In the normal course of things an unaccompanied child is an emergency. Where are their parents? How do we reunite the family? Since October 1st, 2014, there have apparently been 57,000 unaccompanied children who have been apprehended trying to enter our southern border with Mexico. Many more probably have made it into the country undetected. Why are so many parents sending their children on a long journey to America where an uncertain future awaits them? You can only imagine how desperate things must be for parents to even consider such a thing.
Actually, I can’t really imagine it. I can’t imagine sending my son on such a journey. It’s unthinkable to me. But this is what a lot of parents are doing in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. A humane reaction would be to create a program to grant asylum to families under duress rather than what the Republicans prefer which is to deter these families from trying to use America to save their children.
We also might investigate how we can assist the governments in Central America in combating the rampant crime and violence that is causing this border crisis.
Is it too much for us to use our brains and have a little compassion?
“Is it too much for us to use our brains and have a little compassion?”
BooMan,
The only problem with that, is that I’m not sure what our conservatives have less of – brains or compassion?
There’s little evidence of them having any of either at all.
It doesn’t hurt to expand the story and recognize the displaced children from the parts of war torn Middle East. The camps in overburdened Jordan, Turkey and let’s not forget the ones in the regions of Afghanistan.
The countries of this world that abuse their children, sex traffic, murder & torture, terrorize & war have swollen the camps and humanitarian aid abilities of the entire world.
And now we have refugees at our borders. As much as they need America and as much as we should offer temporary shelter, if it were me I’d want to return to my country, my heritage and see a stable government I could live under. Am I a Pollyanna, yes, but the world is up to its eyeballs in human suffering caused by dictators, corrupt governments, lust for war and drug power.
I am not a gunsuck.
However, in this case, providing defensive weapons for the people in these areas is what is needed. In Michoacon and other Mexican states, the local people have gotten arms and have taken on the gangs. This is what is needed. People without guns cannot answer those with guns. We must give weapons to the good folks.
This will mean a lot of dead people. What’s better, living in the middle of a gang run wave of terror or having individuals and groups form militias which can answer the gangs?
Give them guns, and let them solve their own problems. They are adults. We have no business interfering otherwise.
If they’re adults and can solve their own problems, then why give them guns if “we have no business interfering…”.
Yes, that is a contradiction. However, it’s a reasonable approach to enable their own self-defense efforts. I agree, it is a contradiction to say “hands off” and “give them guns”. But I justify it by saying that “we give them guns, and they do the rest”. We provide tools, they do the work with the tools.
You cannot expect unarmed people to stand against armed criminal thugs.
This seems more a problem of poor government and effective law enforcement. We’re tried this arming of the good guys in other places around the world and it usually leads to poor outcomes.
The same logic could apply to our inner cities, no? Flood the streets with guns and hope the good guys kill the gangsters.
We have police. It is not needed here. They do not appear to have police.
http://goo.gl/CjeQAr
Read this and think about it.
Admittedly, flooding Mexico with guns would probably be cheaper than giving refuge to 57,000 children, but it wouldn’t be free.
Not to mention the not entirely inconceivable potential for some serious blowback. A raging civil war below the border might wind up costing us in lot of other ways, too.
Did you look at the link?
Here’s another story:
http://goo.gl/sWAW0z
In this story, the success of the militias appears to be good. They are killing the leaders of the gangs. They are taking control of their own regions. Of course, as some pointed out, the Knights Templar gang began as a militia who opposed the Zetas. So, care is needed. But if you are in the midst of a war by a bunch of insane people, you need the ability to fight fire with fire.
And this DOES MEAN that a lot of people will be killed. However, eradicating a criminal gang is difficult. They have been fighting the Mafia in Italy for years. Yes, there are deaths, but having a weapon if there are no police is crucial.
And this DOES MEAN that a lot of people will be killed. However, eradicating a criminal gang is difficult. They have been fighting the Mafia in Italy for years. Yes, there are deaths, but having a weapon if there are no police is crucial.
