That’s the question a discussion at the Latin American Coalition aims to answer tonight. The coalition and Sisters of Mercy will host Aida Leticia Gonzales, an associate of the sisters and the administrative director of Mercy Dreamweavers in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, who will speak about the violence in Central America that’s causing many of its inhabitants – most recently about 50,000 unaccompanied minors – to flee for a chance at a safer, more stable life in the U.S. To give you an idea of the conditions they’re facing at home, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have some of the highest homicide rates in the world, and drug gangs often use children as their foot soldiers.
- Thomas Frost Jensen (Flickr Creative Commons)
Of course, the migrants face a new set of troubles when they arrive. The Obama administration has a full-on humanitarian crisis on its hands as it struggles to decide the proper way to address the needs of the thousands of unaccompanied minors who have recently crossed into the U.S. Deporting them without an escort puts them at a high risk of danger, but they can’t continue to be held at detention centers, where conditions are already rough. Hopefully understanding why they’re coming will help us come up with a more realistic, holistic approach to immigration reform.
The talk is tonight at 6 p.m. at the Latin American Coalition, 4938 Central Ave., Suite 101. Check back for coverage of the event tomorrow.
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This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2014.
I hear lots of Conservatives screaming about the alien children, but I don’t hear any actual plans. I guess the President is just supposed to throw them over the fence President Bush had built.
Ship them home. Will cost much less than having them on welfare for their entire lives.
I say we should adopt the immigration policies of Europe and NOT allow anyone that wants to crash our borders, to come over here and live and work illegally. If the goal of our government is to protect and serve, then they need to be able to differentiate between citizens that pay taxes vs. illegal aliens.
What an interesting accusation. All Citizens pay taxes and all undocumented aliens do not. Do you have any actual evidence to support that? How do you reconcile that with the claim that the immigrants are taking all our jobs?
How do we “ship them home”? We don’t even know where home is. If we are able to determine their country of origin, how do you plan to repatriate them? Are you actually in favor of just abandoning the children somewhere?
Here is the real point: We should follow the model in Europe and just treat any non citizen as a tourist. Let em cover over, take pictures of our cool shit, eat a hot dog but as soon as they apply for a job in any profession we simply turn them away. They won’t come here, they won’t try to live here. It will be the end of the immigration debate altogether. Shipping illegals around is kind of silly, just stop giving them work and they will leave. It happened at the peak of the recession due to fewer jobs and it will obviously happen again if we just follow European countries and only allow very high skilled workers (in fields where there is more demand then supply) to immigrate over for work. To the question regarding taxes: US citizens have to settle up every year on their taxes by April, or they can get their pay garnished, get audited, have their credit dinged etc. Now if you don’t even have a social security number to start with, obviously there is no motivation what so ever to try to settle up and write Gov-co a check for all the money you made the previous year. So it is common sense, that illegal aliens don’t write the government a check every year, whereas anyone will a SSN will have to. That is the key difference. Now for those that come over with fake paper work named “john smith” and go work at happy burger with their BS stolen SSN… yeah there paying taxes but these types are in the minority compared to most that work in fields where they can just cash under the table in blue collar jobs. I am not claiming that others don’t avoid paying taxes too, but statistically more immigrants work in these fields and deliberately game the system. Regarding the old notation that immigrants are “taking jobs”… No one would care if they were all neurosurgeons, or astronauts, but the fact is they only take the commodity type jobs that are typically given to our working poor. So this creates more supply of workers then their may be available jobs in a specific field in a specific market. This is econ 101 stuff.
“Everybody knows”, or “It’s just common sense” or “There is no motivation” are not evidence. They are opinions. Do you have any actual evidence that all undocumented immigrants work under the table, or that all people who work under the table are undocumented immigrants?
Now, back to the subject at hand: How does that apply to these emancipated children? They are not working. They are interred is government camps. Is your heart so hard that you want us to just drop them on the tarmac at some Hispanic airport? Perhaps you have a plan for finding their parents. Please share it with us.
Liberals see people in trouble and feel empathy. Conservatives see the same people and feel contempt. Xenophobes see the same people and feel threatened. Which group describes you?
DLP, so what is your solution guy? Do you have any opinions at all or are you just an internet troll? I offered my take… by providing a macro-economic solution that is not just theoretical, but is actually in place in Europe. I’m not coming at this to play a politics game and identify with some narrow ideology, or fall into a trivial debate over the best immediate solution. In this situation you are really just picking the lesser of the evils. (Either detain the kids indefinitely in make shift camps, ship them somewhere else, or give them US taxpayer money and just let them be wards of the state.) There is really no good solution short term. But like I said long term… If you make it impossible for illegals to work here, they won’t come here. And to your silly questions about proof, statistics about how illegals are employed here: Rather then posting a few dozen links, just look at this logically. Illegals can either A. work under the table, B. steal someones SSN and work as John Smith, or C. go through the long process to become a US citizen and work here perfectly legally. These are the only 3 options, so picture this as a pie chart if ya like. My issue is two of these options are breaking the law and only one is legit, and I will let you take a wild guess what this pie chart looks like. So why not share your opinion of both long term and short term solutions to the immigration issue? Do you even have an opinion, or do you just like to troll?