Is this a reasonable . That something that is extraordinarily important here. This is nonsense and all of these organizations are just ignoring . You go watch the entire the safety of genetically modified foods tomorrow night at 8 00 eastern here on cspan. Hereby thewould surge of unaccompanied children coming from the u. S. Coming to the u. S. It is on the causes of immigration and what the u. S. Response should be. Interim american dialogue this is one hour 20 minutes. Thank you very much for attending this meeting. Many of you probably have participated in some other gatherings relating to this subject of the immigration crisis. Lots of terms have been used, the surge, the crisis, the byproduct of development and violence, et cetera. And to some extent this is basically a byproduct of something we have been warning for at least six years, that is, that governments in Central America are not taking migration seriously. For those of you who have attended our meetings on migration and development, we have been warning about a need to take this trend of migration more seriously because there will be serious implications for people in the short term and this is one of the examples of those implications. The current debate is mostly as peter talks, paying attention to the border crisis, as if that is the main issue. When you take a closer look, the main issue is not simply of Holding Facilities and carrying capacity of the number of apprehended children and adults, but its more about the migration trend that has been going on for the past five to seven years relating to a number of individuals, adults and minors, who have been leaving the region as a byproduct of the conflict going on in the region, particularly the continued growth of homicides in Central America, the spate of violence that is taking place. So, you know, it is troublesome to me that while here this is a focus in washington of the debate about this surge, in none of the Central American countries and with all due respect to government officials and diplomats from the region there is a legislator calling the president to ask them, how come they were not aware or if they were aware, they allowed to at least have 10 to 20 minors leaving their countries every day for the past five years. This is a fact that was of which many government officials were aware. We work directly with different political officials in Central America dealing with migration, immigration and Development Issues, and they were aware that there were problems but for the most part, countries like guatemala, for example, had a Minor Campaign of the dangers of migrating, a campaign that they invested less than 1 million for two years to tell you, you know, just be careful, take water just in case. And in a way there is a trivialization of the problem in the region that amounted to this crisis today. The crisis is not about the upsurge, because you cannot argue basically that you have that 50,000 people represent a crisis as opposed to 30,000 or 10,000 minors. Who defines what constitutes a crisis . But i think the problem is that there is significant neglect in Central America about what is happening. There are five points id like to conclude with before i talk about the results of the survey. Im not going to deal with the study itself because you have the report with you but i want to point out five main six main issues. First one is that, yes, violence is the common denominator that comes across as a byproduct of the migration flow of adults and minors going on and its more pronounced among adults than minors with the exceptions of honduras where you see that 70 of homicides excuse me of where kids are coming from is where all homicides have taken place. But what it reflects is the presence of crime network, a different source, not just drug trafficking, narcotic Trafficking Networks but an underground economy operating at the level of extortion, kidnapping, political harassment of different sorts, groups that include groupings of five people in a neighborhood to networks of youth gang members in some cases. The widespread effect of that is rather epidemic that it has prompted basically a situation not just insecurity that is read in the surveys but a situation of fear that is quite widespread. Is that situation of fear that has pushed people to move out and ill explain why thats the case. Second is that its an important fact to keep in mind that poverty is not a driver of migration. But there are issues development that are causing people moving out. If you looked at what did the work we did basically, we mapped out all of the areas in the United States where migrants come from because we have been collecting data on the flows of remittances and the money where migrants come from and sent money to that has allowed over the past years to map out the entire region of every single point where people are coming from and were able to plot that to where minors come from as well as where violence is taking place using homicides as a proxy, as well as the local Human Development indicator at the municipal level. We also looked at the School Enrollment rates, too. And basically when it comes to Human Development, there is no correlation in most cases with the exception of el salvador but the reason is that Central America is at the mediocre level of Human Development, in the middle in terms of the indicators. Does it mean its doing well . Actually, no. Because using the indicators, you have six years of schooling against 14 of the high Human Development index which is basically the benchmark that you are measured in terms of being competitive in the global economy. So there is a problem of development that is not