Oh my God, you cannot be serious, dataguy. Do you even know how the Cosa Nostra was formed in the first place?
Yes, as a resistance group against French occupation.
Um, we already have flooded Mexico with guns…
I know what you mean…I can’t imagine sending Peanut away…..I just can’t.
THEY ARE CHILDREN, YOU HATEFUL MOFOS!
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!”
cries she, With silent lips.
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” —
Emma Lazarus, 1883
Sure, that is not in the constitution, but it has always been a main part of our national identity. There have always been those who have opposed the latest group, from Asians, to Italians, to the Irish. Each group has assimilated and contributed to our culture in positive ways, proving the nay say’ers wrong in every single case. Of course hispanics have been, and will in the future be the same positive influence.
The racists have ALWAYS been wrong. Yet each succeeding generation of racist never learns. Always wrong…..because the stupid never learn.
.
I think the root of the problem is that there are people who will always see others as a burden but not as an asset. I look at it the other way – families in these other countries are sending us their most valuable assets, their kids. We should view it as such.
The fact that we have mismanaged our own affairs such that we don’t properly invest in our own assets is often used as a reason to deny these others entry to the system, but to me that’s on us, not on them.
that there should be no limits on immigration?
I don’t buy that – this is a vastly different place than in 1883.
I don’t know what the solution is. I doubt it involves shipping kids back – but if you don’t how do you stop the next flood. Saying “well we should work on a long term solution” is really saying nothing, and ducking the issue.
Ah I would like to point out that the GOP does not even have compassion enough to pass a finance bill to care for our Veterans. The House rejected the bill again as too expensive. Thus, the GOP will do nothing for these children for they are even below the dreaded 47% Romney talked about.
How long will it take the Mexican government decide it is cruel to prevent refugee children children from crossing the boarder in to Mexico? At what point will Mexico ask the UN to set up a refuge camp on the Mexican side of the boarder?
One really has to wonder what the reception would be if these were poor little Australian kids streaming across the border; all of them speaking perfect English, their sad white faces being constantly beamed across the country as they are being interviewed on the nightly news about the horrible conditions they are trying to escape.
I know conservatives like to scream about the evil liberals always “playing the race card”, but is it a stretch to think that there wouldn’t be families lined up around the country to take these little Australian kids in and care for them until there could be some disposition of their cases?
This is just another tentacle on the “taking our country back” monster.
I think we’d care more if these Guatemalan kids were crowded into squalid camps in southern Mexico, frankly.
The problem is that these kids are on OUR backyard, which not only raises the racial hackles of many, but it also exposes the large gap between our pretenses for kindness and our actual conduct as a nation.
If this was happening in southern Mexico, the very same conservatives who are arguing to deport them all would be holding bake sales and clothing drives in their churches.
I would like to do a little thought experiment here, and ask the audience if / how they think this situation would be different if 57,000 unaccompanied Canadian children, mostly white and speaking English (albeit with a slightly funny accent) were seeking refuge.
It would not be different, not a single little bit. The impulse to scream “racist” is one that makes liberals look like morons, honestly.
Here’s a question. It’s July 10. In 2 months, it will be school time. We have 50,000-75,000 kids who will be required, by law, to go to school. To school these children, who do not speak English, we will require 25-50 schools. Each school will cost from $50,000,000 – $90,000,000 if they stay on budget.
Who is going to build the schools? Where are the 18000+ teachers coming from? Who is paying for that? Either it is local property tax (“You want me to double my property tax to school WHO???”) or it is national. If it is either, how will it get through the process of authorization. If it involves the House, NO FUCKING WAY does it pass. If it involves a property tax levy in 90% of the country, NO FUCKING WAY.
1666 teachers, mistake in division there. Also forgot to add in administrators, lunch ladies, etc. Probably close to 2000-2500 admin/support staff.
