Unaccompanied Minors Are a Growing Challenge

One of the side-effects of the undocumented immigration disaster is the apparent increase in unaccompanied minors who are migrating. They may be seeking reunion with parents who migrated from, for example, Mexico or Central America to the US, or they may be seeking refuge from home environments that are dysfunctional for other reasons. No matter what the reasons, it is not a good situation, and the US does not have a good system for coping with them. Fortunately, there is a growing awareness of this and the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in Washington, DC today held a live forum to discuss the issue. It featured Elizabeth Dallam, National Legal Services Director, Kids In Need of Defense (KIND), Lisa Frydman, Associate Director and Managing Attorney, Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, UC Hastings College of the Law, and it was moderated by Kathleen Newland, who is Director, Refugee Protection and Migrants, Migration, and Development Programs at MPI. I encourage you to download the report from the KIND website.

As I have mentioned before, one of my PhD students, Elizabeth Kennedy, is currently in El Salvador on a Fulbright Fellowship investigating these very issues, and I encourage you to check out the article in the LA Times in which she was quoted, which is a good lead-in to the MPI web forum.