Thursday, June 06, 2019
Political Mayhem Thursday: Making sense of the border
Before I launch into this discussion, I want to make something really clear: I don't think that immigration is a major or important issue in the United States. I don't think that immigration at the current levels threatens safety, creates crime, or threatens the economy. In fact, I think that each of the issues I raised this past Tuesday (Guns, national debt, climate change, Russian interference in elections, income disparity, and health care) are far more important than immigration-- each of those issues threaten our country and the well-being of Americans in ways more direct, immediate and important than anything having to do with immigration.
So, anyways... apprehensions at the southwestern border are way up of late. There can be a lot of causes of that: more people crossing, greater enforcement, and a few big incidents, for example. I'm not sure it means anything, really. If you look at the graph of the Bush era above (from the Times), big spikes are followed by big valleys, perhaps correlation with seasonal changes.
But, in the end, it is not a crisis (except, of course, for the migrants themselves-- and that should matter). There are crises going on that directly impact the well-being of many Americans-- and we need to pay attention to those rather than simply obsessing over this.
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I agree that this is not Trump's "invasion," but the situation on the border is a crisis, mostly of the humanitarian variety. In addition to the apprehensions rates, the Times article also reports that "illegal border crossings have risen to a 13-year high," the lion's share of which are either family units or unaccompanied minors. Literally hundreds of thousands of children and families are arriving on the southern border--many from failed Central American states, with no viable option to return--annually. Figuring out how to process, admit, and assimilate those folks in a way that neither reduces their humanity nor undermines American security has undoubtedly reached crisis proportions. Immigration courts are terribly overwhelmed, USCIS is terribly overwhelmed, immigration policy (which has the force of law for immigrants) is changing on a near daily basis, and there is no end in sight. The immigrants themselves, subject to a great deal of insecurity, typically settle in un-assimilated enclaves within large cities (Houston being chief among them). And while the vast majority of Central American immigrants are looking to escape violence and poverty, some of them are bad actors--this does result in increased crime, although mostly perpetrated against the immigrants themselves. This immigration is not the primarily Mexican, primarily economic migration of the past. It is a major problem, impacting millions of people, that--like the issues you raised on Tuesday--is not confronted with any meaningful honesty. And while Trump has unquestionably made the problem worse, it was not good under Obama either (the first large waves of UACs began arriving in 2014).
I agree that it is a crisis for the migrants! My point is that it is not a crisis for Americans generally, in the sense of threatening their well-being.
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