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Border crisis 101: eight things to know about unaccompanied children

Here’s a look at today’s immigration crisis and how it compares to the recent past.

6. What kind of legal status can these children receive in the US?

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
Protesters march in front of the White House in Washington Monday, responding to President Obama's plans to resolve the crisis of unaccompanied children and families illegally entering the US.

Of 42 percent found eligible for relief in 2011, more than half were categorized under Special Immigrant Juveniles Status, which is aimed at foreign children in the US who have been abused, abandoned, or neglected. Children who get a green card through this program can live and work permanently in the United States, but they can never petition for a green card for their parents. They also cannot petition for a green card for any siblings until they become a US citizen.   

Children can also stay in the US if they can show that they may be persecuted or tortured if they return home. One such form of relief is asylum, as defined under international refugee conventions. Another protection is called “withholding,” which is for people not eligible for asylum but who still may be subject to harm in their home country.

Other protections exist for children who are victims of human trafficking or criminal activity.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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