The Guardian – by Rory Carroll
The United States will soon offer refugee status to some undocumented youths from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as part of a wider immigration reform effort.
Vice-president Joe Biden announced on Friday that minors under the age of 21 who live in the Central American countries, and who have parents who are legal residents in the US, could start applying for refugee status from next month.
“It provides those seeking asylum a right way to come to our country, as opposed to crossing the border illegally,” he told a Central American conference at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.
About 68,000 unaccompanied minors, mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, illegally entered the US from Mexico this year. Harrowing scenes of children tramping across the desert triggered a logistical scramble to accommodate them and a political row in Washington.
Biden said minors whose parents legally reside in the US could henceforth be spared that trek. “The programme will provide a safe, legal and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children make – and some children don’t ever arrive, don’t ever make.”
An existing scheme lets 4,000 people from Cuba and Colombia per year seek refugee status in the US. The move will widen that to include the three Central American countries.
A State Department fact sheet said there may be some flexibility in the quota but did not give a new figure.
The White House is finalising plans for executive action on immigration under which President Barack Obama would, among other things, likely provide work permits to almost half of the 11 million people currently living in the country illegally.
Biden made the announcement during a lunch with Guatemala’s president Otto Pérez Molina, Honduras’s president Juan Orlando Hernández and El Salvador’s president Salvador Sánchez Cerén. Obama is in Australia for a G20 summit.
“The United States will soon offer refugee status to some undocumented youths…”
wow
they went from being “illegal aliens” in the last article to “undocumented youths” in this one
i’m confused
Executive action on immigration….in other words the Dictator-in-Chief will now make decisions in place of Congress. Why not just call him Godfather. On the other hand, I have more respect for the old line Mafia than these ass-hats. You knew where they were coming from. Will Americans ever develop the cajones to stop this nonsense?