Monday, I wondered what caused the president’s latest panic about immigration. He had fired, among others, a cabinet official. Tuesday, new U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics came out.
March 2018 was the highest month for southwest border crossing apprehensions since 2007, when George W. Bush was president. The figures are almost double what they were during any month of any year of President Barack Obama’s tenure. For instance, the March 2018 figure of 103,492 triples the same figure for March 2016: 33,316.
The candidate who bragged he would single-handedly stop the flow of illegal immigrants across our southern border is now a president with the worst mass migration numbers of recent history.
The year-to-date figure for 2019 apprehensions is 238,320. Keep in mind this is for apprehensions. These figures do not include those who got through. The border agency is not claiming to be any more effective in their rate of successful intercepts.
The same year-to-date figure for 2018 was 123,003. And the rate of apprehensions is going up also — steeply. The number of apprehensions more than doubled in March compared to the year before. The same is true for February. Here is the link: www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
The Border Protection estimate for next month’s apprehensions is 150,000.
Frequent readers know I am no fan of the president, but these numbers are not the president’s fault. People choose to leave Central America on their own. They do not ask the U.S. president first. The administration’s recent decision to whack aid to the refugees’ countries of origin, while dumb, has not had time to make things worse there this quickly.
So I do not blame the president for something beyond his control. I blame him for promising to solve a problem clearly beyond his control or comprehension. He set himself up to look like a failure.
The administration had a solid offer from Congress for a big increase in border security funding in December. The president wanted more for a wall. Two months and a government shutdown later he got less than was offered in December. He declared an emergency to rob Peter to pay Paul, diverting money from other things to build a piece of his wall. Even many supporters balked. Expect the whole emergency declaration thing to get tied up in court. The president even said to expect this.
The “art of the deal” requires making one. The situation now is what happens when someone bellows about a crisis, does nothing about it for two years and then flails about as things get much worse.
Passing anything effective — or ineffective — about immigration enforcement only gets harder after creating trillion-dollar deficits and losing your party’s majority in the House, by the way.
We must secure our southern border, the president says. Fine. Start by not wasting money and precious time stalling for a multi-billion dollar prop for the re-election campaign. Spend money on agents, courts, fencing, monitors and — yes — aid to the countries the migrants are coming from to make life there tolerable. The “ounce of prevention/pound of cure” ratio is still in effect. An ounce of prevention also beats a ton of bluster or boondoggle.
We should also reconsider backing regimes like that of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, narrowly re-elected in a campaign tainted by fraud. His brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, was arrested in November in Miami for using Honduran military equipment and personnel to ship cocaine to the United States With friends like these, etc.
Also note much of the aid being cut off — or threatened with cutoffs that may never happen with this administration — goes to non-governmental organizations with some results to show, not so much to the corrupt governments themselves.
A little common sense recognition of human nature would not hurt, either. Right now, some parent in El Salvador is thinking: “Well, the last crop failed. On top of that, gangs run wild and my kids are in very real danger. I should flee.” He or she is not thinking: “But wait. If we flee toward safety, we might get separated if we get caught. Better stay here and go hungry while waiting to get robbed and killed.”
Accepting the certainty of hunger and the high risk of death against the chance of separation would make about as much sense as expecting Mexico to pay for a wall.
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Doug Thompson is a political reporter and columnist for the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected] or on Twitter @NWADoug.