ESL is going to be a major expense.
I am confused by your post. You assert it would not be a single little bit different but then talk about all of the challenges of schooling kids who don’t speak English. Which is it?
Nope, the solution would be precisely the same if they were Canadian kids: Send a bunch of guns to Alberta and wish them luck.
No, the point was/is that it will cost 25 * $50,000,000 or $1,250,000,000 to build the schools, and $40,000*2000 = $80,000,000 or a total of $2,000,000,000 to teach these kids.
Who is paying that?
Assuming for whatever reason that we need to build entirely new school buildings for these children, the government could pay for it just fine since the government is able to issue its own currency.
Next problem you want solved in a sentence?
And the matter of getting the House to agree? How is that going to work?
Well then, let’s just disband the US since it’s been a good 238 years or so and let’s just grab guns and see what happens!
The point is that the chump change required to build entirely new schools for these refugees is that – chump change.
The only problem this country really has is that one political party is trying to destroy the country in order to save it’s owners a few bucks in taxes.
Which means you see the problem for exactly what it is, but are instead focusing on refugee children.
Electing a Republican to government is like hiring an anarchist to clean your windows.
What did we do with kids after Katrina? That was 160,000 children?
Sent them to Texas to be abused. That’s what we did.
Not all of them. My little school in the shadow of Mt. Washington had 4…
And some came here to Chicago where they were resettled by private donations, mostly from black churches.
Where is La Rassa on this. Or is “the Race” only Mexican?
What nonsense. It’s true that the anti-immigrant folks are agitated by other concerns besides racism, but it’s ridiculous to pretend racism isn’t a factor.
Or xenophobia, to be more precise. Just consider the reflexive hostility to the Spanish language. If you need proof of that I’ve got plenty, such as the freakout a couple of years ago when a high school valedictorian in the California central valley wanted to deliver his address in Spanish. That was some serious xenophobia on display there.
In Sioux Falls, we have an entire elementary which is Spanish immersion, and they are considering a second. This notion that everyone is horrified by Spanish is not everywhere. I wish they also had a German and Chinese immersion, myself. My wife favors French. Arabic would be good, too.
Well, yeah. Most people in California aren’t xenophobic about the Spanish language either. Nor do most people in California favor mass deportations. But if you look at the set of xenophobes, and the set of people who favor mass deportations, you will find that there is considerable overlap.
People like Steny Hoyer and Barack Obama, who have both indicated that there will be mass deportations in this situation.
If they don’t get ahead of this, and fast, bad results will accrue in 2014 elections.
I’m sorry, hahahha, I can’t hear you over the sound of the deafening lack of teacher support in North Carolina.
For context: Wake County, one of the largest counties in NC, has cut back all specialist support (including ESL teachers) to 50% positions. It doesn’t make the need go away. In fact, the need for ESL teachers is growing. But let’s just cut funding, shall we? Make all the specialists work two 50% positions. Oh yeah, that’ll work. What? You have more children needing language and support services? Oh well, there’s always the charter route. (snark)
If existing needs don’t prompt support, I have no idea how “we” can reconcile the existing policies with the dire needs of this new influx. It’s shameful. Who can we get to strong-arm a new and better response?
Compassion is only a thing to be extended toward white kids.
Bullshit! No wonder people think Democrats are incapable of dealing with illegal immigration.
You do realize that this was a statement intended to capture what is in the closed minds of those on the right, and not my own actual thoughts?
No, I didn’t. I’m glad you clarified.
“Give them guns, and let them solve their own problems.”
That’s what the US of America [and other countries] did in recent decades! See Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria. How did that work out! Don’t forget the states in Central- and South America. More guns, great for home employment.
Berlusconi of Italy had a political deal with Gaddafi whereby the Libyan government would prevent migrants leaving the Libyan coast for a boat journey to the island of Lampedusa. With Gaddafi gone, the migrants have traveled by the tens of thousands to reach Europe. If the boat doesn’t sink, these migrants will enter the European system for refugee status.