clearly reflected in the indicators that are typically used. Income itself is not enough of an indicator. But the reality is there. You cannot live on 300 a month on average when 2 3 of the population actually live on less than 200. The third point is that there is no question about the fact that migration is connected to labor market demand in the United States. There is a demand for foreign labor and Transnational Networks very well established between the United States and Central American countries where you know where labor opportunities exist. If you are in the Washington Area, for example, you know that the Salvadoran Community from eastern el salvador and you get information about the migratory flows. So it cannot be disregarded. Who are the people who are migrating . You have people from different range of occupations but theyre mostly coming to work in the Typical Industries construction, domestic work, some level of agriculture and the Hospitality Industry in general. So the fifth point is basically so if we know that there are problems with insecurity, fear and violence on the one hand, it is a problem of development that needs to be impact beyond the basic indicators and that there is a reality of migration connected to labor market demands in the United States, then we need to have an approach to development that the pace of to the labor sector as opposed to other sectors, like capital or agriculture. Agricultural modeling in america is obsolete at this point in time and we need to Pay Attention to an asset building approach that basically deals with a labor force that is unskilled, informal, uneducated and underpaid and thats reflected in the report. So there are different ways to do that and we have learned a lot of lessons in development to tackle that. The problem is that Central America has not been interested in Development Case and for many years. And finally its important to integrate migrants into the solution, into the strategies for development. And there are ways to integrate them and we have talked about that previously. So let me tell you a little bit about the research in five minutes so that peter can attest that latins can do it, too. [laughter] as i mentioned before, we triangulate we have been following this trend for several years because as you work on family remittances, you work with migration and as you work with migration you also learn where people are coming from, where moneys sent, the differences in volumes and the motivations for which moneys being sent and five years ago we started to notice that there was a flow of children leaving Central America. And, you know, for example those of you who are familiar with el paro, for example, they produced a very important study in 2009 that tell of the experiences of this plight and even hollywood, you know, you dont have to go very far. Hollywood had a move called el hombre, 2009, a honduran kid. The writing was on the wall way before anyone was talking about this and today suddenly there is a crisis. But the research basically looks at the mapping of all the locations where migrants are coming from and we plotted against the certain indicators including homicides as a proxy for violence. We did not include extortion. We did not include kidnapping which is happening at every level in the three countries. We also did a nationwide Household Survey in el salvador last month where we tried to understand a couple of things. One is anybody in the average people knew someone who had migrated and how, if they, the interviewed person, planned to migrate and why, and how did they see were the main problems of the country. At the same time, because of the antiimmigrant backlash that came out saying that immigrants basically were opportunists looking to exploit some flaw in the law and that there were permits being given to kid who crossed the border so we did a survey in the Washington Area interviewing 215 people to get a sense of what did they see were the issues coming across. So with regards to first part, we definitely find that violence is statistical in statistical terms, looking at nearly 900 municipalities in the three countries, its basically positively correlated to the migration of adults as well as unaccompanied minors. In honduras, the statistical relationship is the strongest. When it comes to development, as i mentioned before, only in el salvador, development was negatively correlated. That is, the lower the level of development, the highest level of migration was going to take place. In a country like guatemala, circumstances were different and that asks a number of questions as to why guatemala is different but then there is a strong correlation of migration with adults. Whenever there is migration of adults taking place, it correlates with the migration of minors, for the case of guatemala in particular. In honduras, the most powerful predictor is violence alone. In fact, not even the location where immigrants come from necessarily correlate at all times. And then we reach out to el salvadorans. We choose el salvador because there are different circumstances. In some ways it is historically more modern country than honduras but slightly less than guatemala. Its a country that has Economic Growth experience in some ways better than honduras but not as good as guatemala. Its a country that faces problems of inequality in relative terms, similar to other countries like guatemala but not as inequal as guatemala and honduras. We tried to get a sense of that. Its a country with a dense network, at the transnational level between the United States and el salvador. Basically, 60 of people know someone in the United States and the last majority of people who