Peel Back Some Big Lies to Understand the Border “Crisis”
There are NOT heathen hordes storming the US-Mexico border hellbent on laying waste to the economic, social, and political status of everyday Americans, contrary to what you may have heard on certain weekend talk shows.
It is true that people --human beings-- are at the southern border of the United States hoping to join families together, to live lives free of persecution, to escape the impacts of a changing climate making agricultural livelihood impossible.
Border walls and patrols don't address the current question, namely, what do you do with people legally requesting to stay in the country. They are asking for asylum, which the law says can only be done once you are on US soil.
The Trumpian solutions were to say “no,” be cruel as possible, and mischaracterize migrants as criminals who would flood the country with COVID-19.
Now Joe Biden is President, and a historical seasonal increase driven by serious natural disasters in 2020 along with a promise not to dump children into the desert, is being treated as a national emergency.
There are political and logistical problems needing to be addressed, some of which Congress already appropriated money to solve only to see it misspent by the same agencies now making a big fuss. If you’re going to start pointing fingers, don’t stop with the Biden administration. Don't forget that many of the loudest voices currently being heard have a history of creating or fomenting these problems.
From Gabe Ortiz at Daily Kos:
Republicans have no solutions but they have plenty to opine, and one of the most notorious officials from the previous administration was given a soapbox by The Washington Post this past weekend from which to finger-point at the Biden administration for deciding to follow the law by respecting the asylum rights of kids. “They should have been better prepared,” Chad Wolf, the unlawfully appointed former acting Department of Homeland Security secretary who used his office to campaign instead of focus on white supremacist terror threats, dared to say in the report.
The dangers posed by a theoretical influx of terrorists and a non-existent pandemic surge (migrants are tested for COVID-19) are small compared to the dangers posed using criminalization to justify bigotry.
The surge at the border has been taking place for nine months. There was a 690% increase in unaccompanied minors in Trump’s last year, according to CBP’s website.
Those blaming the increases in unaccompanied children in custody conveniently forget the new Mexican law against holding children and families in immigration detention, along with a policy of no longer taking back non-Mexicans.
Here’s a bit of truth to start out with: the border has the same amount of wall and fencing and same amount of border personnel as it did under Trump. It's not "wide open".
Title 42, an obscure, 77-year-old public health authority never before been used to regulate immigration, became the basis for almost all expulsions at the border starting last March.
The Trump administration held that it supersedes all other US laws, including statutes granting migrants the right to seek asylum; preventing them from being returned to countries where they would face threats, harm or torture; and protecting unaccompanied children vulnerable to being trafficked.
https://twitter.com/LisPower1/status/1373997973319909376?s=20
The Biden administration continues to use Title 42 as the basis for denying entry into the US. NOTHING has changed.
Title 42 expulsions account for the bulk of the increase in border encounters over the past 12 months. It’s a critical piece of left-out context. Yes, more people showed up at the border. And 9 out of 10 were sent back.
From the Los Angeles Times:
In reality, Title 42 is operating precisely as intended: For the first time under the modern U.S. immigration system, people who come to the border and say they fear persecution or torture in home countries are expelled, with no chance to make their case.
Applying for asylum — the most common form of relief from deportation — takes almost two and a half years on average, a rate that is fueling the current record backlog of 1.3 million cases in immigration courts. If an immigration judge grants applicants asylum, they can become legal permanent residents and eventually U.S. citizens, and can bring their families. But fewer than 40% of applicants are granted asylum.
Today, though, when a migrant is encountered at the border, whether at an official entry or not, a Border Patrol or CBP officer immediately decides whether the person will be processed under the CDC’s public health authority through Title 42, with no access to asylum, or under Title 8, the body of federal law dealing with immigration, which requires access to asylum.
A coterie of politicians unwilling to serve their constituents, evangelical dominionists, and authoritarians hoping to finish the Former Guy’s attempt at destroying democracy are hiding behind lies about what’s happening.
From a Politico article that attempts to view the situation at the border through the eyes of those actually experiencing it:
Like Reyes, thousands of parents, most of them hailing from Central America and Mexico, are making the trip north with their small children in hopes they’ll be welcomed by the Biden administration — and praying they won’t get kicked out like most migrants. But so far, their reception at the border is often contradictory and confusing. That’s partly because the U.S. government’s capacity to handle the influx of migrants is limited — and partly because Mexico isn’t always willing or able to receive them.
