Mediaboss Marketing

Unlimited illegal immigrationthats what a Biden administration wants, and that is what it will be able to get after Jan. 20.

This is perhaps the most important domestic policy issue at stake for America as we face single-party leadership in both chambers of Congressand the White House. And it couldnt come at a worse time for our country as Americans struggle to keep businesses open and regain a public health footing from the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 virus.

President-electJoeBiden has a long record of calling for unlimited immigration.

In 2015, he was recalling a conversation he had with a former president of Singapore about what separates America. He stated that it was an unrelenting stream of immigrationnonstop, nonstop.

He had previously expressed this desire to the National Association of Manufacturers, where he said that the constant, unrelenting stream of immigrants into the U.S. was the basis for our economic strength.

He emphasized that he wanted not dribbling amounts, but significant flows.

With the left in control of the U.S. Senate, the Biden administration has aCongress available to rubber-stamp its most radical immigration agenda items. And make no mistake: The left will not waste this political opportunity. Its leaders understand that mass immigration historically transfers into more leftist voters.

Its no coincidence that the open-borders lobby has found a permanent home with leftists. It means pure political power. Look no further thanCalifornia as Exhibit A.

So, what can the Biden administration do with a House and Senate controlled by the far left? First, it can seek to legalize all illegal aliens within the U.S., with token exceptions for some hardened criminals.

Keep in mind that the U.S.doesnt even know how manyillegal aliens are here, in part because theleft has opposed any effortto try to better understand that number. TheBiden team claims it is around 11 million, but other estimates top 22 million.

Such anamnestyeffort would not make any attempt at assimilating illegal aliens into the U.S. mainstreamadopting our language, culture, and patriotism.

Second, the borders would be open and overrun. Promising amnesty has already resulted in a run on the border, or the Biden Effect. Once the wheels start moving toward the largest amnesty in our history, the Border Patrol would be overwhelmed by illegal aliens seeking to get their claim to the most prized passport in the worldand all the government benefits that come along with it.

Couple this green light with stand-down orders to the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and you have a recipe for absolute disaster without any limiting principle. A recent Gallup poll found that more than 158 million adults would migrate to the United States if they could.

With aBiden presidency and a leftist-controlled Congress, what will be able to stop them?

Third, scarce resources would be directed away from current Americans and toward amnestied immigrants. This means it would be open season on the buffet of federal government welfare programs, as well as the continued strain on Americas job availability, education budgets, health care costs, andpublic safetyresources.

Translation? Americans forced to compete for employment opportunities as wages decrease, crowded schools with burgeoning numbers of students who dont speak English, rising health care costs, increased COVID-19 spread, and more gang-related crime, as Americans have seen from the ruthless MS-13 where it has taken hold.

But asBiden says of illegal immigrants, We owe them.

Americans are directly affected by immigration policy in many important aspects of our livesjobs, the economy, education, health care, crime, and national security.

Americans and lawful immigrants want our immigration laws enforced and our borders secured.

Yet, we are on the verge of having neither. With the White House and Congress under single-party leadership, it will be up to the American people to frequently and loudly voice their opinion that open borders and amnesty are wrong for America.

Read more here:
America May Soon Face Unlimited Illegal Immigration - Heritage.org

I recognize, as a member of the Democratic Party, the incoming administration's desire to eliminate as much as it can of the legacy of the Trump administration. It will stop building walls and will ease some of the enforcement of the immigration law that's inevitable.

But, being the new party in power, it also has the opportunity (and the obligation) to do some fresh thinking in this field and to try new approaches to old problems. With that in mind, this is the first of several occasional posts on the administration's opportunities to reform the immigration system, or at least parts of it.

Today's subject is a narrow one: How can we use the Diversity Visa Lottery program to ease the migration pressures from Central America, such as the caravans from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that are threatening our southern border?

At first glance, the two subjects would seem to have no relationship with each other. The Diversity Lottery is part of the legal immigration system and the people from the Northern Triangle are trying to enter the nation illegally.

In 2018, the lottery gave 50,000 green cards to people from all over the world, such as 4,494 to those from Uzbekistan and 1,020 to those from Tajikistan, compared to none in El Salvador, 144 in Honduras, and 120 in Guatemala. The lottery seemed to deliver much less than 1 percent of its benefits to people from the Northern Triangle. What's the connection?

Let's step back a bit and suggest a new approach to immigration policy: How can we use existing systems to discourage illegal immigration without necessarily expanding the huge number of legal immigrants (more than one million a year, a number most Americans find daunting)? This represents a more sophisticated way of thinking about illegal migration than, say, building a wall (which is not a totally bad idea, but that's a subject for some other day).

