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Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks are the authors of RSF book Reunited: Family Separation and Central American Youth Migration. In Reunited, they explain the reasons for Central American youth migration, describe the journey, and document how minors experienced separation from their families and their subsequent reunification. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Castañeda is the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and The Immigration Lab at American University.

Jenks is a doctoral student in the department of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Q. What motivated you to write Reunited? Why is it important to study their migration experiences and experiences reuniting with their families? 

Jenks: We were motivated to write Reunited around 2014 when there was a large-scale showing of youth migrants coming to the border. It was shown in the media as something really new and with a lot of shock value, but it didn't come with a lot of sociological nuance about why the youth were coming and what their lives would be like afterwards. So, we wanted to delve into the larger themes and ideas surrounding what we know about immigration and what we know about immigrant integration in the U.S.

 Castañeda: As Daniel was saying, there was a lot of interest in unaccompanied minors at the border of the U.S. and Mexico around 2014. There were numbers reported by CBP online of their encounters, data that are very easy to access by journalists, and they like to put a lot of attention on these numbers. And there were also cameras showing the number of youth looking for short-term shelter provided by the U.S. government. So, this brings up topics that are very important in studying and understanding the discourse around contemporary migration. First of all, the media drives a lot of the attention to the problem areas around it. The second one is that it then becomes a discussion about resources. “Oh, we don't have enough resources to house these people.” “We’ve never seen this before.” “It's a problem for the taxpayers across the U.S.” “We don't want this.”

And then something that was, in a way, unique about this is that on the one hand, this population was infantilized, because we're talking about minors. Although in our research we show—and if one looks at the data—it is mainly Central American youth aged 14, 15, 16, because that was an age when, at that time, they were at risk of recruitment by the gangs in El Salvador, so they were coming in. 

And there was a family dimension, that is the most important part of the book, that we'll talk about more in detail. But just real quick, many of the youth coming to the U.S.-Mexico border at that time had family members already in major U.S. cities, and they were trying to reunite. And that's something that the focus and the obsession on the border crossing obscures, and I think that's one of the main contributions of this book.  

 And then, at the same time as this infantilization of, “Oh, these people are in need.” “These people are victims.” Or “How can a parent be so cruel to send their kids alone?” There were also a lot of the anti-immigration voices—these groups that make a living out of instilling fear around immigration—were framing these youth as “military age.” That's a phrase that they will use. They claim that they were potential gang members. They were focused on the young men. So, there was a racialized framework tied to it already. And we see it right now, more obviously with Trump, this idea of an invasion of enemy combatants—of potential people carrying out terror. So, this was all this combined with a moral panic around unaccompanied youth. 

We wanted to really give these youth their humanity. And we wanted to understand the phenomenon historically. And to say that it wasn't unprecedented. Mexican youth immigrants in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s, and the early 2000s, were not given the same protections as these youth because there was a different agreement—they could be just sent back to Mexico. Or they would become workers and pass as adults. Some of them would enroll in schools. But it wasn't as visible because it was part of the larger Mexican migration. Or in the 1800s, it was just part of the poor people coming from other places—Ireland, from Scotland, from Poland—with no resources, and fending for themselves. So, there weren’t really a lot of historical records about them. So, those are some of the motivations that drove us to write this book and to talk about it. 

Q. Can you give a brief history of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala? What factors drive Central Americans to migrate?  

Jenks: There're a few major factors that drive migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, especially for youth. Three big ones are poverty, gang violence, and then, of course, a big one that our book focuses on is family reunification. In the book, we go through all of these in different ways. And they really do affect the lives of these youth. As Ernesto was saying in the last answer—how youth migration is not an unprecedented or unexpected thing; it's not something that's unexplainable—there’s a long history in the U.S. that dates back to probably around the 1980s of Central American migration to a few major hubs in the U.S., including D.C., Long Island, and Los Angeles. There're a few other places dispersed throughout the U.S. Our study focuses on the Washington, DC area, where a large population of Central American migrants grew in the 1980s, largely as a result of people fleeing the civil war that was going on at the time. The war was painted by the U.S. in a Cold War light, with the U.S.S.R. supporting the leftist group that was fighting the government and the very repressive and violent right-wing government supported by the U.S. Because of that, the U.S., the Reagan administration, went about this by saying there's not a civil war going on now. What does that mean? The implication is that if you are fleeing El Salvador, and it's out of fear for your life based on the civil war, you can't say that it's because the civil war is happening, because the United States government won't recognize it. So, they won't take that into account. You can’t make an asylum claim, then you would probably be sent back to El Salvador, where then you would have taken a stand against your government. And that's putting your life even more at risk than it may have been before you left. That was why a lot of Central Americans, and especially Salvadorians in this example, would stay in the U.S. without papers. And then these communities built up over time. 

