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It comes as human rights groups Amnesty International and Lighthouse Reports released new evidence of systematic unlawful pushbacks and violence against migrants on the bloc's borders as EU politicians scramble to bring the migrant crisis under control.

Footage circulatedby Lighthouse Reports shows horrific beatings by border guards in Croatia, Greece and Lithuania, the blocs frontiers with the rest of the world.

In one video a border guard beats migrants with what appears to be a large baton as they run to avoid being struck.

While another older video shows the moment the Greek coastguard attempt to attack an inflatable migrant boat with a long pole.

Migrants can be heard screaming in desperation for the guards to stop .

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Reporting for RT news, Europe correspondent Charlotte Dubenskij said: The EU is having to hang its head in shame over the way its border forces are treating migrants just trying to cross into the bloc.

This is no longer just about fortress Europe and the extensive fence building and surveillance systems that are being put in place on its eastern borders.

She said how instead more concerning incidents have emerged from across the bloc which throw the EU into another crisis of its reputation.

It comes as three Croatian border officers have been suspended for violence towards migrants after they were filmed violently pushing back migrants at the border.

READ MOREOh dear Brussels: Leave voter lashes out at 'preposterous' Simon Coveney Brexit response

Despite the chaos on the borders, Lithuanian interior minister Agn Bilotait was defiant in her countrys response.

She slammed: We have taken decisions in our national law that one can only enter Lithuania through a legal way. That is through a border checkpoint or by filing their request with out embassy.

Dunja Mijato, Council of Europes commissioner for human rights said in a tweet that it was high time the Council of Europe investigate effectively, take action and hold each other to account" over the horrific scenes.

The roots of the migrant crisis in Europe stem from the fallout of various conflicts in the Middle East and north Africa as well as economic migrants searching for better lives in Europe.

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EU exposed as multiple border force teams caught violently clamping down on migrants - Daily Express

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told "Sunday Morning Futures" in an exclusive interview that the Biden administration "completely abandoned" ranchers, residents in his state and "all the people who live on the border," arguing that President Joe Biden is "putting them in danger."

He also pointed out that "these arecounties and these are people whotraditionally have votedDemocrat, that the Biden administrationis ignoring."

The Texas governor also blamed Biden's "catastrophic open border policies" for the migrant crisis.

Abbott told host Maria Bartiromo, who traveled to the southern border last week, that one year ago, during the Trump administration, policies put in place led "to the greatestreduction" in bordercrossings.

"But now, were seeing the highestnumber of cross border crossings and its allbecause of thecatastrophic open borderpolicies by the Bidenadministration," he continued.

Thecrisis at the southern border has seen hundreds of thousands of migrants encountered in recent months and has overwhelmed Border Patrol agents while causing a massive political headache for the Biden administration.

In a tour of the border near Mission, Texas, last week Fox News saw groups of migrants coming across, predominantly families, who were pointed in the direction of nearby processing areas.

Border Patrol agents told Fox News that migrant family units were unlikely to be removed under Title 42 public health protections (only 19% of family units were removed under Title 42 in August) and instead would likely be processed and released into the interior potentially at a nearby bus station either that night or in the morning.

The Biden administration ended the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) which kept migrants in Mexico as they awaited their immigration proceedings. Separately, they also ended asylum cooperative agreements (ACAs) which meant migrants would claim asylum in Northern Triangle countries instead.

LEAKED BORDER PATROL DOCS SHOW MASS RELEASE OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS INTO US BY BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

With those changes, the administration has also reinstated the practice known as "catch and release," something the Trump administration had used a patchwork of policies to end. Now, while single adults are mostly still being removed from the U.S., migrant families are mostly allowed to enter the U.S. -- handed only a Notice to Appear at court or a Notice to Report to a nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility.

Republicans have blamedthe dramatic changes in policy, including the ending of border wall construction, for the surge in migration. More than 200,000 migrants were encountered in July and August, and DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has reportedly warned of a worst-case scenario of 400,000 migrants hitting the border if Title 42 public health expulsions are ended.

