America Has Fallen, And It Can't Get Up
Authored by Michael Shellenberger via Public,
The Border Has Fallen
During the Trump years, Democrats attacked Trump as cruel for separating migrant parents and children.
“A policy that separates young children from their parents isn’t a ‘deterrent.’ It’s unconscionable,” said Biden in 2018. “A policy that traumatizes children isn’t a bargaining chip. It’s abhorrent.”
But Dr. Paul Wise, a pediatrician in charge of monitoring the treatment of migrant children in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, reports that the Biden administration’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been separating children as young as eight from their parents.
“Interviews with parents and children found that there were minimal or no opportunities for phone contact or direct interaction between parent and child,” Wise said in the court filing. “The separation of families and the lack of interaction while in custody do significant, and potentially lasting, harm to children, particularly younger children.”
There’s no denying the crisis. In some areas, the border between Texas and Mexico looks like a refugee camp in sub-Saharan Africa. There are thousands of African and Latin American migrants coming through daily. More than two million came last year, over 5,000 per day, and nearly as many will come this year.
The Biden administration rightly points out that it tried telling migrants not to come. “Do not come,” said Vice President Kamala Harris in Guatemala in 2021.
But Biden had made clear from 2018 to 2020 that he would reverse President Trump’s immigration policies. And so, many more migrants are coming.
They also do so because they know we won’t turn them away. Doing so would be cruel. Children, babies, and mothers would die. And the photographs and videos of the horror would travel the world in minutes or seconds.
If you doubt that this is true, watch the videos of parents sending their children through barbed wire fences and crossing the dangerous Rio Grande River.
That hardly means we’re helpless to stop the flow. This year, for the first time, US Border Control is encountering more migrants from outside Latin America than from within it. That means people are flying from Africa to Latin America and entering through Mexico.
Is this part of a plan by Democratic leaders to expand the voting rolls? Some Republicans say so. And in California, some progressive politicians want to give undocumented immigrants the right to vote. They already provide official California state driver’s licenses and IDs.
But if that was the plan, it’s turning the nation against them
The migrants are overwhelming not just the state of Texas but also New York, whose Democratic leaders, both Mayor Eric Adams and Governor Kathy Hochul, say bluntly that the city is filled up.
“The national government has turned its back on New York City,” said Adams in April. “This is impacting our schools, public safety, our ability to take care of those who were already in shelters. This is impacting the entire city.” Hochul is now proposing eliminating New York’s “right to shelter” law.
Maybe the progressive Democrats who run Chicago, Illinois, have more room — or compassion?
Not quite. “Let me state this clearly,” said Chicago’s progressive new Mayor. “The city of Chicago cannot go on welcoming new arrivals safely and capably without significant support and immigration policy changes.”
What, then, is to be done?
The Biden administration doesn’t even bother offering an answer. Democrats can only say what must not be done. We must not build a wall. We must not deport. Anyone. We must instead find jobs for the millions of mostly unskilled and uneducated immigrants to the US who, critics say, will drive down working-class wages and tax already over-stressed housing, educational, and health systems.
As a result, we’re seeing a return of child labor to the United States, as slaughterhouses illegally hire teenage migrants on the night shift, who are scalded by caustic chemicals and maimed in industrial accidents.
Just a few weeks ago, New York’s Governor Hochul tried to stay above the battle between New York City Mayor Adams and the Biden White House. That all changed late last month when Hochul took off the kid gloves. “We’ve managed thus far without substantive support from Washington,” she said in what her aides billed as a major speech.
In the end, nobody will be able to measure how much of the crisis is driven by Biden and how much of it is from the collapse of civilization within the African and Latin American nations themselves.
What’s clear is that if we don’t fix this, it won’t be just the border that’s fallen.