We Democrats believe in government, and that government can and should play a positive role in people's lives, even though some of the mechanisms are complex (like our tax system). It is within this broad context that I bring up the matter of the Visa Lottery and the threat from the Northern Triangle that my colleague Todd Bensman writes about from time to time.

The Idea. My notion is not brand new. It is that if the possibility of legal migration can be offered to a specific population it will, to some extent, stay put instead of seeking to move illegally. New Zealand, where I had a Fulbright Scholarship some decades ago, has long run a small-scale lottery for some of the small island nations north of it. All of the nations involved are, as is New Zealand, former British colonies or, in the case of Tonga, a protectorate; they are Fiji, Kiribati, Tonga, and Tuvalu.

The Kiwi lottery was created to discourage illegal immigration; our lottery, in contrast, was not the result of that kind of planning (something that New Zealand is good at), but rather a reflection of a globalist desire to expand opportunities to migrate to the U.S. to people who would not otherwise qualify to do so. I am pretty sure that the Visa Lottery is a bad idea, but it is in place, and could be used (as it is not now) to ease the pressures on the southern border.

The Plan. As we noted earlier, the lottery causes the admission of thousands of people from Central Asia, among other places, which have no history of massive illegal migration to the U.S. Why not reduce some of those numbers and use those visas to discourage illegal migration to our country? This would not increase the level of legal migration to the U.S. and would serve a highly useful public service.

I suggest that 10,000 visas be drawn from the current total to be used only in the Northern Triangle countries. It would simplify things if the rather loose current qualifications would continue: One must have a high school degree or two years of specialized training, a passport, and one must make an application on a computer (or hire someone to do that chore). I would lay on one further qualification in the Northern Triangle countries one must not have a record of entering the U.S. illegally.

The details of the plan would be designed to keep applicants in their home countries while they wait for a visa possibility. They would have to re-apply every year, and they would be subject to unscheduled home visits by a junior U.S. diplomat, who would simply make sure that they are in-country, and not in the U.S. In subsequent years, people who had filed the previous year would have some greater chance of getting the visa than new applicants, and that advantage would increase further in the third year, and so on.

Introduction of the program would also be useful in our relations with the home countries, as it would be a carrot rather than a stick.

The Precedent. But would not the countries that used to get large numbers of visas object to the 20 percent reduction (from about 50,000 to about 40,000)? Possibly, but that would mean that they wanted to encourage emigration, a rejection of their own country. Further, reduction of chances for legal migration is not the same as the elimination of them.

And there is a precedent for nibbling at the total numbers of visas granted to provide special benefits for a special set of nations. Back in 1997, as NumbersUSA has written, "5,000 of these visas were reserved for individuals who qualified for legal permanent resident status under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act. Those 5,000 visas are not granted under a lottery process."

So once there were 55,000 visa provided by Lottery, and now there are 50,000, and the difference was created for an earlier round of Central American asylum seekers. Why not do it again to offer some benefits to the citizens of the U.S., i.e., less illegal migration?

This would need an act of Congress, or a rider on one of those omnibus appropriations bills.

North, now a resident of Arlington, Va., was his party's candidate for Congress in New Jersey's Fifth District more than 60 years ago and was, later, assistant to the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and worked on immigration policy in the LBJ White House.

More:
To the Biden Administration: Let's Get Creative with Our Immigration Policy - Immigration Blog

One of the most common justifications for immigration restrictions is the claim that letting in too many of the wrong type of immigrants would undermine liberal democratic institutions. In the worst-case scenario, their flawed culture, values, or political ideologies could "kill the goose that lays the golden eggs" that attracted immigrants in the first place, and turn the receiving nation into a cesspool of despotism. Such concerns should be taken seriously, and I devote a large part of Chapter 6 of my book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom to addressing them. Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell's just-published Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions undertakes the same task in much greater depth, and is likely to become the most authoritative treatment of the subject.

But, as Nowrasteh points out in a recent blog post, the focus on immigrants as a threat to American institutions leads many to overlook the much greater danger posed by nativist nationaliststhe people most hostile to immigration. Recent events highlight the severity of that threat:

Benjamin Powell and Iwrote our book Wretched Refuse? The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions to address the argument that liberalized immigration will undermine the very American institutions that created economic prosperity that attracted immigrants here in the first place. Immigrants generally come from countries with political, cultural, and economic institutions that are less conducive to economic growth than those in the developed world. The fear is that they'd bring those antigrowth institutions with them. Thus, as their argument goes, immigrants could actually kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

As we assiduously document, immigrants do not bring those institutions with them and there is even evidence that immigrants improve institutions after they immigrate.

