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Carolyn Patty Blum: How Kamala Harris can find the solution for the migration crisis

By immigrationprof

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Carolyn Patty Blum on The Hill is calling on Vice President Kamala Harris, tasked with working with Central American nations on immigration issues,  This is Patty’s advice to the Vice President:

“Vice President Kamala Harris . . . . is tasked with determining the root causes and addressing them. To have any success, she must demonstrate to our partners in the Northern Triangle that the United States fully understands that their history is inextricably bound with our own history.

The first task on her agenda should be to create a truth commission with academic experts, faith leaders, human rights investigators, and members of the communities of people from Central America to sit as members. Its purpose is to come to terms with our role in the human rights tragedies of El Salvador and its neighbors in the Northern Triangle, and to create a full record of effects from our military action and foreign policy.

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If Harris wants to address root causes of migration from Central America, she should start by looking in our backyard. Only when we look honestly at our history and the links between policy and refugee migration can we have a real dialogue with partners in the Northern Triangle. Her mission, and our moral integrity as a country, need this reckoning.”

(bold added).

Patty litigated cases against four military commanders of El Salvador. She is a clinical professor emerita and senior research fellow at the Human Rights Center at University of California Berkeley Law School.

KJ

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