Coop Scoop [Resend]: "The Biden On The Border" Edition"
No good solutions as migrants pile up on the border.
Issue #68
March 17-18, 2021
By Marc Cooper
I have spent a lot of time –months -- reporting along both sides of the U.S. border over the last 25 years and here’s one truth I can solidly affirm: when a delegation of Republican elected officials suddenly shows up there with the press, you can count on a resulting wave of disinformation, lies and distortions that will soon wash through our news cycles.
And so it was, again, earlier this week when House minority leader and Trump Chihuahua Kevin McCarthy (Q-California), huddled with some of his GOP pals just outside El Paso to declare that Joe Biden was responsible for the current onrush of migrants and that among the masses he had somehow invited in and who got detained were “on the terrorist watch list.”
A platinum-plated set of lies. Not even remotely attached to any reality. In other words, SOP for McCarthy. His clumsy sleight of hand was, nevertheless, totally understandable. Here he was the leader of a congressional caucus whose entire membership had just voted to oppose one of the most popular pieces of legislation in modern political history.
I suspect most Americans were too busy paying off bills with the COVID cash that had just arrived in their bank accounts to pay much attention to McCarthy’s little sideshow.
That’s not to say that the Republicans won’t keep beating the drum on the jam at the border as they seemingly have nothing else to offer programmatically except a defense fund for Mr. Potato Head.
Now, to the facts. A crisis of huge proportions does continue to rage at the southern border of the U.S. It has little or nothing to do with Joe Biden as it has been raging in some form or another for 30 years.
Indeed, I want you to read the following sentence with deliberation and reflection. The U.S.-Mexican border has been most likely the site of the greatest cross border migration in human history. Repeat please. Accept and understand.
The roots of this ongoing migration –which I and a few others compare to a biblical-scale Exodus-- are simple to determine if one considers the confluence of four or five factors.
There is no other place in the world where a land border of 2000 miles separates two regions with such a marked inequality of income and living conditions. Back in 2006, I wrote a long piece in The Atlantic about this migration, (titled Exodus) written mostly from the other side of la linea. Incredibly little has changed since.
In it, I quote my dear and departed friend Chuck Bowden who understood life and death on the border better than the top 10 border reporters put together. Chuck told me:
It’s all bullshit. What we’re seeing is something right out of the Bible. This is an exodus… You’re looking at the biggest story of our lives…This is the largest cross-border human migration in history… People aren’t coming here as much as they are leaving a cratered economy… the only way you’ll stop Mexicans coming to the U.S. is if you lower American wages to the same level as Vietnam…”
Yes, I stole the title of my piece from that quote. Chuck then wrote a whole book with the same title.
Over the last 25 years something like 25 million Mexicans, Salvadorans, Hondurans and Guatemalans have migrated to the U.S. and there is no indication that the flow is anywhere near receding.
Why would it? The prevailing wage for agriculture and service workers is 10-20 times higher than it is in Central America. And not that much different compared to Mexico. The economies to our south, especially in Central America, already stagnant, were devastated by COVID.
In Honduras, Guatemala and to a somewhat lesser degree now in El Salvador, violent gangs run rampant in almost every neighborhood. Murder rates are through the roof. The ruling regimes are repressive, to say the least, and thoroughly corrupt. There are no functioning, independent judicial systems and you can’t tell the difference between the police and the killer gangs.
If you were a poorly educated Honduran making, quite literally, $1 dollar an hour working the fields, what would you do to save your 12 year old child from that life? Here’s a better question: if the prevailing wage in Canada was ten times higher than in Los Angeles, just how many (millions) of Americans would be flooding “illegally” into Vancouver and Toronto?
Yes, Biden has a big problem on his hands, precisely because our immigration policy has consistently failed decade after decade by continuing to view this issue as a problem of regulations, laws, and policing rather than a natural expression of inequality.
When I was in Mexico reporting on the exodus, I would talk with dozens of migrants who were just a an hour or two away from starting their trek and, to a person, not one of them said they paid any attention to new US laws and regs as they were determined to cross no matter what. And no matter the sacrifices.
