The lynchpin of our border crisis is not a lack of border enforcement, but a lack of legal enforcement. It all boils down to the invasion under the guise of asylum backed by lawfare. But is there really anything wrong with the way the asylum laws are written, or is there something wrong with the brains of our political class applying a law to the exact opposite situation it was intended to address? In the case of the Central American invasion since 2014, it’s a lot more of the latter.
To begin, both our laws governing refugee status for unaccompanied children and asylum are designed to protect victims of trafficking and persecution, not those engaging in trafficking to fleece America or those simply reuniting with other illegal family members with no evidence of persecution at home. Asylum was not designed for anyone living in an impoverished and/or violent country. That would make two billion or so people eligible for legal status. It was designed for individuals persecuted by their government. For example, a case like Charlie Gard’s parents in Great Britain, in my opinion, or groups of persecuted ethnic or religious minorities victimized by the majority in a one-way persecution, not a civil war.
Say what you want about Central America, but it’s one of the most homogenous places in the world. There are no persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, and none of them are coming to America because they are being persecuted by the government for, say, supporting free market health care or gun rights. In other words, it’s inconceivable that any of them are persecuted based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” as required by law.
Illegal immigration is all about incentives, not persecution
To the extent that there are push factors driving the migration, it’s all economics. Of course people will come if we incentivize them to come here through amnesty. Hundreds of millions of people would come if we opened our doors. But the ebb and flow of Central American migration does not respond to push factors, much less factors associated with violence (which, again, is not grounds for asylum); it responds to pull factors of our politics in America.
The media has lied to us from day one. To begin with, 80 percent of the children who have crossed over the border since 2014 are not with parents but are unaccompanied. Only 20 percent come with parents. Either way, almost all of them have been resettled with family members who have successfully evaded the Border Patrol over the years and have settled in the country illegally. Why did this begin in 2014? Because of DACA and the understanding that they will get amnesty, just like it is resurging this year because of catch-and-release policies. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) drafted a memo in 2014 asserting that 95 percent of the border-crossers interviewed cited the promise of amnesty as the primary factor behind their migration, not violence back home.
Violence is down, migration is up!
The twisted irony is that violence in Central America actually dropped by 30 percent over the exact same time of the border surge, which shows that this is all a fraud being perpetrated on America’s dime. Oh, and 73 percent of the migrants in fiscal year 2017 were male, the most violent demographic of any civilization, which doesn’t exactly reflect a reality of fleeing from violence. If the primary factor were violence, then why in the world would we not see more women in this percentage? Sounds similar to what’s going on in Europe, huh?
If you break down the murder rate trends by individual country, you see an inverse relationship between violence and migration. As noted earlier this week, by far, Guatemala is dominating the illegal migration, with Honduras increasing but more modestly, and El Salvador decreasing. Guess what? El Salvador has three times the murder rate of Guatemala and is still 46 percent higher than Honduras. Thus, the country with the lowest murder rate has the highest migration rate and vice versa. According to Phoenix ICE officials, 85 percent of the families coming through the Yuma sector of the border are from Guatemala!
Bringing the violence to America – the exact opposite of asylum
With this factual background in mind, now we can appreciate how the fact that Central America is still relatively violent is actually a reason not to let these people in without first being processed off our shores. We are bringing in predominantly young males from some of the most violent countries in the world, all of which are from the same homogenous population as the “persecutors.” This is not to say all of them have been violent or will be violent when coming here, but just that there is no way to disentangle a persecuted minority from a persecuting majority as we could with, for example, the Yazidis, who are being persecuted by the Sunnis in Iraq. In that case, we could bring in the Yazidis a) because they are legitimate asylees and b) because there is no concern that we would also be bringing in the very problem they are fleeing.
Obviously, this violates the most basic solemn duty of the federal government to protect American citizens from external violence. But for all those virtue-signalers who think the job of our government is to sacrifice our security for the needs and desires of other countries, they must remember that their virtue-signaling is a vice, not a virtue for those very people. What good are we doing those peaceful migrants if we bring them in through the uncontrolled border migration in such large numbers that they reconstitute the worst elements of a place like Honduras right here in our own cities? While the gangs and drugs are killing all Americans, it is most concentrated in the communities where these illegal immigrants are living.
Liberal outlets like the Washington Post forget the irony of their virtue-signaling when they have reported endlessly on places like Brentwood, Long Island, where a predominantly Hispanic community and school were torn apart by hordes of teenagers in 2014, some of whom “had never gone to school and couldn’t read or write in any language.” They reported on MS-13 becoming a “powerhouse” and the community “changing” with the surge of Central American teens. Remember, many of those teens are now 19-23 years old.
The same outlet also reported on an “overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County,” Maryland, where MS-13 would “sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students.” It was so bad that “most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.”
Last year, the Post did a report on an illegal immigrant woman from Guatemala who has to pay ransom to MS-13 not to be killed and how she felt she was living with the very elements she fled. She was living in the U.S. for 10 years, but things changed around the DACA surge when “MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”
The gang was almost eradicated under Bush’s 287(g) program, but DACA and sanctuary cities fueled this unprecedented surge, growing every month.
According to the Post, “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America. … Nearly 5,000 of those unaccompanied minors have arrived in Prince George’s since 2012.” This parallels comments made by Geraldine Hart, police commissioner of Suffolk County, New York, that the entirety of the MS-13 crisis is because of the unaccompanied minors and that Long Island had it bad because it was “the largest recipient of UACs in the nation.”
Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich says the Lord wants us to have open borders. We know people like him couldn’t care less about Americans, but if he had a shred of compassion in his soul, he’d support Trump’s plan to only accept asylum claims in a stable and secure environment in our consulates, so we are not bringing along with them the very hellish environment from which they seek refuge. (For more from the author of “Rather Than Being an Asylum From Persecution, We Are Bringing the Persecution to the Asylum” please click HERE)
Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.
