When Donald Trump ran for office, there was nothing unusual about our illegal immigration issue. The height of the problem, such as it ever was, happened in 2005. We had less of an issue with illegal migration when the borders were unenforced. Then, migrant workers, particularly seasonal agricultural workers, came, worked and went home (everybody wants to go home some time). Clampdowns on the border means that when they make it, they stay. Many rush the border today out of fear of an effective clampdown tomorrow. We have created this crisis ourselves.
Emergencies you create for yourself still count as emergencies. Making the rod for your own back doesn’t oblige you to keep hitting yourself with it.
Though people’s lives are at risk, our partisan fun-house hall of mirrors prevents even the use of the word emergency. Emergency is just the word to use to describe infrastructure suddenly strained with the arrival of tens of thousands of people. There is no room for good-faith in arguing that the caravans don’t create grave moral hazard.
Mexico is the main maker of the moral hazard. Mexico gives caravan members identifying wrist bands, to help bum-rush them north, out of their own country. This is a violation of all international refugee law. America is not the most guilty nation in manipulating these poor souls for political advantage. Mexico needs punishing to deter this.
This rush to the border is largely people fleeing a situation we, again, made for ourselves, with our War on Drugs. To claim the war that displaced them could only be defined as violation of the Peace of Westphalia is to be ignore decades of American policy with the War on Terror. The parsing of the cases of Central Americans displaced by the War on Drugs is dissonant with the nation that scarred the face of the Middle East with our other war on proper nouns.
Bernie Sanders, “non-evil racist” standard-bearer of the Left, played a pivotal role in killing the last chance we had at comprehensive immigration reform. President Trump never did that. Yet he is cast as the racist in the fun-house. The truth is that the border crisis is grist for our partisan war-mill, mostly about who can craft immigration politics into a weapon to use to hurt the other side.
The contours for immigration reform are obvious, traditional, with many precedents: some form of amnesty for the illegals who have made productive lives here, some form of making the others return home to re-apply under those obvious reforms. Which would mean controlling how and when they return. Border controls need to be fixed any way you slice this apple. unless we want to go back to the non-policy of benign border neglect that led to this being the non-issue it historically is. Rod-beating-back does tend to remove benign neglect from the options menu, though (see paragraph 1).
The West needs immigration. The developed nations are dying from demographic decline. America is unique in securing our future from this. Again, traditionally, and with precedents: we allow immigration. What kind of immigrant though? The country no longer needs filling (much of it, anyway). It’s clear that technological transformation of the workplace is imminent, and low-skill workers will be losers (among the few). Is it an option for the future to dilute the prospects of native low-skill workers, irrespective of the ethics of managing the refugees? This question is now searing Europe.
Which leads us to: immigration into an open labor market is not the same as immigration into a closed one. Immigration with strong welfare amounts to importing tax-dependents, which no nation does without discord, because it’s not rational. Libertarians would open labor markets, but our policy making power is a jape.
The charge of racism against the USA today is laughable. The latest census data shows 12% of Americans are foreign born. It’s 40% of New Yorkers. Evidence of racial discord amongst us (with the exception of our incarceration habits) is quite thin, given the numbers, given the media attention on the issue. Race problems are best described nowadays as work-in-progress, abstract. In the real world, I can’t think of a real nation that’s done better.
Kids separated from parents: this happens any time any parent is incarcerated. It is a disaster, to be avoided at all costs. But America would still do this more than anyone, even if nobody crashed the border. We lock up kids’ parents for everything from mental illness to the War On Drugs. It’s called prosecution under current law. It’s really an argument that incarceration should be a tool of last resort. Yet mass incarceration has had a bipartisan consensus; Republicans and Democrats: Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton. Democrats suddenly discovering its inhumanity, just for this crisis, is tears from the crocodile, the plying of an agenda, the gathering of grist.
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“We have created this crisis ourselves.”
I did not create this crisis myself. That leaves you 😉
“Kids separated from parents: this happens any time any parent is incarcerated. It is a disaster, to be avoided at all costs.”
NOT separating a kid from a parent is often a disaster. At any rate, the solution is simple: Any time a parent is incarcerated, also incarcerate the child and let the child live with the parent in the same cell. It may be that in a few cases the child will grow up appreciating NOT living in jail and choosing a path that does not include jail.
There’s a fair number of murders committed by persons NOT in prison that ought to be, if only to protect everyone else.
