During his knock-down, drag-out confrontation with soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week over the need for the construction of a border wall, Donald Trump made many false and questionable statements. But he seemed to feel this one was the strongest of his claims:
Trump: “If you look at San Diego, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent once the wall was up, El Paso, illegal traffic dropped 72 percent, then ultimately 95 percent once the wall was up. In Tucson, Arizona, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent. Yuma, it dropped illegal traffic 95 to 96 percent.
He thought he really had a zinger there, as he kept going back to it over and over. Politifact wasn’t able to track down exactly what he was referring to, since pretty much none of “his” wall has actually been built. However, there is already 700 miles of fencing along the border, which began to be built under President Clinton and was then expanded considerably under President George W. Bush.
It’s possible that this was what Trump was talking about, but then again it’s also likely that he’s just parroting a bunch of questionable numbers from InfoWars and he has no idea what any of it really means. If he meant the existing fence, some of his numbers may have been in the correct neighborhood of a ballpark, but correlation is not always causality.
As shown below on Anderson Cooper’s show, most of what Trump had to say about immigration was more of the latter: pulled right out of his ass.
New border wall, the type that Trump originally promised, has not been built. Terrorists have not been caught trying to enter the U.S. through the southern border. Homeland Security has rejected or arrested about 10 people who were on the terrorist watchlist from entering or accessing the U.S., but that was almost entirely from other ports of entry such as airports. A wall wouldn’t help with that. Trump claims that people immigrating across the southern border have “lots of communicable diseases”—which is flatly not true. But Cooper did not address whether the existing fences and walls have actually been effective at what they’re intended to do, which is restrict migration.
According to Trump supporter Paul Sperry at the New York Post, the border wall (fence) at El Paso has been a massive success.
Federal data show a far-less imposing wall than the one Trump envisions — a two-story corrugated metal fence first erected under the Bush administration — already has dramatically curtailed both illegal border crossings and crime in Texas’ sixth-largest city, which borders the high-crime Mexican city of Juarez.
In fact, the number of deportable illegal immigrants located by the US Border Patrol plummeted by more than 89 percent over the five-year period during which the controversial new fence was built, according to Homeland Security data I reviewed. When the project first started in 2006, illegal crossings totaled 122,261, but by 2010, when the 131-mile fence was completed from one end of El Paso out into the New Mexico desert, immigrant crossings shrank to just 12,251.
It’s not difficult to believe that border crossings in El Paso have decreased as a result of the border wall that was built during the Bush administration. In fact, going back to fiscal year 2000, total apprehensions averaged 1.6 million contrasted with fiscal year 2017, where the total was just 310,000. However, the first Buffy stake through the heart of Sperry’s argument is the fact that illegal apprehensions didn’t just go down in areas such as El Paso where there is a current fence: they went down all across the board, even in areas that aren’t currently protected by a wall or fence. That includes the Rio Grande Valley, where it dropped from an initial high of 133,000 in 2000 to a low of 59,000 in 2006, and since then has risen again back to 137,000 in FY2017. And you can’t put a wall across the Rio Grande, because it’s a river.
Also, CBP breaks this down based on those persons who were coming from Mexico and those that were coming from other nations. Sperry is correct when he says crossings in 2006 were 122,261 and then decreased dramatically to 12,251 in FY2010—but it has since gone up to 25,193 in FY2017. This confirms that in general, illegal entries from Mexico had dramatically dropped between 2006 and 2010, but then went back up again—and the charts also show that illegal entries by persons who are not from Mexico have dramatically increased, as well.
In FY2000, the grand total of apprehensions of those not from Mexico was 36,000, which rose to 108,026 in FY2006 and has since increased again to 180,077 for FY2017. For El Paso, those figures are 1,397 in FY2000, 4,724 in FY2006, and 11,974 in FY2017, which is an overall 900 percent increase. (For the record, the bulk of that overall increase—140,000 in FY2017— were located in the Rio Grande Valley, which shows that most of these non-Mexican migrants are simply going around the walls, even though a significant number are still going through places such as El Paso, which does have a wall.) This does not suggest that “The Wall” is the core of the deterrent or the single and primary reason that migration patterns from Mexico have decreased by 81 percent while migration from elsewhere has spiked by just over 400 percent. Economic and other improvements to Mexico—such as the benefits of NAFTA—may have lowered the need for Mexicans to travel to the U.S. to seek opportunities or safety. However, the opposite may be true for El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, which have never been party to the NAFTA arrangement [although there has been CAFTA] and in more recent years have become some of the most dangerous places on the planet. In short, it’s not nearly as simple as “Build Wall: Stop Immigrants,” as Sperry or Trump suggest.
