The U.S. Southern Border: A Crisis Democrats Dare Not Acknowledge

President Trump  is driven by frustration at the crisis on our southern border. As a last gasp endeavor, he threatened Mexico with high and accelerating import tariffs. Should Mexico not help stop the flow of illegal aliens from Central America, Trump was ready to shut off trade with that country. The Mexicans quickly caved.

Nevertheless, Trump has failed to motivate Congress to solve the problem. He would like to see a mixture of changes in immigration law and the building of barriers. However, both means for decreasing illegal entry require congressional approval. This approval is something Democrats have sworn to deny. In fact, the crisis on our southern border is truly a crisis they dare not acknowledge.

Is There Actually A Crisis?

For a very long time  Democratic politicians have denied there was any crisis. In support of their claim, they would point to data as shown in the plot below. This data showed a rising number of illegal immigrants reaching a peak in 2008, and then slightly declining.

The estimated illegal population of 10.7 million in 2016 represents about 3.3 percent of the total U.S. population. However, this figure is hotly disputed. A Yale University study showed great uncertainty in the actual numbers. The curve showing the time evolution of the illegal immigrant population varied with different assumptions about a population that wanted to stay undetected. These assumptions involved the actual numbers of inflows and outflows. Using computer modeling and the different assumptions, the Yale study generated the possible curves shown below.

The largest estimate in 2016 at about 37 million represents about 11.3 percent of the total population; while the average at 22 million is around 6.7 percent of U.S. population. The blue curve comes from data extrapolated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. This is the source used by Pew Research in their own methodology to generate a similar curve.

There are two major conclusions from this family of curves. The first is they all display the same general shape. They all show the number of illegals grew rapidly during the 1990s and early 2000s to saturate around 2008 and then remained roughly constant until 2016. The second conclusion is all the curves are significantly above the most widely referenced blue curve. Those who say there is no crisis grossly underestimate the number of illegals.

Below is a Yale School of Management video in which the study’s authors explain how they came to their results.

Youtube / Yale School of Management

But then the flow of Central American immigrants began to swell enormously sometime during Trump’s administration, probably in 2018. The probable cause for this growing flood is the increasingly dysfunctional nature of those countries’ governments. The so-called Latin American “pink tide” that began in the 1990s now shows many signs of receding. However, its results leave a great many dysfunctional regimes. The Venezuela of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro  is merely its most extreme example. The nations of Central America — particularly Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador — have also joined the descent into poverty, violence, and chaos. Desperate to escape a hell on Earth, the populations of those countries are forming caravans to leave for the United States. The following CBS News video is a sobering look at those caravans.

Youtube / CBS Evening News

The scale of these caravans is astounding. In both March and April of this year, more than 100,000 people were apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol. If this were to continue for a year there would be more than 1.2 million refugees from Central America alone. What would happen if people from other failing states, say Venezuela, decided to join the flight to the U.S.? The situation could quickly become much worse. The size of the Border Patrol’s problem is growing worse to the degree that the U.S. Border Patrol Chief, Carla Provost, has testified they might totally lose control of the border. They are being inundated by the flood of immigrants.

Sanctuary cities, counties, and states had better be careful of what they wish for. By obstructing immigration enforcement, they would prove to be magnets for the coming flood of illegals.

Already homelessness is a growing problem in sanctuary cities and counties like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego County, and Seattle. To be sure, much of this problem has been due to government policies that make housing increasingly costly. That condition combines with a lack of good paying jobs for people with low skills and with increasing drug addiction to drive people into the streets. Notably, most immigrants from Central America are individuals with limited skills who can not even speak English. Not surprisingly, many of them end up homeless.

Homelessness is only one problem exacerbated by the increasing flood of immigrants. The fiscal burden on all levels of government naturally rises as well because of new demands for law enforcement, education, social services, and other government services. In addition, drug cartels engaging in human trafficking and drug smuggling using immigrants are well documented. To recognize these facts does not mean a person is a racist. It is merely a recognition of reality.

What Can Stem The Flow?

What can stop  this catastrophe at our southern border? Trump says a wall at the border is an essential tool. His Democratic critics say this is a medieval solution easily circumvented, say by digging a tunnel underneath it. Yet there are a large number of walls that demonstrate exactly the opposite. Walls would work particularly well when augmented with sensor technology to detect circumvention attempts. Such devices would include simple cameras and drones to show anyone approaching, and seismic devices to detect tunneling.

Equally effective would be changes to immigration law to remove incentives for illegal immigration. One problem is the family-based immigration policy, aka “chain migration”. Under this policy, U.S. citizens and individuals with green cards (lawful permanent residents) can sponsor foreign relatives for green cards, no matter what their merit. Once one family member gets in, that person can initiate a chain, ultimately bringing in almost any other family member,

Another, rather small problem is presented by the so-called Diversity Visa Program, aka the visa lottery. This program allots 50,000 visas every year to nationals of countries deemed underrepresented by other immigrants. They are picked from applicants by lottery. The winners in this lottery then receive green cards.

However, in terms of the Central American flood, the most important difficulty is presented by the broken U.S. asylum law. The migrants arriving from Central America are increasingly being coached by the cartels transporting  them, or by family and friends, to immediately claim asylum when they are apprehended. During the Obama years, arrested illegals were initially given court dates to appear for a hearing on asylum. However, Brandon Judd, president of the Border Patrol union, testified to Congress the Department of Homeland Security had been embarrassed by the low number of migrants who actually showed for their hearings. DHS then ordered once illegals were apprehended they were to be immediately released without a formal arrest. This meant because they were not really arrested in the first place, they were not brought before an immigration court. After entering the general population, they had no need to appear before an immigration court again to prove they deserved asylum. They just blended into the population. This Obama policy was called pejoratively “catch and release”.