I’ll quickly diverge into an example about the development of MS-13 through that. Because many Salvadorans were coming undocumented, they would often be brought to migration jails prior to being deported. So, that was how and where these transnational networks of organized crime, that we know today as MS-13—and now, there're other ones, of course—developed. In prisons in the Los Angeles area. So, it's entirely an invention of the United States as an externality of migration enforcement, which, of course, has only gotten more militarized, more draconian, and further developed since these times. 

And so that’s an interesting way to think about this, because, given that backdrop, we have larger networks of Salvadorans in the U.S. and in 2014—around that time—there was a big gang violence problem in El Salvador and other parts of Central America. This is starting to decline, but I don’t think either of us believe that this decline is going to be sustained. But, basically, then, the gang violence in El Salvador was often threatening the lives of youth who are the subject of our book. They might have been subject to recruitment. They might not have been able to go to school because they were being intercepted by gang members who were trying to recruit them as early as age 12. And it's men, women, boys, girls, everybody. So, really, what we say is that the subjects of our book are the lucky ones in that they were able to leave because they had at least one family member who was already living in the U.S. and they were able to have a place to go when they came up. That becomes the subject of the next part of the book. But that's a quick overview. Ernesto, would you have anything to add? 

Castañeda: You said it well. I would just add that these histories of Central American immigration to the U.S. are connected to Cold War geopolitics and the Red Scare. There was the assumption that the U.S.S.R. was supporting leftist regimes in Central America. But they were probably not sending weapons. They weren’t sending a lot of money. That's what people in Washington were saying. That's a justification. Where, in actuality, a lot of these were grassroots movements by campesinos, by agricultural workers. In Guatemala, for example, the United Fruit Company had a lot of sway over a lot of land, a lot of money that benefited U.S. interests. Then U.S. citizens were buying bananas and things, produced in these “banana republics,” which were the people of these countries trying to have these very democratic attempts of self-governance. Then you had intervention from the CIA and U.S. forces supporting the coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz (1951-1954), and then putting in a more right-wing authoritarian regimes that, in the case of Guatemala, ended up in basically the genocide of a lot of the marginalized and indigenous peoples. 

So, in order to survive, many of them escaped north to Mexico. Some of them stayed in camps there and became citizens later. But many others were helped by early members of the sanctuary movement—diplomats, church people that knew what was going on El Salvador and were based in San Diego, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, in Washington, D.C.—who helped people get to the U.S. undocumented. As Daniel was saying, because the U.S. was part of the causes of the political instability, they would not accept migrants as political refugees. So that, again, that's a big issue in the 1980s that is still not resolved. 

Today, we have similar situations. We are facing the consequences of  intrafamily dynamics. In a way, these unaccompanied youth of 2014 were the grandchildren of the people who came in the ‘80s. And then we're probably going to see the next generation coming. For those of us following these historical and family dynamics, the family reunifications, a lot of youth coming at the same time was something to be expected. It was understandable. But I think a lot of people still saw that as exaggerating the bad situation in Central America at that time. But again, it's something that has been brewing for a long time. And the fact that Central Americans came to the U.S. because U.S. interests, forces, etc., were in Central America creating these negative dynamics.

Q. Can you briefly expand on the reasons that Central American youth choose to migrate? What are their lives like before they emigrate? 

