Posted on 04/09/2019 4:34:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
We just can't kick the habit. Or the media can't, which comes to the same thing, given the media's habitual deference to its customers -- you and me and Neighbor Jones.
We'd rather hear about Donald Trump than about the specific problem he believes himself, on particular occasions, to be addressing. And so today's big story on the Mexican border mess is all about DJT's "purge of the nation's immigration and security leadership," to quote The New York Times.
The story is a story. But it is not THE story: the story, that is, of a mass migration that existing governmental procedures are too weak to inhibit. Thus, what do we do? How do we preserve America's reputation as a simultaneously welcoming and politically stable country? Is Trump advancing the cause or not when he shows Kirstjen Nielsen the door -- none too genteelly, we may assume -- as secretary of Homeland Security and proceeds from there to overhaul the top ranks of the department?
The answer likely depends on your opinion of Trump -- as do all judgments to which we are dolefully invited these days.
Either the chief magistrate is a low-rent swine, or he's a faithful laborer against the "deep state." Such are the choices with which political discourse, online or at the microphone, usually leaves us. Left undusted-off are the underlying questions: What's the problem? What needs doing about it?
You don't get by for long without posing, and attempting to answer, those questions. I suspect most of us would not recognize Ms. Nielsen if she were ahead of us in the Kroger checkout line. I suspect most of us, without much labor, could imagine the implications of turning the Southwestern United States into a destination for every Honduran, Guatemalan or Salvadoran with a painful story to tell about life back home.
This matter is a hard one -- painfully hard. The United States, place the president's assertions and the absurdity of his threats to "close" the U.S.-Mexico border (talk about unbelievable promises and undoable tasks!) has ever welcomed refugees and always will -- however, on its own terms, not the terms of those who've decided to live in the American house, never mind what the landlord says.
Here we come to the nub of the matter. You can't just say, "Come one, come all." Is that the progressive position? One can't tell inasmuch as progressives and their news media cheering section prefer railing at the inhumane Trump to putting forth ideas that address the perils of "Come one, come all."
I have been on church mission trips to Honduras. The Hondurans are, as Texans say, good folks. But is opening wide the gates to them, and to others from the region, the answer to their hardships? This does not compute.
Corrupt government and the disappearance of social morale -- leading to poverty, economic sloth and gang-led crime -- have pointed many to the conclusion that flight is the only answer. The United States should act all the more sympathetically here for having failed, first, to recognize an obvious interest in the welfare of neighboring nations and, second, to create aid programs that enhance democratic capitalism and personal safety. However, from America's blindness to patent needs you can't jump to some fanciful American duty to make up for it all through general overhaul of its laws and policies governing refugees. The political instinct so to do is the same that stokes ever-sillier, ever-more-fervent talk of financial "reparations" to the descendants of African slaves.
No nation does everything right. No nation can, given the ongoing defects of human nature. Anyway, it's too late for replanting the Garden of Eden.
The best America can do about the refugee tide to the south is to:
1. Establish firm control of the situation.
2. Enlist conservatives and liberals alike, as many as can be induced into such an unsavory alliance, to fashion for Central America an aid program that actually aids in addressing the afflictions of crime, subpar economic development and venal government.
Well, it beats chewing the rug over Trump any old day of the week, doesn't it?
NO! Build the wall!
That would involve nothing less than a MacArthurlike occupation for a number of years where the greatest war criminals (gang bangers) were tried and hanged, civilized institutions of government were established and economic incentives for industry (as opposed to sloth) were put in place.
Anything less would be fleeting. Are there any other alternatives?
This matter is a hard one — painfully hard.
The matter or solution isn’t hard, at all. Tell them they will get absolutely nothing. They will not give birth, in an American hospital or elsewhere, to a US citizen. They will be put on a plane and flown back to an airport, somewhere in Central or South America, where the plane lands that day, will suffice. And you’ll be on your own. No one cares that MS13 runs your town or anything else.
Simple, easy solution.
I don’t see these people as refugees.
They are INVADERS posing a clear and present danger to our Nation's security and economy.
Micro entrepreneurship.
PAT BUCHANAN REALITY CHECK---- The 1924 immigration act restricted legal immigration into the U.S. and imposed ethnic quotas.
That's American, (not Nazi), law and was enforced by Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Pres Eisenhower, who led the Allies to victory over Germany, sent Gen. Joseph Swing to the U.S. border to remove a million people who had entered Texas illegally from Mexico, which the general proceeded to do. Ike had crushed fascism and understood that securing the homeland against illegal mass migration is fascism only in the minds of those who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what a country is.
From his words and actions, Trump clearly senses that this may be the existential issue of his presidency:
Can he secure the border against what seems to be an unstoppable invasion from the global south?
Nor is this strictly an American issue. In the capitals of Europe -- Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, Madrid -- the gnawing fear is not of Vladimir Putin recreating Stalin's empire, but of the African and Muslim hundreds of millions looking hungrily north to the pleasant lands of the former mother countries.
Build a wall and end catch and release. No other option is acceptable.
Kaslin is it your mission to demoralize Freepers every morning before coffee?
I see them as ticks.
Your proposal makes sense. A wall is only part of the solution. The invisible wall of no benefits, no work, no citizenship needs to be built as well.
It doesn’t surprise me, but I have yet to see any discussion in the media about Carter’s Muriel boat lift, nor about the 1986 immigration law that was supposed to be end all illegal immigration.
This is a rambling, and sometimes incoherent missive about how the US should be the problem solver of the 3rd world. The author is attempting to dictate that POTUS should make policies for Nicaragua or Honduras, or whatever, and then what? This does nothing to stop the flood of people that see the US as the shining beacon on a hill in which they can escape the pit that they perpetuated.
The US has dragged itself out of financial messes numerous times and never once did we flood other countries with refugees during our hard times.
These invaders lacked the moral courage to fight for the home that they abandoned and lack any motivation to become Americans. They simply see a panacea to their misery that happens to be a placebo.
“Refugees and, Maybe, What to Do About Them”
Rub their @$$ with sandpaper, pour turpentine on it, and they will run all the way back to where they came from.
The whole world can’t come here.
They need to fix their shitholes.
The greatest war criminals are in their own governments. The gangs only get away with it - and sometimes are even used as enforcers - because of their governments.
We let Marxism take over down there, thanks to the Dems and their covert or even overt support for the source of it all, Cuba, and our weak support for the peoples of these countries when somehow they did manage to get rid of their Marxist “Revolutionary” governments. The result was that, as in Nicaragua, etc., the Communists got right back in power. So yes, I’m all in favor of getting rid of the war criminals. But we need to go after the most important ones.
They are a real threat to our security, btw.
It’s absolutely true that there is no way to stop these people from fleeing if they can - and now that Mexico is apparently about to go full Communist there may be even more once the misery starts - but it’s not only the aid they need, since that will just be gobbled up by their governments, but the hangings.
You said it in a nutshell! It seems our original founders were made of stronger moral stuff. Not necessarily all of them but enough to make the difference.
Build the wall and let them sort it out at home.
I agree with handling the situation. I disagree with putting Honduras on foreign aid. Sorry, author!
“Establish control” and convince conservatives to get behind foreign aid?
Seriously??
I say arrest every border jumper and give them a free flight back where they came from;
and build new military bases right on the border. Long, narrow military bases, the more the merrier.
No aid.
No refugees.
Just no.
Don’t let them set foot in our country. Mexico wants so bad to play games, let Mexico deal with them. Permanently. And no aid to Mexico. At all. For any reason. Ever again.
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