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Up a creek

Last night’s presidential statement from the White House in defense of adding hundreds of miles to the existing wall along the border with Mexico fizzled. Trump hoped to excite the country in favor of declaring a national emergency. He failed because he used shopworn arguments that simply aren’t valid.

Trump is up a creek without a paddle. He has embarked on a partial government shutdown that cannot go on much longer without causing serious harm to his own fan clubs (especially in the agricultural sector) and to the country’s economy. Agricultural loans and subsidies need to be paid, food stamps that support agricultural prices need to be distributed, Federal courts need to remain open, data on the economy has to be collected, the weather bureau has to do its thing, and a thousand other services have to continue. Serious, unprecedented economic harm could result if the shutdown lasts another week.

The Democrats have remained solidly opposed to border wall funding, for good reasons: there is no evidence significant drugs or terrorists come across the border where there is no wall. When they come, it is mostly through the well-guarded ports of entry. There is no crisis at the border, where apprehensions are down over the past two decades and the numbers of ill children and other humanitarian cases are entirely manageable by a competent Administration. The Democrats see the wall for what Lindsey Graham said it was: a metaphor for border security (or maybe for stopping immigration entirely), but not a real factor in border security, which they have been willing to fund in substantial amounts.

Trump would do well to follow the well-worn path of Presidents who declare victory and retreat. It isn’t even hard: he can declare a national emergency and his intention to build the wall with Defense Department funds as well as announce that he will foil the Democratic plot to close the government by reopening those parts of it he deems vital to the American people. The wall won’t get built anytime soon, as he’ll be taken to court. Many of his ill-conceived initiatives languish there, but he’ll be able to get those parts of the government he likes operating again. Caveat emptor: my wife works at the Smithsonian, which however isn’t likely to be one of his priorities.

The Democrats, who are passing bills to reopen the government piece by piece, will object, but the debate would shift away from the foolishness of shutting down a large part of the US government to whether he can or cannot use Pentagon funding to build the border wall, which by now has become a glorified fence of steel slats because the Border Patrol has told Trump that his concrete wall would not be a good idea. They want to be able to see what is happening on the Mexican side.

I don’t know what the courts are likely to do with Trump’s national emergency scheme, if he pursues it. They are generally deferential to any president who declares what he is doing a matter of national security. Never mind that it isn’t.

When you are up a creek without a paddle, go with the current. The Democrats in the House are offering bills to reopen parts of the government. Trump would be smart to approve them, while declaring a national emergency that isn’t one.*

*PS: The list of “national emergencies” as of August 2017 suggests his won’t be the only national emergency that is not really a national emergency.

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.