50 Jacqueline Bhabha In addition, the United States could follow historical precedents – the Kindertransport for Jewish children fleeing the Nazis, the Pedro Pan movement for Cuban children fleeing Castro – and institute refugee resettlement programs, establishing reasonable annual quotas and a transparent, fair, and efficient system of admission for the most vulnerable Central American children. The Office of Refugee Resettlement could work with local US communities, tapping into the extensive bedrock of civic capacity and willingness to accommodate, support, mentor, and nurture refugee children. Canada’s civic sponsorship program and Germany’s remarkable network of engaged communities and municipalities provide excellent precedents. Finally, the United States could deploy its unrivalled educational resources to encourage subsidized scholarship programs for at-risk children and adolescents. Many immigrant and children’s rights advocates in schools and colleges would enthusiastically support such an initiative – the much celebrated Erasmus program in Europe, which has facilitated mobility for adolescents from Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary to educational institutions in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Sweden, provides a powerful precedent.53 Nothing but benefit for US educational institutions and their students, the broader community, and of course the at-risk Central American children and youth could flow from such initiatives. As in other complex social fields, what is needed to address the challenges generated by contemporary distress migration (a constant in human history) is clarity and equity. Clarity about who is eligible for protection, for work authorization, for family reunification, for receipt of a visa; equity in relation to the right to mobility, access to timely and fair procedures and legal representation, and protection of basic human rights. Our societies have extensive unmet needs for manual and low-skilled labor, needs that are not matched by proportionate work visas – as a result, millions are employed in an irregular immigration status, a clear inequity.54 Our societies have extensive availability of educational opportunity given declining domestic fertility rates – yet only very wealthy non-citizen adolescents and young people (unless they are highly talented “scholarship” material) can access this opportunity, a clear inequity. Our societies are built on the founding notion that families are a fundamental social unit, the best context for child rearing – yet millions of children are separated from loving families for immigration reasons, a clear inequity. Our societies uphold the right not “The 30th Anniversary and You,” European Commission, https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/ erasmus-plus/anniversary/30th-anniversary-and-you-_en. 54 M. Sumption and D. G. Papademetriou, Legal Immigration Policies for Low Skilled Foreign Workers (Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2013), www.migrationpolicy.org/rese arch/legal-immigration-policies-low-skilled-foreign-workers; “Highly Skilled Migrants Are No Longer Welcome in America. Maybe,” The Economist, June 23, 2020, www.economist.com/ united-states/2020/06/23/highly-skilled-migrants-are-no-longer-welcome-in-america-maybe. 53 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108914994 Published online by Cambridge University Press