War brings unlimited hardship on individual persons and whole families. The Syrian refugees (a war of choice by Western powers) heeft suffered greatly, even inside the UNHCR refugee camps. Children have been sold off for marriage to get the family out of hardship. The West hasn’t realised what a war-torn nation experiences? Such horror!
Human trafficking is a global issue and involves millions of teenagers and young adults!
According to a Global Report on Trafficking in Persons by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the most common form of human trafficking (79%) is sexual exploitation. The victims of sexual exploitation are predominantly women and girls. The second most common form of human trafficking is forced labour (18%), although this may be a misrepresentation because forced labour is less frequently detected and reported than trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Human trafficking or migrant smuggling in Mexico for children crossing border into Arizona. It’s a booming business for the (drugs) cartels.
Here’s a story:
http://goo.gl/CjeQAr
When you have a kidnapping industry that is kidnapping the children of newspaper vendors or house cleaners, there is a need to fight fire with fire.
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya, Syria
Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Cuba, Grenada, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia…
El Salvador.
These refugees are the result of US POLICY in Central and South America. If it weren’t for us destabilizing or outright overthrowing any government to the left of Texas’ in the past 70 years, these people might feel like their children wouldn’t be murdered by gangsters and warlords in their own hometowns.
Exactly, legalize all drugs and the externalities fall on those who support the industry, white people. No amount of “anti-gang training and suppression is going to do a thing. The profits are too great.
We allowed a huge industry to build up smuggling pot and coke, if we had legalized pot 30 years ago the infrastructure would have never developed. Coke is a big score hustle but running weed created the farm teams that supplied the majors. Instead of gringo pilots trying to slip under the radar now scores of people are digging complex tunnels under the border that will have contraband running thru them 24/7. They’re looking for stuff to run thru the pipeline, anything to make a buck once the system is set up.
So in a failed attempt to keep pot “away from our children” and stem the plight of white cokeheads we have destabilized the entire region.
And that was after 75 years of Dole, Chiquita, etc sucking Central America dry.
I am reminded of the kindertransports that took so many children from the arms of Jewish parents and brought them to relative safety out of the areas where the parents knew their children’s lives were at risk. Of course, the record here in the United States with regard to offering asylum and aid to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany is abysmal, so it’s not at all surprising that there is a backlash against these children, who aren’t European, and even worse, have the audacity to have brown skin.
We cannot give these children sanctuary except in extraordinary circumstances. Obviously we have refugee status and protective status for people, but the whole sale coming over the border of teens to less is not sustainable in the United States. …
Look, you’ve got to make sure these children are safe in your country. The United States cannot be expected to give sanctuary to every single child in the world that is exposed to danger in their country because of the failure of the country’s government or local municipality’s government to assist in keeping their own children safe.
— Rep. Steny Hoyer
Quoting a tool like Steny Hoyer?
His actual title is “minority whip”. That means that when he says something, it’s important, and that means that stuff will happen. He is the second-ranking democrat.
I’m kind of surprised you didn’t know that.
Surely no one with any toolish characteristics could ever rise to a leadership position in the House!
Perish the thought, and bless his toolish heart.
Give them all refugee status. Work with our partners for a long term solution. Sending them back is not a solution. It’s inhumane and IMO criminal. Sending weapons is absolutely not a solution.
We also might investigate how we can assist the governments in Central America in combating the rampant crime and violence that is causing this border crisis.
US foreign policy doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of success when it comes to assisting governments in Central America.
Well, assisting governments in Central America would be fine.
Usually we just topple them with CIA-sponsored coups, invade them and topple their government, or send cash, weapons and drugs to right-wing death squads.
Assisting a Central American government would be kind of new for the US.