The Biden administration, however, has blamed a mixture of Trump administration policies and "root causes" in Central America for the surge.

Abbott warned that cartels have been "getting evenmore aggressive."

He said that the cartels on the Mexicanside of the border "arebeginning to open fireon the National Guardthat Texas has down onthe border to secure theborder."

"This is escalating intoa firing war on eachside of the border whereTexas and our NationalGuard are having todefend themselves anddefend the state ofTexas," Abbott continued.

He went on to explain that "Texas is stepping up to do more thanany state has ever doneto help to secure this region."

Abbott added that "Texas has devoted morethan $3 billion tosecure the border."

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He explained that includes having the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety on the border and that "Texasitself is building aborder wall to make surethat we will be able tobetter secure ourborder."

Fox News Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

Link:
Texas Gov. Abbott argues Biden 'completely abandoned' everyone who lives on the border - Fox News

Rep. Stan Lambert| Abilene Reporter-News

Earlier in the year, I had the opportunity to visit our border.

There is much to say about what I saw, but a quote from President Ronald Reagan speaks to many of my thoughts and concerns: Our country is great because it is built on principles of self-reliance, opportunity, innovation, and compassion for others.

The issues surrounding our southern border and our current immigration crisis are significant and multi-faceted, encompassing foreign policy, national security, state sovereignty and countless more.

But at a more basic level, what worries me most is the human suffering that is occurring. People are being killed, trafficked, and abused. Folks that live along the border are scared and their property is being damaged. They deserve the same protection and level of safety we have in House District 71 or anywhere else in Texas.

But those fleeing their home countries also deserve to be safe. So as a lawmaker, my dilemma is how do we protect all individuals affected by this crisis and how much burden and resources do Texans share with our federal partners and other countries?

In total, my team and I have made 10trips to the Texas/Mexico Border since 2015 (five to the Rio Grande Valley, three to Big Bend and two to El Paso). What we have seen cannot be unseen and what we have heard cannot be unheard. It is hard to convey the inhumane conditions we have witnessed, the haunting testimony of those who are victims of human trafficking, the pallets upon pallets of counterfeit goods, large quantities of illegal substances and the pleas of law enforcement begging us to secure the border.

To all those affected, and to me, it is about safety. Safety for all Texans and safety for law enforcement. But equally as important, safety for those seeking to enter our country. I wanted you to know what I saw and heard on my most recent trip.

People who live and work near the border say the 2021 surge of immigrants crossing into Texas has significantly increased. Dealing with threats to their personal safety, the draining of local governmental and community resources causes serious financial losses and disruption. Fences sometimes are cut as migrants move across agricultural land. High speed chases destroy property and lives.

Residents report widespread vandalism. Theft rates are rising. Trash and other unattended items left by the immigrants become the responsibility of these landowners. The rights of these citizens and landowners are being trampled.

It is clear to me, through many meetings with the Department of Public Safety, that those charged with securing our border share the concerns of residents in south Texas. There are six Mexican cartels that control areas of access into Texas, and violent gangs transport illicit drugs and traffic people, operate stash houses, conduct enforcement operations, and provide retail drug distribution throughout Texas.

On March 4, Gov.Greg Abbott announced Operation Lone Star (OLS). On May 31, Abbott issued a disaster declaration concerning border security. In response, the Legislature passed House Bill 9(HB9) during the second special session. HB9 gives Abbotts office more than $1 billion, with about $750 million dedicated to construct border barriers. This is in addition to the $250 million that was already budgeted in the regular session.

In the most recent reports on OLS, DPS reports 5,298 criminal arrests and completed 694 vehicle pursuits (up 774% in Del Rio alone). Additionally, from March 4 through Sept. 8, DPS has arrested 199 known gang members.

From October 2020 through September 2021, there have been a record number of migrant apprehensions and referrals in Texas, totaling more than 1.1 million people. The previous record was just more than 726,000 in 1986.