Jenks: Adult migration is often seen, either in academia or in the broader public, as an economic or labor market thing entirely. Or just a thing entirely based on networks. And of course, we touch on all of those things in the book. But in youth migration, there's a lot of other things we need to look at for why somebody would choose to migrate, as a personal decision, as a family decision, or some mix of the two. You have to look at family ties, sibling-parent relationships, the situations in sending communities. If somebody is being taken care of by an older grandparent, they might become too old to take care of the child who's becoming a teenager. They might pass away. The uncle, who was taking care of them, might need to migrate for their own reasons. And so, those are things that need to be considered. 

As far as lives beforehand, it depends largely on the individual. Sometimes they're living with extended family. They might be in a city, in a rural area. They’re going to school; they're doing other things. They're having normal lives as children until they're not.

Castañeda: Just to add, briefly, in some of our interviews, we also see this educational aspiration of people. They were having normal lives, and they wanted to become lawyers or doctors, and they saw their prospects of employment in those areas curtailed in Central America. So, if they had the opportunity to come to the U.S because they had family members, they would prefer, like many people around the world, to study in a U.S. university or school. 

Q. Can you briefly talk about the migration journeys of Central American youth? What obstacles do they face? 

Castañeda: Contrary to the term, most of them would not travel unaccompanied. They will travel with a local guide, who is usually a trusted family member or a guide, whose reputation depends on getting people from, for example, a village in Honduras safely into the U.S. so they can get more clients. It's not different from a tourist guide, but instead of taking you to Disney World, they are taking you to where your parents live, and without a visa. So, there's more risks, there's more expenses. In earlier decades, it was basically a guide through Mexico, through the desert, and then it became easier once within the U.S. This has become more complicated as time has passed, with more militarization and making it harder at the U.S.-Mexico border, as people are aware of. There's great work published by the Russell Sage Foundation and others documenting this. 

But what we have also seen in the last decade is that Mexico itself has been pressured by the U.S., largely by Trump in his first administration, to deploy the military to dissuade immigration through Mexico to the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico has been deporting an important number of Central Americans. More people, in the last few years, have been deported from Mexico back to Central America than from the U.S. to Central America. And that is not because Mexico used to care a lot about people passing; this has been happening since the ‘80s. But again, it is pressure that they don't want people arriving at the border and making it a PR issue for the government in the U.S. 

Which makes the journey even more perilous because then the army is looking for people on the move—Central American youth and adults moving together in groups through Mexico. It's a large country that they don't know. Mexicans speak slightly differently from people from Central America, so they are noticeable by their dress, by  their accents. They have mechanisms to try to pass and attract less attention, but they are searched for by the authorities. Local police can also terrorize them, stop them, and ask them questions. Criminal organizations, small gangs, groups of youth, anybody with a gun or a threat of violence, can extort them and ask for money. “You're not supposed to be here.” “You're on your way somewhere.” “You're not from here.” “Give me something or I won't let you pass.” So, unfortunately, as organized crime has taken control of more territories within Mexico, this has increased the risk of being recruited in some parts of Mexico to be part of organized crime there. Most immigrants, that's not what they want to do. So, they get kidnapped, and then the family members back in Honduras or Guatemala have to wire money to the organized crime group or a corrupt official for them to be let go and continue the journey. But also, important numbers of people are killed by people in Mexico. So that's why, really is the lucky ones that can make it alive or don't have to use the train, La Bestia—the beast—and risk falling and losing limbs. We have interviewed adults in Mexico who have gotten serious injuries there. 

The people that we interviewed, to a large degree, have people well-established in the Washington area who send them money, who can pay for a better journey. It’s a lot of money for this smuggling, which is not the right term, because it's willingly. They are accompanied by adults and siblings. It can be an aunt or a neighbor who can go with them, who is also trying to migrate for work or other reasons in the U.S. And then, there may be other people who may travel with them. And they will act as temporary parental figures, taking care of them and forming these family units during the travel through Central America and Mexico. Which can take weeks, months, and in some cases, years. When we talk about people coming from further south—Venezuela and other places—this is really a complicated, perilous, and dangerous journey. And more and more of those people are stuck in Mexico. So, there's a challenge of whether they want to immigrate and do this process in Mexico, or if they want to keep trying to get to the U.S.-Mexico border, which is becoming more and more perilous, or if they want to go back home. And again, depending on the reason why they left, it may or may not be viable for them to go back.

Q. Can you briefly speak about the difficulties Central American youth experienced when reuniting with their family members in the U.S.? 