After his claim that the wall had virtually stopped illegal immigration through El Paso—even though it clearly didn’t, since it's been increasing lately—Sperry actually went somewhat further and claimed that largely because of the wall, crime in El Paso has also plummeted.
Before 2010, federal data show the border city was mired in violent crime and drug smuggling, thanks in large part to illicit activities spilling over from the Mexican side. Once the fence went up, however, things changed almost overnight. El Paso since then has consistently topped rankings for cities of 500,000 residents or more with low crime rates, based on FBI-collected statistics. The turnaround even caught the attention of former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other Obama administration officials, who touted it as one of the nation’s safest cities while citing the beefed-up border security there.
Federal data illustrates just how remarkable the turnaround in crime has been since the fence was built. According to FBI tables, property crimes in El Paso have plunged more than 37 percent to 12,357 from their pre-fence peak of 19,702 a year, while violent crimes have dropped more than 6 percent to 2,682 from a peak of 2,861 a year.
Sperry claims that the illegal entries were the source of the crime and with those entries dramatically down (except for those not originating in Mexico), El Paso has seen a renaissance of of freedom and safety. However, when you look at violent crime trends for the entire nation during the same period, violent crimes have actually reduced at a far greater rate than the 6 percent touted by Sperry.
In 1990, the national violent crime rate was 758.2 incidents per 100,000 persons. By 2006 that had decreased to 479.3 incidents per 100,000 people and in 2017, it is now 382.8 incidents per 100,000. That would be a total reduction of 50 percent since 1991, and 21 percent since 2006, before the wall was built in El Paso.
The national property crime figures are similarly showing a decrease of more than 54 percent, from 5,140 incidents per 100,000 in 1991 to 2,362 incidents in 2017—which again is higher than Sperry’s claim that El Paso has reduced property crime by 37 percent.
it actually seems that if El Paso were keeping up with the national average, its crime rates would be lower than they currently are. Is that because it has a wall, since generally speaking, immigrants are less prone to crime?
Somehow, I don’t think Sperry or Trump are going to see it that way.
During his meeting with Chuck and Nancy, Trump continued to claim that “immigrants are criminals,” even though every survey and every piece of information says the opposite—yet Trump refuses to believe it. Instead he apparently seems to rely on an argument made by Rep. Steve King back in 2006 which was based on the same type of slapdash half-logic as Sperry’s, that immigrants have been proven criminals because they comprise a high percentage of those held in federal custody. That means they’re a higher percentage of murderers and therefore they’ve “killed 63,000 Americans,” according to “Cantaloupe Calves” King.
“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”
[...]
“The crimes that are committed by those who enter this country illegally are in significantly greater numbers than the crimes that are committed by American citizens,” King said, “to the extent that 28 percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States are criminal aliens, 28 percent.”
The problem with this argument is that by starting the basis of his math on immigrants who are federally incarcerated, King ignored the fact that about half of them are there for repeated immigration violations, not drug smuggling, not violent murder, or drunk driving, all of which are state crimes. He breathlessly states:
That means then that criminal aliens are committing 28 percent of the crimes in the United States. And so that means 28 percent of the murders, 28 percent of the rapes, 28 percent of the violence and the assaults and battery, first- and second-degree murder and also manslaughter attacks are committed by criminal aliens.”
No, it doesn’t mean that. Not even a little bit. For example, King says that there are about 47,000 to 49,000 “criminal aliens”—who again aren’t illegal aliens, just people of foreign birth who have been convicted of a federal crime, and about half of whom are here legally—that are 28 percent of the prison population, but that’s only among prisoners in the federal system, which includes about 215,000 inmates. The entire prison system among all the states includes more than 2.2 million prisoners, so these so-called criminal aliens that King is talking about are actually only 2.2 percent of all those in our jails. And again, hardly any of them are “murderers,” other than those who really are terrorists or serial killers who would have been picked up by federal agencies due to special circumstances—because generally, murder is a state crime.
Despite King’s blather, the Cato Institute says:
Previous empirical studies of immigrant criminality generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates, are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.
People like Trump and Sperry may not like to have their border ideas compared to racism. Instead, they like to claim that they actually want more “legal” immigration but yet again, that isn’t the case. They just don’t want “those people” coming here, no matter how they do it and no matter the reason for it.
