Border crisis 101: eight things to know about unaccompanied children

Here’s a look at today’s immigration crisis and how it compares to the recent past.

2. What are the trends with unaccompanied children?

Eric Gay/AP/File
Detainees walk in a line at a US Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville,Texas, in June.

In fiscal year 2013 – Oct. 1, 2012 to Sept. 30, 2013 – 82 percent of the 47,000 children age 17 and under apprehended on the border were unaccompanied. Between FY 2009 and FY 2013, the number of apprehended unaccompanied children doubled. That number is on track to double again by the end of FY 2014.

The absolute number of children being apprehended at the border is similar to that of the early-to-mid-2000s, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. But as a percentage of all apprehensions, the number has been rising. That figure ranged from 8 to 10 percent before the recession, but went up to 11 percent in FY 2013.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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