Who has the right to migrate? Do some people on the move deserve more rights than others? Since the mid-2010s, an increasingly common phenomenon seen at the U.S.-Mexico border has been that of the so-called “unaccompanied” minors arriving in the United States without parents or guardians.
While many of them traveled with siblings or others from their communities, they are categorized as “unaccompanied,” and the upward trend, in for example 2014, was often framed in the media and policy discussions as unexpected and unprecedented.
We show how migration policy separates families, which has real-life consequences for the mental well-being of minors.
Why were these children coming across the border without parents? While the focus was on the fact that these children and teenagers were alone, few asked why it was common for Central American youth to arrive in the U.S. traveling without parents. In this piece, we describe why many minors come from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras and, something that is less often discussed, what happens to them once they settle in the United States.
Family-propelled migration
Youth migration from Central America should not be unexpected nor understood as unprecedented. By following prior generations’ migration —geopolitical events in Central America in the 1980s followed by the migration of the next generation of adults without their children— one can see how it was only a matter of time before another set of migrants, many from the same families, would set for the United States.
In the last years, Mexico has deported more Central Americans than the U.S., including minors.
In our book, Reunited, we apply the concept of family-propelled migration to explain how and why minors decide to migrate on their own. Migration is a family-driven decision, often made possible by, or because of family members living abroad.
In other words, we argue that the arrival of these unaccompanied children was to be expected given that these teenagers were the children of parents who had left Central America, sometimes as long as 14 years earlier, joining communities often established by the prior generation who were escaping civil wars. Furthermore, we show how migration policy separates families, which has real-life consequences for the mental well-being of minors. Had they had better legal pathways to migration and family reunification, many would not have gone through traumatic events crisscrossing Central America and Mexico by land.
So, the main factors that explain why minors left Central America include the presence of family in the U.S., long separations between parents and children, the coming of age, and events on the ground, such as an increase in violence and gang recruitment of youth. Indeed, among many of the 58 minors who were interviewed for the book, educational disruption and gang recruitment were mentioned as common reasons why they left.
Structural Family Separation
Additionally, there is a precedent for the phenomenon of youth migrating to the U.S. without a parent. Since 2008, Central American workers increasingly filled many of the jobs previously held by Mexicans in the United States. When parents go north, they often go without their children – due to restrictive migration policy.
We call this process structural family separation. After a few years, as gang violence becomes a more visible issue, family or friends who were taking care of the children are no longer able to do so or pass away, or children get older and express a desire to reunite with their parents: they will reunify in the United States. If minor migrants had been less visible before, it was because the border had never been as heavily patrolled.
Many unaccompanied minors facing deportation were not provided with legal representation.
Arrangements between Mexico and the U.S. allowed for minors caught at the border to be quickly returned to Mexico, and thus, few records of this phenomenon were kept. The same relative invisibility applied to the many minors from Europe and Asia who came alone in previous centuries when the U.S. state was not deemed responsible for their safety once they reached U.S. shores.
In the case of Salvadorans, escaping civil war in the 1980s or gang violence in 2014 can explain why one left, but not why one came to the United States – family and social ties can partly explain that. They are not limited to people from the same hometown or country; U.S.-born White religious leaders, activists, social workers, and non-profit leaders played a key role in transporting people out of violence and at risk of persecution by local governments in Central America and providing sanctuary to them in the United States, even when the U.S. government would not recognize them as such.
We explain in Reunited that the ability for youth to migrate to the United States usually relies on the presence of family – to fund the trip and to have somewhere to stay once one arrives. While some do come truly alone and without anyone on the other side of the border, family ties were cited as the main reason why one would come to the United States.
Legal Peril
A point worth highlighting is that there are deep inequalities that prevent many families from reunifying or migrating together in the first place. Noticing and studying presence is a far easier undertaking than that of absence. So, we can only interview people in Washington, DC, who were able to cross Mexico and the border and reunite with their family members. But we cannot interview the people who were not allowed to make it to the border or enter the country here. In the last years, Mexico has deported more Central Americans than the U.S., including minors.
