Can anyone explain the Immigration crises? How its suddenly exploded?

I’ve tried hard to ignore the Immigration news story. I don’t have a dog in this fight. Although I have seen Little Rock’s Hispanic population emerge in the past 15 years. They’ve caused no problems and they hold jobs a lot of people really don’t want.

What I don’t understand is what has caused the current crises. I always thought the US had a reasonable approach of catch and release. Catch as many illegals as possible and send them back home. There was no punitive charges. We didn’t clog up our courts and prisons. Process them and send them back home ASAP. It wasn’t perfect. Some illegals always got through. It just wasn’t worth the resources to track every one of them down.

Does anyone understand the current crises and how we got into this mess? Why is there opposition to sending all these kids back home? Is there any country in the world with open borders? Just come on in and make yourself at home? :confused:

What is the alternative? If we don’t turn people back? Are we going to simply allow the entire US to fill up? We’ve already got overcrowded cities, heavy traffic, smog. How can we welcome in a few million more people? What would that do to our society and way of life?

Many of them came here escaping violent gangs that threatened to murder them unless they joined the gangs and murdered other children. Is there anyone who isn’t opposed to sending innocent young children home to a violent death?

The current crisis is caused because we don’t have enough resources to process the children in accordance with our laws and sort out which have legitimate asylum claims and which have no legitimate claim and should be sent home. The typical backlog is, as I understand it, over a year.

This is an oversimplification of a very complex issue, but…

NAFTA, basically. The North American Free Trade Agreement made imported goods in Mexico cheaper than goods produced in that country. People stopped buying locally. It also became really easy for foreign companies to come into Mexico, set up shop, hire cheap Mexican labor and export the goods. So investment in the country basically went all to hell, and as a result the agricultural sector collapsed. It became very difficult to make a living in Mexico (I mean, even harder than it already was) and thus immigration to the U.S. exploded.

I saw a little of this impact firsthand when I volunteered in Mexico many moons ago. The farming community where I was staying had been reduced to about 1/10th its original size. 90% of inhabitants had gone either to the city (Mexico City) or up north (to the U.S.) in an effort to make a living. I remember talking to a young girl about her life plans, she couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13, and her plan was to hire a coyote to take her to Canada.

A lot of people saw it coming and were opposed to NAFTA for that reason. But NAFTA had immediate economic benefits for the U.S. which made it really popular politically.

That’s one part of it. Additionally, many U.S. businesses actively seek illegal immigrants to hire because they don’t have to pay them as much (or at all, as the case often is) and they don’t have to deal with those pesky workplace safety regulations. The bottom line is, illegal immigration is good for business in the U.S., and as long as that continues to be the case, nobody is going to do a damned thing about it.

Interestingly, Obama has been pretty tough on immigration. He’s arguably deported more people than any other president we’ve had, though he’s lied a lot about that and said a lot of things that would make you think otherwise.

This perspective brought to you by a woman who was once heavily involved in social justice for Latino immigrants. I had some colleagues who are DREAMers, bright young college kids who were brought into the U.S. when they were very young and are fighting to stay in the only place they know as home. They are very active in advocacy and legislative policy and more than once they’ve allowed themselves to get arrested so they could draw attention to the conditions of deportation facilities.

As for ‘‘open borders,’’ the general rule of thumb is that the more immigrants a country has coming in, the more tough they are on immigration. There are some countries who used to have quite lax immigration laws who have received a tremendous amount of social pressure as immigration to that country ramps up and the immigrants become more visible. I think this is because people are inherently xenophobic and feel threatened by cultures that are not their own.

One element I heard in a news report (sorry, no cite) is that - in these countries of origin the coyotes (smuggler/guides) are basically promoting the message that “kids get a free pass”. That all they have to do is make it across the border and they are set. Now understand that there are truly local dangers, economic issues, and the like, that make the parents likely to respond to the message - but at the bottom line the coyotes have a product to sell and they found a good way to increase their business.

Also, I have heard it reported that the US is working with the other countries to try to get the word out disabusing people of the fallacies that they are being told by the coyotes, but it’s probably going to be an uphill battle - people believe what they believe, ya?

I would add that the U.S. has a pretty interesting history with regards to immigration. We’ve used immigrants for labor for a very long time, so there were times when we’ve intentionally made it easier for people to immigrate, and there were also times we made it harder for specific ethnic groups (see: Chinese Exclusion Act.) We are a country that seems to have a very ambivalent relationship to our immigrants. We want all the economic benefit but not the social ramifications.

It sounds to me though as if there has been a very recent huge increase in children crossing the border. Is that right and if so why now?

The “current crisis” involves mostly Central Americans, not Mexicans. They are mostly coming from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.. This has nothing to do with NAFTA.

In 2008 the US passed a law intended to stop trafficking of child sex slaves.

Krauthammer lays it out fairly well in his latest column.

It took a few years but the word is out on in South America. Kids who make it here get to stay. That isn’t what we intended, but it looks like it’s coming true.