In about 1900 my grandfather, at about 12 years of age, walked alone from his village in Campania to Naples where he boarded a ship, alone, to NYC. His ticket was indeed paid in advance, the cheapest steerage available. And he did have an address in North Jersey where he would be taken in, written on a piece of paper. Without any knowledge of even the the most rudimentary English, he managed to find his way to Lodi, N.J. Obviously there were a lot of Italians around. I’m not saying that the present situation is especially comparable, I only want to point out that poverty doesn’t allow people the luxury of fantasies of the innocence, fragility, sanctity of childhood. Today most U.S. kids remain kids well into their twenties. Let’s face it, someone, somewhere is helping these kids from Central America get to the U.S. border and across. They can hardly be acting entirely on their own.
How bad must it be…? Use your imagination and sense of empathy. It’s pretty damn awful for most people all over the world. The U.S. wil defend it’s privelges until the bitter end. Real sharing is absolutely not on the agenda…nor even on the table.
It is not possible for a 12 YO with her 7 YO brother to cross 1000 miles of Mexico without someone knowing. The Mexican government is assisting the coyotes at a minimum. They might be trying to force the illegal migrant trade to continue.
You are correct. These “children” are, like many, able to take care of themselves. They got here. We can tell them “Go home”, and they will. They are not our responsibility.
Was with you until the “Go Home” part.
All children are the responsibilities of all adults. Refusing to help refugee children makes us monsters.
How bad? Pretty fucking bad: LATimes 7/9/14
For those who may have forgotten from SocialWatch.
That would be the coup that the US, particularly team Clinton, approved.
Another reason — no jobs for adolescents in Honduras —
Or in America.
Sure there are. There’s a difference between “no jobs” and “no crap minimum wage jobs.
“gang violence and crushing poverty”
No different from the South side of Chicago. Fifty shootings, five dead last weekend (good thing those jerks can’t aim). Just a brief note in the news. It’s so depressingly common.
Not sure the “crushing poverty” in Chicagoland is comparable to the “crushing poverty” in Latin America and many other very poor countries. If it were, their parents would be encouraging them to get out regardless of how dangerous the journey would be.
Numerically you are probably correct. But in contrast to more affluent areas, no. And by more affluent areas, I don’t mean the North Shore. I mean mixed race blue collar areas.
We are talking here about kids who only eat in school. And families who sleep on the floor with the mattresses against the wall because of the nightly (nightly!) gunfire. Neighborhoods where the only police to be seen are SWAT teams.
Not getting why these kids only eat once a day. Do Chicago schools not have free breakfast?
Plus the families of not many, if any kids, that qualify for free lunch, don’t also get SNAP. And except for those with no kitchen, SNAP benefits can feed a family.
I didn’t say once a day. I said only in school. Probably breakfast and lunch. No supper at home.
SNAP coupons are often traded at a discount for cash. Not making a judgement here. Living off of assistance is hard and the bureaucracy makes getting benefits difficult.
Charles P Pierce correctly calls out Obama in Why Obama Must Go to the Border Immediately
I disagree.
What use is a photo op? So he goes down there, he gets his photo op with some random kid? He then goes back to DC and what happens if/when he has to send a good bit of the kids back to these probable deathtraps?
Would you or the “esteemable” Mr Pierce then be saying, “well at least he went to the border?”. No, i suspect as now, you’d be saying “how could that heartless Obama look in those kids faces and…”.
He’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t.
What would this photo-op really do? Nothing. What will he learn at the border that he doesn’t already know?
Pierce conceded that is was a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation and concluded better to do.
GWB was (correctly IMHO) blasted for the birthday cake for McCain on a tarmac and playing air guitar while NO was drowning and followed that up by looking out the window of AF-1 down at NO on his way back to DC after his extended summer vacation. He didn’t get too much flak for his staged “I care” speech in NO. Even his later inane comments during visits to MS and AL didn’t create any general backlash.