migrated left without papers crossing the border. We also have estimated the outflow of adults that have left for the past five years to get a sense and i can explain how we have done that. The second result that we found is that 25 of salvadorans say they would rather live in leave el salvador than stay and the primary reason was crime. When we take a look at the percent of salvadorans who say they will migrate and among those who say crime is the major problem, they say they were leaving for the problem of security, because overall, they found crime to be a major problem, but also higher among those who wanted to migrate than among those who did not want to migrate. So 25 is a Critical Mass. In may of this year, the central bank of el salvador released a report and i dont think they thought carefully about the writing they put on it because they said remittances will continue to follow. 50 of el salvadorans want to leave the country and of course it was an intentional not lapse, but it was a mistake, i guess, coming from a government institution. But the numbers basically have been there telling you that people want to leave. In 2009, with the el salvador survey in Central America and at that time it was 15 the number who wanted to leave. It was alarming at that time and no one paid attention to the issue. Then we looked at the immigrants here and we tried to make sense, do you know someone . Half of the immigrants knew someone who has come in the past nine months to the United States crossing the border without papers. Half also knew that it was an unaccompanied minor. We have also interviewed independently as a case study context unaccompanied minors as well as immigrants to get a full sense of the story, the issues that had to do, for example, with economies of scale with coyotes. But, when you ask them why did they we volunteered. The answer was insecurity in our country. Only 3 said something about permiso. It is clear for which ever way you want to look at the issue with the problem comes from, again, knocking on the door with security in Central America. Development because the security is not nothing but the presence of an underground economy operating along the lines of networks that find the operating costs of working in the criminal sector as a profitable one. Therefore, economies are not just against, formal economy but in formal. Context, ithis continues to be seen, it is important to go back to the development. Ago, i came as a project of Central America 2020 and provided a blueprint for Economic Growth for Central America. It was unfortunately practically a nor ignored. A colleague who wrote a report te it is a realro deal and you cannot ignore it. If it is human nature that was migrating, to increasing skills of the labor force and opportunity and investment and the local market strategiesincreasing for school retention. Elementa very basic that cannot be disregarded especially not to disregarded when it is right in your face. And the demonstration asked for less than 10 of the request to work for Central America. These are unaccompanied minors. Thank you. Thank you very much. Cristina . Ok. Thank want to hang interamerican dialogue for having me. I am with an umbrella organization. We have partners and allies in latin america specifically in Central America and mexico. And so, we were asked to come today to give our diagnostic in terms of how we see the issue from the migrants perspective on the ground and what are we recommended in terms of proposed solutions or recommendations. First off, i went to start by giving a face to the story of the children that are common. Who are they . Of our a sense from one members in boston who has been working with a lot of these families from honduras. Fivef she has seen about families per week just this last couple two weeks. That they areting deaf they are reporting they are in during trauma endru uring trauma and really afraid in not really wanted to speak up of what is happening to down. Owner is a Small Business and owns a small bodega. Because of fleeing poverty, her family was ok. They were receiving threats that are never going to kill their fiveyearold son. One day they came to their business and someone left a note that if they did not pay them, their business was robbed several times. If they did not get more money, they would kill their son. Ans one of the Ladies Organization that boston is working with. A story of 4 sisters, whose father had been paying a gang tax for protection. The father was killed when he decided he cannot pay the tax anymore. They all came to the United States. They were process a given ankle bracelets and they have days to appear in front of a judge in january. To give you a face to what did these fountains are going through and who they are. I just want to comment on what called this ay crisis. The data has been recorded and we see this as a crisis. It is only a crisis when it is a decisive moment. This is something that couldve been prevented. This is something that we saw coming. It is a pattern that we have in tracking as well over the years. There is not one explanation as to why the children are coming. It is multifaceted. And apart, the messaging in that has messaging been predominant has been of hate and harsh and harsh positioning from the administration. Of fromately, as well both parties, republicans and democrats. They a lot of what we see, this huge fight of the children not only coming to the United States as opposed to what the media will have you believe. The United Nations high commissioner for refugees reported that there was a spike 5 and applications in mexico and panama and costa rica and belize. 2013. S from 2008 and at the time