Underage Refugees

What are we going to do with all these children? President Obama says he wants to expedite processing by giving Border Control Agents authority to determine whether they are eligible for refugee status. He apparently can't do that under current law, they are entitled to a hearing in immigration court. Neither he nor the congress seem inclined to work out a mutually agreeable alternative In any case are we really going to deport them? Thousands of them? How would we even do that? Fly them to Tegucigalpa and drop them off on the airport tarmac? No, they would have to be reunited with families who may be hard to find. It would take time and in the interim they would remain in our charge. I don't think we even know how to take care of them for more than a few days. We can't just warehouse them indefinitely in storm shelter style dormitories. Even if we had the shelters and staff to operate them, which we don't, the imagery is appalling I don't see that we have much choice but to let them go and assist in their resettlement. What else can we do? If I can believe what I read, and much of it I don't believe, many of them, maybe most, have friends and family already here who can take them in. Despite denials, the rumors circulating in Central America appear to be correct. Once here the children will most likely be allowed to stay, never to be deported. They will grow up here, attend school, and marry. Their own children will be citizens by right of birth. We would do well to acknowledge it and enlist the aid of churches and civic organizations to smooth the process. We've done that before. Remember the Vietnamese Boat People? In the late 70s over a million people fled the chaos of war in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia, mostly by boat. Many of them were unaccompanied minors. Many of their stories had tragic endings. No one could describe it as anything but a humanitarian catastrophe. The U.S. accepted and resettled 823,000 of them. Today some of them are members of my parish in Plano. They have harrowing childhood tales to tell but they tell them without bitterness. They are glad to be here. We are glad to have them. Differences are as striking as parallels with the current crisis along our southern border. Polarized as we were in the closing days of the Carter administration, for whatever reason a national consensus developed thirty five years ago that seems unattainable today. Maybe it was all those horrific pictures of overcrowded fishing boats. Google Boat People. You'll see them. We don't have those now and without them we don't seem to be able to have a coherent discussion. We can't even agree on whether to call them refugees. Resettling the boat people was no simple task, it will likely be even more difficult this time around. So far there are fewer of them. As the numbers grow the difficulty will grow. We have been caught off guard, unprepared to deal with the influx. Until now we have been trying to treat it as an immigration issue but there is no way the Border Patrol or ICE can cope. This is more like Katrina than a wave of immigrants to be stopped at the Rio Grande. They are here, ours to deal with, and options are limited. Refugees or not we will have to treat them as though they were. Churches have to get involved, and relief agencies, and communities, and not just communities in border states. Differences not withstanding, something like a Boat People style resettlement program is called for.