It's ironic that the immigration restrictionists most worried about immigrants degrading Americaninstitutions are attacking those very institutions at every level. After President Trump lost his reelection bid, the most nativistic members of his party have embarked on aquest to reverse theelection. Adozen Republican Senators, mostly those supportive of cutting legal immigration, plan to object to the certification of Biden's win over Trump. Over 100 representatives could join in too. President Trump cut legal immigration more than any other president and he recently threatened Georgia election officials.

Immigration restrictionists have also attacked the institution of private property. The Trump administration has seized or is trying to seize 5,275acres of privately owned land to build aborder wall, most of it in Texas. Trump even diverted Congressionally appropriated funds from the military to build the border wall.

Many in Trump's orbit are also conspiracy theorists or work with them at every opportunity. Making up stories to tarnish your opponents and believing in nutty conspiracy theories bothbreak down trust in institutions, which is exactly what some nativists claim immigration does to the United States.

Alex's post was published on January 5, the day before the attack on the Capitol by pro-Trump rioters. But the events of that awful day further demonstrate his point. While we do not have detailed demographic data on them, it is highly likely that the rioters were overwhelmingly native-born whitesand (much more importantly) strong supporters of Trump's nationalist, anti-immigration agenda.

Political scientists and survey researchers find that white ethnic nationalism and hostility to immigration are among the strongest predictors of support for Trump and his agenda. Those who fear that immigrants are a menace to American culture and institutions also tend to be most likely to tolerate and make excuse for Trump's authoritarian tendencies.

Some of the awful events of the last few weeks are the result of Trump's distinctive personality and behavior, and of idiosyncratic characteristics of the American political system. But many are common characteristics of ethno-nationalist anti-immigration movements around the world. Over the last century, it has been extremely common for nationalist movements hostile to immigrants and ethnic minorities to subvert democratic institutions, often eventually installing brutal dictatorships.

The Nazis are, of course, the most notorious example. But the same was true of other early-20th century fascist movements in Italy, Spain, and elsewhere. More recently, nationalist movements have destroyed or severely undermined democracy in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, India, and elsewhere. In each of these cases, authoritarian nationalists claimed to represent the true will of the peopledefined as those of the majority ethnicity, religion, or culture.

Such claims also naturally lead to the idea the election victories by the opposition must be illegitimate, because only the nationalists represent "real" Americans, Hungarians, Russians, Poles, or Indians (defined, again, as members of the majority ethnic or culture group, free of "foreign" influence). Nationalist movements also commonly promote conspiracy theories. If they alone represent the will of the people, any political setbacks must be due to the machinations of shadowy, nefarious forces, such as foreigners, "globalist" elites, international bankers, Jews, and so on.

Trump's conspiracy-mongering about the 2020 election, complete with claims that the vote was falsified by illegal immigrant voters, foreign agents, and others, is of a piece with similar conspiracy-mongering by Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, and other nationalist leaders in Europe and elsewhere.

The US is not as far-gone as Russia, Hungary and other nations that have succumbed to authoritarian nationalism, and our democratic institutions are (so far) stronger than theirs. But we would be foolish to ignore the parallels between these movements and Trumpism, and even more foolish to ignore the risks of letting such movements grow. Trump and his allies themselves recognize the similarities, and have embraced Orban, Putin, and other similar leaders and movements (including ethno-nationalists in Western Europe), as ideological soulmates.

By contrast with the long record of nationalists subverting democracy, there are no modern instances of a democracy collapsing or even significantly degenerating because of the political influence of immigrants with illiberal ideologies. In their book, Nowrasteh and Powell document how liberal democracies such as the US and Israel have coped well with large-scale immigration from repressive, undemocratic societies. That is partly because most immigrants from such nations don't actually support the ideologies of the regimes they are fleeing (that is a key reason why many fled in the first place), and partly because liberal societies have strong capacity to absorb and assimilate people.

A more sophisticated variant of the claim that immigrants are a threat to democratic institutions is the idea that the problem is not the immigrants themselves, but rather the political backlash they generate. Excessive immigration, it is said, bolsters the political fortunes of authoritarian nationalists (including Trump!), who in turn undermine democratic institutions when they come to power. Thus, we must restrict immigration to protect ourselves against native nationalists.

