"What goes around, comes around: Gang Violence and Unaccompanied Central American Minors"

• In Event: Central American-U.S. Migration and Discourses of “Humanitarian Crisis” - Part 2

Abstract

Today it is a truism that Central American youth are coming to the U.S. fleeing the effects of gang violence in their home countries. Without denying that youth are severely and negatively impacted by gangs in El Salvador, this paper sets out to show a more complex picture of the rise of gang violence in countries like El Salvador,
and to suggest that we are reaping the rewards of the combined effects of US foreign policy, and immigration, criminal and anti-terrorist laws. Ironically, hardline gang abatement policies in the US and El Salvador only fuel undocumented migration further. In this paper, I bring the research I conducted between 1992 to 2012 on the so-called "transnational youth gang crisis" between the U.S. and El Salvador
to bear on topic of this panel. The "crisis" is not news or surprising to those who have been working on the frontlines of these issues. For more than a decade, community based organizations and immigration attorneys in the United States have been inundated with undocumented immigrant youth and gang youth fleeing the combined effect of gang and state violence. In the mid 2000s, a new category of refugee was emerging in U.S. immigration courts, which for want of a better term then I referred to as the Gang War Refugee. The paper considers the precise conditions of the emergence of this refugee flow.

Author

• Elana Zilberg, University of California/San Diego