With Congress so gridlocked it cannot bring itself to deal with even an obvious emergency like the crush of young migrants on the Texas-Mexico border, the Obama administration is now floating an intriguing proposal: To start processing young people’s applications for refugee status in Honduras itself, and thereby deter them from making the perilous journey to the U.S. border.

The administration’s draft plan envisions that under this pilot program, some 5,000 young people (maximum allowed age: 21) would apply for refugee status in Honduras and that about 1,750 would be accepted over the first two years, at a cost of up to $47 million. If this approach was deemed successful, it could be expanded to El Salvador and Guatemala.

There is no shortage of questions that immediately spring to mind. Doesn’t 5,000 applicants seem awfully low, given that since October 1 more than 16,500 minors have traveled to the U.S. border from Honduras alone? How would the U.S. personnel at the embassy in Tegucigalpa decide which young applicants were so threatened by gang violence that they qualified for the coveted status and entry to the U.S.? What would this new approach mean for the young Central Americans who already made the risky journey to the U.S. in recent months?

But the proposal comes with two clear benefits, one substantive and one political. First, it is a big step toward addressing the immediate humanitarian crisis: It will deter at least some young people from making the dangerous trip, thereby reducing demand for the migrant traffickers who are profiting off the children’s desperation.

Second, it might just help clarify the debate about the migrant crisis, which has become unhelpfully tangled with the broader immigration reform debate and its fixation on “border security.” Even before the child-migrant crisis, too much of the immigration reform debate has been taken up with border-security talk, given that by most metrics the border has become vastly more secure in recent years, at considerable cost. Still, it is true that some goodly number of immigrants still slip into the country illegally, making it understandable that hardened foes of illegal immigration would make a fetish out of hardening the border before all else.