He is most definitely not "luring them" here. As it turns out, historically, the US has pretty much been a nice immigration target for a long time, but I don't even necessarily consider these young people immigrants, as such. Look, they are minors. They really don't have a world of choices about what they do--and some of these young people coming across the border are of an age where my ma didn't even let me cross the street myself. And some of them are doing so in the hands of extremely dodgy human traffickers who are just as likely to leave them in the desert to die somewhere as have them cross. I find I think of them as refugees. The reality they are coming from is stark, and if they are facing the equivalent of rape, prostitution and slave labor at home, why not negotiate the same kinds of fitful bargains for their lives to escape that?
And if they find themselves here?
I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I just am. Do we shoot unarmed children so we don't find them crossing our border for the sake of not giving human traffickers the satisfaction, as if their cargo was a mere contraband, like drugs? Or do we feel these human beings at least deserve the mercy of being detained until we can sort out what to do with them? I will have to side with treating them as human beings. It doesn't mean fast-pathing them to citizenship or granting any kind of amnesty, necessarily. But I despise a congress so boneless, bowel-less and shitless that they don't see any urgency in sorting some kind of reforms out.
(And as an aside, what if we did up the ante on human traffickers who only have to get so far and no farther over our border to be considered as having delivered their human cargo? So they raise their prices. Let's not be foolish--they do what they do because there is a market for what they do, and they are mercenary. )
I do not sympathize with the flag-wavers who want to demonize children and assert they are rife with disease (like they won't catch who knows all what in detention). They are scared of the big bad alien threats these kids and mommas are fleeing from. The drug lords, the criminals. But waving flags and signs and screaming garbage at kids isn't a protection against that. It is a tribal display of ignorance. And of course, many of our supposed solons in Congress will react to this ignorance.
All that said, I think an awful lot about these kids. That's what they are. How can I ignore that? Them?
3 comments:
Americans have no idea what courage it takes to emigrate. To leave all that is familiar behind to go to a place where your support group is virtually non-existent takes both courage and fear. The fear comes from the environment you are leaving. The Courage comes from the freedom of having nothing else to lose.
Shirt (an migrant)
Hi Vixen, I'm a bleeding heart conservative.
We have a terrible humanitarian problem.
An extremely grave criminal problem.
A critical cultural problem.
A troubling economic problem.
And an impossible legal problem.
Somehow we have to resolve all of this with a satisfactory outcome of the above-classified items. And we're supposed to do this with an absolute wheezing train wreck of an ineffective government that cannot even agree on simple problems.
Prognosis: not particularly good.
There are many ramifications in connection with the border that people in states far from the border would never encounter.
Where I live, as many people speak Spanish as speak English. Mexican restaurants outnumber virtually any other kind of cuisine. Citizens of border states have been living in relationship to Mexico and Mexicans for as long as there have been states. This is another of those issues that goes way beyond the left and the right.
We were talking to Rita the other day, a second or third generation Mexican woman with an all-Mexican family.
Her son, an American citizen with a high school diploma, cannot find a job. Every time he thinks he has a shot, illegal immigrants will do it for less money, and so he gets fired. The labor costs are driven down because business owners can hire illegals at a third of the price.
On the one hand we have people insisting on a higher minimum wage out of concern for people in non-technical jobs. On the other hand we have illegal immigrants willing to work off the books for much less, which keeps an official minimum wage but an unofficial wage too tempting for business owners to pass up.
When I was working on the border issue during the Bush administration, I learned some things that changed my political opinions forever. In a nutshell, I learned that Chamber of Commerce types, mostly Republicans, wanted the cheap labor. The Democratic side wanted the illegal immigrants in the hopes they would become Democratic voters. Both sides were completely cynical, with only their personal objectives as the goal. Later I found out this undercover arrangement between the so-called right and left goes on under the table constantly.
I've long considered that just like curbing prostitution is more successful when the johns are targeted, La Migra really needs to look at the businesses who employ undocumented laborers. People are coming here because there's a promise of work opportunities--if those opportunities dry up for them, they won't have a reason. In 2008, when the economy bottomed out, immigration was really low--why? No jobs.
I don't respect Democrats whose inaction keeps this a broken issue very much, either. And I really can't blame migrants who are looking for work and a better life--they have reasons, and a lot of them are admirable. But where we see a situation where cheap labor is harming communities, the urgency of addressing the problem should be obvious to everyone.
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