When President Trump took office, apprehended migrants were again arrested and given court dates for asylum status hearings. Later, in April of 2018, President Trump issued a memorandum directing his administration to end “catch and release”. Unfortunately for Trump (and for the country), two immutable realities forced him to bring back “catch and release”. The first is the federal government does not have the resources to detain arrested illegals for the time required to bring them before an immigration court. The second is a 1993 Supreme Court ruling called Flores v. Reno. This ruling said detained migrant children can not be held in government detention facilities for more than 20 days. The Trump administration thought they could get around this by removing migrant children from their families and placing them in foster status. This is what would happen to arrested American parents with children. However, a federal judge in California stymied Trump by ordering separated children must be reunited with their parents within 30 days, and in the future migrant parents and children must never again be separated. The final result was that in March 2019 the Trump administration capitulated and returned to “catch and release”.

There is a great deal of controversy over what fraction of migrants actually appear at their court hearings, and how many do not show and just blend into the population. However, on June 11, 2019, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan testified before a Senate committee that 90 percent of asylum-seekers recently have skipped their hearings.

It does not take a rocket scientist to find corrections for this dysfunctional immigration law. The diversity visa lottery might seem the least of the problems, given the small numbers allowed to immigrate under it. However, each green card holder admitted under it can be the root of a tree of new immigrants under chain migration. All these problems can be minimized by limiting family-based immigration to the nuclear family of the sponsoring green card holder, i.e. to spouses and children.

Dysfunctional asylum law presents a knottier problem, Given current law and court orders, any migrant accompanied by children he or she claims as theirs must be released after a maximum of 20 days of detention. The cartels organizing the migrant caravans make sure the immigrants know this. If the migrants have no children, the cartels make sure children are abundantly available. This poses an insuperable problem for the enforcement of immigration law. As noted above, illegals arriving with children have an absolute, although illegal, guarantee to enter the American population without hinderance. This is ensured by Flores v. Reno together with more recent court rulings. Clearly, any solution would require legislation enabling the government to detain migrant families until they have their asylum hearings.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has just introduced a new immigration bill designed to solve the asylum problem. The bill would do the following:

• Assign 500 federal judges to process the backlog of immigration cases.
• Authorize DHS to deport unaccompanied Central American children.
• Set up refugee processing centers in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
• Prohibit migrants from claiming asylum at the U.S. border. Central American petitions would be processed at the new processing centers in Mexico and Central America.
• Allow families apprehended in the U.S. to be held for 100 days, as opposed to the current 20 days.

Last month, President Trump introduced his own outline for immigration reform. At the heart of his proposal is a change in immigration priorities from a family-based system to a merit based one. Currently around 70 percent of immigrants come from the family-based system or from the diversity visa lottery. Only 12 percent are admitted based on the skills they bring. Trump would increase that percentage from 12 to 57 percent.

All of these proposals require legislative approval. Unfortunately, due to Democrat opposition, that approval appears highly unlikely. Nevertheless, occasionally Trump finds actions he can take to improve the situation by presidential fiat. This is illustrated by Trump’s latest success in getting Mexico to help out. If he can not get Congress to assist, he can put pressure on Mexico to do the job for us.

By allowing Central American caravans pass through Mexico to the U.S., Mexico was committing a hostile act against the United States. Therefore, Trump was justified morally, as well as legally through statutes, to threaten increasing and accelerating tariffs on Mexican exports to the U.S. Trump was justified legally by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in a matter of national security. On Friday June 7, 2019, Mexico caved and signed an agreement to assist in reducing illegal immigration. As a part of this assistance, Mexico will deploy 6,000 soldiers of its National Guard to its southern border to block Central American migrants. Any migrants who leak through to reach the U.S. border will be returned to Mexican custody.

The Mexican agreement might greatly assist in defusing the problem, but we can not depend upon it to totally eliminate the crisis. The Mexican drug cartels still have every incentive to smuggle immigrants through Mexico to cross the U.S, border at unprotected points. A technologically augmented border wall and reform of immigration law are still necessary.

What Democrats Are Willing To Do About It

Only in recent months  have Democratic politicians been willing to say the border crisis was more than a politically manufactured problem. The first crack in their armor was all the news videos showing the huge caravans crossing Mexico to the U.S. What finally demolished the canard of a “manufactured crisis” were two Obama administration officials declaring the crisis is all too real. The first is Obama’s DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, as shown in the video below.

YouTube / MSNBC

The second Obama era official recognizing the border crisis is former U.S. Border Patrol Chief Mark Morgan, as shown below.

YouTube / American Thought Leaders

Nevertheless, Democrats are willing to acknowledge only the human tragedy of the refugees. The national security and economic aspects are totally ignored. They are not willing to recognize the abuse of political asylum and the release of illegal aliens into the general population. The biggest crisis as far as they are concerned is the lack of amnesty for the illegal immigrants already here. Their solution for the immigration problem is a House bill called the American Dream and Promise Act of 2019. This bill would accomplish the following two goals:

• Grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who entered the United States as minors.
• Grant amnesty to aliens allowed to remain in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status because of political turmoil or natural disaster in their own countries.

Otherwise, Democrats are not willing to do anything to stem the flood of immigrants across our southern border. Why should this be? One immediately thinks of how Democrats are loath to give Trump, the man they love to hate, any credit or victory whatsoever. However, they have older motives as well. Their appeal is to identity politics, and one of the identity groups Democrats hope will give them power is Hispanic America. In impeding illegal immigrants from entering the country, Democrats fear we would be keeping out future Democratic Party voters.

It is cold comfort that the people who would be hurt the most by illegal immigration are the citizens of sanctuary cities, counties, and states.

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