The Border Game

By MARK ANDERSON

SAN JUAN, Texas — At a roundtable hosted Feb. 20 by five US House Democrats in this small Hidalgo County town, where anti-border wall sentiment was strong, Bishop Daniel Flores of the Brownsville Archdiocese remarked that the Central Americans illegally coming across the US southern border en masse are largely “pawns” in a larger economic game.

That game, as he inferred, is refereed by major corporations and other powers.

Meanwhile, Elaine Hernandez of Baylor University’s Texas Hunger Initiative gave a presentation at the roundtable, held at LUPE Hall, a Hispanic advocacy and social assistance organization that supports open borders. Hernandez shared some rather staggering statistics.

Expressing everything in fiscal years, she said the number of unaccompanied minor children entering the US hit a record 67,339 in FY 2014, with 16,404 from El Salvador, 17,057 from Guatemala and 18,244 from Honduras — along with 15,643 from Mexico.

With 2009’s total at 19,418; 2010’s at 18,168; 2011’s at 15,701; 2012’s at 24,120; 2013’s at 38,045; 2015’s at 39,399; 2016’s at 58,819, and October through December of 2016 (the start of FY 2017) weighing in at 21,067—that’s 302,076 minor children over nine fiscal years.

This writer asked how so many Central Americans, typically broke and sometimes in immediate danger from criminal cartels and gangs, physically make it 2,000 miles across Mexico to Texas in often searing heat.

“By the grace of God, using buses [and trains] they are brought through the ‘coyote’ systems, so they are trafficked through Central America, through Mexico to Texas,” she replied, adding: “They are being transported to the border through a big network of criminals.”

Although she probably didn’t realize it, that revealing remark does suggest that an overly-open border helps fuel human trafficking and the drug trade and violence that often accompany it.

Moreover, at a border wall forum in Pharr, Texas, that this writer attended Feb. 16, put on by the local CBS affiliate, the four-member panel offered diverse views. A central thing was that people from the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere are coming across the US southern border illegally; therefore, terrorist elements could blend in and skulk into the US.

A rough consensus in Pharr was that while a border wall could, to an unpredictable degree, mitigate some of the immediate exodus out of Mexico and Central America, a “bigger picture” remedy would involve hiring more border agents, and more immigration judges and attorneys. If the workforce isn’t sufficient to process people, then the system unravels.

Panelist Dr. Michael Vickers, a Brooks County, Texas, veterinarian, remarked to this writer: “Why don’t we put more pressure on Mexico to shut down this traffic coming into our country illegally?

So, while Mexico’s southern border with Central America perhaps needs reinforcement, the grinding poverty and danger driving people out of Central America is the root of the exodus. Border walls, immigration personnel and everything else is “downstream.”

One wonders what clandestine CIA operations, among other factors, are making parts of Central America so inhospitable to begin with, apart from a world economic model that snares the most vulnerable in a system that creates money as debt, ensuring that a plutocratic few, over time, own or control most land and resources. The cartels exploit that economic vulnerability.

Indeed, much of today’s mass migration has resulted from corrosive international economic policies that aren’t readily visible.

Author Oliver Heydorn of the social credit economic “school” wrote on Socred.org, “[T]he standard financial system . . . does not automatically provide the consumer with sufficient money in the form of income to offset the costs of production.” This chronic deficiency of consumer buying power creates an economy that is “fundamentally unstable” because it is “structurally insolvent.”

To try and restore stability, the present economic model seeks equilibrium by borrowing additional producer credit from the private banks in order to finance business expansion or new government production, or by issuing more consumer credit directly in the form of personal loans, credit cards, etc. Either way, the economy is forcibly based on perpetual growth, simply for growth’s sake, to remain afloat.

Heydorn clarified, “Countries that have been more or less successful in filling the price-income gap thus have a powerful incentive to steadily increase the populations within their borders so that their economies can continue to expand. If the native citizenry are not having a sufficient number of children to support the required level of growth, large numbers of additional producer-consumer units, otherwise known as human beings, must be ‘imported’ from the outside in order to maintain the economic momentum.”

Hitting home, he summarized, “At the same time, economically stagnant countries that have been less successful in bridging the gap, or even in just producing goods and services in the first place, are also provided with an incentive to export people for whom they cannot furnish an adequate livelihood. This releases some of the economic, social and political pressure which those unemployed or under-employed citizens place upon their respective nations, and especially on whatever social services they may possess.”

Thus, Bishop Flores touched on something that runs far deeper than most everyone would expect.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2017

Populist.com