From that first line,
Dear (BlackSheep1),
The President (he’s more respectful than me) came to El Paso this week.
He promised a wall and repeated his lies about the dangers that immigrants pose. With El Paso as the backdrop, he claimed that this city of immigrants was dangerous before a border fence was built here in 2008.
Beyond refuting his comments about border communities like ours (El Paso was one of the safest communities in the United States before the fence was built here), about walls saving lives (in fact, walls push desperate families to cross in ever more hostile terrain, ensuring greater suffering and death), and about immigrants (who commit crimes at a lower rate than those Americans born here), it’s worth thinking about how we got to this place. How it came to be that 11 million undocumented immigrants call America home, how we came to militarize our border, how we arrived at such a disconnect between our ideals, our values, the reality of our lives — and the policies and political rhetoric that govern immigration and border security.
Included was this clip from the El Paso Times of 2003 — before BushII’s fence went up. As Beto told Chris Hayes this week, the border is safe; major cities along the Border from San Pedro to Mission are safer than similar-sized cities deeper in the Mainland. This trend hasn’t changed in more than 15 years (well, except for a while El Paso was THE safest city with a population of 1 million or more in the USA).
El Paso Times, 2003
Not much gives the lie to the claims of needing a wall (or a fence, or steel slats, or a barrier, or whatever it’s being called now) to “stop drugs and crime” quite like facts, but the current misadministration is completely immune to facts, from its so-called leader to Senate enabler-in-chief Mitch McConnel (R-Cowardliness).
Drugs come in at ports of entry, not over the river in the middle of nowhere.
Refugees refused entry in cities and urban crossings do, in fact, try their luck over the river in the middle of nowhere, and yes, more die because of that remote and inhospitable terrain.
Make no mistake: the people coming are not mostly Trump’s fearmongering hordes of criminals.
The people coming are parents, children, families seeking refuge from places even more lawless than Trump would have you believe Mexico is. They’re refugees. They’re not what this so-called potus claims: "They are not our friend, believe me," he said, before disparaging Mexican immigrants: "They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people."
From USA Today:
The number of family units – usually mothers or fathers with small children – apprehended in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley sector jumped from 49,896 in fiscal year 2017 to 63,278 in fiscal year 2018, which ended Sept. 30. That's a 27 percent increase, according to recently released agency statistics.
Those numbers are in line with an overall rise in family unit apprehensions across the Southwest border, which increased from 41,435 in fiscal year 2017 to 50,036 this past fiscal year, a 21 percent rise. The Rio Grande Valley Sector, which covers 320 border miles and runs from Rio Grande City to Brownsville and up the coast to Corpus Christi, was far and away the biggest contributor to that total.
The wave of migrants – coming primarily from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – arrive in large groups, sometimes 70 or 100 at a time, and are jamming federal facilities where they’re held while their asylum requests are processed.
These are the folks getting numbers inked on their forearms in “migrant camps” on the other side of the Bravo (or in California and Arizona and New Mexico, in what amount to concentration camps set up to satisfy the demands of Trump’s DHS).
Why are people leaving El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in such numbers? Fear that they, or members of their family, won’t survive in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
www.vox.com/…
www.nbcnews.com/…
www.thecut.com/…
www.lataco.com/…
The problem isn’t the refugees, it’s the failure of US policy to address the conditions they’re fleeing, and more importantly, forcing them into inhumane conditions as they wait for the barest chance of asylum. We have to do better.
www.thestar.com/…
Back to Beto’s letter:
I’ve come to the conclusion that the challenges we face are largely of our own design — a function of the unintended consequences of immigration policy and the rhetoric we’ve used to describe immigrants and the border. At almost every step of modern immigration policy and immigration politics, we have exacerbated underlying problems and made things worse. Sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes with the most cynical exploitation of nativism and fear. Much of the history of immigration policy (and the source for the graphs that I’m using) is powerfully summarized in a report entitled “Unintended Consequences of U.S. Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America” by Douglas S Massey and Karen A. Pren.
He’s looking at the post-Bracero program effects. The harder you make a thing to do the more likely you are to make people who manage to do it reluctant to undo it later, he notes.
But in the US Mexican migration is reversing itself — Since 2012, according to the Pew Research Center, more Mexican nationals are going south than are coming north.
en.wikipedia.org/....
Passel, Jeffrey S.; Cohn, D'Vera; Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana (2012-04-23). "II. Migration Between the U.S. and Mexico". Hispanic Trends. Pew Research Center. Retrieved 8 Feb 2019. [...] net Mexican immigration to the U.S. is at a standstill, and the Mexican-born population in the U.S. leveled off and then declined in the last half of the most recent decade.
Back in the 1980s the EEUU (also known as the USA) engaged in the sponsorship of terrorism in Argentina and a similar campaign preceded that in Mexico. Some of this related to Iran-Contra, some predated it, much of it rolled into the general Cold War, which included some serious nastiness against its own citizens by the US Government.
Guatemala is not a new player in the problem of refugees. Native Americans (aka Indians, FIrst Nations, First Peoples, Los Indios) fled Guatemala during the Reagan administration; some succeeded in staying in Mexico long enough to earn title to the land they worked: www.unhcr.org/….
But the troubles in Honduras and Guatemala continue. The UN says refugees are running from gang violence: www.unrefugees.org/… Other sources (that USA today article previously cited, the Times time.com/… article, and more — any search engine will break your heart with accounts of the violence and its consequences) concur. El Salvador is no better.
The US shouldn’t answer this kind of violence with more terrorism. Children don’t belong in cages. Families shouldn’t be forced into inhumane, squalid conditions to wait for hearings on asylum. The rule of law (which, ironically, is what the people coming here are coming here for) demands we not pile on to the misery and fear — but the rule of law means less than nothing to this white house and its occupants.
I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have I-9s yet. I remember the anti-immigration hullabaloo raised when Ronald Reagan claimed the employers who hired undocumented workers ought to face consequences, and I remember the screaming fits the GOP threw before the 1986 Immigration Act passed. I didn’t like much Reagan did, but in hindsight if this had been enforced the way it should have the world would look a good bit different today.
en.wikipedia.org/…
IF I can find the full letter from Beto on line I’ll link to it. Suffice it to say the policy Beto advocates is as opposite the so-called president’s stupid, racist wall and ignorant approach to international relations as you can possibly imagine.