Quoted in article by Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Los Angeles Times on 14 November

To read the entire Los Angeles Times article by Molly Hennessy-Fiske, “More Central Americans fleeing violence to enter U.S., sugesting another major surge,” click this link: http://www.latimes.com/nation/immigration/la-na-border-stats-20151114-story.html.

“During the first 10 months of this year, El Salvador reported nearly 5,500 homicides, according to a congressional report last month. That’s more than any other country not at war, according to Elizabeth Kennedy, a San Diego State University social scientist who has worked with migrants.

By the end of this year, the homicide rate in El Salvador — a country of 6.5 million people — may exceed 90 per 100,000, a level of violence, including massacres and killings of police, not seen since the country’s bloody 12-year civil war that ended in 1992.

Kennedy said conditions also remain poor in Guatemala and Honduras — two other originators of illegal migration to the U.S. — but El Salvador is worse.

“We’re seeing more and more indications that this is a refugee crisis, and it needs to be treated as such,” said Kennedy, who interviewed immigrant women, mostly mothers, for a new United Nations report released last month that documented a thirteenfold increase in asylum seekers within Mexico and Central America since 2008, and a nearly fivefold jump in the U.S.”

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