For example, if you listen to the Federation for Immigration Reform, undocumented immigrants are indeed a significant health risk.
Because illegal immigrants, unlike those who are legally admitted for permanent residence, undergo no medical screening to assure that they are not bearing contagious diseases, the rapidly swelling population of illegal aliens in our country has also set off a resurgence of contagious diseases that had been totally or nearly eradicated by our public health system.
According to Dr. Laurence Nickey, director of the El Paso heath district “Contagious diseases that are generally considered to have been controlled in the United States are readily evident along the border ... The incidence of tuberculosis in El Paso County is twice that of the U.S. rate. Dr. Nickey also states that leprosy, which is considered by most Americans to be a disease of the Third World, is readily evident along the U.S.-Mexico border and that dysentery is several times the U.S. rate ... People have come to the border for economic opportunities, but the necessary sewage treatment facilities, public water systems, environmental enforcement, and medical care have not been made available to them, causing a severe risk to health and well being of people on both sides of the border.”1
FAIR, as they call themselves, also have various sob stories about Americans who’ve been the victims of violent immigrant crime. They claim that DACA is based on a myth and that President Obama “dismantled border enforcement,” which is just plain ridiculous because at his peak Obama deported 406,000 people in 2012, which is almost twice as many as Trump deported in 2017 and on the whole more than any other president in history.
President Barack Obama has often been referred to by immigration groups as the "Deporter in Chief."
Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who "self-deported" or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
According to governmental data, the Obama administration has deported more people than any other president's administration in history.
In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.
And when it comes to racism: can you find these types of wrongheaded false arguments repeated on Stormfront? Why, yes—you can.
SAVAGE: “It’s a disaster to bring in diseased immigrants, don’t you agree?”
TRUMP: “Well that’s what’s happening, and people don’t like talking about it and certainly it’s not politically correct to talk about it and that’s why they don’t do it, because everything we do today has to do with political correctness. If something’s a little bit off, off just a little bit, they say, ‘Oh, please don’t mention that.’ Even my people tell me ‘don’t mention that’ and I decide to mention things anyway, even though I know it’s going to end up being a firestorm I mention them anyway. But there’s something that’s one of the other elements, and the people are pouring into this country and, in many cases they’re not well people, in many respects.” |
Anti-Vaxxer Trump Claims Immigrants are Bringing Back Previously Eliminated Diseases
It is ironic that Trump, who actually is an anti-vaxxer, is concerned about diseases coming from immigrants when the anti-vax movement has generated fresh outbreaks of measles.
These types of associations of immigrants to disease actually go back to the earliest parts of the 20th century, which eventually lead to the bigotry of the Yellow Peril.
During the 20th century the united states witnessed sweeping social, political, and economic transformations as well as far-reaching advancements in medical diagnosis and care. Despite the dramatic changes in demography, the meaning of citizenship, and the ability to treat and cure acute and chronic diseases, foreigners were consistently associated with germs and contagion.
[...]
Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, as the pace of urbanization and industrialization quickened, many native-born Americans became alarmed at the huge numbers of immigrants arriving daily at Ellis Island and similar, but smaller, reception centers around the country. Between 1881 and 1884, approximately 3 million newcomers set foot in the United States, almost the same number of immigrants who entered the country during the entire decade of the 1870s. Between 1885 and 1898, 6 million immigrants landed, followed by 18 million between 1898 and 1924 (U.S. Immigration Bureau 1890–1924). These figures are even more significant when comparing the size of annual admissions with the size of the host society (rate of immigration). This rate reached its zenith in the first decade of the 20th century (10 to 11 immigrants arriving per 1,000 residents per year) and dropped off sharply in the aftermath of the restrictive admission policies of the 1920s, the Great Depression, and World War II. By contrast, today's wave of immigration, while in absolute numbers approximates that of the early 20th century, runs at a rate of about four immigrants per 1,000 residents per year (Statistical Abstract of the United States 1992).
The association between immigrants and disease isn’t new, and it’s not even mildly unique. It’s a supremacist presumption that we are nearly always “better, smarter and healthier” than those who happen to be just arriving. But the quality of medical care in Mexico, which happens to have a national health care system paid into by all their citizens, is very close to the quality of health care in the U.S.—and improving at a faster rate.
A study published this year in The Lancet found that Mexico’s Healthcare Access and Quality Index rating rose from 49.2 in 1990 to 62.6 in 2015.
