 Thank you very much. Always when you get introduced and they say all these things, you say, that's me, you know, I don't It went by so fast. I don't need Okay, I have 20 slides. No, no, I have 10 slides in 20 minutes So I've got two minutes for slides. So at some point We'll get started here Central America. Yeah, okay Which where do I change the slides here? Okay, great. Thank you Okay, uh, so My presentation is giving you background on the central american migrant youth And so let's get into that right first thing I want to do is look at numbers And I know this are very small here and I apologize for that But I just wanted to show you something here and that something is uh We're here a lot of big numbers, but a big chunk of the big numbers like up till june of this summer A big chunk included, uh, mexican children that come over So we had like 12,000 mexican Unaccompanied youth that came over and apprehended by border patrol And the mexican children used to send right back They're not tasting detention centers as such and so there's a special arrangement between the us and the mexican government So if we take away the mexican children We can we drop down to central americans and we're looking at the most numerous and some a lot about the malin gluris We're at about 39,000 of those kids unaccompanied mean they came by themselves without adults Or they arrived without adults Usually the large majority are from like 15 to 17 14 to 17 maybe 80 percent or something like it varies and then the rest can be even younger, right? including There have been cases of babies who were carried over by older children who themselves are minors. Okay, so I've seen those cases as well. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that uh, the big the big big numbers often include the mexicans which mexican children are uh The big numbers for the longest time with the mexican. What's happening now is that the central americans Are cashing up to the mexican numbers of children unaccompanied and the mexicans are going down reasons I I don't I don't know When we look at the at the central american Unaccompanied children or youth We see that there's a fluctuation some years or high some years or lower, but then it's been growing since 2012 for the saladorans and in in one year 2013 to 2014 if we do it by month they increase by about 170 percent. So there's a search of saladorians the big search is on The the youth coming from anduras with it increased by 214 percent most recently and the guatemalan children are about 122 percent. So numbers are increasing. They fluctuate I've been studying central america Unaccompanied migration of children since 1990 during the civil wars in central america We had big waves of children who were coming over Many of the young the boys age 14 were deserters from the military did The armist would go and I've seen this myself Into the villages and just get boys and put him in the army And kids would you know get traumatized by war and they run and they run all the way keep running and Try to make it to the us Okay, and here's just some some background. We've heard like a lot of power, etc And a couple of things I want to show you here is And I want to compare us and a lot of what the long unders in mexico Infant mortality rate a number of death of infants below the age of one Okay, when they're born before they get to one An infant mortality rate is a good rough indicator of conditions in a country when they're terrible and poor People are suffering So the higher the infant mortality rate, right the worst conditions are in that society In the u.s. This is 2013 our infant mortality rate is like 5.9 Infants for 1,000 life births before the age of one died But if you look at look at what the mala, okay, so it's like infants are More than four times more likely to die in what the mala did in the u.s. Okay, and in central america except for in salvador Conditions are even worse, you know, and Then what we find in mexico those are indicators of very Few resources of health care and good jobs and family income and this is harsh poverty Killing infants and when i'm coming out, what are they dying from diarrhea? I get diarrhea. I go to the drugstore. We have to be small. I'm okay by the evening These that i've been doing the highlands of what the mother many infants died of diarrhea There is no drugstore. There is even if there was they don't have money to buy anything So that's what we're talking about and those countries are like the rest of the global south Or the fastest growing growing countries They're producing more populations total fertility rate is large families number of Kind of like the average number of children women has here by the time she Man's referring for to the age, right? so big families And here's the percent of the population of the country that's 15 years of age Or or less than 15 so you can see these are populations that have a lot of children and so we have that And this is just my economic comparison here like This is if you think of like per capita think of like income Percentage poverty and here we are right And then you can see those are very poor countries Making very little money Farage poverty. I mean we know that conditions are arching Mexico, but Central america's like you've gone down to another level You know extreme poverty They have This is during the recession. So we we didn't do too well here Those countries did well, but there's small economy many agricultural economy So they increased production of coffee bananas or something. And so this number is going to go up But the question becomes So if you have population growth, who gets the who gets the profits? How is wealth distributed? And then we look at the poorest 20 percent of the population What percent of total income that they get look at our doors? The bottom 20 percent of the population gets only 2 percent of total income in the country I mean they're almost getting nothing Okay, we're talking about extreme absolute poverty And what about the richest 20 percent of the population they get 60 percent? They don't walk away. It was