Closing the U.S.-Mexico Border Won’t Make America Great Again, But Might Get Trump Re-elected
You have to admit the threat of closing the border is a fabulous launch for the Re-elect Trump in 2020 campaign. Fox News was so excited, they dumbed it down for viewers. Geography is for losers, after all.
Fear, loathing, lies--it's got everything needed to help keep the faithful energized and the country headed for authoritarian rule.
The administration’s choices are designed to exacerbate an already unstable situation at the border, starting with one big lie, namely the myth of the current number of migrants at the border.
There were more in the early 2000s, but that’s one of those pesky facts, like largest number of illegal migrants settling in the US each year are those who stay in the country after their visas expire.
It goes downhill from there. It’s deliberate. What the government is doing is making it worse.
Given that the President has accelerated the pace of to an averaging of 11.7 false or misleading claims per day, it’s safe to assume what’s going on at the border has something to with getting elected.
He’s even gone so far as to claim the country will be ‘making money’
"Mexico is going to have to do something, otherwise I'm closing the border. I'll just close the border. With the deficit like we have with Mexico and have had for many years, closing the border will be a profit-making operation."
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan have been tasked with making the rounds in Congress telling lies about refugees seeking US asylum at the Mexico border.
Customs and Border Patrol is overwhelmed, but I would argue it’s by design rather than circumstance.
The cruelty stemming from their practices is the point, one helping to dehumanize refugees and build support for policies designed by a bunch of White Nationalists in the White House.
During a Monday CNN panel, contributor Irin Carmon said that Trump’s plan to shut down the border was completely unrealistic and sounded more like something you’d see in a 4Chan thread than from a serious White House.
“This is what happens when you are governed by the base instincts of YouTube commentators,” she said. “This is, essentially, kind of engineering a racist fantasy land. Whether it comes to fruition or not, this is all about keeping President Trump’s base in a permanent state of furious arousal.”
Carmon then accused the administration of doing as much as it could to create a humanitarian crisis at the southern border by not giving aid to migrants who are trying to claim asylum in the United States. Doing this, she said, bolsters Trump’s case to his base that the United States is being “invaded.”
"The Trump administration's response to the multidimensional refugee and migration challenge posed by deteriorating conditions in Central America is one-dimensional," said Frank Sharry, the director of America's Voice. "No wonder their simplistic and futile strategy has failed so miserably."
A majority of apprehensions at the border now involve families turning themselves in to border patrol agents, asking for asylum. The policy forcing families to remain in dangerous circumstances in Mexico is causing them to cross the border between ports of entry.
Cartels involved in smuggling Central Americans are using the administration’s threats as a selling point: go now before things get worse at the border. Migrants are rushing in now — just like before the 2017 inaugural — in part because of the president’s menacing remarks.
The horrifying images of humans caged under freeway underpasses in El Paso, easily accessible not just to journalists but to everyday passersby — including some who, according to BuzzFeed, shout “Go back to your country!” or “You’re not welcomed!” from up above are not an accident.
Blocking legal asylum, threats to Mexico and cutting aid to other Latin American countries is a Trump-made crisis designed to please his base and intimidate legislators. He wants it to look bad (like separations) so Congress will act to indefinitely detention of families and deporting unaccompanied minors.
Here’s the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch, calling like it is:
Trump’s brand is crisis — a notion he cemented on Inauguration Day when he elected to speak not on hopes or dreams but on “American carnage.” His fevered rallies, where diatribes against the “invaders” (the same term that just animated a mass murderer in New Zealand) are met with chants of “Build the wall!," reinforce that. And nothing aids the president’s goal of portraying himself as a defender against invading hordes than images of large crowds of asylum seekers like the images we’re seeing right now out of El Paso.
The cruelty of American policy on the southern border feels intentional — the kind of thing that fires up Trump’s angry base, especially when the president is emboldened by his claim of exoneration in a Mueller report that America hasn’t seen. And it feeds a xenophobic synergy with his state-run media known as Fox News, which on Sunday showed its colors with a laughable-if-it-weren’t-so-racist chyron saying Trump is cutting aid to “three Mexican countries.”
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The President has threatened to completely close off the border as early as this week unless Mexico intervenes to stem the increasing numbers of Central Americans seeking asylum in the U.S.
Here’s what Trump said on Friday: “If they don’t stop them, we are closing the border. We’ll close it. And we’ll keep it closed for a long time. I’m not playing games.”
It’s an idle threat, for now. Border control officials have received no instructions to prepare for a shutdown, which would --in theory-- require time to notify Congress in addition to re-deploying personnel. Media reports say staffers at the White House and the Department of Homeland Security think it's a terrible and unworkable idea.
There is a consensus that ‘closing the border’ would mean shuttering some or all ports of entry. This would create shortages of goods and services, leading to almost immediate higher prices for consumers.
The temporary shutdown at San Ysidro last fall cost an estimated $5.3 million; a system-wide shutdown could cost more than $1 billion daily in lost trade, along with blocking the daily commute of workers on both sides of the border.
Twenty five states have Mexico as their #1 or #2 trading partner. There are 5 million U.S. jobs directly depending on trade with Mexico.
The threat of such economic disruption is exactly what the President has in mind. And there’s no way of predicting what the stable genius in the White House will do.
On Saturday, following tweets from the President, the State Department announced it’s ending support for programs in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Most of the half-billion plus in aid would have been directed to non-governmental agencies working to reduce high rates of poverty and violence in the region, the root causes of migration.
Adriana Beltrán, a director with the Washington Office on Latin America told Politico the cuts will worsen conditions in the countries — and potentially cause more people to trek to the U.S.
“It’s a shooting-yourself-in-the-foot policy.”
To nobody’s surprise, this presidential declaration caught the people charged with carrying it out flat-footed, per this snip from the Washington Post:
...the president’s decision to cut off the remaining funds appeared to take many people by surprise. It came just a day after Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen signed what the department called a “historic” memorandum of cooperation on border security in Central America.
One former U.S. official said there was “chaos” in the State Department and U.S. embassies as officials tried to figure out whether they had to cancel existing contracts or simply not renew them.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/1111085635069194240
Keep your eyes on the prize, folks.
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