According to today’s Washington Times, the GAO reports that over the last 4 years USAID has paid some $27 million in taxpayer dollars to “ease re-integration” for illegal aliens the U.S. deports back to their home countries in Central America, who get what is, in effect, a “nice try” CARE package from the U.S., which includes things like toilet paper, school supplies, and even toys for their kids.

See https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/7/american-taxpayers-27m-ease-deportees-lives/

More to your point, can a greatly improved economy be leveraged politically? I think the GOP should have tried harder too; and they still should try harder now.

Friedman says in “Money Mischief” I believe, that the psychology of a strong economy (and the expectation of inflation) sets in when many of those salaried workers get bonuses or pay increases. This is also partly why the Fed is fixated on a higher baseline inflation rate; people get pay raises even in a flat economy.

I suppose that the GOP country club set thinks, “Gee, we don’t have to do anything, the pay increases make the selling point for us.” They perhaps miss the fact that we all now live in a world awash in advertising and propaganda, and they need to get in the game or die.

Or, as Mr. Sailer calls it ‘awardable housing’. Dwellings with concessionary rents create patronage opportunities for insiders. Accept a Section 8 voucher, the transactions costs of evicting a problem tenant are jacked up.

From what I’ve read Mexico _did_ offer to take care of the caravaners, but they would have none of it. They are not travelling to get away from Honduras, they are travelling to get to the United States, specifically.

This whole episode has been nothing but transparent manipulation of the U.S. for political reasons, where the migrants themselves are being used by whoever is financing the caravan (someone has to be behind it… it would take millions to organize and run this thing), presumably to forward an agenda of provoking trouble, even violence, on the border in order to make the U.S., and President Trump in particular, look bad.

I had some experience with the “public interest bar” when I served on a planning commission. Developers, the state legislature and “public interest law firms” have an iron triangle of mutual interest in “affordable housing.” Our small city in Orange County was “built out” almost 100% when I served on the commission. The state legislature kept ruling that we did not have enough “affordable housing” after they were “sued” by the law firms, which in turn were funded by developers.

There deal was that the developers funded the law firms, which sued the city, creating a “crisis,” which then was corrected by the developers and the state paid the law firms’ fees. Next, the legislature would decide the criteria for affordable housing had to go up. And the cycle would repeat.

As for Venezuelans, set up refugee camps just outside the border.