Not "Border Crisis" — Cruel, Needless Tragedy

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

11 June 21

 

UCSON – A migrant I just visited has finally found a permanent home across the border behind a minuscule door labeled “Arizona.” Gaily painted with cactus in bloom, it opens to a small box of unidentified ashes in a scruffy remote corner of Evergreen Cemetery.

Odds are 89 percent that he, or she, was Mexican. If not, almost surely from farther south in Central America. The notion that terrorists from distant lands brave a hostile desert frontier is one of the fallacies that distort a callous, politically manipulated immigration debate.

The remains of “John Doe” – really Juan or Juanita Doe – are in a columbarium, a cluster of urns set among pauper’s graves a short walk away from where Martin and Mary Rosenblum are buried in a greener part of Evergreen. Their stories are essentially similar.

My parents’ families fled persecution and poverty, one from what is now Belarus and the other from Ukraine. They sold everything to lead terrified children on perilous voyages. In an earlier time, both of their stories had happy endings.

Greg Hess, Pima County medical examiner, knows the overall numbers. But he sees each casualty as an individual, likely with a spouse and probably kids, loved ones desperate for news – or closure. His sleuths spend up to a decade trying to link human remains to families.

“We deal in people, not politics,” he told me at his compound in Tucson’s industrial zone. The “fully fleshed,” he said, usually can be identified. But decomposition is quick in the heat, with circling buzzards and scavenging animals. His team keeps trying, year after year, to find DNA matches or a relative to provide a name.

In one room, plastic sleeves hold migrants’ last possessions: love letters, photos, rosaries, phone numbers scrawled on bits of paper and tattered wads of pesos that would barely buy a decent meal. In another, he has skeletons in the closet, more than 100, each labeled with the place and time they were found.

Across the world, people who fear for their lives or can’t feed their families spend their last savings in desperate flight. America’s “border crisis” is a small part of an inexorable human tide. Because of conflict, despotic regimes and climate collapse, it is rising by the year.

The U.N. International Office of Migration tallied 272 million international migrants in 2020, nearly double the 2010 total, and the trend is rising. Some of them emigrate legally into safer, wealthier countries. Many do not.

Intelligence analysts see a grave threat to global security. Bitter young migrants with no other options are a boon to criminal gangs, terrorist groups and stateless guerrilla armies. Humanitarians see selfish societies slamming the doors on people they could easily help.

Families might wait years in sprawling, squalid camps. Others set out on their own, making their way across the Sahara. Human waves wash up on Mediterranean shores from Gibraltar to Greece. War refugees come east toward Europe, facing hostile resistance in Turkey.

But in the United States, “crisis” is only a logistical problem that a rich nation can resolve. It could easily live up to its Geneva Convention commitments with more screeners and judges to process cases quickly, keeping families together in decent conditions for brief periods.

Definitions are crucial. Migrants simply seeking a better life need a visa, which can take decades, if not a lifetime, unless they have a sponsor. Asylum seekers, far less numerous, may be allowed in. Most work hard to make new lives, raise families and enrich the society.

Every country needs to control its borders. If migrants cannot make a convincing case for asylum and do not qualify for a visa, they must be safely deported. But America has plenty of room and stable population growth.

Germany, with seven times the U.S. population density, took in a million refugees in 2015, mostly from conflicts it opposed. Studies show its economy is far better for it. America, after triggering so much upheaval, accepted only 65,000. Trump then capped the limit at 18,000.

As so often happens, Americans form ironclad opinions without regard to history or human realities. Donald Trump’s baseless ethnic slanders – Mexicans are killers and rapists; Muslims are terrorists bent on jihad – are likely why he conned his way into the White House.

The Republican narrative is absurd. Criminals and terrorists find easier ways in. Most hide in trucks or trains at ports of entry. Some fly over or tunnel under. When dark, calm nights confound aerial surveillance, some jet-ski across from Tijuana. Others just falsify documents.

A few migrants manage to slip past surveillance worthy of the Berlin Wall, secreting themselves in our midst to work hard and avoid running afoul of the law. Most are detained on arrival and face America’s idea of justice. The rest die slowly from exposure.

