EDITORIAL

Let the Kids In

Reports that approximately 60,000 children have made the trek north from danger-plagued barrios in Central America to the Texas border have really brought out the blatherskites north of the Rio Grande.

US House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in June blamed the administration for the flood of children immigrants from Central America. “We’re seeing a humanitarian disaster, one of the administration’s own making,” he said. “The administration’s actions only serve to encourage more illegal crossings. It’s another situation that appears to have caught the administration flat-footed.”

The administration actually followed the requirements of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush. The law provides a process to consider asylum applications of young refugees from nations that are not contiguous to the United States — such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Xenophobic protesters in the United States claimed the Central American kids are not our responsibility but, in their defense, many of the protesters are imbeciles who are as unfamiliar with the history of US-Central American relations as they are with the history of Jesus Christ, who started out life as a refugee and who admonished His followers that they would be judged on how they treated the poor, the sick, prisoners and foreigners (see Matthew 25:31-46).

The children making the perilous journey north from Central America to the Texas border do not appear to be motivated by economic opportunity. They appear to be fleeing for their lives. They are running from gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (a.k.a. MS-13) and Calle 18, who gave the kids the choice of submitting to the gangs or risking the dangers on the road to Texas, with dodgy smugglers, sex traffickers and corrupt officials along the way.

These children are not illegal immigrants. They are refugees from dysfunctional nations that US foreign policy helped to wreck. And the kids aren’t actually doing anything illegal. They cross the border into the USA, then they turn themselves in to the Border Patrol, seeking asylum. They are not much different from Cubans who, if they manage to set foot on the USA and claim they face persecution at home, usually are allowed to stay.

David Bacon notes at InTheseTimes.com that the tide of migration from Central America dates back to the wars that the US promoted in the 1980s, “in which we armed the forces, governments or contras, who were most opposed to progressive social change. Many hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans came to the US during the late 1970s and 80s, to say nothing of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that some day they’d be reunited.”

As young people from Central America arrived in Los Angeles and other US cities in the 1980s and ‘90s, many were recruited into gangs. Among the gangs that developed in Los Angeles were MS-13 and Calle 18. When US law enforcement and immigration authorities deported the gang members back to their homelands, many of the young deportees were incarcerated almost as soon as they arrived; prisons became schools for gang recruitment.

The Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), signed in 2004, further uprooted farm workers and small business owners who were swamped by imports from the US, unsettled these nations’ workforces.

The children who made their way north this year are not gangbangers. Instead they have showed extraordinary courage in coming to the United States in the belief that they would find a safe refuge here. The least we can do is give them a hearing.

But Republican congressional leaders proposed an ex post facto bill that would take those legal procedures away from these Central American refugees, and the White House indicated the President might go along with it. Democrats should block this backward step. These refugees should be given humanitarian consideration under the 2008 law that was in effect when they entered the country.

While Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) has ordered 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to deploy to the border, despite complaints from sheriffs along the border that the “help,” which will cost $12 million a month and pull the Guards away from their regular jobs, is not needed, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (D) eloquently defended the refugees and offered to provide temporary shelter for up to 1,000 of them, despite local protests. Patrick cited America’s history of giving “sanctuary to desperate children for centuries” and the “blight on our national reputation” when US authorities refused to accept Jewish children fleeing the Nazis in 1939. He added that his Christian faith “teaches that ‘if a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him but rather love him as yourself’.” He added, “”The point is that this good nation is great when we open our doors and our hearts to needy children, and diminished when we don’t.”

We agree with Gov. Patrick. If we fulfill the faith that these kids have in the United States — and the parents who sent them north in the desperate hope that they’d find a refuge — we think they’ll be a credit to their new homeland, as succeeding generations of immigrants have proven, when given that opportunity.

Defund the Gangs

If the United States wants to improve conditions in Mexico and these Central American countries so these children might safely return, the first step should be to legalize marijuana to help defund the gangs and criminal cartels. The Washington Post reported in May that since 21 states legalized marijuana for medical use and Colorado and Washington state for recreational use, pot farmers in the Sinaloa region of Mexico have stopped planting marijuana due to a massive drop in wholesale prices, from $100 per kilo down to only $25. One farmer told the Post: “It’s not worth it anymore. I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”

Retired federal agent Terry Nelson, who worked to prevent drugs from crossing the southern border, told VICE News that before medical marijuana and state legalization in Washington and Colorado, about 10 million pounds of pot were grown in the US every year. But 40 million pounds came from Mexico, and marijuana accounts for as much as 40% of income for the drug cartels, which operate throughout Mexico and Central America.

While the DEA’s chief of operations, James Capra, told senators in January that legalization “scares us” and is “reckless and irresponsible,” former DEA intelligence specialist Sean Dunagan told VICE News that, although it’s too early to verify the numbers: “Anything to establish a regulated legal market will necessarily cut into those profits. And it won’t be a viable business for the Mexican cartels — the same way bootleggers disappeared after prohibition fell.”

Over the past four decades federal and state governments have poured over $1 trillion down the rathole that is the War on Drugs. The current cost is more than $51 billion per year, according to the Drug Policy Alliance. The number of people behind bars for drug law violations has grown from 41,000 in 1980 to more than half a million in 2011, with 406,000 in state prisons and local jails, the Sentencing Project reported. Money funneled into drug enforcement is diverted from addressing serious crime as well as health, education, social services and public safety programs. It is no coincidence that funding for higher education has dropped during the same period that the War on Drugs has sucked up those resources. A 2010 study by Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron found that not only would the US save tremendous amounts of money were it to end drug prohibition, legalizing could bring in an additional $46.7 billion in yearly tax revenue.

And after years of denial by federal authorities that marijuana has any valid medical use, now that medical marijuana is legal, it is being used for a variety of recognized clinical applications, including relief of pain, nausea, glaucoma and movement disorders, as well as appetite stimulation for patients suffering from HIV/AIDS and dementia. Research indicates it also may have use in protecting against malignant tumors. And if it gives somebody a pleasant buzz as a side effect, well, that is an acceptable risk. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, August 15, 2014