The southern border crisis is a fraud

Here is the Department of Homeland Security basis for declaring that there is a humanitarian crisis at the southern border: from December 22-30

• The United States Border Patrol has referred 451 cases to a medical provider. Of those, 259 were children. 129 children are under the age of five. 88 are between the ages of six and fourteen, and 42 between the ages of 15 to 17.
• 17 individuals including six children are currently hospitalized with illnesses.
• On average, the Border Patrol is referring approximately 50 cases a day to medical providers. December 26, 2018, Border Patrol referred 82 cases to a medical provider.

This is not a crisis: more like a minor perturbation that can readily be handled by existing medical capacity. Two hundred and fifty-nine children along 2000 miles of border is on average one every 8 miles or so. About 12 million people live near the border. Is DHS really trying to tell us that medical service capacity for 12 million people cannot easily handle 259 children, only 6 of whom require hospitalization? But it is worse than that, because these children could be handled in medical facilities throughout the US, a country of 326 million people.

This is not a crisis. Saying so is a fraud. It is also a transparent effort to distract attention from the deaths of two children who had been held in US government custody.

But what about unauthorized immigration, terrorists, and drugs? Apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants, which are generally viewed as indicative of the numbers of unauthorized immigrants, have declined sharply since 2000, from over 1.6 million to 310,000 in 2017. No terrorists are known to have entered the US from Mexico in recent years.* Most drugs entering the US do so through legal ports of entry, as do most unauthorized immigrants. This is only one reason why a wall on the southern border is useless. Most of the border not already fenced or walled is terrain that is difficult to cross, few try, and the border patrol is effective at catching them.

In recent years, more Mexicans have been leaving the US than arriving. There is however a surge of families trying to reach the US from Guatemala, Honduras, and Salvador. They have good reasons: poverty, gang violence, and political repression are among them. If you don’t want them to migrate, you’ve got to deal with those problems, a conclusion that led the Obama Administration to amp up development and rule of law assistance in Central America. The Trump Administration is threatening to eliminate those programs, in a misguided attempt to punish the governments involved.

President Trump has been backing off his demand for wall money for weeks now. It started out as a concrete barrier, now it is just steel slats, sometimes he claims it is already being built, and maybe it might be just a fence, but in any case one that will not have to line the entire 2000-mile stretch of the border, and maybe he is asking for only $2.6 billion rather than $5.7 billion.

But every time it appears the Administration might be moving in the direction of compromise, Trump yanks the rug out from under his negotiators, including the Vice President, and reasserts his maximum demands. Now he is asking for over $10 billion for the wall plus. In the absence of an agreement, the President is threatening to declare a national emergency and use the military to build the wall, but that proposition is a sure-fire way of ending up in court for years of complex litigation. He has also suggested he might keep the government shut for years. That is not a credible threat, but it underlines how desperate he is getting.

In the meanwhile, the institutions we use to prevent unauthorized immigration are not functioning. Immigration courts are at a standstill, border patrol agents are going unpaid, and the companies are unable to use the system that they are supposed to use to verify the immigration status of employees. Trump is claiming that the furloughed Federal employees support the shutdown because they want the wall, but he has also said most of them are Democrats so he needn’t worry about them. Trump’s own heavily rural constituency is uncomfortable: American agriculture depends heavily on government funding for both production and consumption. Those mechanisms are grinding to a halt, as are the Internal Revenue Service and other vital government bureaucracies.

The Democrats in Congress are clear and unequivocal: they have refused to provide money for any sort of extension of the physical barrier but are prepared to provide $1.3 billion for border security. The newly inaugurated Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, whom Trump once said was weak, seems to have rock-solid support in her caucus, and some Republicans are moving in her direction. She is not wavering.

No doubt a compromise of some sort that allows reopening of the government will eventually be worked out, I would guess next week if not this. But the political consequences of the government shutdown are yet to be fully realized. We can never be sure, but it is looking like a big loser for Trump, who somehow convinced himself he could get from a Democratic-controlled House funding for a border wall that he failed to get from a Republican-controlled one. The crisis is not at the border, but rather in Washington, where the ultimate deal maker is proving inept.

*Here is an update: six people on a US government list of “known and suspected” terrorists were stopped at the border in the first half of 2018. Seven times as many were stopped at the Canadian border, where no one is claiming there is a crisis. I needn’t comment on the likelihood of error in a USG list of the known and suspected.