 Jenks: As I was saying about how we need to understand the decision nexus of children's migration versus adult migration, I think it's a very similar to how we understand the integration trajectory of children, because it really is very different. And I think it’s understudied. Youth are often going to school instead of going straight to work, which is an everyday interface with the government. Whether it's local, state, or federal, it's an everyday interfacing between a community and its neighbors. That’s something that adults don't have, and it does make integrating look very different. 

We looked at the ways that youth were integrating into schools. We looked at the ways that they understood their experience in schools and how this helped or hindered them emotionally, in learning English, or in understanding their new communities and their families. So, that's one big arena.

Then they also have to deal with everything that comprises the experience of migration while being in a really unique stage of their life. Where two months can be a really, really long time. And that experience can be entirely different for a 10-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 14-year-old. Because all of those are such wildly different ages. The difference between a 22-year-old and a 26-year-old isn't that big. It's a big change, but it's not the same as 10 to 14. And the age of the child affects things about cognition and emotional ties to family. 

Ernesto, I don't know if you want to speak about the use of the term vos? 

Castañeda: Yes. Salvadorians use vos informally to talk to peers, and they may use usted more formally to talk to their parents. There’re variations depending on the region and something similar happens in northern Mexico. This was very interesting at the sociolinguistic level. Some of the minors and the youth coming to the DMV—the Washington metropolitan region—to live with their biological parents, mother, or father, or both, or a mother and a stepdad, etc., have been communicating with each other via Zoom, etc. They've been sending money and receiving money, but they haven't really cohabitated since they were babies or very young kids. So, they are getting to meet each other again. 

Sometimes, in the mind of a young woman, the maternal figure is a grandmother who stayed behind in Central America, and the biological mom is like an older sister, like a new friend. So, they call her by their first name and use vos as, again, as an older acquaintance that lives in D.C. that they’re getting to know, but not with the deference of usted. Like, “Don’t tell me what to do or tell me I'm going to need permission from you if I want to go out or not. Because, I mean, who are you? To me, you haven't played the maternal figure.” Sometimes it's openly said like this, but most of the time it is more implied. More often, it's unintentional. It's unspoken. But that informality in the language betrays that it is not a “traditional” mom-daughter relationship, which is okay. With time, they may start forming new ties. So again, it's not to moralize or complain about anybody not fulfilling the role, but it’s a different type of family dynamic. If more teachers, social workers, and city employees understand that dynamic, the easier it is for these immigrants to integrate and have a successful life in the U.S. 

Q. What mental health challenges do Central American migrant youth face? 

Jenks: There are several mental health conditions that we talk about in the book. We largely talk about PTSD and depression. We talk about the symptoms that the youth expressed, because we're not doctors, we're not health professionals. But we were able to collect and look at the results of scales that were used by doctors to diagnose and talk about signs of depression and PTSD. So, some youth showed signs of PTSD. We can talk about this as an effect of things that they saw, either in their sending countries or on the journey northward, because there are some really traumatic things that happened which we talked about a bit in a prior answer and, of course, talk about more in the book. 

PTSD and depression are interconnected things, and one of the ways that we can think about depression is how youth fare when they when they get to where they're going. Thinking about how they negotiate and understand these new familial relationships that they're being placed in or thinking about how they negotiate and understand being in school—maybe not understanding the language that's being taught in school, for instance. Not to directly correlate this with depression, but, just as an example, for some Guatemalans, Spanish is their second language. Their first language might be a more local native language. So, then they have to go to school where they speak English, and then maybe you're being helped in Spanish. There's a larger disconnect. And then if you're spending a lot of the day not necessarily understanding what's going on, that can be a depressing thing. 

 That being said, I think there's a lot of ways that schools can help. Especially if the communities are able to come together and work on English as a Second Language programs, and help students, help each other, and help families understand and negotiate these new relationships. So, that's what I would start off with when thinking about mental health challenges and migration for Central Americans.

