Writing status update; The US child immigration crisis · 12:45am Jul 17th, 2014
I've got 1,440 words written so far for the latest Crysis chapter. I don't have an ETA on the chapter being published, but it should be relatively soon. I've also been doing some work on the sequel to Halo: The Interlopers.
Recently, tens of thousands of Central American children have begun to head to the US. It's easy to compare it to the normal illegal immigration problems the US faces, but the problem is much different. To understand, we need to rewind more than 30 years.
See, back in the '70s and '80s, a lot of Central American countries were fighting civil wars, insurgencies, and other internal threats. Tens of thousands of people from those countries fled the violence and headed to other countries - mainly the US - many of them illegally. Los Angeles, with its Spanish name, already significant population of Spanish-speaking individuals and association with the American Dream, received a very large portion of those immigrants.
I'll focus on one group that is a microcosm of the larger problem.
Salvadoran immigrants living in the Pico-Union neighborhood were threatened by established LA gangs, and formed their own gang for self-defense that grew to encompass many other Central American immigrant communities; many street gangs are actually formed for such defensive purposes. This gang, Mara Salvatrucha (perhaps better known as MS-13), became known for their violent tactics, as many of them had witnessed or been involved in such violence in their home countries. Over the years, MS-13 became a feared gang with an international presence.
US federal law dictates that illegal immigrants imprisoned in state facilities for violent crimes be deported back to their home country. As you can imagine, a lot of criminals were deported to their home countries over time. By the '90s and '00s, the civil wars were over, but they left a lasting impact; families were broken, economies were bad, there were few legitimate ways to make ends meet, many public institutions were no longer trusted, many people who had lived through the conflict had military/paramilitary/law enforcement training, and to top it all off there were plenty of guns to go around (as in any war-torn nation).
That's where the deportees came in. They were sent back to their home countries, where they became leaders in criminal groups there, which were and are a relatively dependable source of income for members. Gang membership shoots up, criminals become more organized and violent, and the governments are ineffectual. Large-scale attempts to fight crime fail, and worse yet, the gangs begin to influence politics. I'm not talking about some generic "all politicians are bad" shit; gangs have begun to influence politicians through official and unofficial means. So basically, take a lot of the negative qualities Americans associate with Mexico and squeeze them into smaller countries with weaker economies and more painful pasts. And of course, gangs often utilize the technique of using small children (some as young as 4 years old) to carry and deal drugs, act as lookouts, and even engage in violent crimes.
So the deportation of illegal immigrants kinda backfired, and now the countries that are sending their children to the US en masse are doing so because they don't want their kids growing up in their home countries. Another US federal law, this one signed as recently as 2008 and intended to combat human trafficking, contains a provision preventing the deportation of children who come from nations that don't border the US. So the hordes of child refugees can't be simply deported.
Now for some local news. A man in Pima County, Arizona organized an anti-illegal immigration protest, claiming that he had inside information from the Department of Homeland Security saying that buses of children were going to be taken to a large ranch. When several buses of children neared the protesters, they surrounded them and prevented them from proceeding. As it turns out, the children onboard were American citizens heading to summer camp for some good-old fashioned American-style summer fun. Ironic, huh?
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