During the Trump years, anti-migrant sentiments hardened. Germany’s growing right wing campaigns against new arrivals. Opposition is strong among its 26 European Union partners. Italy bears the brunt of illegal immigration, but its welcome mat has long been worn thin.

Castel Volturno, the once classy seaside Roman Empire resort near Naples, is overrun with illegal migrants struggling to survive as shopkeepers and street vendors, but also as prostitutes and drug dealers. Nigerian gangs fight bloody turf wars against local mafias.

At a Catholic mission I met a Ghanaian volunteer who crossed from Libya in a leaky boat, evading Italian patrols. Borders are arbitrary lines on a map, he told me, and governments should not prevent people from moving freely.

“We were all born in the same world,” he told me. “No one has a right to stop me from going where I want to go.” National laws say different, he acknowledged, but he knows committed people will always find a way, whether they seek a better life or simple survival.

The only sustainable solution, most immigration specialists say, is to help people stay at home, with the possibility of working for short periods in wealthy countries in need of labor.

I grew up along the border south of Tucson when much of it was marked by a few strands of floppy barbed wire. It was porous in both directions. Mexicans needing money crossed over, picked cantaloupes or hauled bricks, and then went home to their families.

Until the 1960s, the Bracero program helped Mexicans and Americans both. Farmworkers moved back and forth with the seasons to harvest crops. They paid taxes on wages they took home, where most would rather be, until they were needed again.

Push is a far greater problem than pull. Despite common belief, “they” don’t want to be like us. In Mexico and everywhere else I cover migrant flows, I find most people would rather stay in their own cultures, among families and friends. They leave when there is no choice.

At an immigration rally years ago, a kindly Mexican woman asked me, “You think I want to clean your toilets for $5 an hour?” She had sneaked across decades earlier, acquired papers to stay, and put two daughters through school, a lawyer and a doctor.

Today, push is a massive shove in much of Central America. As climate patterns collapse, alternate drought and storms devastate fields. And more, U.S. foreign policy has fortified thuggish leaders since the Reagan ‘80s. The Contras – “freedom fighters” – grew rich feeding America’s drug habit. In brutalized societies, gangs and corrupt police kill at will.

In response to the wave of refugees forced to flee northward, Trump slashed aid to Central America as punishment. That made a desperate problem worse, pushing yet more to leave home and wait in perilous limbo on the Mexico side of the U.S. border. Those who managed to cross were separated from young children in a heartless effort to discourage others.

Joe Biden now faces a fresh influx from migrants who see hope in his humane approach. Yet Republicans rile up their base by excoriating Kamala Harris for not visiting the shambles they left behind. Like runaway Covid-19, the “crisis” is somehow Biden’s fault.

In fact, Harris is doing what she should. Biden’s long-range approach is to increase aid to Central America, and his tough-minded vice president is tasked with obliging – in private – military leaders and corrupt law enforcement agencies to use it as it is intended.

Whether that works depends on 2022. If Democrats lose their razor-thin edge in Congress, Biden has little leverage on authoritarians who expect no carrot to accompany a stick. It also depends on how well aid can be designed to reach the people who need it most.

Money alone is no answer. Since 2017, the European Union has paid well over $100 million to Libyan warlords, some linked to slavers, to turn back frail craft. In one authenticated video, crewmen stopped the German mercy ship Sea-Watch from rescuing victims off a crowded boat they capsized. The Italian coast guard kept electronic watch from a distance.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi has softened his predecessor’s tough stand on migrants only a bit. Patrols still attempt to deflect landings. Nonetheless, 3,000 people in small boats made it to Lampedusa island this year by late May. The Sea-Watch remains impounded in Sicily.

On June 7, a front-page New York Times piece from Guatemala said Biden’s increased aid was not working, as if entrenched dysfunction could be reversed in a few months. And the first paragraphs made clear why so much “development aid” has failed in the past.

American contractors showed coffee farmers a new app that lets them check international prices “to be part of a modern agriculture.” One grower asked if there was a phone number so they could call the Americans “and tell them what our needs really are.”

This reflects a challenge equal to that of curbing migration. Past foreign development aid has gone largely to pay American experts to apply solutions not suited to local situations. Large schemes tend to end up feeding corrupt officials’ bank accounts.

