Featured image from The Guardian. Follow the link for more on the story.
Del Rio Texas shows us how broken our border is, and how the impact of political rhetoric creates a magnet drawing people from all over the world. In the span of a week, a massive swarm of Haitian migrants has flooded over the southern border, turning a temporary detainment camp into a shanty town.
As of today, the population of this “camp” had risen to over 14,000 illegal aliens (though with the Biden Administration I don’t believe the numbers) and has fallen to about 8,600 as of the publication by the AP. The Border Patrol is flying the illegal border crossers to other states, to be processed and released into the interior of the country.
And the imagery, aimed at defunding the Border Patrol and throwing open the Southern Border of the United States, circulates. It reminds me of a meme that I see floating around the interwebs, all about perspective.
Same moment in time, two perspectives, two very different stories. The lie of the Border Patrol whipping Haitian zooms around the world, while the truth is just barely tying its shoelaces.
But this feeds into a much larger issue. While we mull about the vaccine mandate (*cough cough* UNCONSTITUTIONAL *cough cough*) and see thousands of workers terminated in the middle of a pandemic with nearly ELEVEN MILLION JOB OPENINGS, and supply chain disruptions and shortages. This is going to continue to punish the American people and pit those who would comply with the government’s increasingly fascistic tendencies with those who value their freedoms. The conspiratorial part of me wonders more and more aloud if it is all intentional, designed to tear down the system and replace it with a centralized command-and-control style government/economy.
Leaving the border open and not requiring those detained to not get a vaccine or be tested for COVID undermines any sense of consistency or even principle that the government claims to have. Why is it that illegal immigrants can stroll into the country untested and unvaccinated while I can’t go to the gym without showing my papers? When did the people that claimed “my body, my choice,” become the crowd of “you must get this medical procedure whether you want it or not”?
Borders matter, ladies and gentlemen. And let me play devil’s advocate, channeling my inner “progressive anti-fascist millennial.”
According to those folks, America is a white supremacist nation, full of institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, and so on. Why then, should we subject the poor people of color to that racism and discrimination? We should protect the rest of the world from the evils that is the American Republic system of government by building a strong and secure border, that way people who are falsely under the impression that America is a land of opportunity don’t fall for the grift and experience the “real America.”
Of course, I don’t agree with their premises. I think America is a beautiful, albeit imperfect, system and offers opportunities to those who are willing to work for it. I believe that the current system needs drastic reforms, and that there is heavy investment by special interests and political parties to keep it very difficult to enter the country legally. So I realistically don’t believe that the federal government has the will or incentive to make substantive changes to the system. From drugs, to human trafficking, there are things that the federal government doesn’t see and tolerate in their pursuit of power and control.
But borders matter people. We are seeing our Visigoth moment here in real time. We must recognize that our leaders do not see it as such.
A Place 4Politics 