We are once again at record levels. Something like 4500 migrants a day are showing up at the border. About 400-450 of them, every day, are unaccompanied minors. These numbers are absolutely consistent with the historic flow, though the number of lone children is spiking and the “sender” areas have migrated from southern Mexico to Central America. And while the pandemic interrupted the flow to some degree this past year, when the dust clears, we add about a half million “illegals” and asylum grantees per year.
Perhaps the most crucial factor in understanding immigration is the one never mentioned, except obliquely i.e. that migrants do the jobs that Americans won’t.
That’s true. In 1950, exactly 2.4% of American high school graduates went to college. Today that figure is about 70%. When was the last time a friend or acquaintance of yours told you excitedly that they wanted little Jimmy to be a grape picker, a busboy, a gardener, nanny or a maid?
Those half million workers a year who come across with or without papers are easily integrated into the work force as their labor becomes absolutely essential to our economy and society.
There are currently 3400 unaccompanied minors in custody on the border. The current spike no doubt owes to news that the pandemic is losing its clout in the U.S. and that the economy is picking up. That means more job opportunities than last year. I also think that, yes, the ascension of Biden to the White House has probably also greased the migration wheels.
That’s not Biden’s fault. You can thank Trump who let a backlog build by forcing tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum to wait in trash-filled camps on the Mexican side of the border, now for two years or more. And you can thank US policy that has never adequately addressed this issue.
Biden did announce he would have a “more humane” immigration system. But let’s face it, crossing into a Trump-run, diseased and economically depressed America wasn’t that attractive.
By law, the US government cannot hold a minor in immigration detention for more than 72 hours. Biden cannot meet that goal, yet. The administration is scurrying to have FEMA build sufficient and humane shelters for the minors where they will be transferred to Health and Human Services who then becomes responsible for placing them with sponsors, mostly relatives who are already here and who were the intended destination of the youngsters.
So there are kids who are, in fact, warehoused in insufficient and crowded structures today as the government tries to catch up with the never-ending torrent. It’s not a pretty picture. It is also not a replay of the infamous Trumpy Kids In Cages.
The Republicans have exactly zero credibility on this issue. Give Reagan credit for granting an amnesty in 1987 to millions of Mexican agricultural workers. And George W. Bush, for a time, tried to push a comprehensive immigration bill. But the Republican congressional delegation has been a bulwark against any real immigration reform and they are not about to help out Biden this time around. For the Republicans, a problem is something to be weaponized, not to be solved.
Neither do the Democrats have a much a better record. Their policy proposals make a lot more sense than the Republican “offers” but it was really the Clinton administration that put in place the draconian border lockdowns in the mid 1990’s. Policy has been tweaked here and there since then but it’s still that locked down, militarized approach that underskirts most policy.
Biden, however, has supported a comprehensive reform that would legalize the millions already here but it is not clear at all if the Democrats would make it easy and transparent to legally admit about the half million people a year our economy actually needs (that’s apart from any humanitarian considerations we might make for those fleeing the failed states in our hemisphere).
Some Democrats have joined the criticism of the Biden administration, urging it to skip detention and send the unaccompanied minors directly to their sponsors. They say for those kids arriving with the phone number and address of a relative/sponsor should be sent to them immediately. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined that critique tweeting this week: “This is not okay, never has been okay, never will be okay — no matter the administration or party.”
Others involved in the issue say the idea of skipping over the kids having HHS as an intermediary is a bad idea. The job of HHS is to vet the sponsors to make sure the migrant minors are not forced into an abusive family.
There’s an easier way to put this. Until Americans realize that our relative wealth and prosperity and democracy has arisen on top of a region that is poor, corrupt and repressive, that we will always be an irresistible magnet and that we must somehow legalize and normalize the free flow of people, as freely as capital is allowed to migrate, then there will be no good solutions. And that is our current quandary: nobody is offering them. +++
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