Help reduce flow of Guatemalan minors
The plight of unaccompanied minors crossing national borders poses great challenges. The surge from the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala
— at levels never seen before 2014, brings to light the need to attend the root causes of this migration.
The 2014 border crisis is the result of failed public policies in the United States and in the above-mentioned countries, where the U.S. was involved in their civil wars in the 1980s — and who are now our allies. Many of the unaccompanied minors are sexually exploited or perish along the way. A wall along the U.S. southern border is not the solution to deal with this particular migration, since the majority will request asylum to immigration officials at points of entry.
Our “enforcement-only” approach of a dysfunctional immigration system, has been the worst type of foreign policy for this region. A legal diaspora is very beneficial to these three countries, whose livelihood largely depends on remittances. Yet for the past 10 years, our nation proceeded with a “deportation only” approach, threatening the remittances and tearing families apart.
Under the last administration, 3 million people were deported, mostly nationals of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico. The legacy of those deportations fed into the cauldron of despair that human smugglers use to entice the most vulnerable to come to the United States.
Those nations have failed to carry out public policies to help reintegrate the large number of deportees of this past decade and help address the abject poverty that continues to drive others to leave. Also, drug cartels have flourished in this region.
I just returned from a trip to Guatemala to visit Ak Tenamit — a rural school in the eastern rainforest of Guatemala, nestled at the banks of the Rio Dulce River. In the Maya language of Q’eqchi — Ak Tenamit means, “new village” and was created in 1992, by Steve Dudenhoefer, an American from Jupiter.
Ak Tenamit now educates 540 boarding students, roughly half girls and half boys. They obtain practical training and three-month internships with potential employers . It has the highest employment rate of any vocational school in the country. Graduates of the school earn roughly double the national average for rural indigenous high school graduates.
Educating girls breaks patterns that lock them into forced marriages and a life of destitution.
Today, the Guatemalan government covers about one-third of the school’s operational costs. Dudenhoefer is working closely with the Ministry of Education of Guatemala to replicate this public/private educational model in other areas. He is also in the process of securing a building in Guatemala City to help the returning minors from Mexico and the U.S. be reintegrated by providing them with vocational training and job placement.
The Guatemalan Tomorrow Fund provides a way for concerned people to send tax-deductible donations to Ak Tenamit, which will help vulnerable youth obtain good jobs in Guatemala, thus avoiding the risky migration to the U.S.
AILEEN JOSEPHS, WEST PALM BEACH Editor’s note: Josephs is an immigration attorney and local activist on immigration issues.