“As for the unaccompanied minors, advocates fear that a number of the children already here, because of the narrowness of U.S. asylum law, might be sent back to persecution and, in some cases, certain death. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat representing part of San Antonio, believes the ways in which we define refugees must be updated for the 21st century - that connecting refugee status to specific enemy states, at a time when non-state actors like Al Qaeda or narcotrafficking cartels make for bigger threats, is leftover thinking from the Cold War.

“One of the ways we demonstrated to communist dictators that we disapproved of their government was by accepting their people as refugees,” Castro points out. “Granting refugee status to these children would be a way of demonstrating how insidious these cartels are, and that the U.S. stands against them. When I hear people click their tongues and say, ‘Who’s going to pay for it?’ I say, ‘Well, the same people who paid for Cubans fleeing Castro or Jews fleeing the Soviet Union.’”

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