The Border Closing

President Trump has signaled he is prepared to close the Southern Border of the United States, hoping to put a definitive stop to our ostensible Border Crisis. The crisis is a compounding of immigration and drug related issues, as honest asylum seekers and migrants attempt to identify themselves as a distinct population from the hellions attempting to smuggle drugs into the country. The President derives this authority from Section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, permitting the President to indefinitely close the Southern Border in a National Emergency, such as that which followed the assassination of JFK in 1963. Freshly-sworn in, President Johnson closed the Southern Border, fearing a broader attack on the American executive establishment was imminent. However, it is not Johnson who Trump either knowingly or unintentionally stands to imitate, but rather his Republican predecessors Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon and Reagan admired and supported each other extensively throughout their careers and it is clear they shared similar visions for how to resolved the National Drug Crisis which launched the All-American War on Drugs, border closures included among the many policies they eventually propagated in their administrations for this purpose.

In the opening months of his Administration, Nixon attempted to curb the flowering marijuana industry swelling in the underground channels running from Mexican ranches into the lungs of many a bong-hitting hippy commune-ists in what was dubbed Operation Intercept. It was a tremendous failure. A predictable story of the American War on Drugs was thus written, as those moving marijuana into the United States deferred to an alternative form of transport: airplanes.This method proved much cheaper than the risky ground routes they had been using before and was a boon for the industry. By contrast, the Administration’s final haul of marijuana seized from the several months long operation was something more than underwhelming — a total capture of almost 4,000lbs of marijuana. This bag may seem large until one considers that in the prior year the government had seized about the same amount, at a rate of 150lbs a day or so.

Quite the interception.

Indeed, this failure was further compounded by the fact that the entire event may have, in fact, made marijuana more popular and therefore further lined the pockets of the cartels, who likely couldn’t be more pleased with the fumbling of the Nixon Administration to handle the problem. This isn’t meant to completely shame, Nixon however; in the same year, the President was also dealing with contentious riots across the country in reaction to the Vietnam War; the closure was, of course, several years prior to the Kent State Massacre, the Cambodia bombing, and Watergate among other events which would further break apart the country, setting up the disparate pieces for Nixon’s veritable protege Ronald Reagan to win in 1980.

Divide and conquer.

Reagan’s Closing was much more successful, even if it wasn’t truly a closing. Guided morally by the case of Kiki Camarena, a DEA agent working in Guadalajara that was abducted, tortured, and then killed with no response from he Mexican government. Reagan, infuriated, effectively sealed off the Southern border, ordering patrol agents to inspect every vehicle coming across the border, a procedure which normally takes about 20 minutes. Traffic was locked for seven hours at a time to try and get into the United States. The Closure lasted for about a week while the Mexican government ended its pilfering on the Camarena case and eventually prosecuted the offenders. All of this, the murder and the events leading up to it at least, have been dramatized in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico. The following year, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 into law.

The Act provided amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants while promising a sweeping clampdown on border security, the likes of which never came to be seen, as many of the laws key provisions went unenforced, while illegal immigration continued to soar well into the 2000s, when 2006 brought the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA), infamously voted “yea” on by Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton — if only for the fact that the bill authorized the construction of some border fencing, a precursor to our current raucous caucus of Border Wallers, lead by none other than President Donald J. Trump.

It would be against the backdrop of these historic Closures that the Trump Administration would be seeking to close the Border, likely not to be reopened but instead placed “under construction” until the completion of the long rumored and awaited Wall.

The case the Administration will likely make, and has been making, with the help of numerous GOP senators and the President’s procession of twitter tirades, is that there is a crisis on our Southern Border. This is of course something that can’t be denied, objectively: a humanitarian crisis is taking place on our Southern Border, however the crisis has been partially caused by poor administration of that Border itself as much as it has a sudden influx of migrants from the south of the continent. Migrant families have been released into the streets of South Texas sans both guidance or resources to help them acquiesce to life as an undocumented in a strange land where their very existence is maligned daily by the chief executive in the land. That is to say these destitute people live under a new regime of fear, the number one tactic of the Administration to achieve results internally, domestically, and abroad.