One flaw in this argument is that survey data consistently shows that most people in both the US and Europe consistently overestimate the true amount of immigration, and those most opposed to immigration overestimate the most. Given such widespread ignorance, we cannot assume that, say, a 10% reduction in immigration will lead to a parallel reduction in ethno-nationalist sentiment. Indeed, most nationalist voters might not even notice the difference.

It is also worth noting that hostility to immigration among natives often tends to be greatest in parts of the US and other countries that have the fewest immigrants. Indeed, it is striking that anti-immigrant nationalist movements came to power in Hungary and Poland, countries with very few immigrants (no more than 4.6% of the population at any time in the last 30 years, in the case of Hungary; no more than 3% in the case of Poland, and much lower in the last 20 years). This too weakens claims that we can reduce support for illiberal nationalist movements simply by cutting back on immigration at the margin.

Efficacy aside, the idea that we must restrict immigration in order to protect against native-born nationalists is morally perverse. It suggests we severely restrict the liberty and opportunity of innocent people in order to protect against wrongdoing by others. The innocent people in question include natives, as well as potential immigrants, since immigration restrictions also impose severe burdens on many of the former.

The backlash-prevention rationale for immigration restrictions is similar to nineteenth-century claims that we must allow southern whites to impose racial segregation on blacks in order to prevent the former from continuing to engage in violence and otherwise pose an ongoing threat to the Union. And, indeed, immigration restrictions have many similarities to domestic racial segregation, as both impose severe constraints on liberty and opportunity based on arbitrary circumstances of birth, and often based on the desire to maintain the dominance of a given racial or ethnic group.

If we must restrict liberty in order to protect ourselves against illiberal nationalists, the most appropriate people to target should be the nationalists themselves. But I hasten to add that I do not believe the US and other Western nations should actually go down this path, so long as there is any other plausible alternative. There should be a strong presumption against any constraints on civil libertieseven including those of people who have little respect for liberal values, themselves.

We cannot completely rule out the possibility that there are cases where illiberal immigrants pose a threat to democratic institutions. In my book, I describe potential extreme situations where that could be a real threat. But, in the vast majority of cases, the far greater menace to democracy is that posed by nativist nationalism.

Read the original:
Nationalists, not Immigrants, are the Real Threat to Liberal Democratic Institutions - Reason

At Sierra Vista Ranch in Arizona near the Mexican border, Troy McDaniel is warming up his helicopter. McDaniel, tall and slim in a tan jumpsuit, began taking flying lessons in the 80s, and has since logged 2,000 miles in the air. The helicopter, a cosy, two-seater Robinson R22 Alpha is considered a work vehicle and used to monitor the 640-acre ranch, but its clear he relishes any opportunity to fly. We will have no fun at all, he deadpans.

McDaniel and his wife, Melissa Owen, bought their ranch and the 100-year-old adobe house that came with it in 2003. Years before, Owen began volunteering at the nearby Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, and fell in love with the beauty and natural diversity of the area, as well as the quiet of their tiny town. That all changed last July when construction vehicles and large machinery started barrelling down the two-lane state road, says Owen.

Once work on President Donald Trumps border wall began, construction was rapid. Sasabe, a sleepy border town, located over an hour from the nearest city of Tucson, was transformed into a construction site. I dont think you could find a single person in Sasabe who is in favour of this wall, Owen says.

The purpose of our helicopter trip today is to see the rushed construction work occurring just south of the couples house, as contractors race to finish sections of the border wall before Trump leaves office. Viewed from high above the Arizona desert, in the windless bubble of the cockpit, this new section of wall stretches across the landscape like a rust-coloured scar. McDaniel guides us smoothly over hills and drops into canyons, surveying the beauty of the landscape. Here, as on much of the border, the 30ft barrier does not go around; it goes over stubbornly ploughing through cliffs, up steep mountainsides, and between once-connected communities.

That was already a pretty good barrier, McDaniel says of the steep, unscalable cliff in front of us. The bulldozed path of Trumps wall creeps up over the mountains west side, but on the other side of the cliff there is no wall, just a large gap. As with many areas on the border, the wall here is being built in a piecemeal fashion. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, there are 37 ongoing projects, of which only three are set to be completed this month; others have completion dates as far away as June 2022.

In August, at a virtual press conference with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Joe Biden told reporters that there will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration. The 37 existing construction sites, in various stages of completion, are likely to be shut down.

Yet he will have to formulate a more complex policy than simple suspension. Many of the private contractors building the wall have clauses in their contracts that will trigger large payouts if the government simply stops construction. There are also ongoing legal cases brought by private landowners from whom the government seized land. The exact nature of these obligations may only be clear to Biden once he takes office.