This 100-point scale is a measure of citizens’ access to quality healthcare. It is based on the death rates for 32 diseases that can usually be treated easily, including heart disease, diabetes, maternal and infant diseases, as well as diseases that can be prevented with vaccinations.
Over the same period, the HAQ Index for the United States rose from 73.7 to 81.3.
The average for all countries was 53.7 in 2015. Andorra topped the list that year at 94.6, with Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea at the low end.
Terrorist are not about to trudge their way across the Mexican desert and then the Arizona desert just to be able to blow up a truck in Times Square. Most of the terrorists we’re truly dealing with today are alt-Reich white supremacists who come from here, and many of the ISIS sympathists also come from here.
Drug dealers are not going to load up some hapless migrant with 50 pounds of their prime product only to have them die of dehydration and exposure in the Arizona desert. According to the DEA, they’re more likely to use a truck, a plane, or a boat, not some kid with “cantaloupe calves.”
A 24-page report prepared by the DEA in May found that drugs coming from Mexico do often enter through the southwestern border, but they do so concealed in vehicles, like tractor-trailers. Moreover, drugs coming from Colombia are more often transported by plane and boat, the reports notes.
Transnational criminal organizations “generally route larger drug shipments destined for the Northeast through the Bahamas and/or South Florida by using a variety of maritime conveyance methods, to include speedboats, fishing vessels, sailboats, yachts, and containerized sea cargo,” the reports reads. “In some cases, Dominican Republic-based traffickers will also transport cocaine into Haiti for subsequent shipment to the United States via the Bahamas and/or South Florida corridor using maritime and air transport.”
So the “wall” would be completely useless in this area.
Again, Trump and his ilk always say the problem is that these immigrants aren’t coming in the “right way.” But as I’ve previously written, people entering for the purpose of seeking asylum don’t have to come in through an approved port of entry, as is specifically stated under federal law.
Sec. 208. (a) Authority to Apply for Asylum.-
(1) In general. - Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien's status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 235(b).
Trump ignored this law, then changed the rules for determining whether asylum claims are valid by arguing that someone doesn’t have a “credible fear” if they are attempting to flee gang or domestic violence.
As part of the Trump administration's broader crackdown on immigration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently tightened the restrictions on the types of cases that can qualify someone for asylum, making it harder for Central Americans who say they're fleeing the threat of gangs, drug smugglers or domestic violence to pass even the first hurdle for securing U.S. protection.
Immigration lawyers say that's meant more asylum seekers failing interviews with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to establish credible fear of harm in their home countries. They also say that immigration judges, who work for the Justice Department, are overwhelmingly signing off on those recommendations during appeals, effectively ending what could have been a years long asylum process almost before it's begun.
But the real issue is that if the local police are incapable of or unwilling to protect people from gang violence because they are corrupt, or from domestic violence because they are inept, that is indeed a credible fear on multiple levels. When Cubans manage to reach the beaches of America they are assumed to have a “credible fear,” because America didn’t approve of the politics of the Castro regime. But someone arriving from El Salvador—which is considered the murder capital of the world—doesn’t get that same consideration.
While changing the rules for credible fear and illegally demanding that asylum seekers can only enter at an official “port of entry,” the Trump Administration has also been closing those ports of entry to asylum seekers, leaving them literally no viable option.
It started at the bridges. Federal officials instructed asylum-seekers to cross the border at those sanctioned ports of entry, telling them if they did it the “right” way, they wouldn’t be separated from their children the way other migrants were after illegal border crossings. But recently, families who went this route have been forced to wait for days, sometimes in inclement weather, often sleeping on sheets of cardboard. Border Patrol agents reportedly told them there was no room on the other side. And in at least some cases, families that managed to make it across were still split up.
Rather than honoring the actual law, Trump has been arresting and deporting asylum seekers—even those that come in the “right way”—arguing they don’t have the right to do exactly what they’re doing under clear language of the law. And even though he had promised he wouldn’t continue separating families, he’s still doing it.
Over the last three months, lawyers at Catholic Charities, which provides legal services to immigrant children in government custody in New York, have discovered at least 16 new separation cases. They say they have come across such instances by chance and via their own sleuthing after children were put into temporary foster care and shelters with little or no indication that they arrived at the border with their parents.
ProPublica stumbled upon one more case late last month after receiving a call from a distraught Salvadoran father who had been detained in South Texas, and whose 4-year-old son, Brayan, had literally been yanked from his grasp by a Customs and Border Protection agent after they crossed the border and asked for asylum. Julio, the father, asked to be identified only by his first name because he was fleeing gang violence and worried about the safety of relatives back home.
