President Joe Biden’s decision to explore the root causes of forced migration from Central America to the United States is a step in the right direction. But it will lead only to long-term solutions. In fact, political preferences aside, both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have shown a type of leadership that is rarely found in American politics: governing with a long-term vision.
As Harris will soon find out, one of the most complex geopolitical problems in the 21st century involves dissimilar root causes forcing Central American migrant children to seek protection abroad: drug trafficking, domestic violence, cultural forms of discrimination, gang violence, state violence and corruption, institutional inequalities, and climate change.
The solution for both unaccompanied children fleeing persecution, conflict, and poverty in Central America and the U.S. struggling to end detention as its first, if not only, institutional response may be found not in the south but in the north.
Canada, a country that not long ago faced public backlash to end the systematic detention of unaccompanied children across its provinces, has been developing some of the world’s most effective programs on reception and resettlement of refugees while substantially reducing the detention of migrant children in the country.
What led Canadian authorities to introduce legal changes concerning the detention of unaccompanied children was not a legal issue but a defining question of values. Canada is a country where multiculturalism is considered public policy and human rights is a protected constitutional value. Unlike the U.S., Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which eventually facilitated the adoption of the notion of “the best interests of the child” as a constitutional principle applicable to all children present in Canada regardless of their race, national origin, or migration status.
This reform has forced most provincial governments to break down policies and practices gradually, jeopardizing the best interests of unaccompanied children, including systematic detention and detention beyond administrative purpose. More so, this legal change led the Canadian government to develop the Alternatives to Detention Program and the Canada Border Services Agency national directive on housing of minors, as well as Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations making unaccompanied children detention a last resort.
Of all programs Canada has introduced to integrate refugees, the one that the Biden administration should consider, with some minor adaptations, is the Private Sponsorship of Refugees. This program enables different members of society — organizations operating in local communities, groups of citizens or residents with no fewer than five members, and authorized institutions — to host and sponsor refugees previously listed by the government or by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. The program, moreover, allows the government to prioritize certain groups of migrants facing greater danger or in need of immediate protection. In the case at hand, for instance, unaccompanied children fleeing violence.
The advantages of the program are significant. First, it would give the migrant powerful incentives, including the possibility to avoid the treacherous journey altogether and save thousands of dollars otherwise spent on human smugglers, along with the opportunity to arrive to an American household rather than a cell and, as such, integrate more effectively into society.
Second, it would save both the government and taxpayers billions of dollars in detention and security costs while discouraging existing detention-for-profit models.
What is more, this program would allow the government not only to control the flow of migration and know where the unaccompanied children are located, but also to focus on running security checks and, in the future, on vaccinating migrant children from poor and developing countries.
The most powerful country in the world neglecting or unnecessarily punishing the most vulnerable population on the planet is unconscionable, particularly when our immigration laws appear increasingly foreign to our values and in direct contradiction to the most basic principles of international human rights law and refugee protection: human dignity, non-refoulement, and non-penalization.
In the end, we will have to choose between enforcing laws that do not reflect our values or enforcing the values that truly reflect who we are or aspire to be. Looking up north for solutions, not just south for the problems, may help us to find the way forward.
J. Mauricio Gaona is a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy and O’Brien fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism.