The Administration is not known for its compassion, refusing to send humanitarian (not military) aid to the border to mitigate the crisis; nor apparently its logistical acument, as it is nigh inconceivable that the wealthiest and one of the most well resourced nations on this planet can’t handle a couple of thousand people down at the border. This should have been foreseen given the Administration’s fumbling of aid shipments to Puerto Rico, whose post-Hurricane Maria crisis is still ongoing. It is not merely incompetence, but refusal that gives rise to these egregious gaffes. Many people wait for months in detention centers as will due to the speed at which courts move, which is slow and costly, but symbolically efficient to exacerbating the Crisis.

The other question to be considered is why these people are showing up at our borderstep in the first place. It is not merely because the United States is a great nation to live in, but also because the United States is one of the only nations in this hemisphere with the resources and capacity to provide asylum from regimes throughout Central & South America, a chaotic region choked by despotism in the form of corrupt representatives and bankrupt moral economies — in some instances, because of historical actions taken by the United States itself. The first line of immigration defense should be ensuring that our southern neighbors are acting justly towards their citizens in terms of safety, stability, and judicial proceedings. The streets of Central & South American cities are governed by the rule of force, as legions of oligarchic cartels vying for regional hegemony maximize their profits via bullets and bribery. They further expand their power through the substances they sanction to keep populations at once docile and addicted — it’s not just the Americans who have a habit.

This is not a task that the United States can embark upon alone, instead enlisting a coalition of other nations capable of vanquishing evil from the inside. This is not a call for overthrowing regimes nor empowering insurgent groups, but using all exterior measures we have in our disposal to support countries which fail and make the entire Union of nations much more vulnerable to collapse from the bevvy of problems one large or small nation’s instability brings, emigration just one among them.

The United States has completely minimized its sphere of influence, which has led numerous governments to come under poor command, such as in Venezuela. Although Mr. Trump, and many members of the Congress, would like for America to abdicate its responsibility as a power of such magnitude to influence the world around it, the truth is that many of these problems are within our ability to stop, if only we stop maligning many of these migrants who arrive with nothing more than a request for just a little bit of compassion. It requires no cognitive dissonance and we need not be soft on immigration to fulfill this request: the money that is going into the border wall should be going to bolstering security checkpoints and defenses, because the reality is that the majority of people who are sneaking into this country are not coming in through the trodden deserts paths through the state of Chihuahua but through normal ports of entry, on land, in air, and through visas. The Administration, and many of those supporting him, are purposefully enacting policies to later call for their repeal or amendment at an expedient political moment, when they can let loose a baptismal watershed capable of placing them in the light of the valiant, victorious heroes. The policies do not create solutions then: they are the problem.

As the historian Jill Lepore writes in an essay for the New Yorker about the other maligned group that took our jobs, “Panic is not evidence of danger; it is only evidence of panic.”

The policy put forward should reflect our ability and nigh obligation to help stabilize Central America whilst also bolstering ports of entry, increasing the border force, making it easier to get and renew visas, overhauling the many thousands of people currently sitting in the purgatory of asylum review, starting an education campaign about how to enter the United States legally and properly, streamlining the immigration system to make it just that much easier for those who need to enter to enter, and properly administering the border rather than inciting a false panic meant to inflate the urge for an immediate solution in the form of a wall.

Border closings, like tariffs or sanctions, can be an effective diplomatic tools if they are implemented correctly, and it can be assured that the state being pressured will likely balk to said pressure, as Madrid did in 1985. There are reasons to believe this will not be the case, however, given President Trump’s rhetoric towards the state of Mexico and its leaders. Certainly, rhetoric too can be an effective tool, however Trump inflames more than he persuades — even his supposed pressure on North Korea hasn’t stopped the state from building missiles, despite two conferences that both ended without a binding agreement of any kind to show for them. Presidente Obrador has already ruled out the idea that Mexico will financially pay for the wall, that Mexico will support the wall, or that Mexico will stand for the closing of the Southern border, in a statement today:

“We respect president Trump’s position, and we are going to help. That is, this is a problem of the United States, or it’s a problem of the Central American countries. It’s not up to us Mexicans, no,” Lopez Obrador told reporters. “I just emphasize that migration flows of Mexicans to the United States are very low, a lot lower,” he said. “The Mexican is no longer seeking work in the United States. The majority are inhabitants of our fellow Central American countries.”