In the meantime, Trump has accelerated building in the wake of the election, with crews working flat out, late into the night. Throughout December and into January, mountainsides were exploded with dynamite and large portions of desert bulldozed, to make way for a wall that may not be finished in time.

For the past four years, I have been living in New Mexico, travelling in the borderlands and documenting the ongoing impact of the wall on communities and the environment.

They started working nights six weeks ago, says photographer John Kurc, who has been documenting construction in the remote Guadalupe Canyon in Arizona since October last year. Its been nonstop ever since.

Verlon Jose, former vice-chair of the Native American Tohono Oodham Nation, tells me he has seen the wall plough through his ancestral homeland. We are caretakers of this land. We are responsible for these things. Has anyone ever asked for permission from the local folks to do the construction? This is about President Donald Trump. Its not about protecting America. Its about protecting his own interests.

When construction stops, there will be large gaps in the new wall. In some places it will join up with older barriers that the Trump administration deemed inadequate; in others it will finish abruptly. They work as fast as they can to build walls that will just end, says McDaniel, as his helicopter circles back toward their property over saguaro-studded hillsides just north of the Mexican border. We drop altitude and approach the landing strip a patch of dirt just off the road whipping up a small dust storm as we touch the ground.

***

After four years of daily scandals, and the shocking scenes in Washington DC last week, its easy to forget that Donald Trump was elected in 2016 with one signature policy: to build a wall. That was the call echoed at his rallies, the embodiment of Trumps hardline approach to immigration and his purported America First ideology. Trump claimed the wall would address an invasion of undesirable migrants, bad hombres, a nationalist rhetoric that resonated with his base. During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order that included a policy for the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border.

Construction began in 2019, mostly replacing existing fences, vehicle barriers, and other border structures, as well as unwalled sections of the border. The bollard wall, Trumps barrier of choice, consists of a series of vertical steel posts set in concrete, with small gaps in between. While in some places it reaches a height of 30ft, it is less of a wall and more of an imposing metal fence.

According to Kenneth Madsen, an associate professor in the department of geography at Ohio State University, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has waived 84 laws and statutes many enacted specifically to protect the nations most treasured cultural and ecological sites in order to expedite construction.

Dozens of environmental and public health laws were brushed aside to build walls through parks and wildlife areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge and Coronado National Memorial. It has brought devastation to the environment and the communities of the borderlands, says Scott Nicol, author of a 2018 report for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) about the impact of the wall, and a resident of the Rio Grande valley in Texas.

Nicol believes the walls charted course has been determined by ease rather than efficacy. Construction has been much busier on federally owned land, not because thats where there are likely to be more border crossings, but because building on private property is a lengthy process. Texas has the most border but the least wall mileage to date because the Texas borderlands are mostly in private hands, says Nicol.

According to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, 452 miles of border wall have been constructed under the Trump administration, at an estimated cost of $15bn, one of the most expensive infrastructure projects in US history. In September 2019, Trump promised to build between 450 and 500 miles of wall, so he has reached this goal even if the vast majority of it is replacing existing barriers.

On Tuesday, days after the violent insurrection at the White House, Trump made a final visit to the border in Texas to celebrate reaching this target. During a short speech, he skirted any responsibility for the capital siege, and instead remarked on his successes in halting illegal immigration and securing the border.

When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional and open border, he said. We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure southern border in US history.

Has it had any impact on immigration? According to attorney David Donatti, from the ACLU of Texas, the answer is no. In recent months, according to CBP data, the number of people trying to cross has increased. The wall as a whole is unlikely to have any discernible impact, says Donatti. In a race to construct, the administration is building where its easier as opposed to where most people cross.

And while the wall may be an impressive barrier, it is far from impregnable. Just after Christmas, Nicol visited a new section in the Rio Grande valley between Texas and Mexico and found numerous ladders scattered on the ground. You can always go over, he says.

You can also go through. John Kurc started using drones to photograph and video the construction of the wall. The last time he was in the border town of Sonoyta, Mexico, he saw two young men with yellow, handheld angle grinders cutting through the wall while a lookout with a radio watched for Border Patrol. They would put the section back with a special bonding agent and then use paint that oxidizes the same colour as the bollards, says Kurc. Then they just go in and out.