Let me add a bit of information that was new to me but as a Mexican resident in the U.S. not surprising: the caravans are the tip of the iceberg and only for people who couldn’t put enough money together, or maybe to make some kind of point or even as a distraction.
When Trump put the screws to Mexico the new President, AMLO, reacted immediately and put his Foreign Secretary in charge, including over the actions in Mexico. The level of the response surprised me. As far as I know it’s unprecedented.
During the first few days they stopped a convoy of eight box cars behind four trailer trucks with nearly 800 illegals going from the southern border to the U.S. The boxes were sealed and the Mexican authorities shocked by the condition in which they found the migrants. This group had been charged 3,500 dollars per person or 5,000 if they wanted insurance for a second try if they got caught on the first.
This was reported by the Secretary at one of AMLO’s daily one to two hour morning press conferences. What struck me about this is how genuinely surprised at least the Secretary was.
Next morning a reporter prefaced a question to AMLO—often one learns more from those questions than from the media itself—reporting that during a three day stint at a remote southern border town they had filmed one of those trailer convoys being assembled at night in full knowledge of the local authorities, and that it was a routine event.
He pressed AMLO for an answer on what they were doing about it, including the corruption of the local authorities. He replied that they had identified 63 possible crossing points like that and were working on it. I was blown over by the number and I might have gotten it wrong but it was high any which way you look at it.
Based on this and other information I picked up over the years, this is what I think was happening. Mexico City authorities have known about the problem for years but turned an eye because it had not been a crisis. Over the years the flow and bribes became routine, and in the way of Mexican bribing some of the money filtered up the chain to Mexico City and everyone was happy and over time became desensitized to the problem.
Enter Trump and AMLO, particularly AMLO, who seems to really mean business fighting corruption this time around. He has been doing it by the extraordinary means of disbanding entire corrupt institutions and restarting them from scratch.
Now, in Mexico just about everything is corrupt and AMLO can’t go after everything at the same time; he may not even have known or have thought about some of the corrupt sites like the check points at the southern border. Even if he did he couldn’t act on it until he had the makings of his new national guard to replace the old federal police.
Here is a leap: I think Trump or his people knew all of the above very well and had been holding back pushing AMLO until his national guard began to take shape. He then forced AMLO’s hand on the priority for the use of the first elements of that national guard.
For those who don’t think Trump is well informed suffice it to say that Jared Kushner flew to Mexico City about a month ago just to have a private dinner with AMLO. The Mexican media got wind of it and AMLO “confessed” with a smile at his next daily press conference!
I’m retired and have a lot of time in my hands to read and watch news from around the world, particularly Mexico, and I’ve been shocked by how clueless and misinformed the U.S. media is, and that includes even the more conservative media.
At the top I wrote that the caravans could well be just distractions. If the illegal convoys at night are as routine as that reporter said they were, do you think they are going to dump their cargo at major crossing points in full sight of everyone, or is it more likely that they released them in out of the way poorly patrolled places without a wall and while the border patrol is preoccupied with the more visible caravans? I have a bridge…
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This comment is by me but I guess I wasn’t logged in. I’ve been a member a long time but it’s my first comment 🙂
This is a very informative post. It makes total sense. Thanks!
Let me add a brief note with new information. At this morning’s AMLO news conference a reporter spoke of having travelled large treks of the southern border on the Guatemala and Belize side. He said there were about 400 crossing points–I had been skeptical about the 63 AMLO had said his people had identified thinking that too high.
The reporter said there were no border control authorities at most of the crossings and where there were they were very corrupt–he did some test bribing himself that worked.
His main point was to question whether there had really been a recent increase like the U.S. reported because he was told by locals that the flow of crossings was quite routine with no recent increases. AMLO responded his own data did show did show a recent increase.
Anyway, my point is that we really don’t know how many are crossing if as I proposed in the last paragraph of my original post most of the illegal convoys are unloaded in the dead of night in out of the way crossing points into the U.S. If we don’t catch them how can we know how many came through. When they do cross where they are caught it could well be a diversion by the cartels, as the Border Patrol keeps insisting.
The other point is that we don’t really know how many illegals are in the country. The conventional wisdom has been 11 million but that number hasn’t changed for at least ten years. I don’t believe it. More likely the real number is closer to the 20+ million of the study Tucker Carlson refers to occasionally.
These complex systems are so easy to have a small, interior detail take down the whole thing.
It’s funny, my dad is retired law enforcement, and he was dismayed at the state of the border when he left his academy in 1965.