An Obama-era program allowed parents located in the U.S. to legally apply to have their children migrate to the U.S. without first having to make the thousand-mile death march across El Salvador and Mexico. Then, Trump killed that program.
Obama had a program which ensured that migrants who were going through asylum processes would appear for their immigration hearings, and it was 95 percent effective—but Trump killed that program, too.
Migrant kids being held at the Tornillo, Texas, tent camp are being blocked from access to legal aid workers, which makes it difficult to determine if they’re being abused or are in unsafe conditions in the middle of the Texas desert.
Parents and relatives who have attempted to claim children being held in detention have faced arrest and deportation themselves if they have issues in their immigration status. As a result of all this, more families and children are being held for longer and longer periods, increasing the current count of those being held in immigration detention from 15,000 to 44,000.
ICE has been arresting people when they show up at the court house for their immigration hearings, which is just totally low down. Those people are literally showing up for court to resolve their issues and ICE is arresting them again, which is only going to inspire more people to not cooperate with the court because it leaves them vulnerable.
Trump has been threatening to deport refugees who have been in the U.S. for 20 to 40 years on Temporary Protective Status due to tragedies in their native lands, such as 200,000 Salvadorans and Hondurans who arrived in the U.S. in the wake of Hurricane Mitch, as well as another 100,000 refugees from the Sudan and Haiti.
Bipartisan members of Congress launched the TPS program in 1990. Before Trump took office, there were over 300,000 TPS recipients living in the U.S., from a total of 10 countries spanning the globe from Central America to Syria. But in September, the administration discontinued TPS designation for Sudanese, and then, in November, it discontinued TPS for Nicaraguans and Haitians.
The decision to discontinue TPS protections for Haitians—a community totaling 50,000 before Trump took office—sent droves of Haitian TPS-holders over the border into Canada, where Ottawa is struggling to cope with the influx, housing the the new refugees in makeshift dwellings while immigration authorities process them for resettlement. Tijuana and other Mexican cities bordering the U.S. have also been struggling to deal with a surge in the number of migrants freshly deported by the Trump administration.
These 200,000 Salvadorans have had about 190,000 children who were all born within the U.S. and are all technically American citizens. He’s even threatening to deport refugees from the Vietnam War who’ve been here for decades.
At every possible turn, Trump has shut the door to legal options to immigrate, taking what was part of a relatively orderly and organized (if problematic) process and turning it into one of nothing but chaos and confusion. He has removed legal pathways to migration without rational reasons or valid justifications until finally we have border patrol agents firing CS gas and pepper pellets at toddlers on the border at Tijuana, supposedly in order to protect border agents who weren’t hurt at all by a few thrown rocks.
It leaves almost no other option but to conclude that this is driven by bigotry, racism, and a rather severe case of empathy deficit disorder. The reason the U.S. has asylum laws is literally to prevent a repeat of the kind of tragedies we saw with the Cambodian Killing Fields and the Holocaust. Newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tweeted about it, only to be ignorantly criticized by Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Hey Lindsay: Ocasio-Cortez was exactly correct. There are literally people setting up an underground network of safe houses and shelters for undocumented immigrants, just like they did for Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust, and particularly for those who are likely to be murdered if they are returned home. This is no joke, and not an exaggeration. Asylum law was created as a result of the U.S. ratification of the 1951 UN Convention on the Refugee, which was inspired directly by the events of the Holocaust.
The 1951 Refugee Convention is the key legal document that forms the basis of our work. Ratified by 145 State parties, it defines the term ‘refugee’ and outlines the rights of the displaced, as well as the legal obligations of States to protect them.
The core principle is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom. This is now considered a rule of customary international law
Current U.S. law (as well as the Constitution, because treaties ratified by Congress are considered part of the “supreme law” of the land under the Supremacy clause) says that those seeking refuge and asylum will not be returned to a country where they face serious threat.
If they are within U.S. jurisdiction, their safety and rights are our responsibility. We aren’t really allowed to ignore their rights and just think of our own safety, or our own worries about security or health. Both are at issue and we have a responsibility to craft a system which functions to benefit all—not just us, not just them, but all.
Trump doesn’t know that. Trump doesn’t understand that. Trump doesn’t care about that.
All of his efforts have been intended to terrorize—yes, terrorize—immigrants in order to cause the rate of migration to slow, but even that has failed.