Pierce is a partisan Democrat and thus, more accepting of and inclined to defend stupid shit that Democrats do/don’t do than I am. So, when he says, in this instance, this Democrat gets it all wrong, other partisans should pay attention.
he may not have gotten flack in the media, but I can gurarantee you that we in NOLA did not appreciate it one bit.
We wanted and needed and still do want action. For people in NOLA, GWB coulda never stepped foot in NOLA, as long as FEMA and the government was doing what needed to be done.
Also too, as a Katrina survivor, I remember all those damn Katrina photo-ops? Surprising one here I’m sure, photo-ops don’t mean shhh if not backed by the “right” course action.
Much to my dismay, apparently so. Sean Hannity and Rick Perry went on an undocumented kiddie hunting expedition geared up with caps, sunglasses, and assault rifles. Or so Hannity is tweeting back in some of the sickest political theater ever.
Meanwhile Virginia’s GOP candidate for Senate thinks that minimum wage is playing on the company softball team.
The political doldrums this year are as bad as those in 2001. I wonder what we are missing that is going to come back and bite us. Beginning to worry about a Pakistan meltdown with Hindu dominionists in power next door. Maybe the 90-degree and 60-percent humidity is making me worry more.
Back to the topic, we are treading very close to serious human rights violations in the way we have been handling immigration (if anyone cares about human rights anymore). Obama cannot continue to triangulate immigration reform. But there is little he can do to create paths to citizenship without poking the GOP desire for impeachment.
Ducking, covering, and ignoring the news for the next four months is looking more and more attractive. And if that’s the mood I’ve gotten to, you know that we are in some bit of trouble.
Hoping for the GOP to beat itself on the ropes very soon.
I’m puzzled why we haven’t heard about this violence before now – at least I haven’t seen or heard anything about it. Colombia and Mexico are mentioned in the “news” from time, but not these CA countries.
P.S. I’ve asked this before, but forgot to check for an answer. What do the number at the top of a comment mean? If they’re indicative of recs and pans, how do you do that? I click on them, but don’t see a way to give a thumbs up.
Because the news is controlled by mega-corporations. We only hear what they want us to hear.
At the bottom of every comment, there’s a little gray box with -none- in it. If you click on the arrow there, you’ll get a little drop down box that will allow you to select a rating 1-4 for a given comment. The ratings box also has general guidelines for how each rating is commonly understood. You can rate however many comments per thread. To post the rating, hit a “Rate All” button found on any comment before leaving a thread. Voila. Rated. You can also go back and change ratings if need be. HTH.
How much of the crime is funded by US laws making particular substances illegal?
These kids are basically war refugees…a war the United States has created out of whole cloth.
The War on DrugsTM is a massive scam. It is getting people killed, it is destroying communities and countries and governments in Central and South America, and here in the US.
You can debate whether we should round up these kids and throw ’em in a camp, or hand them AR-15s to go and continue fighting the US-created War on DrugsTM, but that is all missing the point.
Providing sociopaths with lots and lots of money, weapons and power because we want to keep Cannabis and Cocaine expensive and almost kind of hard to get is the cause of this.
If that isn’t addressed, then nothing serious is being said.
The USA funded anti-terrorism schools for Central America. Why not sponsor anti-gang schools in police tactics and strategy.
And if the Central American governments treat the gangs like they treated the Marxist opponents, i.e. taking them out for a 50 mile swim, It will not break my heart.
Meanwhile, the demonstrations against helpless kids are disgusting. Still, dataguy is right. We can’t be the permanent dumping ground for the rest of the world. The Central American governments are at fault for mismanaging their countries. The Mexican government is wrong for accommodating the coyotes as long as people don’t stop in Mexico.
There is no good solution except to treat the kids as refugees, put pressure on Mexico to help solve the overall illegal immigration problem instead of condoning it and helping Central America put their countries back together.
I had neighbors from Belize. They were proud of their small country. I wonder if they are still proud.