all you know wealth not all but big big chunk So a very unequal distribution of wealth Now we're not doing so well ourselves I'm not just gonna point I tell you a country that does wealth Japan I think that Japan several times and To me it's like it's all middle class. I'm exaggerating. It's not all middle class, but it's a lot more middle class than we are You know, and so that's one of you know, what's driving is my when we talk about absolute poverty This is what we're talking about. It's not just that people are poor is that huge inequality Severe inequality in a country that's already poor Okay We talk about violence driving the migration of youth or attack, etc. This is from the Pew Research Center And this is scary Okay, look at the homicide rate Murders for 100,000 inhabitants. Look at Honduras night Honduras leads the world Right and yeah, we have more kids coming from Honduras. Okay Is when 90.4 is their homicide rate Then you drop down to 41.2 for a Salvador 39.9. What the mother does how even this is how in Mexico 21.5 You know what the us is 4.7 I feel safe now You're 18 times more like 18 times more likely to be murdering things you gotta talk Honduras and New Orleans have Okay Do you get it now? I mean this is like scary stuff And here's what's even scarier This country's I don't know why Mexico or I can tell us They don't have 9-1-1 You get attacked you're on your own your brothers and sisters better come out and help you They don't have 9-1-1. You don't call 9-1-1 time because you do it's the police that's attacking you or hitting up in you There's a I do for two decades, I've been going to the Guatemalan islands to communities where I do migration research And uh Looked at my notes. This is in the province of Tocunitapan anybody from Guatemala Okay, I mean so I can I can stretch my I This is uh, the municipio the township small county of San Cristobal, Tocunitapan or a lot of migration to houston Especially but all over and all from the highlands all over into the u.s. It's going to Antonio Right and so looking at conditions affecting youth migration in the Guatemalan islands family separation exactly what Harriet told us That families come over they're locked in we have almost 12 11.7 million undocumented immigrants It's a sign of success. We're doing such a great job at border control People are afraid to leave because they know they can't come back to their job So they stay there and I've met migrants who haven't seen their parents except for skype and all stuff like that for many years, right and so Children grow up they're left with their grandmother the grandmother dies or it gets too old to control them and then so They want to come and look for their family. They want to come look for their father They want to come look for their older brother. And so that's something that drives this migration to come and look for family members Uh, I know other youth who migrated because their friends migrated. They decided to migrate together Okay It's like Harriet said there are cultures of migration throughout central america and migration is a right of passage for for boys who think they become men now and and need to migrate We've created this migration system And I say we because I'm thinking of u.s. Employers and institutions that create a labor market for central american labor And I used to go our labor market went to Mexico and now we went further into central america And people there know that when they grow up they're going to come to the u.s to look for work Uh, families collapse their family members died There's illness There's no control of the older children the children become homeless And then they join other kids and then they start migrating to medico and from medico into the u.s. etc Fear of violence very present If a brother or older cousin gets killed by a gang amara Then younger children may decide they're going to migrate to because they're afraid that that's going to happen to them And so they move to lose her some of the things that that i've seen in San Cristobal and other island communities that i've studied that's creating this push factor of children Where's the time? violence in the in the con in the highlands The situation is not that there's violence in the highlands violence But in the context of a weak state in a in any context where you don't expect your government to do anything Because they don't have the resources or whatever. They don't have the organization for it They they said there is no one 911 to call And so in the community for a study of here's some of the violence threats against families for extortion or remittances One of the things that's happening now is so much migration a lot of money being sent by migrants in the u.s. Back to their families the gangs find out push families are receiving monthly checks From the u.s. And they go hit those families They want a percent of their remittances every month and they give them a bank account and they tell them every month Put so much hundred dollars into this bank account of fifty dollars or two hundred depends on what you're getting It's getting so hard for me to do research because families don't want to identify themselves as migrant families Because they're afraid that the gangs are going to find out how to hit them Some of the migrant families are building homes and this is happening all over happening in Mexico It's happening in Central America with their remittances building homes And so gangs find out Who owns the homes and they do home invasions go in Tie everybody up take all the appliances out whatever that that they can sell later and then leave The only thing that I don't have any data on it, but I think the only thing that's different from the u.s. From immigration is it seems like they don't kill you if you just cooperate And I know in the u.s. They need to go to operate you can get killed in all the information at least in Houston Kidnap and you can meet this where I've been kidnapings Uh A small hillowner had a daughter kidnapped and killed and another kidnapping of a prominent political figures family members So