Trump likes to claim that his “zero tolerance” policies are working and they’ve been an effective deterrent to migration, but in the past year “illegal” border crossing attempts have increased by more than 200 percent.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that "illegal" crossing attempts from the Southwest border tripled in March compared with a year ago.
"We saw a 203 percent increase from March 2017 compared to March 2018 and a 37 percent increase from last month to this month — the largest increase from month to month since 2011," Tyler Houlton, the DHS press secretary, said in a statement.
[...]
The government's data show there were a total of 50,308 people last month that were apprehended or deemed "inadmissible" at the Southwest border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That was up 37 percent from March 2017, when there were 16,588 people stopped, and up 203 percent from February 2018's tally of 36,695 people.
So his efforts are literally backfiring.
Trump’s fetish for this wall seems to be both heartless and brainless, as CBP agents have repeatedly stated that they don’t necessarily need a physical wall across the entire border. Instead, they want a virtual wall.
Reuters has a new report citing unpublished documents and interviews within the US Customs and Border Protection agency. What the American authorities on the ground want is roughly 23 more miles of real-world fencing. But mostly reinforcements to the “virtual wall” that they’ve been building since the 1970s. That includes more sensors, drones, and cameras on the US-Mexico border.
From Reuters:
The Border Patrol has been doubling down on a “virtual wall” of drones, blimps and tower-mounted cameras, an approach that has produced mixed results.
The bulk of the CBP’s current $447 million annual budget for fencing, infrastructure, and technology goes toward surveillance towers, unmanned aircrafts, retired military blimps, and other advanced technological equipment.
Last year, I looked at the first attempts made by the United States to build a “virtual wall” in the 1970s. The technology that was installed was developed by the US military and included drones and electronic sensors used in the Vietnam War. They were primitive in the 1970s, but by the 1990s, the technology to build the “virtual wall” was really coming into its own.
Twenty-three more miles of fencing is not going to cost $5 billion.
Senate Minority Leader Schumer and upcoming Speaker Pelosi don't have an argument with the real border security strategy of a virtual wall and they’re willing to fund it, but they also want the DACA kids protected. They previously had a deal on the table for border security funding in exchange for permanent protections for DACA, but Trump turned it down because he also wanted to change the legal immigration rules to no longer allow naturalized citizens (like Melania Trump) to be able to sponsor their parents for a visa. He claims that's “chain migration,” which would allow someone to bring in their brother-in-law’s counsin’s sister’s mother, even though that would take about 50 years for each of them to gain a visa, legal resident status, and finally citizenship.
He also didn’t want to continue the diversity visa lottery program, which allows people from countries that don't usually immigrate to the U.S. a chance—just a chance—to possibly get a visa, but only after they’ve been fully vetted.
During the 2013 negotiations for a comprehensive immigration bill, Democrats were willing to limit family reunification and the diversity visas in exchange not just for DACA, but also creating a new class of visa for those people who are currently undocumented as long as they didn’t have any outstanding warrants, paid a fine, and paid their back taxes—all of which could be considerably expensive. It wasn’t a path to citizenship, but a path to documentation and legality.
But Republicans didn’t want to do that. They wouldn’t even allow the bill to come to the floor in the House because it just might have possibly passed. I don't really see why we should make a worse deal now than we nearly had then.
Hardly any of this is doing anything to really curb illegal immigration. It’s really just punishing people mostly for what is supposed to be legal immigration. And while all that’s going on, Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club is now in hot water for hiring and then verbally threatening and physically abusing their undocumented workers.
The undocumented immigrants who are reportedly maids at President Donald Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club have been abused and threatened with deportation since Trump was elected president, their lawyer told CNN Thursday.
“In the beginning everything was great,” attorney Anibal Romero told CNN. “Since he became president, the staff at the club has in a way become empowered. And now there is plenty of abuse, they have, at least Vicky (Morales) has been physically assaulted on numerous occasions. They have been both — they were both threatened with deportation. They were coerced into doing work they didn’t want to do.”
This is what they want: certainly not fellow citizens, but pliant and subservient serfs, ready and willing to be used as they see fit for their convenience and profit. They don’t see them as potential citizens, and they don’t even see them an human beings.
The migrants even said that their employers at Bedminster helped them falsify immigration documents in order for them to work there.
“There are many people without papers,” Diaz, who left her Bedminster job in 2013, told the Times.