An issue for the ones who arrive is navigating the legal process; many of the minors, as well as the legal sponsors that we interviewed, did not focus on whether migrants understood their cases or received updates from their lawyers.
It became evident that the legal process of family reunification or getting asylum, temporary protective status, a J visa, or a green card was highly confusing, even for those complying with requirements such as providing documents and paying fees.
We found that migrants struggled to keep up with their legal cases and understand how to best advocate for themselves, especially since immigration cases can be lengthy. Legal situations were difficult, leaving many dependent on their lawyers and volunteers to advocate for their best court outcome.
Unfortunately, many unaccompanied minors facing deportation were not provided with legal representation. This stems from the fact that immigration courts operate under civil law, which differs from the criminal justice system, which provides public defendants for those who cannot afford their own lawyer. Coupled with their economic disadvantages and high lawyer fees, this creates a heightened vulnerability, leaving them susceptible to critical legal errors and swift deportation.
For instance, one family with a pregnant mother missed a court date due to the delivery of the baby, and that led to the beginning of deportation proceedings. Therefore, defendants in immigration courts do not have the same rights, and as a result, many migrants, including young children, were processed quickly and asked to answer legal questions that only a lawyer could properly address, complicating their ability to navigate the system.
Workers or Families?
For most of human history, family units have usually migrated together. They may have been looking for better lands to hunt or cultivate, or they may have had to move to escape war, violence, or famine.
The contemporary nation-state system—with its increasingly fortified political borders and an international “remote control” system of passports and visas—treats migration mainly as something to discourage.
We need a humane and rights-centric approach to managing migration.
Most contemporary migration legal systems conceive of immigrants—especially those from poorer and non-white-majority nations—as solitary individuals rather than as members of families.
Part of the problem started with guest worker programs, whose sole purpose was to provide temporary labor in the host country. These programs and those who designed them viewed foreign-born people as vehicles for labor rather than as individuals with agency, families, goals, and emotional needs. One such program was the Mexican Farm Labor Program, more commonly known as the Bracero Program (1942–1964), which brought essential labor to the United States from Mexico during and after World War II.
In the United States, Mexican and Filipino labor fulfilled the needs in agriculture, mining, and railroad construction on the West Coast after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement reached with Japan in 1907. Along with the women who entered the labor force, immigrants were essential in filling industrial jobs while soldiers fought abroad in the world wars. So, for a while, managed legal migration and undocumented migration have rotated around attracting single working-age individuals. Nevertheless, the family is the fundamental unit of migration and decision-making about migrating.
Looking Forward
Once in the U.S., the government knows who the unaccompanied minors are, where they live, and who their sponsors are. They are legally in the United States. While unaccompanied minors were processed according to the law and allowed into the interior, they are discussed by some politicians as if they should not be in the U.S. no matter what. Some frame them all as criminals and gang members.
Nevertheless, the great majority find housing with family members and go to school. Their parents want to work. Indeed, the DC metropolitan area depends on their work to function. The minors want to get an education and contribute to their new communities. Public schools in the region are doing a great job of welcoming them and helping them adjust.
Youth are indeed particularly vulnerable. The are special provisions for unaccompanied people younger than 18. This cutoff is at once rational but also capricious. Nineteen-year-olds, or, for that matter, adults facing the same circumstances, are often returned at the border if they cannot convince authorities about a credible fear. This also creates incentives for families reaching Northern Mexico to send their children alone if they are not allowed to present to ask for asylum as a family.
The unaccompanied minor so-called “crises” in the United States during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations remind us that restrictive attitudes toward migrants —fortified by systems that paint migrants as a negative— separate families across borders and keep them apart.
Then, they and their children experience more difficult lives even after reunification following years of being apart. We need a humane and rights-centric approach to managing migration. In a system providing better legal opportunities for migration and better labor protections for adult migrants, alongside social programs accessible to everyone, societies can successfully support and welcome migrants, who then also help support everyone else through their contributions.
Further Reading
