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Why Families Flee: A Study Of Family Migration Patterns From The Northern Triangle Of Central America, Claire Williams

Honors Theses

The past decade has witnessed an unprecedented increase in migrant families from the Northern Triangle, the region of Central America comprised of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The mass influx in family migration has important consequences for destination countries like the United States and Mexico as well as the countries which they leave behind. This study aims to answer the question of how family migration patterns in the Northern Triangle of Central America have changed in the past decade and why. I outline the migration decisions of families through a qualitative and quantitative lens. I use newspapers and NGO reports …

Cruces, Carlos Mario Tobon Franco

Theses

Cruces is a multimedia installation depicting immigrant conditions and experiences throughout landscapes, Latinx communities, and borderlands. Made during the last two years, it is constructed as a multivocal ethnography of immigrants with varying legal statuses, countries of origin, and stages in their journey. The imagery, sounds, and narratives are composed of the distributed yet relational geographies of immigrants’ experience and the pieces are structured to highlight the constitutive elements of human mobilities, such as trains, rivers and immigration hubs, as well as the natural obstacles they face in their perilous transit, such as forests and deserts.

The fieldwork was carried …

The Experience Of Guatemalan Women Who Seek Asylum In United States Courts: A Legacy Of Paternalism And Gendered Violence, Nina E. Harris

Honors Papers

Karen Musalo, a leading asylum attorney, explains,“In the United States, few refugee issues have been as controversial as that of gender asylum.” Despite perceived progress, inconsistent judicial decisions engender doubts about the viability of gender-based asylum cases. The U.S. courts continue to see violence against women as a personal or family matter rather than a pattern of accepted social behavior supported by the political and legal authorities. Using cases from Guatemalan women seeking asylum, my research scrutinizes the asylum system, and shows how the U.S. furthers a colonial, paternalistic narrative—allowing U.S. judges, adjudicators, and policymakers to decide who is worthy—or …

Sin Papeles: The Experiences Of Undocumented Central American Immigrants In The United States, Elizabeth Jarquin

Department of Family Therapy Dissertations and Applied Clinical Projects

In the United States, the topic of immigration represents a source of intense debate, which has escalated in recent years. Research indicates that Latinx immigrants are negatively impacted by current immigration policies— they are feeling afraid, angry, exhausted, defeated, overwhelmed, and concerned about themselves and their family (Castrellón, Rivarola, & López, 2017; Wray-Lake et al., 2018). This research, however, has largely neglected the Central American subgroup and the experiences of undocumented immigrants. The purpose of this study was to understand the experiences of undocumented Central American immigrants and their families within the current sociopolitical context. I utilized interpretative phenomenological analysis …

The Immigration Crisis Under The Trump Administration, Angelica Elizabeth Merino Monge

Senior Projects Fall 2020

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Honduras: Factors Underlying Immigration To The United States, Annika M. Meurs

UVM Patrick Leahy Honors College Senior Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between out-migration from Honduras, US policy, and conditions in Honduras. More particularly, it examines the violent and repressive conditions in Honduras along with US Military Assistance from 1980 to 2017. I look at the impact of US immigration policy on migration flows into the United States. Using data from World Bank databank, the US Foreign Aid Greenbook, the World Development Report, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), and the Political Terror Scale (PTS), I argue that violent conditions in Honduras, US military aid, and US immigration policy have significantly contributed to the ongoing exodus from Honduras …