Ok. So the sensationalist headline is grossly oversimplified. The chain of events that led these refugee children to flee their home is complex, but there can be no doubt that our policies toward Honduras over the past hundred years or so contributed to their fleeing.
American multi-nationals have been active in Honduras, the original “banana republic” for at least a century. We have consistently supported Honduran dictators who favored American business interests over the interests of the Honduran people. The coup in 2009 is a case in point. When popularly elected President Zelaya began championing the cause of the poor rather than the wealthy and business interests, he was forced out. Some have argued that the CIA and/or the American military were involved in the coup. Whether or not they were, the US is at least partly responsible for the results. While the rest of the world demanded the reinstatement of populist elected President Manuel Zelaya, the US, after tepid disapproval of the coup, continued to provide financial support and military training for the new and illegitimate Honduran government, citing as an excuse the war on drugs.
Zelaya’s successors, particularly Honduras’ current President, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who defeated Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, in a fraud-riddled, widely disputed election characterized by assassinations of opposition party activists, have instituted a brutal dictatorship that has destroyed social cohesion. They have been implicated in land grabs by wealthy businessmen and corporations, oppression and marginalization of indigenous populations, and widespread murder of activists and political opponents.
Under their leadership, Honduras has had the highest murder rate in the world. The total breakdown in social cohesion has opened the country to brutal drug cartels. Whether or not members of the government have been directly involved in the drug trade, they have done little more than watch as drug lords have taken over large sections of the country. Honduras’ increasingly marginalized and threatened indigenous populations are squeezed between greedy and unprincipled rich landowners and businesses, a brutal and corrupt government that supports those businesses and stops at nothing to suppress opposition, and equally brutal drug lords who force the powerless into serving as their agents.
Rather than go into further detail here about our imperialist history in Honduras and other Central American nations and the resulting collapse of social order, I refer you to an excellent article by a writer of Honduran heritage, Hector Luis Alamo, Jr.
So the Honduran children are not ordinary immigrants. They are refugees. The US has accepted and resettled refugees from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Recent refugees have come from countries as diverse as Iraq, Myanmar, Darfur, and Somalia. According to the 1951 international Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is defined as a person who:
owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.
Do the Honduran children meet the definition of refugees? They and their families have been caught between powerful drug cartels and a rapacious and corrupt US-supported government that neither can nor wants to protect them. Certainly, the violence in their own country represents a significant threat to them, and their government, rather than protecting them, oppresses them, supporting the business interests and large landowners who would deprive the fleeing children and their families of their land and livelihood. Some have even argued that the government is complicit in the drug trade. The Honduran refugee children are clearly of indigenous ancestry, making them members of a “persecuted . . . social group,” incidentally a group whose ancestors were in the Americas long before most of ours.
But whether or not they meet the strict criteria of refugee, we are responsible for taking care of them. They are children, they are hurting, and they have nowhere else to turn. And they are here because we supported an oppressive government that drove them to flee their country. I hear the arguments that we cannot afford to take care of these children. But we are among the richest countries in the world.
According to the United Nations High Commission for refugees, a much smaller and poorer nation, Jordan “continues to provide asylum for a large number of Syrians, Iraqis and other refugees, despite the substantial strain on national systems and infrastructure.”
Those “large numbers” total more than a million, including 500,000 Syrians and 30,000 Iraqis.
While we in the United States have a population of nearly 320 million, Jordan has only 8 million people; while the United States has an area of almost 10 million square kilometers, Jordan has only about 90,000 square kilometers; and while our gdp is $16 trillion or $52,000 per person, Jordan’s gdp is $40 billion or $6100 per person.
If Jordon can take in over a million refugees, why cannot we, with 40 times Jordan’s population, 90 times its land, and 400 times its financial resources, take in a few thousand suffering refugee children? The simple answer is our overwhelming greed and selfishness. And so I despise and verbally spit upon the border residents who bully the children with signs, telling them to go home, the yahoos in Congress who describe the Honduran children as some kind of invasion or pollutant, and idiot Republican bullies like Rick Perry, who are sending troops to drive the children out!