The immigration wars are surging again, with mutual accusations of "soft on crime" and "racist" (and worse) being hurled by uncomprehending elites in conflict because of a shared commitment to fondling our economic private parts, which is the source of our immigration problems in the first place.
Democrats want our southern border to resemble a state-of-the-art day care center with a welcome mat out front. Republicans prefer it to look like a concentration camp. Immigrants don't care what it looks like, as long as it leads them to a life without the violence and poverty they are desperately fleeing.
The Wall Street Journal has disclosed that president-elect Donald Trump is elaborating plans to carry out mass deportations once he assumes office on January 20, 2025. Trump advisers are debating what executive actions need to be taken as well as how to finance the operation, which is anticipated to cost around $88 billion a year.
It is likely that Trump will revoke an order given by the Biden administration that ICE not pursue undocumented immigrants who have not committed other offenses, in order to concentrate first on those who have been issued final deportation orders by the courts, as well as those who have criminal charges or convictions against them.
Trump has promised to end the practice of letting foreigners who want to live and work in the United States arrange an appointment over the internet, without having to present themselves at the U.S. border, while also reviving immigration protocols from his first term like Stay In Mexico, which obliged asylum applicants to wait in Mexico for an official response to their application, a dangerous option due to high crime rates there.
Trump maintains that there is no alternative to mass deportation because wave after wave of murderers and drug traffickers are allegedly destroying the U.S. and other countries, too. Whatever it costs, he says, it must be done.
According to Trump adviser Jason Miller, the president-elect doesn't even need an act of Congress to go back to building his border wall and making the asylum process more difficult than it is right now.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the incoming Trump administration intends to eliminate the humanitarian protection against deporting millions of immigrants on TPS - "temporary provisional status" - which currently covers hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Venezuelans living in the country.
Representative Chip Roy, D-Texas, believes that Trump should ignore TPS protection because it was granted in an illegal way.
Trump argues that an aggressive deportation effort is needed in order to get the U.S. back on track after the arrival of what he claims are eight million illegal immigrants during the Biden years.
According to experts, restricting further the already limited ways of entering the U.S. legally will only make immigrants change their plans and rely even more on human-traffickers to get them into the U.S. Millions of real and potential migrants from desperately poor regions of the world will be those most affected, many of them already on the way to the U.S., having sold everything they owned to finance their voyage to fulfilling "the American Dream."
One fundamental contradiction plaguing the immigration situation is that migrants fleeing horrendous economic conditions are hoping to prove they qualify for asylum status in the U.S., which is generally reserved for those whose lives are in danger due to ethnic, racial, or religious persecution. In most cases, they are unable to do this, but the U.S. "catch and release" system allows them to remain in the country while U.S. immigration courts work their way through an immense backlog of similar cases in order to get to theirs. In fact, knowing that they are likely to lose in court, most do not even show up for their court dates, having already gotten what they came for - access to working in the U.S. economy.
Democrats tend to see immigration policy as a vast humanitarian relief program that just incidentally provides them with a wide range of cheap services (jobs Americans "just won't do" because they are vastly under-compensated), while Republicans regard it as a national security challenge - to repel a tsunami of human garbage from "shit-hole countries."
As the late economist Edward Herman pointed out years ago, Washington pursues what he called a "favorable investment climate" throughout what used to be known as the Third World in order to maintain high-repression governments presiding over low-wage economies, yielding an impressive flow of profits back to the U.S.. It is no coincidence that people flee this kind of exploitation by migrating to where the money is.
This is a problem that cannot be solved by police, soldiers, or turning the government into a welfare agency.
Source:
"Trump Opens The Way For Mass Deportation," La Jornada (Spanish), November 18, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment