Crusade of children

The policy of any government is composed of two unequal parts: internal and external. As a rule, in democratic states it is the internal that plays a decisive role, especially during the election. There are situations when the government is trying to divert attention from internal problems by foreign policy adventures and demarches, and this usually indicates an administrative crisis - here you can’t give an example more clearly than the current pressure of Russia in Ukraine, with the capture of Crimea and home -made people's republics, but chauvinistic carbon monoxide requires a constant supply of fuel, and ultimately the domestic policy prevails.

In any case, this is clear for a sober look from Russia itself, where at the moment domestic policy comes down to a series of more insane prohibitions imposed almost daily, whether it is on synthetic underpants, smoking on the street at a distance of fifteen meters from anything or registration on foreign servers. As for foreign countries observed from such a position, it is primarily that their foreign policy is striking, and the domestic is either incomprehensible or uninteresting.

From this point of view, the affairs of the United States are very unimportant today: there is an inability to consolidate the Western response to Russian aggression, and the failure of another attempt to regulate Israeli-Palestinian relations, and the triumphs of Muslim extremists in Syria and Iraq-you can’t list everything. The look from the inside of the United States, however, gives a slightly different picture. After a painfully slow way out of the 2008 crisis, the economy gradually develops decent speed, and this is perhaps the main good news, although we can also mention the relative success of the health care reform, despite the fact that the Supreme Court managed to saw off sensitive pieces.

But the main domestic political failure of the administration is the actual failure of immigration reform due to the complete refusal of the republican opposition to compromise. About 11 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, mainly from Latin American countries, and since there are more and more votin American voters, the problem is aggravated for both parties. For some time, unpleasant foreign policy events really pushed her into the background, but for six months now she, allegedly expelled at the door, burst out the window.

Children run away from hunger, but mainly from youth gangs, many of which are associated with drug trafficking and in which children are forced to engage in force

In the stream of illegal immigrants there are more and more children arriving without parents and any support of adults. The immigration service and the administration of the border districts do not have effective means of combating this children's invasion. Experts guess about the reasons for such an unexpected influx, but generally believe that this is due to the poverty and collapse of civil society in Central American countries, primarily in Guatemala and Salvador. Children run away from hunger, but mainly from youth gangs, many of which are associated with drug trafficking and in which children are forced to engage in force. At the same time, some of the criminal cartels found a way to extract additional benefits and directly beat the children to escape in the United States, levied for this from their relatives and friends huge money for them.

Rumors are distributed, including in the media, that if the child is in the United States without parents, he will no longer be expelled - on the contrary, he is issued special paper and residence permit. As a result, many desperate parents voluntarily send children through Mexico, accompanied by guides - the so -called "coyots" who rob and rape them on the road, or even kill them. Rumors, of course, are mostly false, but they have a certain real background. In accordance with existing agreements, the United States can return children to Mexico and Canada who fled from these countries, but there are no similar contracts with others, and sometimes it is not clear where and to whom to return these children. Adults caught when trying to cross the border are usually placed in camps at a time when the immigration court decides the issue of their deportation, but you can not leave children to bars. As a result, they really give out paper, giving the right to reside before a court decision, and by this time the trace of many is lost: either they find relatives, the same illegal immigrants, or dissolve in a huge country where there is no passport regime.

Residents of the border strip demand from the authorities of the states and the federal government of immediate measures, they have to spend a lot of money from their own tax budgets for the maintenance of children, not to mention the fact that they need to pay for their studies in schools, since immigration courts are loaded for long months in advance. It is pointless to increase the number of border guards, because the children who managed to cross the border are primarily looking for an official, waiting for the promised permission.

It is obvious to everyone that the situation requires urgent legislative measures, and President Barack Obama calls on the congress to take these measures. However, in the conditions of the current political polarization in the country, this is not possible: the speaker of the House of Representatives John Beiner has already stated that there would be no new legislation before the autumn elections, when the Republicans hope to receive a majority in both chambers of Congress. Meanwhile, the invasion of children continues.

Alexey Tsvetkov-New York Political Commentator, Poet and Publicist

Opinions expressed under the heading "Law" may not reflect the point of view of the editorial office