Children Crossing Border Are Here To Stay

Kevin Rennie
Contact ReporterThe Hartford Courant

Children crossing the United States border with Mexico are teaching us a lesson in the power of the human spirit. A nation must be able to control its borders, but ours with Mexico is 2,000 miles long. It will always be porous. The Berlin Wall was about 100 miles long and required an army to keep East Germans from escaping communism to freedom in West Berlin.

Misery and opportunity are powerful incentives. They also provide vivid visual images. We're seeing them now with tens of thousands of children from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador making the treacherous journey from their home countries and Mexico to the American Southwest.

Mexico's southern border with Guatemala is 540 miles, with another 140 miles with Belize. The southern border is notable for rivers, jungles and crime. The Mexican government is no match to control it in the face of what spurs its southern neighbors to flee their unhappy countries.

If the recent past indicates future results, the surge of children appearing at the American border will not be going back. It takes a powerful strain of determination to escape, for example, bloody Honduras, with the world's highest murder rate. It's determination that far exceeds the spirit a plucky 12-year-old American shows on a school soccer field.

Rahm Emanuel's Chicago made national news last weekend when 82 people were shot in 84 hours, with 16 of them killed. That's life in Central America day after day. People are going to find a way out. To escape deadly violence, Central Americans will risk their lives and do business with the cartels that have added human trafficking to their dark portfolios of supplying illegal drugs to Americans. Wouldn't you?

The children and their families know the risks of extortion, abuse and kidnapping at the hands of Mexican gangs and corrupt police and immigration officials. Nevertheless, they climb onto to the top of a freight train, known as The Beast, to begin the perilous journey through Mexico to the United States.

The spurs of poverty, violence and family ties ought to be familiar to most Americans. Wars, pogroms and potato famines in Europe, for example, provided human capital for American freedom and prosperity. We are still the world's brightest beacon for the ambitious downtrodden.

The federal government has been slow to respond to the surge in immigration, especially the added burden of unaccompanied children who turn themselves over to border officials when they cross the border into America. This is different from our notion of adult illegal immigrants scattering and fleeing from law enforcement when they get to the United States.

Federal law does not allow children arriving here from Central American countries to be turned around at the border and sent immediately back into Mexico. Instead, they enter into a slow-moving immigration bureaucracy that gives them plenty of time to settle into American life. Most of the children have relatives in America and, after processing and brief court appearances, they'll be reunited with family and disappear into vast America.

The formal American immigration process gives families fleeing wretched living conditions persuasive incentives to gamble that they will not be sent back to Central America. It typically takes more than a year and a half for the adjudication process to run. By the time it does, most illegal immigrants do not show up for court appearances and have joined the 11 million other illegal immigrants around the nation.

As many as 90,000 children may arrive at our southern border this year. The Obama administration appears to have ignored warnings that the deluge was coming, so the government is unprepared to provide places for the children to live while the legal process lumbers along and they are released to families here. Moving tens of thousands of new cases through immigration proceedings will extend the time for resolution. Border states will continue to bear an unfair burden in coping with chaos.

The $3.7 billion the administration requested to address the challenge will provide some relief, but not quickly. Leaders in Washington, we already know, are not going to be able to agree on a comprehensive solution beyond the short run. We are not going to see thousands of buses rumbling through Mexico returning sobbing children to hopeless destitution.


Copyright © 2016, Hartford Courant