~written by Todd McLeish
The flood of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants attempting to cross the southern border of the United States has been called a “national security crisis” by the current executive administration. And yet for four University of Rhode Island (URI) faculty members who study immigration, child welfare and related topics, the situation is more accurately described as a humanitarian crisis — especially for children — created largely by the nationalistic policies of the current administration.
“I define crisis very differently from the way this administration does,” says Evelyn Sterne, URI associate professor of history, who studies the history of immigration in the United States. “My perception is that this is a crisis in how the children are being treated, rather than being a crisis because they are trying to get into this country. Children are being held under inhumane conditions, separated from their families, simply because they’re trying to escape crime, food and employment problems in their home countries.”
The policy of separating children from their parents, enacted initially as a strategy to discourage families from attempting to cross the border, can result in long-lasting mental and physical problems that Karen McCurdy, URI professor of human development and family studies, equates to other causes for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“When kids are separated from their parents, they usually become withdrawn, especially when they realize the parent probably isn’t coming back,” she says. “They become hyper-vigilant, they want to know where is the person who protects them, and they can become alarmed, agitated and chronically anxious. Some children become depressed and/or develop behavioral changes such as increased aggression. These behavioral and psychological impacts can be quite profound and lead to lasting changes in brain chemistry, structure and function.”
According to URI’s Paul Bueno de Mesquita, professor of psychology and director of URI’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, these children are facing a form of systemic violence.
“It’s essentially political violence manifesting itself through governmental policy,” he says. “It’s harmful to anyone who is seeking freedom from violence in their own countries. But for children, they’re facing what psychologists call adverse childhood experiences — things like physical, emotional and psychological trauma, witnessing violence, neglect, abject poverty — which, when experienced early in life, is linked to long-term negative health and mental health outcomes. Their suffering may last a lifetime.”
The reported unhealthy, unsafe, and unhygienic conditions under which the children are being held all serve to compound the situation. Bueno de Mesquita and Sterne compare the current conditions in the detention facilities to the internment camps Japanese-Americans were forced to live in during World War II.
“The conditions by themselves are shocking to me,” adds McCurdy, “but the impacts on children being detained are substantial. For kids, they’re confused and scared. Likewise, the affected parents are under great psychological stress as well, and they are also vulnerable to depression, anxiety disorders and even physical illness.”
Julie Keller, a URI assistant professor of sociology who studies migration from Latin America, agrees that the present situation on the U.S.-Mexico border constitutes a humanitarian crisis. She views the issue from an international law perspective and cites the violation of several human rights agreements ratified by the United States.
“The Refugee Convention of 1951 lays out the rights of asylum seekers, and with our situation today, there are clear disparities and violations,” Keller says. “Anyone — minors and adults — has the right to apply for asylum when they’re being persecuted in their home country. And now the current administration is weakening U.S. law to say that first you have to have applied for asylum and been rejected by every other country you’ve traveled through. Nowhere in the 1951 convention does it say that.”
Sterne also notes that the treatment of families at the border is inconsistent with every U.S. immigration policy enacted in the last 95 years.
“Protection and reunification of families has been a priority for immigration policy,” she says. “Even in our first comprehensive immigration act in 1924, which placed limits on immigration and was extremely discriminatory in terms of how quotas were allocated, there were still loopholes to keep families together. That principle was enshrined in our 1965 immigration act and again in the 1990 act. So this separation of kids from their parents is wildly inconsistent.”
How should federal policies change to better handle the surge of people attempting to cross the border? These URI professors all agree that the first step is to reunite all children and their parents, to immediately and dramatically improve basic living conditions at the detention centers, and to provide the necessary manpower and legal guidance to speed up the asylum hearings so those seeking asylum aren’t detained as long. Also, the more recent practice of refusing to allow asylum seekers to remain in the U.S. at all while their cases are being considered is, in itself, inhumane and will lead to measurable harm for many thousands of individuals.
“We can’t look at this as an isolated incident, though,” asserts Keller. “It’s a larger issue that’s not going away any time soon. We can’t see it as some kind of invasion of people who are different. This is a humanitarian crisis and it requires a compassionate response.”
“We also need to hold the administration accountable,” she adds. “The current administration is violating laws, so we have to hold our government accountable to prevent it from continuing.”
Bueno de Mesquita’s recommendations for addressing the situation take a broader view: “Besides humanitarian assistance to children and families, we need to get to the root causes, occurring in several parts of Central America, that are leading to the current events, namely, political instability, poor healthcare, inadequate food supply (which will likely escalate with continued global climate change), poverty, crime and violence.”
“That means that the most effective longterm U.S. strategy will be to provide these countries with the assistance and aid that creates regional peace and security. It seems like our policies now are to remove all foreign aid as an act of retaliation when we should be intervening to address these problems within the local social and economic contexts of a few key countries.”
He concludes: “And any policy has to also ensure that we avoid causing lasting psychological damage. These are policies about people, and they have to be consistent with the best psychological science that we have with respect to children, the biological, behavioral and social impacts of severe trauma, and about desperate people who are fleeing violence.”