Unaccompanied migrant children from Central and South America are coming to the United States in record numbers, often driven by economic desperation made worse by the pandemic. In the last two years, 250,000 children have crossed the Mexican border into the United States, and only a third of them reunited with their parents. Many of them end up in grueling jobs that ignore child labor laws, a situation that has recently attracted immense media attention.  On this episode of the HCA podcast, Anja Schüler talks to Soledad Alvarez Velasco,  a social anthropologist and human geographer at the University of Illinois Chicago, about the shifting dynamics of child migration in the Americas.