Because the solution is much broader than police tactics and strategy and goes to the fundamental architecture of our relationships with Latin America. And those involve the IMF, NAFTA, WTO, and the World Bank, among other institutions. And the hash that the School of the Americas (now renamed the School of the Western Hemisphere or some such name) has made of the idea that the US is committed to democracy in Latin America.
All of the fine work that John Foster Dulles did starting nearly a century ago is coming home to roost. We should directly bill Chiquita Brands and ITT for the costs of humanitarian aid to these people.
Very true, but we must have more choices than:
a. Invite everyone in Central America to come here.
or
b. Throw up our hands and do nothing.
or
c. Mine the entire southern border. (Tea Party idea)
There must be a core solution and it must involve the governments of Mexico and Central America.
I am interested in actual ideas for change, not mindless anti-white racism or self-flagellation. I’m not accusing you in particular of those, but that’s how I read some of these posts.
So, it’s the “white man’s burden” again. I am absolutely in opposition to this point of view. Things are as they are. Historical guilt is not a contemporary excuse.
These countries are full of adults. The adults make choices. The choices are not forced upon them by history; there is at most an influence.
Germany was a prime mover in 2 world wars. There was collective guilt in the treatment of jews, gypsies, and gays, and the actions to murder 6,000,000 were done with full compliance. Yet, today, the Germans have accepted the guilt and have moved on.
All of this guilty whining about our influence in Central America is just crap. They are adults.
I refuse to accept the white man’s burden that the whiners wish to foist upon us. What we should do is arm the peasants, and let them kill the gang bangers.
You create a humanitarian mess with mercantile economic policies that benefit only certain industries and national security policies aimed at undermining democratic governance and change in Central America; the you get refugees. After all it was Hillary Clinton who punted when a military dictatorship took over the elected government of Honduras when that elected government was beginning a program of land reform that would affect US businesses. It was the US who has prevented a popular indigenous government for taking control in Guatemala every time it has won an election.
And it is US businesses that continue to employ undocumented workers at sub-minimum wages, using their illegal status as a means of control.
And it is US and European economic policy of austerity that has made the global economy continue in recession for over a decade. And US agricultural policy that makes it cheaper to import than grow crops in Central America (unless in plantations for export to the US) that has impoverished Central American independent farmers.
And it is the US war on drugs that has turned Mexico and Central America into a growing gang polity.
And it is US Second Amendment crazies that have allowed the sale of weapons in the border country to straw purchasers for the gangs in Mexico and Central America.
And it is the US CIA that has hauled drugs to the US on behalf of selected persons who do neat stuff for the CIA.
It’s not at all the dainty “white man’s burden”, it is blowback from well over a century of cynical US policies on the ground in Central America.
It’s not a matter of guilt. It is a matter of accepting responsibility for the consequences of US policy. These are, and were at the time, the predictable consequences. Most Americans knew this. That’s why most of this policy always was done in secret–even John Foster Dulles’s lobbying for United Fruit in the 1920s. Even his actions on behalf of his law firms clients when he was Secretary of State.
Changing the policies to something less self-serving changes the reality on the ground. But at this point that would require dismantling the entire military-intelligence-industrial complex, investigating and prosecuting some very large and powerful corporate law firms, and taking down or reforming institutions like the World Bank and IMF that sucker (and bribe) leaders of these countries into extractive government loans.
Take them to the border and push them across. Let the Mexican government worry about “reuniting the families.”
Though I must say if my family just threw me across the border into the US I don’t think I’d be in that much of a hurry to be reunited with them.
Clearly, they didn’t give one sweet shit.
With 57,000 out of a population in Mexico and Central America of over 100 million, it is quite possible that the parents of these folks are no longer alive. It is also possible that not only gangs but government death squad have committed atrocities that we do not yet know about. Journalists in Mexico and Central America are among the first targets if they do not treat the guys with guns with invisibility.