The U.S. Immigration System Is Only Getting Worse [PSMag.com]

The biggest tragedy of America’s immigration apparatus has nothing to do with national security.

While a rise in refugees worldwide to an all-time high of 21.3 million as a result of the conflicts in Syria and Afghanistan (nearly half of whom are children, according to a new reportby the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) has for some spurred terror-laden anxieties, America’s real immigration crisis centers on the treatment of those who enter the country.

According to a new report from humanitarian non-profit Child Trends, some 127,000 migrant children will seek refuge in the United States in 2016. Of those children, only 29 percent will be granted refugee or asylee status, mostly those from war-torn nations. But those other 71 percent of migrant children — 90,000 young people, mostly fleeing strife in Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — will land right in the middle of a humanitarian disaster. While the rise in border apprehensions and deportations (spearheaded by the Obama administration) over the last several years may suggest to immigration hardliners that U.S. policy is working, the Child Trends report reveals that too many migrant children entering the country are effectively doomed to bureaucratic limbo, resigned to the seemingly endless institutions of border control and, in turn, sentenced to a lifetime of personal dysfunction and trauma.

[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/the-u-s-immi...3aebe2d04#.ckzmeub7h]