As I work with my colleagues to pursue solutions to this crisis, I hope we can all keep the following in mind, as these issues have been weighing heavy on my heart:

I ask for your prayers for discernment as we workto help alleviate the border crisis and its widespread effects.

Rep. Stan Lambert represents Texas House District 71.

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Legislators working to address the border crisis - Abilene Reporter-News

For the past week, senior Conservatives have been taking to the airwaves to talk about the new economic model they are apparently creating. A high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy, their new enthusiasm sparked by the shortage of workers since Brexit.

Though the idea has been discredited, even by rightwing thinktanks, ministers have still been repeating it lets face it, the idea of a brave new order in which everyone can be a high-skill worker, paid high wages, and so highly productive that the government can still cut taxes, is seductive populist politics.

Yet it is a deliberate distraction from the real crisis in the UK, which is a shortage of labour for low-skilled jobs; and if supply chains are not to collapse, it is these low-skill jobs for which we will have to start paying higher wages and improve conditions, with all the inflationary pressures that will bring.

Ministers talk about automation as a way of improving productivity, yet machines to replace these workers cannot be magicked up instantly. Business, which Boris Johnson blames for not investing, has in fact over the last three decades poured millions into automating our supply chainsso much capital has been sunk into the infrastructure of transnational just-in-time systems that they have decimated any local alternatives and will be hard to abandon.

Business has invested in its people technology too, so that workers in distribution centres can wear hi-tech, high-productivity wrist devices linked to control rooms that calculate arm movements a minute and beam orders to them to hurry up if they lag behind company targets. It is not lack of business innovation that has held their wages back.

The big lie in the governments slogan is that, like a conjurer, it can abolish this low-skill work. Further investment in automation may reduce the need for some of it but it is just as likely to simply create low-skilled work in new forms, in different parts of the supply chain, as it has in the past.

For a century at least, and not just since we joined the European Union, the UK has depended on importing foreign labour to do its low-skilled jobs; and for the last 70 years immigration has been managed by successive governments through a series of schemes. According to Prof John Salt of University College Londons Migration Research Unit, there are few if any cases anywhere in the world where jobs that have come to be dominated by low-paid migrant labour have been transformed to better-paid work for the domestic population. The possible exception, for a brief interlude, is agriculture in California in the mid-1960s, when a clampdown on undocumented Mexican labour saw a burst of automation and more local employment, before reverting to migrant workers again.

Poverty wages are not caused by immigration in itself, but by a failure to ensure wages and conditions for the local workforce are not forced down by exploiting migrants. The two ways to prevent a race to the bottom are by organising labour so that unions can bargain for decent pay, and by enforcing labour law. The Conservatives, with their anti-union policies and constant bonfires of regulations, brought this low-wage economy into being, however much Johnson would like to disown responsibility.

Through most of the 1960s and 1970s the share of UK national income paid out as wages was between 58% and 61%, but in the Thatcher years it declined rapidly and hit a low in the late 1990s of 52%. The share paid out in profits to private companies increased correspondingly.

Recent Tory governments have continued to promote a low-wage economy. They worked hard to block EU directives on working time, and on equal rights for agency workers that sought to curb the undercutting of existing terms.

In 2013, prime minister David Cameron abolished the Agricultural Wages Board that protected pay and conditions in low-skill farming jobs. His austerity budgets imposed such deep cuts that it would take inspectors responsible for enforcing the minimum wage hundreds of years to visit Britains businesses. Gang master inspectors were similarly cut back.

In January, Matthew Taylor left his role as director of Labour Enforcement, accusing the government of a deafening silence around protecting workers and tackling the low-wage gig economy. He has still not been replaced.

As Taylor had left, the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, cancelled a consultation on transferring EU labour protections in post-Brexit Britain. A promised employment bill to bring those protections into British law has not yet materialised.

It was not the Conservative government but Uber drivers, with the help of unions, who took the company to court to claim their legal right to the minimum wage and to challenge bogus self employment.

Meanwhile, in all his bluster, Johnson makes no mention of the thing that would really give low-paid people higher wages: redistribution, so that ordinary workers receive a fairer share of the national income.