Gil Kerlikowske, the Obama-appointed former commissioner of the CBP, says there is not a one-size-fits-all solution for border security: There are places where the environment is difficult and so remote you dont need any barrier at all. In these areas, surveillance and detection technologies would be more useful and cost-efficient, he argues. It is such an unbelievably complex problem. When someone proposes a simple solution to a complex problem, you can be sure thats the wrong solution.

***

Thats not to say Trumps wall has had no impact. Back on the ranch, cameras set up by Melissa Owen have captured passing wildlife mountain lions and javelina, pig-like mammals, the skulls of which can also be found around the house. There were no environmental surveys, no groundwater surveys, none of that, says Owen. Once contractors arrived in town last summer, they began pumping enormous amounts of water out of the ground in order to mix concrete for the border walls foundations.

Residents in Sasabe began complaining of reduced water pressure. At San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, groundwater pumping for concrete began draining a crucial wetland and endangering four threatened species of fish. Similar concerns were raised when the Quitobaquito Springs at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to the endangered desert pupfish began to dry out as contractors pumped water from the ancient aquifer that fed it. Thats our water thats what we depend on, says Owen, looking out towards arid ranchland that is suffering from a long drought.

Myles Traphagen, borderlands coordinator of the Wildlands Network conservation group, has called Trumps wall the single most damaging project to the ecology of the mountainous Sky Islands region and the animals that call it home especially the jaguar, which has made a remarkable comeback in the US after being hunted to extinction by the late 1960s.

We had three different jaguars in 2015 and 2016, which hadnt happened since the 1930s, says Chris Bugbee, a senior researcher at Conservation CATalyst, an organisation dedicated to the worlds 38 wild cat species.

If this border wall hadnt started, we expected a female to eventually arrive and have breeding jaguars again, adds Aletris Neils, Conservation CATalysts executive director.

The jaguar is one of numerous species such as the endangered ocelot and the Mexican gray wolf found in a region that extends from south-western New Mexico into western Arizona and far down into Mexico. If current border wall construction is completed, says Traphagen, 93% of jaguar habitat will have been walled off.

Only males have been seen in the US since the 60s. They have huge ranges and some travel north where there is plenty to eat, before returning south to find a mate. There is currently one jaguar (whose location cannot be shared due to poaching concerns) on the US side, cut off from Mexico because of the wall.

Bugbee has spent years tracking the famous El Jefe jaguar, one of the few sighted recently in the US, with his dog Mayke. We havent seen signs of any jaguars since construction began, he tells me when we meet at the Coronado National Forest, where he previously tracked the cat. A mile or so away, construction workers have been blasting and bulldozing over the steep Montezuma Pass, where another jaguar, known as Yooko, once roamed.

Owen and McDaniel are far from open-border liberals. The entrance to their ranch has a sign that reads: Border Patrol always welcome. Owens two horses, Rocker and Kiowa, are retired Border Patrol horses the best, she says of their temperament. In her early years on the ranch, Owen says, undocumented migrants and smugglers were coming across the border in large numbers. She would frequently encounter migrants on her property. One morning someone broke into her house. I dont want it to go back to then, she says, but adds that the economic downturn of 2008 has slowed immigration considerably. No one wants a secure border more than I, she says. But a 30ft-tall, poorly constructed barrier is not the answer. Its a campaign gimmick. My neighbourhood is being destroyed because a megalomaniac wants to pacify his supporters.

During his election campaign, Trump claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall. Once he was in office, Congress provided some $1.37bn a year for construction, but each year the president demanded more, ultimately declaring a national emergency in order to divert military funds to pay for the wall. Its estimated by the US Army Corps of Engineers that Biden will save about $2.6bn if he stops construction on the border wall in his first day in office.

Trump, and some within CBP, have maintained that the wall is a crucial means of halting smuggling. Illegal drug and human smuggling activities have decreased in those areas where barriers are deployed. Illegal cross-border traffic has also shifted to areas with inferior legacy barriers or no barriers at all, said a DHS spokesperson in a recent email to the Guardian.

Kerlikowske, who also served as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2009 and 2014, admits that drug trafficking is a problem. However, he points out that the vast majority of illicit substances, such as fentanyl, cocaine and heroin, are smuggled through legal ports of entry where elaborate walls and security systems already exist. During my time as commissioner, I met with hundreds of border patrol agents. No one in the border patrol says we really need a wall, he says.

Donatti from the ACLU of Texas says there is little evidence that walls deter either drugs or undocumented immigration, which is being driven primarily by so-called push factors (war, poverty, desperation) in other countries. The US federal government has tried to study this several times and has never found support that a border wall stops the flow of undocumented immigration, he says.

