Minors: Minors Poetry and Immigration System

minors: For a select few, there is hope, according to The Chronicle Herald. For a handful of immigrants who came to the U.S. from Central America many as unaccompanied minors poetry has given them a chance to tell the world both about their journeys north and through the byzantine immigration system. Some cling to pleasant memories from home. A lot happens in life, most of it sad, an occasional happiness, and sometimes you have no choice but to play the clown and laugh on the outside, even though inside we feel less than failures, wrote one of them in a poem titled The Future. The Associated Press reported Thursday that immigrants as young as 14 at the centre said they were beaten, locked away in solitary confinement for long periods of time and left alone naked in cold cells. The collection of poems in Dreaming America, published last year, was assembled by a Washington and Lee University professor and students who visited the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center in Staunton, Virginia, lockup and helped the young immigrants put pencil to paper, giving voice to a largely unheard population at the centre of an increasingly heated U.S. policy debate. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.