this is levels of violence attempted robberies by armed assailants used to miss knives Uh Something shooting us bus drivers who refused to share pathogens repairs of his gangs Up in the island the gangs are hitting the bus The bus is privately owned and so No people don't have cars so they make money and the gangs want the bus drivers to handle part of the affairs Robbery and murder of smugglers Smuckings are very dangerous business because you carry a lot of cash because you've got to pay off police and make people Or central america or even maybe in the u.s And the bandits know that you're carrying money so the bandits are hitting us on the smugglers and I had I need two smugglers and both have been killed by by bandits A solid rape of young women by gangs modest of the pan american highway There's some highways that have traveled a lot by gangs and migrant youth and the pan american highway is a major one And so using that community that's in the pan american highway You're going to get a lot of traffic of kids some of them who are the gangs, etc Other levels of violence violence in the island the killing of political candidates It's still going that didn't stop It continues right they just don't call it a civil war anymore killing of human rights workers continues and in Right there research there was in october the fourth the watermelon army the national police came And they shot at mayan protesters. They were protesting in some kind of constitutional reform They killed four and wounded many more All right But equally violent is is the power that's maintained by unequal distribution of wealth because it deprives people of the ability to To to have a good quality of life to keep their children alive, etc, etc. How we do five minutes? This is community where I do research. This is the pan american highway Here are the private buses And so I all along the pan american highway highway one You see this bus stops and this are many of these are migrants. They're getting ready to go Somebody we're going to go into guatemala city. They have visas and they've been flying to houston Etc etc others are not they're going to take the bus to get to the mexican border and then Or they're coming with smuggler Etc so as many not all of these but many of our migrants are heading out Uh to vibrate dangerous in the journey in the 1990s. I did a survey of which was a large team of Public health workers and psychologists who were looking for a post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD among migrant children And so we used a question area was divided into three parts Tell us the the potentially traumatic events you experience in your own country during the civil war And we say potentially traumatic because not every child will react to the same you've had the same way At home during the journey to the u.s. And after you entered the u.s And here the the types of of dangers they experience physical Uh in the journey to the to the u.s physical assault some kids sexual assaults especially of the girls robberies extreme hunger Serious health problems especially the girls some of the the kids have been kidnapped Victimized by police. This is a constant and even today when I interview migrants. This is still reported, you know And it reported a lot from mexico Uh because mexico's a long it's it's a long country and i've spent a lot of time frozen it And there but there are music police everywhere not just in mexico even in the u.s In early this year of board patrol kidnapped young migrant Go to his apartment. I think he assaulted her and then he committed suicide Something you didn't happen anymore Some of the children are exploited by workers Some of the children have a family member die in the migration Some of the children fell off the train on top of the train and i grew up falling or whatever In our study in the early 1990s we found that The children experience potential traumatic events in back home in their war zones about three Or eight different types of events not not frequency but different types And then they experienced potential traumatic events the number that we calculated was 3.7 Meaning that for the children the journey the migration on it is is about The migration is the same as being in the war zone for children. Okay, it's very traumatic And then to end with my one last minute This is on highway 77 before you hit 59 near victoria We're 19 migrants died in the back of the truck 18 wheeler There was a father and his son from guacamole. I think the son was seven years old One of the 19 who died there And so what how do we solve all of this there are many things that need to be done You know some things immediately the heritage talked about But you know, there are big things that we need to do right We have large numbers of people in this country or undocumented. It doesn't help anyone to have these large numbers. They're already here Okay, and they've been here for a long time here the estimated numbers by the h From the honan security of central america the big numbers, right? And we know that i've been involved in other research With undocumented immigrants who don't we're separated from family because they're undocumented and we find that it generates a lot of stress And it's something that that pushes youth to migrate So we need a new lot for migrants to be able to travel home and visit their families and children We need to Maintain the family unit for those migrants, right? But as harriet said congress is not acting it's become a political pace for a game or something And so and congress will not act because There's a huge social cost for not having this new law and this is part of it Okay, but congress doesn't pay this cost. Who pays this cost these people do and the children, right? So whatever we can do, you know to Encourage our Represent is that we need we really need a new law and that doesn't mean I open up the border. I'm not talking about that I'm talking about people who've been here productive contributing to society, etc, etc, right? Give it give those families a chance my minute. It's up. So thank you very much