Castañeda: There is also the issue of the separation itself. A lot of children experience it—even if it’s not technically the case—as abandonment so then they have questions about self-worth. It’s also a separation where the family member is not dead, so they cannot grieve like the separation is forever. There's always this promise of family reunification, and that can take over a decade sometimes. There’s a term that some psychologists use, “ambiguous loss,” and you cannot really get over that grief because it's not final. The family member is alive, you just don't see them, and you don't live with them because they're in another country, and the legal framework doesn't allow you to visit or allow them to visit you easily. The reunification, in a way, should be able to do away with that, but it doesn't, because there's years of longing and these expectations that “everything will be perfect once I live with my mom again”. But then you have to pay rent, and buy stuff for school, and learn English, so life is tougher. Then you realize, “Okay, being with my mom is not enough to solve all my problems.”

There’s all this mismatch between the expectations and the realities and the way the parents see their sacrifice. They think, “I did this so you could have more food, more educational opportunities, etc.,” and the child’s not understanding that. And then the young adult tries to negotiate that, and may understand it in an intellectual sense, but also has those feelings of abandonment.

It's something that school districts and nonprofits that had funding for that have been very effective at addressing. They have a number of mothers or youth in that situation doing a type of group therapy—even if they call it something else—to process these feelings and to think more sociologically, to understand that the separation was not something unique to them or their fault or their lack of moral character or their moral failings, but that it was something that economic systems and the legal systems were putting their families in the middle of. And that really helped people then focus on becoming Americans and having a successful life in Washington, which many of them do. Many of them enrolled into college. Many of them are going to become professionals. 

The more intentional that teachers, programs, and cities can be in focusing on that kind of welcoming, and understanding who these migrants are, where they're coming from, in all the senses of the word, the more open the future is for them, and it helps the community where they integrate. Instead of this belief, “Oh, they're not from here. They're not going to understand English. They may go back. We shouldn't invest in them,” which makes the process tougher and may lead a few of them to then join gangs in the U.S., which is where more of the resources and the attention are. The questions of, “Are they going to be Mara Salvatrucha members? Are they Mara Salvatrucha members? Should we deport them?” - a lot of money is put into that, but that actually makes the possibility of that thing we want to avoid more likely. The money is going to that rather than putting the money in public schools, public parks that are going to benefit the locals and the newcomers, and where they're going to interact as equals. 

That's why the cover is that of the soccer field, because you have some immigrants of different countries, of different statuses, playing with people born and raised in the U.S. What matters is who can score, who can pass, who can have fun. That's a positive aspect also, of coming and living in the U.S. They don't have to worry about gang violence, as they did in their countries, and they don't have to worry about that separation. We saw that just that - just the act of migration, once they successfully get into the U.S. - resulted in some indicators of mental health improving. So, that is a good intervention. Allowing families to reunite is going to make people happier. It shouldn't be a shocking surprise, but that’s another way that having more humane policies is going to help individual mental health. It’s going to help the productivity of the workers here who may work in a grocery store or on a construction site. If they are depressed because they miss their kids, they are more likely to have an accident or be less productive. But if they have their kids again, then they're going to learn more skills, be more interested in learning English, etc. 

Q. How can schools help ease the integration of Central American migrants? What can make their integration more challenging? 

Jenks: I think really having deliberate and thoughtful programming is what can help. Often that comes with a necessity for resources that some schools don't have. In what we were able to see, a lot of them did and a lot of them do. So, for instance, one district made a high school just for newcomer migrant youth. It had specified programming to help them learn English and then figure out what that next thing that they want to do is, whether it's going to college or joining the workforce or getting into some other sort of training program. And then by having that kind of learning space together, they're then able to craft a good space where people can support each other.

I think for younger kids, especially who are mainstreamed in schools, a lot of the things schools can do is administrative. For instance, just registering students sometimes is a challenge. And so, if the parents don't have to jump through a million hoops to get their kids in school, that will help their integration. More and more this is an ignored topic in school districts, I think. And that's unfortunate, because we can really make these educational spaces where everybody can learn from each other. And that can improve the integration trajectories of youth when they can understand what's happening in school and when they’re placed correctly.  

There were some really, really sad pieces that we got from the interviews. Some beautiful ones too, but some really sad ones. One student said that she felt like she was smart in Spanish but stupid in English, and that is a challenge. It's emotionally hard to feel like that. 