Effective help for people who need it – coupled with quiet but muscular diplomacy to protect them from police and criminal gangs – would likely take years to make a significant impact. Yet another reason why the next presidential election is so crucial.

In the meantime, migrants and asylum seekers will keep coming. If we don’t deal with them as luckless fellow humans in dire straits, and appropriate funds to process them quickly, medical examiners like Greg Hess will need much more space to bury our shame.

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Joe Manchin Retreats to Fantasyland and Sticks America With the Consequences

By Eugene Robinson, The Washington Post

11 June 21

 

en. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) has the right to live in a make-believe wonderland if he so chooses. But his party and his nation will pay a terrible price for his hallucinations about the nature of today’s Republican Party. And even this sacrifice might not guarantee that Manchin can hold on to support back home.

Manchin’s declaration Sunday that he will vote against sweeping legislation to guarantee voting rights nationwide and that he “will not vote to weaken or eliminate” the Senate filibuster is a huge blow to President Biden’s hopes of enacting his ambitious agenda. There’s no way to spin this as anything other than awful.

Manchin’s decision is a catastrophe not just for this particular bill, though he has almost certainly doomed the legislation. A senior administration official told me Monday that “none of this is a surprise to those who have heard Manchin’s views” and that the White House will continue working to “make progress notwithstanding the difficult challenges in front of us, including a 50-vote Senate.” But thanks to Manchin’s decision, Biden doesn’t even have a 50-vote Senate for what many Democrats see as an existential fight against the GOP’s attempt to gain and keep power through voter suppression. The 49 Senate votes left after Manchin’s defection will take Biden and the Democrats precisely nowhere.

Worse, Manchin is asking Democrats to respond to ruthlessness with delusion. In an op-ed in the West Virginia paper the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said he will oppose the For the People Act, passed by the House in March, because it has no Republican support. “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy,” he wrote.

Manchin did say he supports another proposed House bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would essentially restore provisions of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act forbidding some states to change election laws without obtaining preclearance from the Justice Department. The original preclearance rules were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.

But Manchin wants this, too, to win bipartisan support. Unless Manchin changes his position on the filibuster, 10 Republican senators would have to cross the aisle and join with Democrats. So far, there is one — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). The other nine must be in some parallel dimension, visible only to Manchin, where all the leprechauns, tooth fairies and unicorns are hiding.

Inconveniently for Manchin’s fantasies of unity, the fact is that one of our major parties — the one Manchin ostensibly belongs to — believes in guaranteeing access to the polls for all eligible voters, making political donations more transparent, tightening ethics rules for members of Congress and ensuring that congressional districts are drawn fairly. The other party doesn’t want to do any of those things, because Republicans see these reforms as threatening the GOP’s ability to win national elections with the support of a minority of voters.

Trump’s incoherent policies so robbed the GOP of any consistent philosophy that last year’s national convention did not even attempt to produce a party platform. Republicans have replaced ideological litmus tests with pledges of loyalty to the former president. Opposing efforts to expand and guarantee voting rights appears to be the one policy idea they can all agree on.

Look, I understand the reality of Manchin’s situation. He is himself a political unicorn — a Democrat sent to the Senate by one of the most Republican states in the country. But insisting on bipartisanship in all things might not be a magical talisman against defeat.

A new survey of 600 likely 2022 general election voters from West Virginia commissioned by End Citizens United, a Democratic group advocating for passage of the For the People Act, and conducted by the polling firm ALG Research shows that Manchin is viewed favorably by 43 percent of voters and unfavorably by 50 percent. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.)

One poll question suggests a contradiction that implies the limits of Manchin’s dedication to defying political gravity, both at home and in Washington. The self-identified non-conservative Democrats who provide Manchin’s strongest base of support, with 59 percent viewing him favorably, are also the most skeptical of the filibuster Manchin has pledged himself to protect. Twenty percent of them say the filibuster should be eliminated, and another 45 percent say it should be reformed. Forty-three percent of West Virginians overall say the filibuster should remain unchanged.

That is just one poll, and Manchin’s history of winning suggests he knows his state. But even Manchin has to hold on to his strongest supporters. Blocking Biden’s agenda and allowing GOP voter suppression are not stances that will help him win his next election or change Washington’s increasingly twisted laws of politics. In this fairy tale, Manchin is setting himself up to be the villain.