Originally posted here:
It was Tory governments that created the low-wage economy not immigration - The Guardian

Jessica Vaughan| For the Headlight

After the alarming surge of 15,000 illegal border crossers fording the Rio Grande into Del Rio, Texas in just a few days, the Biden administration has finally cried uncle and begun to enforce our border laws. It is an important admission that, on top of the Afghanistan fiasco, Bidens open border approach is undermining public confidence in his leadership, to put it mildly, and potentially endangering the Democrats larger agenda.

Andshock of all shocksthe enforcement is working to slow the flow.

First, the Texas State Police, later joined by Border Patrol agents on horseback, showed up to blocked off the main entry points from the river. Then, the feds began bussing the migrants to other sites for faster processing and, even more noteworthy, began deportation flights to Haiti and Central America.

According to my colleague Todd Bensman, who has been reporting from the bus station in the Mexican city of Acuna, across from Del Rio, large numbers of Haitians are giving up and turning around. Having lived and worked in South America for the last several years, the last thing they want is to be sent back to Haiti. Clearly, barriers reinforced by consequences for illegal entry work much better than a show of addressing the root causes of migration through foreign aid.

It remains to be seen how long the migrants will be deterred. Reportedly, it is mainly single adults who are being sent home, and those who brought children along still are being allowed to enter, as has been the Biden policy all along. This has brought record numbers of illegal crossers; more than 200,000 were apprehended in both July and August, on pace for a total of about 1.5 million by the end of the fiscal year. About half of the migrants have been allowed to enter pending a court date long in the future, and another half-million so-called gotaways (mostly criminals and prior deportees) are estimated to have successfully evaded arrest.

Judging by the settlement patterns of arriving minors as reported by the Department of Health and Human Services, so far they have clustered in a handful of locations with more than one-fourth landing in just 11 counties: Harris, Dallas, and Travis Counties in Texas; Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties in Florida; Los Angeles County; Queens and Long Island, N.Y; Davidson County, Tenn.; Prince Georges County, Md.; and Mecklenburg County, N.C.

Most of the newly arrived Haitians likely will head for Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Because the sudden restart of deportation flights is likely a temporary stopgap, state and local officials need to have a plan to deal with the influx. Texas and a few other states have taken the Biden administration to court to compel them to enforce federal laws. That is useful and necessary but has not yet made a difference in the policies, or in relieving the huge fiscal and security burden imposed on the states.

So far this year, an estimated 40,000 children who crossed the border illegally have settled in Texas alone. They will be enrolling in school, to the tune of about $10,000 per student, for a total cost to taxpayers of $400 million. Add to that the cost of emergency health care and other assistance, not to mention criminal justice costs for the MS-13 gang members sprinkled in, and this is a major unfunded mandate. In addition, according to one of my ICE sources, about 30 percent of the women arriving illegally will soon add a US-born child to the family.

State officials need not watch helplessly as the bills mount. They can use state authorities to attack the problem.

Dust off the state smuggling and trafficking laws, monitor the transportation routes, follow the illegal money trails, investigate and prosecute the identity theft necessary for employment, and go after those who hire illegal workers. Equally important, scrutinize the activities of NGOs that participate in re-locating illegal aliens and insist that they stay within the bounds of their business license and state law. South Carolina has prohibited child welfare agencies from contracting with the feds to resettle illegal unaccompanied minors. Oklahoma collects about $12 million each year with a tax on illegal residents who wire money overseas.

Eventually, Congress will have to act because, as Joe Biden has discovered, open borders are fiscally and politically unsustainable. Besides showing once again that barriers and deportations work to control illegal immigration, the Del Rio episode may have quelled the appetite of some Democrats to ram through a mass amnesty and expansion of legal immigration. What we really need, besides more enforcement, is a long period of more moderate immigration so we can more easily absorb the recent wave.

Jessica Vaughan is director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research institute. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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Your turn: Migrant crisis needs more action from states - The Deming Headlight