Jorge was just fifteen when he fled the gang violence of Tegucigalpa, Honduras with his six-year-old cousin. Headed for the United States, the boys crossed 4,000 miles over the course of a month. They traveled by bus, on top of freight trains, and walked for seven days while barely sleeping, guided by a coyote with a group of other immigrants through northern Mexico and across the border (as reported in New York Times, February 25, 2012).

Jorge and Eric emigrated from Honduras in 2009. Then, they were two of several thousand unaccompanied minors who entered the U.S. annually. Today, tens of thousands of children are fleeing violence and poverty throughout Central America, seeking safety and reunion with family members within our nation. Customs and Border Patrol have apprehended 57,252 unaccompanied minors at the southwest border since October, 2013. According to a special report by the American Immigration Council, the greatest percentage of these kids came from Honduras, and the rest from Guatemala, Mexico, and El Salvador. The number of apprehended children has doubled from last year, signaling serious crisis in Central America.

The immediate causes of unaccompanied child immigration are clear. Their home nations are plagued by violence and poverty. Child migrants cite crime, gang threats, and insecurity as reasons for leaving. Due to gang and drug cartel violence, the murder rate in Honduras is higher than anywhere else in the world.

Guatemala and El Salvador have high murder rates too—higher even than that of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the troubled war-torn region of Africa that receives a lot of global attention. Many kids leave because their parents or other family members have already emigrated to the U.S. for work, like Eric’s mom, and they wish to be reunited.

The spike in unaccompanied child migrants has sparked a media frenzy, in part because of the hostile reactions some U.S. citizens have shown to hosting the kids in their communities. The protestors of Murrieta, California earned nationwide infamy when they blocked a busload of children from arriving on July 3. Protestors claim that the children will place an unfair financial burden on the town and its school system, and wonder if the kids are dangerous criminals. They want the kids sent back to their home countries. One protestor held a sign that read, “Not our problem!”

As a sociologist who researches globalization and its consequences, the sign bothered me, and not just for its callous attitude toward children seeking refuge from violence. It bothers me because of its ignorance of the history of economic, political, and military relations between the U.S. and the nations of Central America. When you look at immigration in socio-historical context, these 57,000-plus kids are very much our problem. I’ll explain why.

In addition to living in communities plagued by violence and crime, many in Central America also suffer from hunger, lack of water, and inadequate access to education. Those living in poverty in urban areas are also likely to live in overcrowded, diseased, and dangerous slums. These conditions exist because of the globalization of capitalism through free trade agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), U.S. military interventions designed to create political conditions amenable to a freely moving global capitalism, and the ongoing U.S.-sponsored drug war that generates conflict and violence throughout the region.

Sociologists have documented in rich detail how the globalization of capitalism “pulled” rural populations in poor countries into urban centers, and how the conditions of poverty, political instability, and violence that follows it then “pushes” them northward and across our border. People throughout Central America were pulled into urban centers by institutions like the World Bank and the IMF that lend money to poor nations so that they can develop infrastructure, grow their economies, and eliminate poverty. Loans like these stipulate that the money must be invested in urban and semi-urban areas, and not in rural communities. When governments accept these loans and urban development ensues, a mass exodus of rural peasants to urban centers in search of work follows.

Many find work in factory complexes built with the loaned money in Free Trade Zones and Export Processing Zones established as part of free trade agreements, where global corporations pay no taxes and import and export tariffs. But, these are mostly dead-end jobs that offer very low pay, and there are not nearly enough jobs to go around. So, many turn to making money through informal, black market, and even violent means in order to survive. Working for the drug cartels is one way in which people can earn money and support their families when no other options exist. Today, because of this “pull” dynamic of globalization and the lack of jobs with livable wages, nearly 1 billion people around the world live in urban slums, over 1.4 billion people are in extreme poverty, and 1 in 8 people are chronically hungry. 

Many U.S.-based global corporations have amassed unprecedented amounts of wealth by operating in Central America thanks to free trade agreements, and have created a vast chasm of wealth inequality that drives the poverty described above. We in the U.S. have delighted in the bounty of affordable consumer goods brought to us by CAFTA, which means we are implicated in the U.S.-sponsored military intervention throughout the region designed to ensure “free” trade thrives. But, ignorance of this reality is the order of the day.

Greg Prieto, a sociologist and immigration expert at University of San Diego, believes that the surge in unaccompanied migrant children has everything to do with failed U.S. trade and foreign policy, and that the federal government has a responsibility to accept and provide for the kids. Of the situation, he said, “The Obama administration and many in Congress have made it clear that they will only respond to the consequences and not the causes of this ‘humanitarian’ crisis. Despite the origins of this crisis in failed free trade agreements, failed military interventions, and failed drug war initiatives—in all of which the U.S. played a central role—the national response has been the banishment of these child refugees whose migration is born, in large part, of disastrous U.S. meddling in the region over decades.”

Dr. Prieto refers to instances like the 2009 military coup in Honduras, implicitly backed by the U.S., that ousted democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya was opposed to the free trade policies that had impoverished many, and so the U.S. did not do anything to stop the coup. UCLA sociologist Leisy Abrego, writing at Huffington Post, points out that military intervention has historically fueled violence throughout the region, as does the U.S.-funded drug war through programs like the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI). These conditions, along with free trade induced poverty, create the “push” factor that drives Central Americans from their homes and toward ours. In sum, sociological research shows that the current influx of migrant kids, and immigration from Latin America in general, is for the most part a consequence of the globalization of capitalism.

As a sociologist who recognizes the political and economic relations that exist between the U.S. and Central America, I argue that this crisis is our problem because most of us stood idly by as the leaders of our nation dismantled trade and finance regulations. We might have lamented it, but we did nothing about it when factories across the country shuttered and corporations outsourced production to poor nations. The migrant children are our problem because we delight in the ubiquity and bounty of affordable goods that line the shelves of Walmarts and Costcos, and we nourish ourselves with the abundant variety of fruits, vegetables, and grains that the system delivers to us. It is our problem because we benefit daily from the labor of immigrants who clean our workplaces and homes, landscape our gardens and yards, grow, process, and package our food, care for our elderly, our sick, and our children, while their children grow up without parents in cultures of violence.

The immigrant children come to us because, by both action and inaction, we brought them here. Their problems are very much ours.