If the current influx of minors from a few Central American countries teaches us anything, it is the wisdom of Robert Burns’ paraphrased argument that, “The best laid schemes of mice and men oft go awry, and leave us nothing but grief and pain.”
Well-intended U.S. and international policies to reduce the horrors and injustices suffered by those fleeing political persecution or imminent peril may have been “best laid” plans when adopted. But the effects have been far from what was intended and often negative.
Right now we are focused on coping with a spate of children from Central America. But some European Union nations face near identical chronic problems of immigrants risking peril to gain a physical foothold to attain protected refugee status and avoid immediate deportation. I’m thinking of Greece, Italy and Spain, which are near regions with harsh economic and political conditions. The same is true for Australia.
By giving political refugees asylum, or giving specific groups, such as minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, legal protection against immediate return to a place where they might be at grave risk, these laws create an incentive for many more people to choose to migrate for a variety of other reasons.
Laws intended to protect those fleeing immediate danger often increase the odds of any immigrant gaining quasi-legal status in the destination country. Increase the probability of success and the personal cost-benefit calculations tip more decisively toward making the move.
If this were purely a private decision, with no effects on anyone else, economists would see no problem.
But migration can have “external effects” on others. Desirable destination nations may be forced to spend billions of dollars to seal their borders against illegal immigrants or to hold and process them after arrival.
High levels of immigration, legal as well as illegal, can skew labor markets. Since illegal immigrants often have lower skills relative to people in the destination nations, lower-skilled and lower-income natives of such nations can see sharp competition for jobs, greater unemployment and stagnant or falling earnings. Economists who study this usually argue that these effects are vastly overstated in public discussion, but the problem does exist.
Finally, citizens of nations receiving large numbers of illegal immigrants simply may be made less happy by the fact that something is happening counter to the majority will and established laws of their societies. We may or may not agree with these motives, but the right to limit who can become a resident or citizen is fundamental to any nation-state. And in a democracy, the desires of a majority of citizens demand great respect.
When Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the latter on a near-unanimous vote, its intent was to deal with a few thousand cases a year of children who arrived in the United States and who might have been victims of the sex or drug trades or other criminal activity. The idea was to protect them from immediate return to a perilous situation in their home country.
No one anticipated that the flow might soon near 60,000 a year.
The same was true for international agreements adopted under the aegis of the United Nations or European Union that afforded protections to political refugees.
These were motivated in great part by guilt over how Jews fleeing Nazi persecution were turned away by many nations and by the fate of post-World War II refugees forcibly returned to totalitarian governments.
The intent was humanitarian and the assumption was that political refugees would be clearly distinguishable from those simply seeking to better their lives economically and socially.
Life in poor countries is complex, however, and poverty often blends with high levels of violent crime and of religious or ethnic or gender discrimination.
Education and health services are bad and access to may be driven by political or social discrimination.
It often is exceedingly difficult to parse out the complex circumstances that motivated any single person to migrate or the parents of any single child to send their offspring on a trek to another country.
Yes, poverty, crime and gang violence are high in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the three nations given special status in the 2008 U.S. legislation.
But they are similarly high in many areas of Mexico and minors from that nation don’t get similar treatment. And things are just as bad in parts of Colombia or Brazil, let alone Congo, Pakistan or Bangladesh.
Whatever the moral imperative for giving refuge to any child endangered by crime, the fact that hundreds of millions of children worldwide would meet the criteria makes more than a token response politically difficult.
Both political parties supported the 2008 legislation and majorities in both now probably favor its repeal. Returning minors from three small countries to the same status given migrant children from everywhere else certainly will harm some. But it will also simply return them to the same status afforded millions of other minors worldwide. Whether that is morally flawed depends on the eye of the beholder.
More broadly, the question of how to structure laws that protect those facing severe persecution — while not motivating decisions by other seeking simple improvement in their lives — will always be a tough one. There simply is no way to do it. Like it or not, illegal migration is arousing sharp political reactions in many other nations beside ours. Indeed, in the European Union, it is one of the principal factors moving politics to the right. So whatever Congress does about the special status of some Central American kids, expect to hear more in the future.