Immigration Watch International (2): ‘Root causes’ aren’t behind migrant surge

Friday, October 21, 2022

‘Root causes’ aren’t behind migrant surge — it’s open borders

So how’s that root causes nation-building project working out so far?

Short answer: About as well as the idea worked for European liberals who first concocted the root-causes doctrine in the early 1980s, resurrected it after the catastrophic mass migration of 2014-2015, and have seen it fail miserably ever since. Border Patrol apprehension numbers, widely regarded as the chief indicator of total crossings, is the ultimate progress report.

In 2020 when Donald Trump was in office, Border Patrol caught 106,762 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans. By the end of fiscal 2021, they’d caught 701,049. Border Patrol caught another 505,448 this fiscal year with another month left to count.

Anyone endowed with basic critical thinking and research skills could have predicted this American policy failure, but it was never even lightly challenged. When the Joe Biden campaign first appropriated Europe’s failed liberal social engineering experiment as its chief immigration policy, star-struck American media never bothered to dig into its long, sorry history or demand details for how much it would cost. No one asked when, exactly, the White House would consider Central America “fixed” enough to declare U.S. border security success.

And most importantly, “root causes” ignores a simple equation: People decide to jump the southern border when federal government policies let them illegally cross and stay for long enough to earn back many times the smuggling fee money they borrowed. When they feel the odds of that happening are high, they come. They stay home when they see they’ll be turned away at the American border or be quickly deported to square one, with nothing to show for the smuggling money fortunes they gambled.

The vice president and her acolytes asked Americans to believe that the vast continuing influx that began right after she and Biden took office was all so very “complex.” During an April 2021 state visit to Central America, the border czar laid blame on “extensive storm damage because of extreme climate.” And kept going.

“We’re looking at drought in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important bases for their economy,” she explained. “We’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that.”

To somehow buy away those bad conditions but never explaining how, when or offering accountability benchmarking, the Biden administration pledged a $3 billion down payment to Central America over four years, including $860.6 million in fiscal year 2022 and $986 million in fiscal year 2023. Harris has boasted of coaxing some American companies to invest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

But what the root-causes doctrine really does is act as a plausible-sounding cover story for opening the border. At the heart of progressive appreciation for this plausible-sounding strategy was that it would serve not as a complement to American deportation, detention, and deterrence — which cause immigrants to stay home — but as their total replacement. So, while those dollars somehow will rebuild three countries on no particular timeline (a dubious proposition), the Biden administration would leave the border gates open. Americans were told it would all prove out in due time.

But the problem with “due time” is that the European experiment proved that just testing the theory is a generational proposition. To find out, its purveyors would have Americans wait decades for a conclusion at a cost of untold billions of dollars from the national treasury, while foreigners pour across a border left unimpeded. Root-cause conditions certainly exist and encourage poor people everywhere to leave for greener pastures.

But European and American government can never hope to improve these conditions quickly enough to explain the monthly, quarterly, and yearly ebbs and flows of mass rushes and retreats.

https://nypost.com/2022/10/13/root-causes-arent-behind-migrant-surge-its-open-borders/amp/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Background

Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.

Why is "La Raza" the one Spanish term that is NEVER translated in the American mass media? Because translating it would make it a lot less respectable. It means "THE RACE" -- The mixed Hispanic "race" of Mexico. Racism is fine South of the Rio Grande only, apparently.

The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:

1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.

2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.

3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.

4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.

5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: Before the pandemic, you usually COULD buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.

6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.

I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.

Immigration Watch International (2)

Friday, October 21, 2022

‘Root causes’ aren’t behind migrant surge — it’s open borders

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