That’s suffer as in “let them impose on you,” not suffer as in “make them suffer.” As the nursery song says, “Jesus loves the little children.” Even, one must suppose, Unaccompanied Alien Children from Central America. Over the 11 months from October, 2013 to August, 2014 at least 66,127 “Unaccompanied Alien Children from Central America” (as the Department of Homeland Security calls them) arrived uninvited on America’s southern border. The combined totals for fiscal years 2013 and 2014 run to over 100,000. Another 80,000 people arrived as families, mainly women with children, and promptly turned themselves in. These are not people running from Customs and Border Protection. They are seeking border protection.

Mixed in with these statistics are a steady trickle of 10,000-20,000 children arriving every year from Mexico who mostly do try to evade Customs and Border Protection. These are mainly teenage boys under the age of 18 who are legally children, but in the public imagination seem more like young men. Children like these have been crossing the border for decades seeking work in the United States. The current crisis includes them but isn’t mainly about them. The current crisis is mainly about the flood of Central American children, nearly all of them from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras but also some from southern Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, who are unambiguously being sent north by their families in hopes of saving their lives.

These are not migrants. These are refugees. Most Americans understand this. The results of a recent survey suggest that 69% of Americans “say that children arriving from Central America should be treated as refugees and allowed to stay in the US if authorities determine it is not safe for them to return to their home countries.” The same survey from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that 71% of Americans “agree that while children from Central America are waiting for their cases to be heard, they should be released to the care of relatives, host families or churches, rather than be detained by immigration authorities.”

A refugee is any person who “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”