guatemalans came to immigrate to the U.S. (Foer 2). Unfortunately, as Kalina M. Brabeck, of the Academic Journal Community, Work & Family reports, due to the supportive stance the U.S. took towards the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments, less than 3% of these immigrants were granted asylum (Brabeck 3). How the United States could go into the homelands of these immigrants and ravage them with war, then leave them to their own devices is unbelievable. The U.S. presence in Guatemala and El Salvador “destroyed crops, disappeared or murdered breadwinners, and decimated communities that collectively farmed and subsisted for generations” (Brabeck 3). And when the war ended, America left, and these countries were left to suffer in the aftermath.

While America left Central America in the 1990s, the drug economy and its violent cartels remained. It didn’t take long for Honduras to become the drug capital of the world; unguarded coastlines, empty jungles, and a convenient location created a perfect storm for the drug business. Sonia Nazario, author of the New York Times article “The Children of the Drug Wars,” asserts that 79% of all flights smuggling cocaine to the US pass through Honduras (Nazario 1). Through a series of unintended consequences, the perfect workers for this drug business would be sent to Central America, directly from the United States.

During the 1990s, Los Angeles gang members were deported en masse to their countries of origin (Nazario 1). These gang members returned to Central America with no warning and no program in place to impede the threats they posed (Foer 3). Then came the U.S.-Mexican “war on drugs,” which drove the Mexican cartel and other criminal organizations into Central America, looking for a new base of operations where their freedom would remain uninfringed (Foer 3). There are now an estimated total of 85,000 gang members spread across Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. This number is combated poorly by the shrunken Honduras police force, composed of just 14,000 very poorly paid officers (Foer 4). The murder rate in Honduras’ metropolitan areas is staggering. Pedro de Sula, one of its largest cities, has a murder rate of 173 homicides per every 100,000 citizens; compare this to the rate of 30 homicides per every 100,000 citizens in the notoriously war-ridden Congo and it is easy to see just dangerous Honduras has become. In the face of such societal and moral decay, it is inevitable that children would soon become victims of just as much violence as adults.

Children of Honduras are constantly faced with the threat of gang violence. Girls as young as nine are threatened with rape if they refuse to cooperate with the cartel (Nazario 1). Gangs use schools as primary sources of recruitment, so attendance plummets (Foer 4). Older students pressure younger kids into working for the cartel; they are used as lookouts, extortionists, and anything else the cartel sees fit. As an incentive, these children are offered food, money, and clothing. Children still wishing to go to school must pay a “war tax” to attend and teachers must pay the same tax to teach (Nazario 2). With poverty as pervasive as it is in Honduras, the prevalence of dropouts is as unsurprising as it is saddening. Thirty-one of Hondurans live on the equivalent of under $1 a day, while 58% scrape by on under $2 daily (Brabeck 3). Children are too poor and quite likely too afraid to attend. Most Honduran children will not give up the chance to earn money as well as pacify the cartel to go to school. And if they do make the mistake of going against the gangs’ wishes, then the gangs can simply resort to threats and brute force to get what they want. Often the safety of children’s families is threatened if they do not comply, so any semblance of a choice is taken away. It becomes virtually inevitable that a child will go to work for the cartel and eventually become a part of the gangs that have terrorized them since birth. Thus the cycle continues, always leading back to the gangs.

The only hope these children have is the possibility of asylum in the U.S. For the United States to turn away these children as they turned away victims of the Central American crisis--another hardship the U.S. had a hand in--would be unforgivable. Franklin Foer argues that without a well-regulated border, the United States loses the ability to choose who does and does not get admitted (Foer 2). This is true, but seeing as the United States played a large role in creating the circumstances which have increased immigration rates by the thousands, denying these children asylum would completely compromise the country’s self-proclaimed hegemonic status. The strict border policies that the U.S. has enacted, along with its actions in Central America, are directly responsible for this influx of child immigrants. When the border was more lax, immigrant parents could return to visit their children in their native country. But since the border has become more of a military base than a dividing line, these parents tend to stay put, so the incentive for their kids to make the journey to the U.S. becomes much stronger (Dannemiller 4). It is irrelevant whether the U.S. can afford to take in these children. We are responsible for the circumstances that led to them fleeing here, so we are responsible for providing temporary refuge from those circumstances. A major step towards accepting these immigrant children is accepting the role their parents play in the U.S. economy, particularly the benefits they provide.

Immigrant workers have a great deal to offer to the US labor force and further, the U.S. economy. The main economic threat attributed to immigrant workers is the that of taking jobs from Americans and lowering wages. This is supported by the substitution/complement framework. Jeremy Pais, author of the article “The Effects of U.S. Immigration on the Career Trajectories of Native Workers,” explains that the framework maintains that rising numbers of immigrant workers can have either negative (substitutional) or positive (complementary) effects on job opportunities for natives (Pais 1). David Card, of the Economic Journal backs up the substitute/complement framework by asserting that the section of the labor market facing the most competition from migrant workers is that of the lowest level of educated Americans (Card 4). Most immigrants coming into the U.S.