President Biden made quite a show of tasking Vice President Harris to deal with the migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border. I remarked at the time that this assignment was so fated to fail, it seemed intended to sabotage any ambition she was harboring of succeeding him as president.
After all, Biden had already tasked Harris with the equally ill-fated job of leading efforts to combat the Republican legislative blitzkrieg underway across the country to suppress the voting rights of Blacks and Hispanics. Hell, all that remains is for him to make a show of tasking her to find a cure for cancer.
For her part, Harris spent most of her time since then fending off criticisms for failing to visit the border. She continually countered – with unbridled indignation – that she is interested in dealing with the root causes of the crisis, not in posing for Trumpian photo ops.
This is why she made quite a show of visiting the Northern Triangle (composed of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) in June. But even there she was hounded by that border question, which she answered as follows:
‘Listen, I’ve been to the border before. I will go again,’ she told reporters. ‘But when I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what’s going on in Guatemala.’… I haven’t been to Europe,” Harris said.
(Politico, June 8, 2021)
Tsk-tsk…
The problem, alas, is that Harris has little to show for her efforts. Because we now know that, after a few high-profile deportations, the administration dealt with the reported 20,000 migrants who set up camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, by letting most of them into the country.
Now comes yet another migrant caravan, which Reuters reported on as follows on October 23:
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Several thousand migrants from Haiti, South America and Central America set off from southern Mexico headed north on Saturday, clashing with law enforcement trying to hold the caravan back.
Some people among the latest mass movement of migrants trying to pass north through Mexico said they hoped to eventually reach the U.S. border, where the number of migrants trying to gain entry was already hitting new records.
A highway checkpoint in Tapachula with some 400 law enforcement officers aimed to block their path, but many migrants managed to break past.
U.S. authorities arrested more than 1.7 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border this fiscal year, the most ever recorded.
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To be fair, Harris has the right idea. The only way to deal with this problem is to invest the money and deploy the resources necessary to help Northern Triangle countries combat those root causes, most notably chronic poverty and violence. Not least because the latter is often related to the trafficking of drugs, which end up hooking and killing thousands of Americans each year.
As it happens, I wrote at length about the manifest necessity of engaging in this combat in “Separating Migrant Children from Parents. This Is America … Too!” June 20, 2018, and “Despite Trump, This Migrant Caravan Must Be Stopped!” October 22, 2018.
But it’s self-evident that leaders throughout the region are paying no heed to what Harris is saying. Primarily because they are too busy parroting what Trump is saying, most notably blaming Biden’s “welcoming” migrant policies for this migrant crisis.
Not to mention the manifest futility of Harris traveling there to tell people don’t come here. After all, people there have friends and family here telling them, “Hey we made it, come on up!”
But the Northern Triangle aside, it behooves the United States to figure out why so many purportedly allied countries in Central and South America are allowing migrant caravans to march in sequent toil through their territories, respectively. Because, as things stand, each appears to have a vested interest in seeing them reach the US-Mexico border, if not invade the US itself.
In other words, during the years it will take to combat the root causes, assuming there’s even the will to do so, the United States must use its wealth and power to induce these countries to stop subsequent migrant caravans in their tracks, which each one can easily do.
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Separating families… Migrant Caravan… Biden-Harris 2020…