Morales acknowledged using falsified documents to the Times; she said supervisors at Bedminster helped her work there despite being undocumented.
[...]
Morales and Diaz — who both cleaned Trump’s clothes and personal space at Bedminster — recalled generally being treated well by Trump, at times receiving $50 or $100 tips, but Morales said her supervisors have made more of an issue of her immigration status since Trump declared his presidential candidacy — though an unnamed manager still helped her obtain a false green card.
One supervisor, in the Times’ words, “frequently made remarks about the employees’ vulnerable legal status when critiquing their work … sometimes calling them ‘stupid illegal immigrants’ with less intelligence than a dog.”
And then there was the Trump modeling agency, which was basically a sweatshop that encouraged their workers to violate immigration laws.
In a blockbuster article, Mother Jones documents that Trump Model Management employed undocumented immigrants who were encouraged to come to the United States on promises of work visas that were only infrequently met.
With no secure documentation, Trump’s firm exploited these models, whose wages were eaten up by the exorbitant fees they had to pay for rent and other amenities. The conditions in the barrack-like residences the models lived in were the opposite of chic.
[...]
Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”
All of this shows an incredible ignorance of American values and even basic human decency. The only impetus here is for greed, for narrowing our immigration, and away from the concerns of reunifying separated families (whether they are legal immigrants or not). Trump and his ilk want to steer away from concerns about human rights and the need to offer a safe haven for those attempting to escape the horror, death, and tragedy of gangs in Central America; ISIS in Syria; or famine due to the war in Yemen (which could lead to new Holocaust that could kill millions). He instead wants to focus on importing useful, disposable workers and employees that you can then treat like virtual slaves and chattel until they displease, annoy, or dare to defy the company line. At that point they can have their company-dependent H2-B visa cancelled, or simply be deported for being undocumented—and then another chattel wage slave can be brought in to replace them.
This is why while Trump has been railing about “immigrants” and the need for a wall, he’s actually increased the limit of corporate H2-B visas and his Mar-A-Lago club applied for even more of these workers, most of whom come from that “shit-hole” country, Haiti.
Trump thinks World War Z is a documentary. In the continuous film loop in his head, he’s playing Brad Pitt, the intrepid hero protecting the silken and deserving few from the surging zombie horde of the inferior, diseased, and infected.
These people pretty much think this horror/fantasy is real. They would love to get their point across by having a violent Kent State moment at the border.
The “they bring crime” excuse is bunk. The terrorism excuse is bunk. The disease argument is bunk. The “they bring drugs” justification is bunk, the “merit” argument is bunk, and the “they should come in the right way” line is a crock. There is no “right way” to immigrate to the U.S. for a work visa legally without a pre-arranged corporate sponsor; you can’t do it on your own. If you have family or can afford to come for school or a vacation, then maybe, but if you’re poor or working-class and don’t have any connections, you’re screwed. It’s all bullshit. All of it.
I do believe that these people would permanently and totally close the border to all persons seeking humanitarian relief and even to all people looking to find economic salvation or to bring their families back together. They don’t care about what’s best for those people: they only care about what’s best for themselves. They only care about how they can make use of these people for their own enrichment, and if they have no way to make use of them, then they are considered worthless. Claiming that they are diseased, criminal, or are terrorist drug dealers that are dumb as dogs is just an after-the-fact rationalization based on moral cowardice, greed, and avarice.
Yes, there’s racism behind this, but it’s also about partisan political power. Their real enemy isn’t just minorities or immigrants, that’s only a means to an end. It’s Democrats and liberals that they truly hate. We constantly hear the argument that “Democrats want open borders and they don't mind crime,” despite the fact that there are no elected or even un-elected Democrats who are running around with an “Open Borders Now” button, bumper sticker, or misspelled sign. That’s NOT a thing. It doesn’t exist. Republicans truly believe that Democrats oppose their efforts to seal—not just secure, but SEAL—the border because they think that once we grant all the illegal immigrants “amnesty,” we’ll have an overwhelming electoral majority that will banish them to the political hinterlands.
That’s what they’re fighting so hard to preserve: their political power and their social power. Their ability to stay in control and dictate to everyone else how things are going to be is of paramount importance.
