The Obama administration is working with the United Nations to develop “new mechanisms” to process more Central American unaccompanied minors as refugees in their home countries before flying them to the U.S., a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) contends.
And, according to analysis from Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at CIS, taxpayers can expected to pay twice as much to process and care for each unaccompanied alien child (UAC) next year compared to 2010. In 2010, the average cost to provide for each UAC was $8,217. That figure is expected to rise to $17,613 per child, should Congress provide the $1.32 billion requested for the program.
The Obama administration has portrayed its response to the surge of UACs — which spiked in 2014, fell last year, and is on the rise again — as a humanitarian effort. The tens of thousands of minors are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries, government officials and President Obama have claimed.
But one overlooked catalyst for the massive surge is family reunification. A vast majority of Central American UACs have family members — usually parents and usually illegal aliens themselves — already in the U.S.
So rather than being solely a desire to flee crime and violence, UACs are often sent for by their family members to make the dangerous and expensive trip to the U.S.
In December 2014, the administration unveiled a program that would help protect child migrants from making the journey from Central America to the U.S. by allowing federal agents to identify potential refugees in their home countries of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
But the initiative failed to attract a sizable number of applicants, largely because of the requirement that parents of child refugees must be living in the U.S. legally.
So, according to Rush, the Obama administration adopted a new idea: expand the program to admit UACs into the U.S. even if they do not have legal residents here that can sponsor them upon entry.
Secretary of State John Kerry referred to such a plan during a speech in January at National Defense University.
“I am pleased to announce that we have plans to expand the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program in order to help vulnerable families and individuals from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,” he said.
At around the same time, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced “new mechanisms to process and screen Central American refugees in the region.”
“These new refugee processing mechanisms will build upon the existing Central American Minors Program, which is already providing an in-country refugee processing option for certain children with parents lawfully in the United States,” he said.
According to Rush, in order to enact the expansion the U.S. government will work with — and provide funds to — the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). That’s the same group that is seeking to develop “alternative avenues” to helping bring more Syrian refugees to the U.S.
In a separate report last month, CIS pointed to a speech given in March in Geneva, Switzerland by Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in which he described those “alternative” routes for refugee resettlement in Western nations. CIS favors low levels of immigration.
Grandi said then:
These pathways can take many forms: not only resettlement, but also more flexible mechanisms for family reunification, including extended family members, labour mobility schemes, student visa and scholarships, as well as visa for medical reasons.
According to Rush, the federal government, in cooperation with UNHCR, is setting up refugee processing centers in several Latin American countries, such as Belize, Costa Rica and Mexico.
And once those centers are up and running, “UNHCR will start interviewing migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who seek protection, grant them refugee status (or not), and refer those who qualify as ‘refugees’ to the United States for resettlement.”
Federal officers will then screen the applicants to decide who to allow into the U.S. As many as 9,000 applicants could be resettled in the U.S. this year under the program.
“We might even call this program what it really is: a family reunification program specially crafted for illegal aliens and their children under the cover of refugee resettlement,” Rush writes.
Migration data strongly suggest that family reunification is a strong motivator for UACs.
CIS’ report cites a 2014 study by the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), which found that “family separation has long been a strong motivation for unaccompanied minors to migrate.”
“Immigration to the United States from Central America and Mexico in high numbers over the last decade has led adults, now settled in the United States, to send for the children they left behind,” the MPI report reads.
Rush also cites statistics from UNHCR showing that 81 percent of the children from Central America and Mexico that the group interviewed said that reuniting with a family member was one of the reasons for migrating to the U.S.
And according to data provided to the Associated Press, of the 71,000 Central American children apprehended at the southern U.S. border between February 2014 and September 2015, more than half were placed into the care of their parents. Many of the others were reunited with siblings and other relatives.