Of course, Obama’s administration isn’t helping:

It’s a crisis not recognized by the president. A weak reaction on our part just encourages more of them to come.

It is the nature of partisan politics that a crisis always needs to be created where there is no need for one.

Obama and the Hispanics in Congress argued for the Dream Act, which provides many of the services a citizen would receive to young latino illegals.

A little while later, young children are flooding into the US from south of the border.

Coincidence?

Obama is tough on immigration?

Sometimes SDMB makes me laugh.

Yes. I forgot about the dream act. That’s definitely part of the problem too.

Are you saying the flood of unaccompanied minors across the border is not a crisis? Sure seems like one to me. We can argue about what the solution is, but I think both sides recognize this as a crisis.

How one reacts to this depends on whether you see these kids as legit refugees or simply “economic refugees”.

This sentence has never been true.

Basically, our only solutions are to raise a million non-citizens as Americans, deport them to an awful situation, or establish the new island nation of Ungamunga, with plenty of housing and power, to which we start deporting all illegals as “trespassing Ungamungans”.

**Can anyone explain the Immigration crises? How its suddenly exploded? **

CNN finally tired of talking about the missing airplane and there hasn’t been a school shooting lately. Gotta fill those 24 hours with something.

This. Because of DACA.

Some of the kids and moms are telling the Border Patrol that they are here because they were told through their local media that children and mothers with young children will get a free pass once they get here.

Several years ago the average was 6,000 children coming over. Last year it was 23,000. Since October of last year 57,000. Not to mention the 30,000 adults since October. So that’s roughly 87,000 since October.

The government knew the amount of children coming was rapidly increasing especially since October. Yet they waited until just a few weeks ago to start doing anything about taking care of the kids already here, let alone how to try to stop them from coming.

So it’s a partially created crisis on the part of the government. Why weren’t they trying to get funding for housing and supplies a year ago?

There’re more news outlets than just CNN. You don’t think Fox would have jumped all over this last year when the amount coming here doubled? This was kept quiet by the government. Some Border Patrol agents are leaking that have been told not to talk about it and reporters that visit the housing compounds are not allowed to interview Border Patrol or the people there.

Seems like the government wanted this quiet until they didn’t so maybe they can use this issue for the upcoming elections. Like so maybe the Republicans can say we have to tighten the border and Democrats can say the Republicans don’t care about children.

Both sides can use this to appeal to their bases.

Yes. I’m saying that. There are many things going on this country that are at or approaching crisis proportions, and a few thousand kids is not one of them. That many kids quit school before graduation, every day. That’s not a crisis?

My grandparents came to America with exactly the same motives as these children. Fleeing from both oppression and poverty. The legal facts may now be different, but the ethical ones are not, and ethics are not subject to the whims of partisan politics. These children are at least blameless, if not praiseworthy. There is room for them in my country and in my heart, which to an American ought to be the same thing. There is no argument about the solution. They are here. Each of them is now one of us…

Crisis? Not for the United States. Southern immigration at a all time low, deportations at an all time high, new big giant East German style border wall.

Yeah, tens of thousands of starving Central American children showing up at the gates makes for rough decisions. But media coverage on this is really being driven by politics (Drudge)…too insinuate that this is some dastardly Obama scheme to make America brown. Or that stopping immigrants at the border is some sign of incompetence.

Again deportations at record high, immigration at record low, and I hardly think that voting down Dream Act 4 years ago has anything to do with anything. The Great Recession and the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras are mostly responsible. Desperate times.

So there are four options for dealing with these children;

  1. Let them in (not going to happen)

  2. not do anything and let let them build shanty towns on the south side of The Wall (most unwise …think Lord of the Flies)

  3. Shoot them

  4. Put them in concentration camps until some transportation back to Central America can be arranged.

So the Feds are going with #4. And people are hopping up and down with the rage…
.
.

You’re forgetting the one to which the U.S. is obligated under international law and treaty obligations:

5). Let them present to an asylum officer and/or immigration judge an application for asylum and withholding of removal, and have decisions made on an individual basis according to each person’s circumstances. And let let them have access to counsel, and preferably appoint counsel for them. I am on the National Lawyers Guild National Immigration Project listserve, and there are all kinds of posts over the past weeks about children whose families in the U.S. have hired counsel for them, but the counsel can’t even get any information about whether and where they are being detained, let alone have access to their clients to interview them about what form(s) of relief from deportation they might be eligible for.

Mark my words, you are going to start seeing some very unpleasant stories on the news about children who are denied access to counsel (private, hired and paid for by their own family members!), summarily removed to their home countries without any evaluation of their circumstances or legitimate fear of violence and persecution, and then murdered.

Is this the kind of country you can feel proud of? I’m not feeling very proud right now about how my country is treating some of these children. Most of them probably don’t understand the legal process at all, and they are being rounded up and shipped home without even a chance to have their stories heard and
evaluated.

Eva Luna, Immigration Paralegal