This “open borders” argument betrays their true terror, their true cowardice, and their true intentions, which are to freeze the nation demographically so the already-in-progress changes of growing minority/Democratic participation and engagement will not be able to dilute the power of the right-wing/white-wing vote. It’s not just racial: it’s partisan and it’s selfish. They’re willing to engage in illegal gerrymandering schemes to gain more electoral power than they demographically deserve, as they have in Wisconsin and Michigan. They’re willing to use illegal voter suppression and purging to block minorities (ie: Democrats) from the polls as they have in Georgia and Kansas. They have no qualms about using voter caging against our vets overseas, they’re willing to use ballot harvesting to steal elections in North Carolina, and then they say that Democrats are the ones who support “illegality?” Democrats are the ones who violate the rule of law?
Bullshit.
Democrats don’t support comprehensive immigration reform (including reasonable border security) just to gain some kind of electoral advantage. We support it because it’s just, it’s right, it’s moral, it's kind, and it’s humane for everyone involved. Not just for us, for everyone. Republicans really don't care about what’s moral or what’s just: they only care about themselves, and their ability to increase their profit from the labor of others.
The so-called “merit-based” immigration that Trump seeks to implement is one based on the “merit” of being able to make corporate barons more money while our southern border is blocked by a new Iron Curtain/Berlin Wall of doom. It’s designed to keep the poor, the desperate, the dying, and the destitute due to gang/drug violence and government corruption trapped in that situation permanently on the other side, away from them. It’s designed to turn America into an armed camp, a highly policed gated community that keeps the undesirable shit-hole people out and marginalized, while the privileged on this side of the Iron Wall remain pampered, cowering, and protected.
Hopefully, Trump will never fully implement this plan. And hopefully, Democrats won’t help him—not even a little bit.
Sunday, Dec 16, 2018 · 8:12:20 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
At the time that I put together the first draft of this on Wednesday-Thursday for editing was before the tragedy of 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin from Guatemala who died in CBP custody after she and her father surrendered themselves for aslyum in New Mexico.
Initially Homeland Security Sec. Cruella de-Nielsen blamed the father for taking his daughter on this trip saying that ”This is just a very sad example of the dangers of this journey” after there were reports that Maquin had suffered from dehydration and exhaustion without recognizing the irony that the reason such a journey is so dangerous is precisely because there’s a 113 Mile Wall from El Paso into the New Mexico desert that asylum seekers now have to circumnavigate since the normal and legal points of entry have been closed to them for months. If they could just go to the El Paso point of entry and be processed or asylum right there, none of this would be happening, but they can’t — not anymore.
And we know the CBP really truly cares about the health and safety of migrants because this:
Yes, this trip is dangerous, in fact estimates are the last year 412 migrants died during this perilous trip, 91 of them drowned while trying to swim the Rio Grande and at least 46 of them died of dehydration and exposure in the desert. Seven of those who died last year were children. Migrants are aware of this and have to weigh these risks against the fact that Guatemala happens to be one of the most dangerous places on the planet.
Rates of crime in Guatemala are very high. An average of 101 murders per week were reported in 2016, making the country's violent crime rate one of the highest in Latin America.[1] In the 1990s Guatemala had four cities feature in Latin America's top ten cities by murder rate: Escuintla (165 per 100,000), Izabal (127), Santa Rosa Cuilapa (111) and Guatemala City (101).[2] According to New Yorker magazine, in 2009, fewer civilians were reported killed in the war zone of Iraq than were shot, stabbed, or beaten to death in Guatemala, and 97% of homicides "remain unsolved."[3] Much of the violent nature of Guatemalan society stems back to a thirty-year-long civil war[citation needed]. However, not only has violence maintained its presence in the post-war context of the country following the Guatemalan Civil War, but it has extended to broader social and economic forms of violence.[4]
For comparison the Murder rate in Chicago in 2015 was rated at 18.6 per 100,000 people, after descending from a peak of 34.5 per 100k in 1992. So we have people coming from cities that are 8-9 times more dangerous than Chicago who are supposed to be deterred because they’re afraid of a wall or a trip through the desert? I don’t think that’s going to do it.
Further reports however have been that the Father and family dispute that claim that Maquin hadn’t been fed or had water, that they had crossed the desert on foot having traveled mostly by bus where they were ultimately dropped off with only a 90 min walk to the border, or that her condition was a result of the trip as it appears she was actually suffering from brain swelling and liver failure. The father also says that CBP did a good job of trying to get his daughter to medical care and the hospital revived her several times after her heart stopped. The only thing that impeded care was the fact that it took time to transport them from 95 miles away to the Border Patrol station, which again was because they were circumventing the wall that Trump wants to extend even further.
More wall means one clear thing: more deaths in the desert.