Why Child Migrants Head to the US
Whitney Eulich - The Christian Science Monitor
August 4, 2014The dramatic increase in unaccompanied child migrants crossing the US-Mexican border this year didn’t develop overnight. What can be done to both keep the more than 57,000 migrant children from Central America safe and halt the flow?
What happened in Central America recently that led to the surge of child migrants?El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras have long had high rates of violence, struggling economies, and lack of opportunity, all of which tend to “push” emigration. Over the past decade, the increased presence of street gangs and organized crime have further exacerbated the situation.
“It’s not like there was a golden age” in the Northern Triangle, as this region is called, says Dana Frank, an expert on Honduran history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Civil wars raged across Central America throughout the 1970s and ’80s, and economic inequality persists.
These three main countries from which the children are fleeing are among the nations with the top five murder rates in the world (along with Belize and Venezuela), according to the most recent United Nations data. In some cases, such as Guatemala, the homicide rate has actually declined slightly in recent years. But crimes like extortion have become “widespread and intolerable,” says Cynthia Arnson, the Latin America director at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “Everyone is hit, down to the person at the bottom of the informal economy selling chewing gum.”