Our press tends to frame subjects in the most superficial ways. I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, but sometimes it’s so blatant that it hits you in the face. The “crisis on the border” coverage is frankly kind of shocking, a bit like the talk during the Trump years of “caravans” heading north from the “northern triangle” countries we spent decades rendering ungovernable. Practically every outlet has used the term “crisis” in their headlines. I understand the incentive structure here – if it bleeds, it leads – but what they’re referring to is literally more of the same phenomenon we’ve been seeing on the U.S. southern border for years. It certainly isn’t way out of line from recent months. Stats compiled on Factcheck.org, from CBP numbers, show that crossings are not nearly as high as they were in May 2019 and more or less even with March, April, and June of that year. Was their hair on fire back then?
This is probably a good week to point out that this “crisis” keeps happening because we don’t take any meaningful steps to address it, just as might be said of mass shootings in America. It’s the classic definition of insanity, right? Granted, the influx of people from Central America is not down to one simple cause, but this thing that the right professes to hate like fire is largely a product of the toxic policies they and many of their liberal adversaries have been pursuing since the Second World War and longer. Why are people leaving Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other Central American countries in such large numbers? Because they are failed states, in essence, thanks in no small measure to the so-called anticommunist crusades we undertook in the region from the first decades of the last century. Between bad governance, corruption, and dominance by criminal cartels funded through drug sales to the United States, the northern triangle nations are virtually unlivable for most of their battered citizens. That’s the return on our investment in fascistic governments.
Then there’s the border itself. It’s an imaginary line bristling with armed officers. The fact that it’s highly militarized and that it’s very difficult to make the crossing means that when people come here, they tend to want to stay. I’m not someone who thinks that immigration is an intrinsically bad thing, but there was a time when people could cross the border without a lot of trouble, stay for a while, work, send money home, then return to their families. Now if they manage to survive the crossing, they stay put and send for their families. The very efforts designed to keep people out is, in essence, keeping them in. Frankly, it’s fortunate for us that people want to come here and work. These “illegal immigrants” include many, many essential workers. Think about that for a moment: both illegal and essential. They get food to our tables. They take care of our grandparents. They do the jobs most Americans shun. Why the fuck do we put a target on their backs?
As I said previously, these are not simple issues that can be solved easily. We need to get our heads around what’s causing this misery, year after year, and try to work towards solutions that are radical in that they would necessarily dismantle the systems of oppression and exclusion that we have built over the course of our history. Or …. we could find something easy to do, and just keep complaining about it. Up to us.
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That said, it’s hard to deny that Trump takes a certain special joy in his work, promoting the basest forms of ignorance, painting refugees as criminals, rapists, etc. The furor around the immigrant caravans from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador ranks among the most despicable initiatives thus far in his putrid presidency, right alongside family separations. This is, of course, a contrived “crisis” intended to gin up the Republican’s racist base in time for the mid-term elections as well as set the stage for clashes at the southern border. They did this by prohibiting asylum seekers from applying for asylum anywhere other than at designated points of entry. This violates the relevant statute (
The two Koreas have taken some tentative steps to de-escalation, and I for one am glad to see that. In fact, I wish they would just bury the hatchet and tell us to take a hike, frankly. But it’s the kind of detente that can easily be upended by a volatile president, and Korea is one of those issues over which even the craziest commander-in-chief can find willing allies in Congress. Israel/Palestine is another. Trump’s policy on Jerusalem is appalling, but it also happens to be the same policy Congress long ago approved and a previous president (Clinton) signed into law. This is a symbolic issue domestically and a very substantive issue internationally; I am guessing that most Americans have no idea what the implications of this policy are, no notion of how large the municipality now called Jerusalem has grown over the past three decades. Underwriting Israel’s unilateral annexation of this city essentially eliminates any chance of a two-state solution, period. Some of my countrymen know this; many more do not, or simply do not care.
The thing is, you need to listen to their rhetoric. They’re talking about “illegal immigrants”. They’re echoing the applause lines of our own crackpot politicians. No surprise, because we’re witnessing the same experience on our own southern border. People fleeing from the neoliberal aftermath of our bankrupt Central America policy, starting with support for decades of regressive, kelptocratic Mexican governments to our serial interventions in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere, pouring into this country in hope of a better life. And we’ve got freaks like Donald Trump calling them rapists, murderers, etc., and not just him. Those Hungarian xenophobes? Turns out, they are us.