One thing border walls are effective at is increasing the number of migrant deaths. As the US has walled off more of its border, the risk to migrants crossing illegally has increased. Since 1998, around 7,000 people have died along the US-Mexico border, the majority in Arizonas rural deserts and, in recent years, the Rio Grande valley. As you keep building, you keep pushing people into more remote and dangerous areas, says Donatti.

Its a humanitarian disaster, agrees Eddie Canales, of the South Texas Human Rights Center, who has spent the past decade operating hundreds of water stations in the Rio Grande valley in Texas to save migrants. We do what we can, Canales told the Guardian in early 2020. But people keep dying. The wall funnels people into more dangerous crossing points, where physical barriers do not yet exist. Summer temperatures in the Arizona desert are brutal; 2020 became the deadliest year since 2010 for those who crossed the border there.

***

Its hard for people to understand what this means to us, as Oodham and Native Americans. What it means to us as the original indigenous peoples of this land, says Verlon Jose.

When I visit Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a pristine tract of Sonoran desert, earlier this year, contractors are busy dynamiting Monument Hill, a sacred mountain and burial site for the Tohono Oodham people. Uprooted saguaros, the huge, tree-like cacti sacred to the tribe, dot the path of the wall. It was like, Tell me where your grandparents live, and Ill put a wall through there, says Jose.

In certain areas, we wont be able to continue our traditional practices, says Jose, whose tribal members span both sides of the border. We spent billions of dollars on the wall. Why dont we invest it in our border cities and towns?

According to Norma Herrera, a border resident from McAllen, Texas, the walls $15bn price tag is an insult to one of the countys most impoverished regions, where critical infrastructure is often lacking. This issue was laid bare during the pandemic, when places such as the Rio Grande valley in Texas, a centre of border wall construction, was devastated by Covid. Hospitals reached capacity, deaths mounted, and all the while, the wall continued to rise.

We had more deaths in the region than the entire state, says Herrera, community organiser at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, which advocates for marginalised groups in the area. To see the wall going up, to see resources used on useless steel and concrete, its senseless.

According to Donatti, whose parents originally emigrated from Argentina to the US, the wall should be seen in the context of broader exclusion policies such as the Remain in Mexico programme enacted by Trump, under which asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry are returned to Mexico to wait for their US immigration proceedings. Its this idea that there is a fundamental Americanness, and either youre inside, or youre out, he says.

That idea was evident in late 2019, when I visited a shelter in Tijuana. The two-storey building in the neighbourhood of Benito Jurez was packed with families, with mattresses sprawled over every inch of open floor. At that time in Tijuana, nearly 10,000 asylum seekers were waiting for their immigration hearings after being turned back at the border and sent to one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.

Many are hopeful that under the Biden administration the approach to migrants and the borderlands will change; that policies such as Remain in Mexico will be undone; and even that sections of the border wall will be removed. A week after inauguration day, a coalition of groups across the borderlands will begin a monitoring project in order to assess the damage, and to see what needs to be done. Some hope certain sections can be removed in order to reconnect critical habitats and communities.

Verlon Jose of the Tohono Oodham has a sliver of hope that some of the walls will come down. I believe Biden will not build another inch, he adds.

Others are not so sure. Optimism? No, says Donatti of the prospect of the wall coming down. He hasnt committed to as much. But there is a strong coalition along the border that will be fighting for it.

John Kurc, who has spent thousands of hours watching the destruction of Guadalupe Canyon, sees the scale of the challenge. The Trump administration has caused so much damage to these environments, he says, peering through a set of binoculars as a crane hoists up an isolated section of wall, with huge gaps on each side. We have a lot of work to do.

Read more:
'My neighbourhood is being destroyed to pacify his supporters': the race to complete Trump's wall - The Guardian

(Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty)

We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period, former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted indignantly on June 17, 2018. Which was true, but only in the most literal sense. What DHS and the Justice Department did have was a policy to arrest virtually everyone who tried to enter the country between border stations, automatically rendering any children apprehended unaccompanied and forcing them into state custody.

I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our Southwest border. If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you. Its that simple, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced on May 7, 2018. If you smuggle illegal aliens across our border, then we will prosecute you. If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.

Which might have left the public with the impression that this was a measure meant to combat human trafficking. But later that month on a phone call with U.S. Attorneys, the AG was more clear. We need to take away children, he said, leaving no doubt that his intention was to disincentivize immigration with the threat of seizing migrant children.

