We’re gonna need a bigger moat
A small point to those calling for increased border security in response to the flood of unaccompanied minors that have sparked both a humanitarian crisis in the U.S. and a bit of a political crisis in Washington: That isn’t the problem.
The point of increased security along the U.S.-Mexico border, be it a thousand more National Guard troops, a longer fence, or a moat, is to catch undocumented immigrants before they disappear into the vast, multi-ethnic middle-places of the country. But the problem posed by the 54,000 minors that have come to the border in the last eight months — in fact, the reason the U.S. can count the 54,000 — is that they have been caught (or in many cases, volunteered themselves to border authorities).
The saying is that success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, but the humanitarian crisis that now confronts the U.S. is a failure with many parents. From a neocolonial hangover to the collateral damage of the war on drugs, from an administration that has deported more people than any before it, to a Congress that has no path to meaningful immigration reform, there are many factors that have shaped the current crisis.
But the problem in this case is not a lack of border security.
President Obama, his own zealous pursuit of deportation aside, saw the problem coming in 2011 … the political problem:
They said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Now they're gonna say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol, or they'll want a higher fence — maybe they'll need a moat. Maybe they want alligators in the moat.
Of course, the president’s problem … the political problem … was/is his belief that if he just built enough fence, put enough personnel on the border (the southern border), and deported enough people, his opponents would recognize him as serious about border security, and so deal with Democrats on the kind of comprehensive immigration reform so favored by big U.S. corporations and some immigrant advocates.
But that’s not really what this is about, now, is it?
Speaking Monday to the conservative media outlet Newsmax, Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, let his id show:
“In the end, they have said that they want to turn Texas blue, they want to turn America blue,” Gohmert said, claiming that former Rep. Quico Canseco (R-TX) was voted out office because undocumented immigrants in his district were encouraged to vote. “And if you bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of people and give them the ability to vote and tell them — as Quico Canseco said, he had illegals in his district that were told, ‘If you want to keep getting the benefits, you have to vote, and President Obama’s lawyers are not going to allow them to ask for an ID, so go vote or you’re going to lose the benefits you’re getting now.’ That drives people to vote and it will ensure that Republicans don’t ever get elected again.”
It is an air of conspiracy echoed by former Texas governor and man who still thinks he can be president Rick Perry in an interview last month on Fox News:
We either have an incredibly inept administration, or they’re in on this somehow or another. I mean I hate to be conspiratorial, but I mean how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and then into the United States without there being a fairly coordinated effort?
And Perry has repeatedly pushed the point since, as he did last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”: “I have to believe that when you do not respond in any way, that you are either inept, or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from,” Perry said.
But, of course, many GOP electeds have an ulterior motive of their own: survival. If Republicans were not already thinking immigration was the new knockdown pitch of their party, the primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has given all of them the jelly leg.
Rep. Cantor’s half-hearted approval of a watered-down version of the DREAM Act may or may not have cost him as much as his general distaste for campaigning in his own district, but the firestorm on conservative talk radio over the unaccompanied immigrant children erupted in the week before the Virginia primary, and Cantor was a very specific target.
It is a dynamic that does not bode well for a political solution, and, more importantly, for the children now huddled in makeshift shelters and detention centers along the southern border. It might be a handy talking point — for both parties, really — to allow the immigrant minors’ crisis to be viewed through a border security lens. But no matter how high the wall or how wide the moat, there will still be violence in Central America, there will still be overwhelming understaffing of the various agencies involved in processing immigration and asylum cases, and there will still be tens of thousands of children with few options and fewer resources.
And one other small point often overlooked: When Robert Frost wrote, “Good fences make good neighbors,” he was being ironic … or if not so much ironic, it was a lament. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” that same poem starts. Something like this humanitarian crisis, perhaps.
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