Later in the same article, by Reuters, Obrador’s government also cites the United States’ “bipolar” immigration policy as another primary factor for the reason why migrants continue to mass towards America; we at once tell them to go away while coming in as asylum seekers, leading to the overcrowding of detention centers, which leads to an inadequate allocation of resources, something which should be unthinkable in a nation with a 20 trillion dollar GDP and a gluttony of resources that could, if properly administered, be allocated efficiently to ensure no one has to endure inhumane detainment for any extended period unnecessarily. Likewise for our own citizens this side of the border, in waterless cities like Flint and food deserts in San Francisco or Dallas.

There is another blockade which Trump will have to overcome if he should declare the Southern Border closed, which are surefire legal challenges, which have amounted generally from his National Emergency declaration and the reallocation of Pentagon funds to support a wall on the Southern Border, again instead of going to increasing ICE and CBP forces, improving the various checks at ports of entry, or creating a system that would further ensure all procedural checks are taken methodologically, or simply running a campaign for Congress to properly reform our immigration laws in a spring cleaning event. The onus would be on Trump to provide the concrete evidence for a broader crisis at the border, something that hasn’t quite materialized in reality, but only within the narrative constructed by the Administration to milk funding from any source it can be derived.

Trump also continues to deal with the challenge of getting a wall built at all, of which the entire immigration debate now rests upon — if he cannot get his wall, Congress has to answer with a better solution, and if he does, then the question still remains about what is to be done about the broader immigration crisis happening not only on the United States’ southern border, but around the world. Europe is besieged by immigrants and asylum seekers, and it is becoming increasingly apparent these countries are unable and unwilling to capacitate these immigrants; in Poland, for example, the right-wing government has launched a stifling immigration effort meant to attract only Christians, the result being that Poland has seen a substantial population deflation as Christian Ukranians apply for Polish visas, but use the country as a mere stepping stone to get to Germany, the haven of European immigration; that, or native Poles leave the country never to return, for better opportunity in places like the United Kingdom and America. The United States cannot simply close itself off and hope the problems will disappear from behind the wall, nor should the United States favor such a permanent solution to a problem which will ultimately be temporary, if something at all gives. And it is likely not the meaning of making America great to have her befall the fate of other countries and see her people seek better opportunity elsewhere in the world. It is not a matter of xenophobia which will drive our citizens away, but rather the dereliction of the the American government to live up to its ideals of peace and liberty by preserving domestic tranquility, which is linked irrevocably with the stability and peaceable relations of other nations. At the very least, we can be assured that walls are in fact not permanent solutions, but can rather come tumbling down —

Whose line is it anyway?

Addendum, 29 March 2019

Yesterday, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security sent an urgent letter to the Congress pleading they provide additional support to address the humanitarian crisis at the border, akin to the proposals I listed above — increased medical aid and shelter, as Nielson writes in the letter about Health and Human Services capacities:

…because of the surge in arrivals, CBP has high numbers of children taht have not been transferre [to an appropriate sponsor]. As noted earlier, HHS is taking steps to rapidly add thousands of shelter beds. But in the short term, HHS is still approaching its maximum capacity and will very likely require thousands of additional beds in the coming weeks and months. I must emphasize how important it is to quickly transfer children out of border locations, which are not designed for long-term stay and are especially inadequate for the care of young people. (Emphasis my own)

In the letter, Nielson also addresses some of the pull factors, distinct from those mentioned by the Obrador Administration yesterday, such as the fact that children are almost garaunteed a sponsor who can care for them indefinitely while they await the outcome of their trials, or the fact that the United States pursues a policy, typically, of keeping families together, which Nielson addresses for the fact that,

Unlike previous flows, these migrants are not arriving in high numbers, one-at-a-time. They are arriving in large groups. In a normal year, DHS would encounter one or two groups over 200 migrants. Already in this fiscal year, we have encountered nearly 100 large groups comprised of 100+ migrants, nearly half of which have arrived in remote locations.

This is an ecumenical step forward for the Administration, with many of Nielson’s suggestions in the letter aligning with either the letter or the spirit of my policy suggestions above; for instance, Nielson also mentions she “also signed a first-ever regional compact with the countries of the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras — to address irregular migration, counter human smuggling and trafficking, and crack down on transnational criminal organizations that are also fueling the crisis.” Certainly, the results of this “first-ever” compact will have to be seen — the same countries now signed into the compact have been the worst offenders of inadequate border control. With pressure, and hopefully support, from the United States, some change will occur. Whether stopping short of directly recruiting American military forces will be effective in actually impacting change will also have to be seen. It is undoubtable, however, that this compact reflects a small about-face for the Administration that has largely scorned its allies internationally.