People on the move

Can you spot the commonality? I can: these are all countries that were invaded, sanctioned, exploited, or otherwise heavily messed with by none other than the United States. Afghanistan and Iraq are, as I discussed here previously, poster children for US foreign policy failure, closely followed by Syria, where US efforts at regime change have succeeded in wrecking Syria, and now appear to be causing a dismemberment of Iraq, care of a US-trained, US-armed group of fundamentalist troglodytes that go by the name of ISIS. Mexico fell victim to the US war on drugs. The ways in which Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras have been undermined and exploited by US policies run the gamut from arming and training death squads to sending in missionaries that preach against birth control.

Americans are generally unconcerned about the plight of these people. They only start getting upset about the situation when the people their government has dispossessed and evicted from their homes show up and start demanding public services. Then their typical reaction is to demand “emigration reform,” by which they mean locking down the borders and tossing the refugees out.

Most Americans seem quite incapable of making the simple connection between destroying somebody’s house and having that somebody then move in to share yours. For those who are struggling with processing this idea, there are some helpful sayings, such as “What comes around goes around” and “Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.” The plan of locking down the border isn’t working too well, for one simple reason: it can’t start with locking refugees out; in order to work, it has to start with locking Americans in—not the tourists or the expats, but definitely the State Department staffers, the NGOs, the CIA spooks, the rapacious American businessmen and, last but not least, the US military. I am sure that there would be no international refugee crisis if only all these categories of people were safely stored in a cool dry place on US territory. But once these people have been let out into the world to do their thing out there, the inevitable result is a global refugee crisis. With Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria it is possible to shunt the refugee flow to other unlucky lands—Pakistan, Turkey, Iran and Jordan are now playing host to more than their fair share of them—but with it comes to the unlucky nations south of the border, resistance is futile. To date, all efforts to keep the out the Mexicans, the Guatemalans, the Salvadorans and the Hondurans have failed.

When questioned about their reasons for coming over, the Central American refugees often cite crime (Guatemala City is a gangland disaster area), lack of opportunity (all the good land has been snapped up by export farms) and poverty. After they are questioned, some of them are extradited: there are regular charter flights going from the US to these entral American countries, coming back empty. The current surge of Central Americans coming into the US is interesting: not only are their numbers way up, but a lot of the people pouring in are children! This creates many headaches for the officials charged with stemming the flow. First of all, it is deemed unseemly to horribly mistreat children, no matter what the situation; the public seems all in favor of shabby treatment of the “illegals,” but if they are children, then there is some residual sense of shame or a faint echo of human decency in the general population that has to be reckoned with. Secondly, extraditing a minor involves finding a parent or guardian in a foreign country: quite a trick, that! What that all means is that this is a very, very expensive proposition.

This influx of people, children included, is best viewed as part of a conflict—a territorial conflict, in which people whose land your government took away from them then decide that therefore your land now belongs to them. And when looking at a conflict and trying to predict how it will end, it is helpful to look for asymmetries: which side has to pay how much for what. So, for instance, in Eastern Ukraine, we have the US-installed Ukie Nazi junta, which is spending money it doesn’t have to train, arm and equip conscripts that are utterly demoralized and surrender at the drop of a hat, while on the side of the so-called “pro-Russian separatists” (who are actually Russian, not just pro-, and not separatists but federalists) you have a highly motivated all-volunteer force armed and equipped free of charge, care of the hapless Ukies (who keep abandoning their weapons). Or look at Syria/Iraq (or, shall we now say, the Levant?) where the hapless Iraqis just had to buy a few used Russian military jets (because the American ones aren’t any good) to try to defend Baghdad against ISIS, whereas ISIS parades around in American Humvees they outright stole from the Iraqis while brandishing American weapons which they got, you guessed it, care of the Obama administration. You see, when one side in a conflict has it much easier than the other, you need to take that into account when trying to predict the outcome.

Which is what makes the question of illegal immigrant children flooding into the US so interesting: here, the asymmetry is absolutely huge. Consider an average Guatemalan woman, living in the Mayan highlands on $1,500 a year, surviving on beans and corn. She can still pop out half a dozen children. Brought into the US, each of these children would cost at least $30,000 to repatriate. Recently, the Obama regime has budgeted $1.5 billion to repatriate the 50,000 children that have shown up during the last eight months; those are the numbers that have been published, but I am sure that the real costs, all included, are much higher. And so a Guatemalan kid that cost her mother maybe $1000 to raise costs the US government in excess of $30,000 for what amounts to a nice field trip. Brilliant!

If any of this bothers you, then there isn’t much you can do about it. Chances are, some possibly very nice people from a country your government and business elite had conspired to destroy will come to live with you. They probably won’t even bother to learn English because, you see, the US wasn’t their first choice for a place to live; their country was—but they can’t live there because you failed to keep your psychopaths in check. Losers can’t be choosers, so just make peace with them the best way you can. Because what else are you going to do? Fly to Syria and declare yourself a “pro-American separatist”? Because if you do that, then those nice ISIS militants, whom your tax money helped arm and train, will—quite literally—crucify you.