This is what we’re being told about the Central American women and children showing up on our doorstep: they are, in effect, refugees, driven by desperate conditions in their home countries,including gang warfare and sky-high murder rates, with the countries’ governments wholly unable to, well, govern. It’s almost remarkable that every single Central American child hasn’t already fled, but based on the reporting we’ve seen, we can expect them to do so. And, as in any refugee situation, international law requires that the country to which they flee take in the refugees — with the proviso that the refugees don’t get to pick-and-choose but stop at the first possible country.
(Of course, that ought to mean that Mexico ought to be taking in these refugee children — the fact that they’re not stopping there does tend to invalidate their refugee claim, but let’s figure that Mexico isn’t any better on the corruption front.)
But if this crisis is so bad that life in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras is intolerable, if it’s inevitable that our Southern border will simply be overrun, by legions of desperate mothers and children, then isn’t it in our own national interest to intervene? Perhaps we need our own military, recently returned from abroad, to begin patrolling the streets there. Perhaps we need to install our own government structures to replace the failed local ones — education, healthcare, etc.
No? These are sovereign nations, you say? A nation which can’t take care of its own people and sends them abroad to be dependent on others surrenders its sovereignty, don’t you think?
And if these children are homeless back in their home countries, abandoned by their parents, then aren’t they better off being repatriated, with foreign aid being targeted at some form of orphanage, rather than adapting to the foreign culture and language of the United States? (After all, the rationale of the “Dream Act” is that it would be an intolerable hardship for Mexican national children who have grown up in the United States to adjust to Mexico, right?)
Yes, this is an extreme solution. But I’m not seeing any other solution on the table: It’s a joke to imagine that the media campaign we’re told is underway, to persuade parents not to send their children to the U.S., will have any effect when there are not yet any actual reports of children being repatriated (and, instead, the only unknown is exactly how far-reaching the anticipated amnesty-by-executive-order will be). Obama says his hands are tied by the 2008 law requiring hearings for “other than Mexico” children, but the Democrats have refused to consider changing the law except as part of a full amnesty.
So before you say “Jane’s gone off the deep end” (which would be true — but this is really just a starting point for discussion), what’s the alternative?
Update:
Here’s another observation: remember how Jeb Bush claimed that illegal immigration from Mexico was different than elsewhere, because these were desperate people doing whatever they could to feed their starving families? The stories of the Central Americans are different — they’re paying substantial amounts of money to coyotes. (This LA Times article says $7,000, I’ve seen $5 – 10,000 elsewhere.) To put this in context, the per-capita GDP in Guatemala is $5,300; for El Salvador its $7,500 and $4,800 in Honduras, according to the CIA Factbook.
Where’s the money coming from?
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