Yesterday the Justice Departments Inspector General released a scathing report on the family separation policy officially in place between April 6 and June 7, 2018. Prior to that, U.S. Attorneys had endeavored not to arrest adults crossing the border with minors, and there was no preparation for an abrupt policy shift that would necessitate taking thousands of children into government custody.

DOJ leadership, and the OAG in particular, did not effectively coordinate with the Southwest border USAOs, the USMS, HHS, or the federal courts prior to DHS implementing the new practice of referring family unit adults for criminal prosecution as part of the zero tolerance policy. We further found that the OAGs expectations for how the family separation process would work significantly underestimated its complexities and demonstrated a deficient understanding of the legal requirements related to the care and custody of separated children. We concluded that the Departments single-minded focus on increasing immigration prosecutions came at the expense of careful and appropriate consideration of the impact of family unit prosecutions and child separations.

The DOJ ignored the warnings from the Western District of Texas, where a similar zero tolerance program in 2017 encountered difficulty reuniting families, and instead the AG focused solely on the increase in illegal entry prosecutions resulting from the El Paso Initiative and did not seek readily available information that would have identified for them the serious issues that arose as a result of the prosecutions of family unit adults and the corresponding child separations.

Today, there are 611 childrenstill not reunited with their families an outcome which was entirely predictable based on information known to the DOJ and DHS before the family separation policy was implemented nationwide.

Jeff Sessions, who refused to cooperate with the inquiry, comes off second only to Stephen Miller in his fanatical zeal to inflict pain on migrants. But Sessions deputies at the DOJ look pretty awful, too.

Justice Department attorney Gene Hamilton, a close ally of White House Counselor Stephen Miller, blamed Homeland Security for the policy, telling the IG, If Secretary Nielsen and DHS did not want to refer people with minors, with children, then we wouldnt have prosecuted them because they wouldnt have referred them. And ultimatelythat decision would be between Secretary Nielsen and the president. Which conveniently ignores the fact that Sessions was the driving force behind the policy, and that Nielsen told the president it would be logistically impossible and maybe illegal.

But in some sense, you know what youre getting with avowed xenophobes and dinosaurs from a bygone era, already shuffling toward the exit. Its former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who knows its wrong but still marches loyally forward doing this horrible shit, who breaks your heart.

Here he is defending his complete indifference to DHSs capacity to take care of the children in its custody and eventually reunite them with their parents, because My approach was to trust them and presume that their folks were going to administer it as they should, and I thought it was not for me to micromanage someone elses business.

You would expect DHS and HHS to be able to manage the children who were entrusted to them. I think thats something they should have considered. They should have said, Hey, theres problems if we do this, were going to lose track of the kids and were not going to be able to reunify the kids. Thats an issue that they should have flagged. I just dont see that as a DOJ equity.

Heres John Bash, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas, explaining in an email to his staff that he just got off the horn with Rosenstein, who ordered him to take babies into custody no matter how young.

I just spoke with the DAG. He instructed that, per the [Attorney Generals] policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child. In other words, our directive is that if [the Border Patrol] refers a single parent of a child of any age to us (or both parents of a child of any age), we should not decline prosecution absent case-specific special circumstances (e.g., the child is seriously ill, the child speaks only a native language, etc.). I had understood that [the Border Patrol] itself had a policy of not referring parents to us when doing so would separate children under 5 from the parents. But apparently [the Border Patrol] did so yesterday in El Paso in two cases, and we declined per our understanding of the policy. Under the directive I just received from the DAG, however, those two cases should not have been declined.

Rosenstein professed to be shocked that Bash would have interpreted this as curtailing his discretion not to prosecute parents if it would involve the government taking custody of young children, or non-Spanish speaking youths who would have no way of communicating with their caregivers.

If somebody got the idea that they were supposed to be just like a soldier, prosecuting every case without regards to the facts, that didnt come from me, and if you look at Bashs emails, he says, consider case-based circumstances, he told the IG.

Since leaving the Department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy, Rosenstein said in a statement released yesterday. It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better.

Mistakes, it seems, were made. This policy should never have been implemented. By whom? Well, Rod Rosenstein cannot say. But he thinks about it a lot and wonders what, if anything, someone, somewhere could have done differently.

Justice officials respond to report on family separation by blaming Trump, expressing regret [NBC]Review of the Department of Justices Planning and Implementation of Its Zero Tolerance Policy and Its Coordination with the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services

Elizabeth Dyelives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Read the rest here:
Rod Rosenstein Is Real Sorry About All Those Kids Separated From Their Parents. Oopsies! - Above the Law