Immigration benefits like deportation relief and work authorization did not drive unaccompanied migrant children to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a new study by the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center released Monday.
Since 2012, critics of President Barack Obama’s executive action to grant some individuals temporary immigration relief have claimed that his action would act as a magnet for Latin American children to cross the southern U.S. border. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) criticized the president for giving families in Central America “false hope” that the children could stay in the country. Other lawmakers like Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) said that the Obama administration was personally responsible” for “incentivizing” unaccompanied children with the promise of “citizenship for anyone in the world who arrives illegally in the country by a certain age.”
Contrary to these claims, Niskanen Center researchers found that fewer unaccompanied alien children (UACs) entered the United States in the three months after the president announced his executive action known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) than the three months before it. “Without knowledge of the program, the children who came to the border in early 2012 could not have been motivated by DACA,” the report found. “The reality is that fewer children migrated illegally in 2014 than a decade earlier, indicating that illegal child migration is not a recent phenomenon… The child migrant crisis is not unique to this presidency.”
About 66,000 unaccompanied children came across the southern border last year to flee violence and extreme poverty in Latin America. According to the report, the year 2012 did see a 53 percent increase in unaccompanied children, but the surge started before the president’s announcement in June of that year. The study explained that there were four possible reasons that children streamed across the border, including: improved economic conditions that allowed immigrant parents to foot the transportation bill for their children to cross into the U.S. and increased violence and homicide rates in Central America. The report stated that the other two explanations “have to do with the shift in the overall composition of illegal immigration away from adult laborers toward children and family units.”
In particular, the report noted that human traffickers banked on an American immigration law known as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 that “guaranteed access to the United States” for parents of would-be unaccompanied migrant children, a sales pitch that “has the benefit of actually being true, but not because of DACA.” That law allows Central American to stay in the country until their immigration court date, but flags children from contiguous countries for deportation.
The Obama administration made clear that newly arrived children who didn’t qualify for such protections would likely be returned to their country of origin.
Other studies also bear out the conclusion that Obama’s executive action did not create the migrant children crisis. A Center for American Progress study found a positive relationship with the countries experiencing the highest rates of homicide also having the largest numbers of unaccompanied children fleeing. That study found that “the increase in unaccompanied children began well before 2012. [Customs and Border Protection] estimates that between 2008 and 2009, for example, there was a 145 percent spike in unaccompanied children arrivals, jumping from 8,041 to 19,668.” Another study by a Vanderbilt University professor suggests that there may be a link between crime victimization and the decision for women and children to emigrate out of their countries.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agency also found that of 404 children who had left Latin America, at least 58 percent of the children cited “international protection needs,” as in they were seeking protection from the international community because their home governments could no longer protect them. And a 2012 Vera Institute report found that at least 40 percent of apprehended children are eligible for some form of legal relief from removal. What’s more, there has been an uptick of these child refugees since 2009, long before either the Senate comprehensive immigration bill or the DACA program came into public existence.