That means some families are allowed to stay, while others are forced to leave.
Here and in other Texas border towns, local officials and non-profit leaders aren’t interested in debating whether or not they’re facing a “crisis” at the border. To them, it’s not a crisis. Yet. They’re focused on the day-to-day challenges: getting the migrants released in the U.S. fed, clothed, tested for coronavirus — and moving to their final destination as quickly as possible.
Still, their efforts are overshadowed by the rhetoric coming out of Washington and Austin, where Republican leaders and lawmakers are calling what’s happening at the border a “crisis” and a “superspreader event,” blaming President Joe Biden for what they see as mishandled policy and messaging.
The political solutions needed in this situation are impossible to achieve until our Big Lies are met head on. It’s not the thousands of immigrants that we need to face, it’s what we’ve been led to believe.
Let’s start with the thorniest of Big Lies, namely the threat of violence.
(I’m fully aware that somebody somewhere will construe what’s being said here as an argument along the lines of “defund the police.” Screw that. I’m saying that guns and handcuffs first policies simply don’t work.)
San Diego and other southern border cities are among the safest in America according to FBI statistics. Not only are they safer than non-border cities of similar size, they’ve uniformly seen less violence over the past three decades even as alarmists have been claiming the U.S.-Mexico border is a "lawless" region.
Former Border Patrol agent --now turned immigration advocate-- Jenn Budd has brought to light (via much longer twitter thread) a master's thesis from former Supervisory Border Patrol agent Christopher Montoya addressing the question of violence at the border.
“The mythology surrounding the Border Patrol is itself a powerful trope producing the image of border warriors who daily do battle with the immoral, illegal, and corrupt actors in our world."
"Border Patrol agents are the victims in this border drama. They are the target of the threats in the Border Threat Narrative."
"I stand by my assessment that the Border Patrol, relative to comparable agencies, is one of the safest, if not the safest law enforcement job in the country."
***
The “crisis at the border” narrative is being driven by bigots. Decades of white supremacist lies about the border must be seen for what they truly are.
An interview at New America with Alina Das, law professor at New York University School of Law, co-director of the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, and author of No Justice In The Shadows: How America Criminalizes Immigrants is perhaps the best short and sweet encapsulation of this history. A quote to get you started:
The Constitution itself didn’t say much about immigration, but it did ask Congress to come up with a uniform rule of naturalization. When they did that in 1790, they specifically had Black people in mind and limited citizenship to free white persons. Even when it came to birthright citizenship, which was understood to be part of the foundations of the Constitution, Black people were not considered [eligible] to receive citizenship at birth. So from the beginning, race had everything to do with who belonged in the United States and was a significant driver of these concepts of citizenship and immigration—much more than this idea that being born somewhere else made you suspect.
https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1373632871022399489?s=20
Much of the “factual material” and ideological arguments against immigration comes via a network founded and funded by people whose opposition is based on eugenics – the practice of selective breeding with the aim of “race betterment,” a policy practiced by the Nazis.
The organized anti-immigration "movement” was almost entirely the handiwork of one man, Michigan activist John H. Tanton. The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a list of 13 groups in the loose-knit Tanton network. Chances are, when you see an “expert” quoted in the context of opposition immigration, you won’t have to look very hard to find ties to this network.
Brook Binkowski’s research on this topic, summarized here, is vital toward understand these connections.
The Trump administration drew heavily on the ideas promulgated by the Tanton groups. The administration took ideas from the group including recommendations to detain asylum seekers, undermining sanctuary city policies, cooperation between local law enforcement and ICE through 287(g) agreements, and increased workplace raids by ICE.
Former spokesperson Kellyanne Conway spent years conducting polling for these groups before becoming part of the Trump campaign and administration. Other former staff from Tanton groups involved with the Trump administration include Kris Kobach, Julie Kirchner, Ronald Mortensen, Robert Law, Jon Feere, John Zadrozny, and Ian M. Smith.
There will eventually be discussion before the Congress about immigration reform. Eliminating the "good vs bad" immigrant framings and peeling bad the lies upon which they are based is a necessary first step.
Hey folks! Be sure to like/follow Words & Deeds on Facebook. If you’d like to have each post emailed to you check out the simple subscription form on the right side of the front page.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com