Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

This much, at least, became clear. Most children came from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—the three countries that make up the Northern Triangle—and practically all of them were fleeing gang violence. Although the flow of youths migrating alone to the United States from these territories had been observed for years, there had been a considerable and sudden increase in the numbers. From October 2013 to the moment the crisis was declared in June 2014, the total number of child migrants detained at the border approached 80,000.

(Later, in the summer of 2015, it became known that between April 2014 and August 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the border.)

The priority juvenile docket, in sum, was the government’s coldest, cruelest possible answer to the arrival of refugee children. Ethically, that answer was more than questionable. In legal terms, it was a kind of backdoor escape route to avoid dealing with an impending reality suddenly knocking at the country’s front doors.

the word “illegal” prevails over “undocumented” and the term “immigrant” over “refugee.” How would anyone who is stigmatized as an “illegal immigrant” feel “safe” and “happy”?

Usually, the kind of harm the children are fleeing makes them eligible for asylum or SIJ status. This status can be obtained in two steps. First, a family court must determine that they are impeded from reunification with at least one of their parents because of abuse, abandonment, neglect, or a similar basis under state law, and that reunification or return to their home country is not in their best interest. Once the family court makes this ruling, the minor can request SIJ status in the immigration court. Asylum, on the other hand, is granted to people who are fleeing prosecution (or who have a fear of future prosecution) based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, and/or association with a particular social group. It is very difficult to be granted asylum because it is not enough that these children have suffered unspeakable harm, that they will continue to fall victim to the systematic and targeted violence of criminal groups. The harm or prosecution must be proved to be because of at least one of those four classifications. The main problem with asylum—the reason lawyers often consider it a secondary choice—is that if it’s granted, the children can never return to their home country, where they fear being persecuted, without jeopardizing their immigration status in the United States.

Less common are the U visa, which can only be granted to victims of certain crimes, and the T visa, for victims of human trafficking.

But we cannot make up the answers in their favor, nor can we lead the children to tell us what is best for their cases, as much as we would like to. It can be confusing and bewildering, and I find myself not knowing where translation ends and interpretation starts.

To justify Programa Frontera Sur, the Mexican government maintains that Mexico must protect the “safety and rights” of migrants. But the reality is something else entirely.

Programa Frontera Sur is the Mexican government’s new augmented-reality video game: the player who hunts down the most migrants wins.

The belief that the migration of all of those children is “their” (the southern barbarians’) problem is often so deeply ingrained that “we” (the northern civilization) feel exempt from offering any solution.

There is little said, for example, of arms being trafficked from the United States into Mexico or Central America, legally or not; little mention of the fact that the consumption of drugs in the United States is what fundamentally fuels drug trafficking in the continent.

refer to the situation as a hemispheric war would be a step forward because it would oblige us to rethink the very language surrounding the problem and, in doing so, imagine potential directions for combined policies. But of course, a “war refugee” is bad news and an uncomfortable truth for governments, because it obliges them to deal with the problem instead of simply “removing the illegal aliens.”

And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society. To stay in the United States, you will unlearn the universal metric system so you can buy a pound and a half of cooked ham, accept that thirty-two degrees, and not zero, is where the line falls that divides cold and freezing. You might even begin to celebrate the pilgrims who removed the alien Indians, and the veterans who maybe killed other aliens, and the day of a president who will eventually declare a war on all the other so-called aliens. No matter the cost. No matter the cost of the rent, and milk, and cigarettes. The humiliations, the daily battles. You will give everything. You will convince yourself that it is only a matter of time before you can be yourself again, in America, despite the added layers of its otherness already so well adhered to your skin. But perhaps you will never want to be your former self again. There are too many things that ground you to this new life. Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive.