Borders Ain’t Just a Book Store No Mo’

 

We are a nation of immigrants. Even our indigenous people are traceable to a land bridge across the Bering Strait, long, long before White Europeans arrived. These invaders from across the Atlantic implemented practices somewhere between super-modernization and selfish exploitation; they made a human and environmental mess of much of the North American continent. While wiping out most of those indigenous people. It became an American tradition to ignore the landholdings of the local people, as if they didn’t exist, easily carving up their territory to be parsed out to the Europeans who wanted it. Traditionally, we always seemed to be okay with white Christian immigrants, but when it came to other racial groups, they mostly got here by force as slaves or as quasi-slaves like the Chinese workers on our building our nascent railroads.

We usually purchased or conquered land. The Louisiana Purchase benefited from a slave revolt in French-held Haiti. Napoleon had expected to use those slaves to turn that massive territory into a productive supply of agricultural and mined products… and when the revolt crushed those hopes, since he needed money to fund his European war, the US was ready with a modest checkbook. As the above map illustrates (plus Alaska which we bought from Russia), we expanded partially by buying land, much by war and conquest and some by voluntary annexation.

Our land was viewed as wide open, when you ignored the Native Americans, and our borders were unguarded in the early days… closing slowly with ethnic bans (e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882), rising slowly to a move towards tightly controlled immigration law and border controls in the 20th century. Farmworkers squeezed in, and under the Ronald Reagan era Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, many of those “undocumented” workers were given a road to US citizenship. It was also our last major immigration reform act as Republicans soon adopted a highly restrictive view of who is qualified to enter the US going forward, embracing policies quite contrary to international law (under treaties to which we were signatories). Democrats wanted a more humanitarian approach; Republicans wanted a much more restrictive practice, even rejecting immigration reform proposed by their own George W. Bush.

Anti-immigrant mythology, focused on those from south of the border, exploded in the Trump era. Exemplified by Donald Trump’s “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people” (June 16, 2015) speech, a mantra that has continued ever since, including his most recent (December 16th) “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” campaign statement. Severely controlling our southern border has become MAGA doctrine, now increasingly embraced by a majority of those polled. The kind of Reagan-era major immigration reform, obviously needed, has no chance of being passed by a highly polarized Congress. Republicans and an increasing number of Americans won’t have it.

Even though much of the problem stems from ultra-violence in Latin American countries, well-armed by American guns, well-funded by American demand for narcotics plus a big dose of agricultural damage due to climate change generated heavily by American industrialization, Americans still blame those fleeing regional disasters. Looking at simple metrics, the number of undocumented aliens is declining, a fact that seems to have fallen between the cracks. The surge at the border, however, paints a different picture. Mixed messages from US factions have led many hopefuls south of the border to try and enter the US, many embarking on perilous journeys. Their welcome in Texas suggested pure animosity as floating barbed wire barriers lined the Rio Grande.

Democrats, particularly Progressives, prefer a more humanitarian approach, a message once echoed by President Biden during his campaign. But that is not how the political winds are blowing as pointed out by David Leonhardt in the December 18th news feed, The Morning, from the New York Times: “To many Republican politicians — and most voters, polls suggest — the porous southern border is an urgent problem. Since President Biden took office, the number of people apprehended at the border (a proxy for flows of illegal immigration) has risen more than fourfold compared with the average level in the 2010s. The data suggest that thousands of people are entering the country illegally each day. This surge has created chaos in parts of southern Texas and Arizona and has strained resources as far away as Chicago, Denver and New York…

“Today, migrants who manage to set foot on U.S. soil can often claim asylum. Some genuinely qualify because they have a credible fear of repression in their home countries. Many others do not qualify, but they have learned that claiming asylum allows them to remain in the U.S. for months, if not years, while their case is heard.

“Congressional Republicans favor several measures to change this system. One would temporarily shut the border — allowing almost no new asylum claims — if migration flows were to rise above a certain level. Another measure would make it easier for U.S. officials to detain and deport migrants who did not have credible asylum claims. A third would require migrants to have first applied for asylum in countries through which they traveled, like Mexico.

“Critics of these ideas have used extreme language to describe them — words like drastic, seismic and severe. But [Doris] Meissner, the former [Clinton era] immigration commissioner, told me that she thought the concerns about the migration surge were ‘fair’ and ‘legitimate.’ The recent rise in undocumented migration has also been drastic, after all… ‘The deeper issue here is our immigration laws have not been updated in 30 years,’ Meissner said. The ideal solution, she and many other experts believe, would combine stronger border enforcement, more resources to decide cases quickly and clear new ways for people to apply for legal immigration.

“Of course, experts have been making the same arguments for years, without Congress acting. The two political parties remain too far apart on the issue to pass any comprehensive bill. But Biden’s push for Ukraine aid — combined with the Republicans’ focus on reducing illegal immigration — could lead to a narrower bill in coming weeks that tightens the border.”

There is hypocrisy in our policies. Our very, very lax gun laws have armed the cartels, but that fact is never mentioned in any realistic debate. Or that our drug habits fuel the cartels. All we ever get from these efforts is a patchwork of immigration initiatives is can-kicking, band aid solutions, and red states making false promises to undocumented asylum seekers as they load them into busses and planes to be shipped to blue states. And lots of blame and false narratives about human beings just trying to survive. Will Congress even be able to pass another band aid to get other bills passed?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is clear that none of the current immigration initiatives will work or are consistent with our American values; what we need is comprehensive immigration reform, the impossible dream but necessary solution.