I think another thing to consider is that a lot of times there was educational disruption in the sending countries. So, older kids may have gotten to, say, be a sophomore in high school and then got cut off for a year. Then their English skills might not be tip top and so then they have to be in lower-level classrooms. Then you have a 17-year-old in a classroom full of 14-year-olds. and that can be strange sometimes. I think that is a challenge, and it's solved with deliberate and thoughtful programming for helping schools to make inclusive learning environments.

Q. What policy changes would you recommend to better support Central American migrant youth?  

Castañeda: As Daniel was saying, having schools be intentional and create some specific programming. We already have some programs in the books like ESL or learning English as a Second Language—it's called different things in different places. Sometimes these programs are unpopular to people that think that resources are diverted from the majority of the school to go to that, but these are students that will be in the school anyway. They have the constitutional right to be in school. So, rather than having a curriculum in English that they won't understand, having it in Spanish is just the way to for the school to deliver the education as they learn English. 

Another successful program in schools that we have as a policy recommendation is the immersion programs. Immersion schools for speaking Spanish or Chinese, or different languages depending on the school, are seen as a plus, because the natives can develop a new ability. When being bilingual is valued, it's better for everybody. And that's a great integration tool. 

We know it's challenging, and as Daniel was saying, sometimes people may think that there's not enough money to dedicate resources for this special programming for unaccompanied youth or new arrivals—from Ukraine or Afghanistan or whatever the country at the time. But a lot of this is just a teacher spending a couple hours on this, intentionally, per week. As part of their salary, as part of their job as a club or as an extracurricular activity right after class. It's not necessarily expensive. It will be as hard as organizing a debate club or a soccer league. The same infrastructure can be used for this programming, so it's not prohibitive for public schools. Private schools - like Catholic schools, where some of these youth enroll with scholarships. They mean well, but probably don't have this type of programming, because these youth are more invisible, because there may be many fewer of them, but they also have the resources to help them. 

 In terms of overall policy recommendations – what the book is trying to say is that family separation is not only when people arrive as a family unit at the border and the authorities put the parents in one room or one facility, and the and the minors or youth in another, which is cruel and intentional. But family separations also happen when the U.S., and many, many rich countries in Europe and elsewhere, take guest workers to do manual labor legally for a period of time, but only the worker is allowed to come. We saw that with Algerians in France, with the Turkish in Germany, with Mexicans in the U.S., etc. This is a type of family separation. It will be temporary, and it will be seasonal. So that's a choice, and it's not as bad. And for a long time, the U.S. has tolerated—and I will say it's changing—but it had encouraged a system of undocumented migration. And it was separating the workers from Asia, Africa, Latin America mainly, and their children in the Philippines or many different countries around the world, for years, for decades. Making it a very hidden, quiet dynamic affecting a lot of the global working-class service community. You have similar dynamics for people working in cruises and other industries, where part of the job is to be separated from your family for an extended amount of time. While academic scientists, ambassadors, diplomats, CEOs, and people more likely to read this book and who have a sway in policymaking are able to move as family units. If somebody gets deployed on a mission in Geneva, they're going to go with their family, if they choose to do that. That's a luxury not available to a lot of the global population that needs to move. 

If we start thinking of immigration policy, not with the individual as the unit of analysis but the family from the get-go for guest worker programs, for low-skilled workers—because that's already what happens with low-skill migration, to a large degree—policy can be improved. When the spouse of a worker from India cannot work through the H-1B program , there are issues. What happens to the minor when they become older than 18? Can they still be dependent on the family visa or not? These are issues also impacting people in the tech sector and they're very vocal about it. We really need an immigration reform that takes these things into account. 

So, a big part of the book is that we talk about structural family separation. Family separation is happening because these larger economic and legal systems—which the minors and the parents have little control over—force them into this false “choice” of leaving the family behind. We saw very interesting policy innovations in the last few years. For example, Salvadorians and some people from other countries, even if they were in the country undocumented, could take a step forward and apply for family reunification for their family members to come legally from El Salvador and join them here, put them in schools. And they’ll have permission to come, so they don't have to deal with the travel and the expenses of going through the border. They're going to come anyway and it's better that they come legally, so the government knows where they live and all that.  

