While we were busy talking about plenty of other things (whack-a-mole, anyone?), the illegal immigration situation in this country seem to have gone from dreadful to utter chaos, with no end in sight.
This is absolutely disturbing on so many levels it’s hard to process. Also, as a side issue, are Jan Brewer and Arizona being punished by the Obama administration?:
Hundreds of migrants nabbed by the border patrol after illegally crossing the US-Mexico border through Texas have been flown to Arizona and left at Greyhound Bus stations in Tucson and Phoenix during the past month…Critics charge that released border-crossers will vanish into the woodwork. Immigrant advocates accuse the federal government of releasing migrants without providing enough basic necessities such as food and water on days that hover around 100 degrees F.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) calls it “another disturbing example of a deliberate failure to enforce border security policies and repair a broken immigration system” in a letter to President Obama.
Yeah, a letter! That’ll do it. Although to be honest, I don’t know what the remedy would be. Even impeachment wouldn’t do it at this point, because fixing this would require that both parties be dedicated to tightening both border security and lessening the cornucopia of services available to illegal immigrants, which would require some harsh and extremely difficult decisions that I don’t think our politicians are up to.
Meanwhile, things have been getting worse. In the last couple of weeks or so I had read a couple of articles about how more children have been crossing the border alone. The articles explained that they are fleeing political and social turmoil in their countries of birth, but none that I read managed to point out the obvious, which is that people are sending children here because they perceive them as being less likely to be deported than in the past, and if the parents follow, they too will be unlikely to be deported because of policies that favor family unification (here’s a typical article of this type, from the NY Times of May 17). The Christian Science Monitor article I linked to at the beginning of this post was the first one I had seen that alludes to the Obama administration’s policies as at least a partial explanation of what’s been happening.
The CS Monitor offers more background here on why the number of illegal child immigrants has increased in the last two years:
At issue is Mr. Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which in 2012 allowed some undocumented immigrants who came to America as minors to defer deportation for two years. Last week, the administration announced guidelines for how these immigrants could defer deportation for a further two years.
DACA would not apply to anyone coming across the border today. Only undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as minors before June 15, 2007, are eligible. But to Republican critics, DACA created the opportunity for misinformation and confusion.
“Word has gotten out around the world about President Obama’s lax immigration enforcement policies and it has encouraged more individuals to come to the United States illegally,” said Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R) of Virginia, a key broker in immigration reform efforts on Capitol Hill, in a statement last week…
During the decade preceding fiscal year 2012, the federal government agency tasked with caring for unaccompanied minors who cross the border illegally dealt with an average of 7,000 to 8,000 cases a year, according to a Department of Health and Human Services fact sheet. In fiscal year 2011, the number was 6,560.
The following year, however, the number jumped to 13,625. This fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, 2014, federal officials are estimating that the number could be 80,000, according to an internal memo cited by The New York Times.
Obama called the situation a “humanitarian crisis” Monday. Poverty and violence are driving the migration, administration officials say, and activists working with migrants agree. But some also suggest that DACA could be a factor.
Ya think?
That article goes on to say that Obama is being pressured by his base to stop deportations of illegals altogether. As a pro-immigrant San Francisco crowd yelled to him last November: “”Stop deportations! Yes we can!” And why not? Obama makes the laws and he also breaks the laws at his pleasure, so the crowd was well within its rights to think Obama could and would do it. Obama needs his base (which includes Hispanics/Latinos) to come out in force for Democrats in 2014 or he could lose the Senate, so his motivation to please them is very strong (although he was already motivated to allow as many illegal immigrants—and potential Democratic voters—as possible to come into this country). It’s no accident, either, that Obama announced DACA in 2012, a presidential election year.
The CS Monitor seems to be the mainstream paper covering these issues in the most depth. Here’s another article from them about it, which mentions the fact that most of the children coming across the border alone are boys over twelve.
One small ray of sunshine in an otherwise very gloomy situation is that the increasing phenomenon of child illegal immigrants might help convince people that the border is nowhere near as secure as Obama says it is. In turn, this could discourage Republicans in Congress from caving on immigration/amnesty. As Jan Brewer said, ““If the Obama administration put half the effort into securing our border as it has invested to institute this operation, our state and nation would not be facing this situation.”
More:
Nora Griselda Bercian Diaz, a mother from Guatemala who crossed into the U.S. illegally with her 6-year-old daughter, told local media outlet KRGV that the message being spread in her home country is, “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.”
Bercian Diaz said she thought the U.S. border was open to all families. She added that news reports are circulating in her country which state that mothers and children are obtaining bus tickets.
And once they come they need not only food and water and housing, but they need lawyers to fight deportation. So here’s some money for the lawyers.
Obama’s reaction to all of this is to ask for even more money to help the illegal immigrants once they’re here. And there is little question that their plight is indeed very troubling and pathetic at this point, because the numbers have overwhelmed whatever system was already in place. But the truth is that incentivizing a behavior increases it, and this is what Obama has been doing right along. His response to this new crisis is to incentivize the behavior even more.
[NOTE: I agree with this article, but I do not agree that Democrats were unaware of the incentivizing effect of amnesty. They are well aware, and for them it’s a feature rather than a bug.]
