IMMIGRATION - What's Driving Migrant Children Across Our Borders

"Is hope of citizenship or endemic violence driving migrant children to cross the border?" PBS NewsHour 7/7/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  For more on what’s causing today’s circumstances, and possible remedies, we turn to Marshall Fitz.  He’s director of immigration policy with the Center for American progress.  It’s a left-leaning think tank in Washington.  And Jessica Vaughan, she’s the director for policy studies at the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies.

And we welcome you both to the program.

Marshall Fitz, let me start with you.  I want to ask you both this question.  What’s your understanding of why we are seeing this big influx of children, especially from Central America?

MARSHALL FITZ, Center for American Progress:  Well, it’s clear that the major drivers behind this recent influx are the conditions in the sending countries.

We know this for a fact because they are dispersing throughout the region.  It’s a regional crisis.  There’s a 712 percent increase in asylum applications in Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Costa Rica.  So, the immigrants are leaving those three countries because of the endemic violence, the weak institutional government, and lack of protections for the civil society there.

And it’s happening now because that violence is escalating.  Honduras is the murder capital of the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And in fact, we have a — I think we have a graphic to show our audience, what is it, 90 — the highest number of deaths per 100,000 people, followed — the third country in that list is El Salvador — or, rather, the fourth is El Salvador and the fifth being Guatemala.