The reunification of unaccompanied minors and family members in the U.S. only works when you don't penalize the legal sponsor, who is often the legal guardian or biological parents, for being in the country without permission if they are undocumented. Because if the government now knows where you live and knows your status, it may be a disincentive to apply for reunification. That's why some people may stay with a cousin, with an aunt, or with somebody that is a bit more remote and who has papers, so they are less at risk. But then, sometimes those arrangements may create some funny dynamics . Those stories are what the media and the right wing get a hold of and talk about, like people being forced to labor in the U.S. or being trafficked. It happens, but again, it's not the bulk of the story.  

A better family reunification policy will be a big improvement for the undocumented and the people who will arrive and apply for asylum. Right now, a lot of our immigration law is driven by family reunification. But it’s only once somebody has a green card or becomes a citizen that there indeed can be a process to ask for people. And that's how a lot of people from Asia and Latin America have migrated since ’65. But if one is not allowed to regularize—which is hard for many people, to become legal—if there's not a line to get in, then the family reunification will happen in the way that we document in the book. That is not ideal in any sense. So, there's a lot that can be done just by understanding these family dynamics. 

And again, these youth are not leaving because they have the American Dream, necessarily, or they wanted to leave. They were forced to leave for many reasons. So, decreasing gang violence and drug trafficking in the countries of origin is going to make less people need to go. And if there were more job opportunities, or if the parents were able to go back and forth by regularizing their status, fewer people would feel like they need to leave. The people with TPS, the temporary protected status, can have more of a transnational life. That then decreases the need for the youth to move to the U.S., cross through Mexico, and risk their lives. 

It wouldn't be hard to find ways to come up with a better system or to have an allocation system s like those that Washington or cities in Northern Virginia have. They receive such large numbers of these asylees, refugees, immigrants, and family members of immigrants that they can get federal resources for their education. Because these youth are coming early enough that they're going to learn English in a couple of years, they're going to learn the American way, they're going to be a great labor force for the U.S. that is going to be more trained and more skilled than their parents. They’re going to create more wealth for themselves, for their families, and for the U.S. In a time where we are seeing population decline, we need these youth. The more we invest in them, the more the return is going to be for the country and the city and the state. 

Q. Is there anything else that you would like to add?

Jenks: If you're listening to this, please read the book. We're both happy to Zoom in if you teach the book and are happy to answer questions, if you're in the Philly area, or maybe even New York or D.C., I'm happy to show up in person as well. 

Castañeda: We're just barely touching the surface in this interview. Hopefully this piqued your interest in reading the book. In the book, you will read the quotes from our interviews with the minors—a little bit of the input from their parents, sponsors, and professionals—but a lot of very powerful quotes coming directly from the youth we interview. This is something that we cannot do justice in a podcast or in an interview. You have to read the book in order to feel these voices and accompany them on the journey. So, yes, I would also encourage you to read the book. It's about this very real topic. It's sometimes sad. It's a hard topic emotionally, but it is a way to humanize these real people who come to the U.S. looking for an opportunity, like everyone else. They're not interested in breaking the law. Most of them are law-abiding and very few of them are criminals, but they are portrayed in the media that way. So, it's important that we are informed and that we know the reality.

This is an academic book published by the Russell Sage Foundation, so it's drawing on very rigorous research, a very rigorous research process, and a series of interviews. It took us a while to write it, but it's written in a way that is very accessible to policymakers without any background in the social sciences or immigration law or anything. That’s why it's also very useful in the classroom at any level, even in high school. I presented this in high schools in the Washington area. The kids who may be close to this experience—whether they're from Central America or from Ethiopia or from other countries— see themselves reflected. And it's very, very useful for them to learn why it's important to read, to get engaged with the material, the power of social science, to draw better policy and to tell these stories. The media, because of the limits that they have in how long a piece can be and how fast they have to report back, cannot go as in-depth as we did. And we tried to cover the history, before migration, the journey, and then the arrival and what happens, but in a way that is easy to read. It won't take you too long. It's very accessible. It's very readable, and the book is not too long, so it's also not a big burden.  This one is something that is great for the classroom, for a general audience, for journalists, and for policymakers to grasp in a couple of hours of reading the book.