The current issues surrounding the influx of refugees over the Mexican-U.S. border have been decades in the making. It doesn’t matter whether it was a Democratic or Republican administration, American policies and initiatives have created the past and current issues surrounding refugees and so-called illegals, particularly from Central American countries. Anyone who would like to examine an excellent historical accounting of these policies should read a 2024 book by Jonathan Blitzer entitled: “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here (The United States, Central America, and The Making of a Crisis)”. Mr. Blitzer is a well known staff writer at The New Yorker. He describes not only past U.S. policies supporting autocrats and military regimes in countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, but he also relates stories which put a face on several migrants.
He noted as follows: “From the 1980s to the early 2000s, the story of the southern border was about the United States and Mexico. At the time, migrants entering the US tended to be single Mexican men looking for work. But around 2014, a different population started to arrive on a scale Americans had never before seen. These were children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — traveling north to seek asylum. In just about every respect, the US was unprepared for this shift.”
Notably, each of the last three American presidents have had to deal with a major humanitarian emergency at the border, while also deepening involvement in two major civil wars in Central America, often in the name of fighting communism as alluded to by President Ronald Reagan back in the early 1980s. While rebels in these countries were fighting for people against authoritarian regimes, social injustice and military atrocities, the U.S. was backing those same regimes through military aid and covert operations carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Government led violence and massacres became common place, forcing many families and individuals to flee these countries.
Today, one can add Venezuela to the list as the most recent migrants are from that single country. Many Venezuelans had expected to join large existing communities of their compatriots in places such as Florida and Texas. How did the governors of some states react to this latest influx? They simply began a program of busing or flying recent migrants to cities such as New York, Washington, Chicago and Philadelphia. Interestingly, the destinations were cities run by Democrats who supported the Biden administration’s more open immigration policy. Soon, some neighbourhoods in those cities started looking like Texas border towns.
As reported recently by The New York Times, in two years Texas alone bused more than 119,000 people to Democrat-led cities, shifting both migration patterns and the debate over immigration. The list of targeted cities apparently just keeps expanding. As noted, Texas governor Greg Abbott took what otherwise might have been the slow diffusion of migrants from the border to cities and towns across the U.S., and directed it at just a few places. The White House called it a “political stunt.” Such expensive state policies of course do nothing to address the real issues as to why people are fleeing these countries in the first place. The U.S. has to better address the realities of violence, poverty, cartels and the drug trade, and the inability of Mexico itself to deal with the migrant problem, both economically and politically. The detrimental impact of climate change will only add to the nature of agricultural and industrial decline in that part of the Third World.
What is most disconcerting is that under former President Trump, parents and their children were deliberately split up. Unfortunately, hundreds of parents who eventually were deported did not even know what had happened to their children in the U.S. Such separation was inexcusable and inhumane. Let’s hope that another potential Trump presidency would not introduce such a policy in the name of creating some kind of uncertain deterrence factor.
