The ongoing border “crisis” continues to grow. November saw another record of 233,740 southern border encounters, and there seems to be no sign of the current mass migration letting up.
And while politicians are pinning their hopes on Title 42 to keep some semblance of order on the border, they are doing nothing but deceiving themselves. Ask yourself, would you give up after paying a substantial amount of your savings and traveling thousands of miles on the promise that you’d be let into the U.S. if you arrived and were told the border was closed? Would you simply shrug your shoulders and say, “Oh well, guess I’ll make my way back?” No, you wouldn’t, and most others wouldn’t either. That’s exactly what’s happening.
Luz Moztardo, 25, arrived in Juarez five days ago with her husband and two small children, aged three and twelve months. They had been waiting for Title 42 to expire in order to turn themselves in to border officials.
They checked out of their hotel Tuesday morning, hoping they would be in El Paso by nightfall.
“We still have the hope of crossing into the US,” Moztardo told The Post. “We want to cross legally, but we will cross illegally if that’s our only choice.
“We did see the mayor in El Paso has so many beds and the Red Cross has medicine and we don’t know if that helps applies to us. Many people are growing desperate and crossing illegally.”
Legally or illegally most of these migrants are determined to get into the U.S. The more desparate or daring may choose to try to cross illegally sooner rather than later. Those with more financial resources and work skills may choose to stay in Mexico to wait and see what happens. Either way, very few are turning around and going back.
So where does this lead? If Mexico continues to do little about the ever increasing numbers of people crossing its southern border and those amassing on the north, will we start to see large encampments cropping up? Will we see something akin to refugee camps, but filled with people not necessarily fleeing their countries from war but for better economic opportunities via an asylum claim? Asylum has historically not been granted for this reason.
Along with the growing number of people waiting at the border will be the growing pressure on the U.S. government to “do something” about the immigration system. Not that there hasn’t been pressure to do something previously, but the back and forth between Republicans and Democrats has been that Republicans has basically resulted in a standoff. Republicans have wanted tightened security including things like a wall and electronic surveillance which Democrats have refused to agree to without promises of “pathways to citizenship” for all those who’ve made it into the country already. Republicans won’t agree to any pathway to citizenship without a border barrier already being in place arguing that additional legal pathways would just draw more and more people who couldn’t be prevented from entering without a barrier already in place. So the standoff has gone for decades.
But the last two years of unprecedented border encounters is something we’ve never seen before. In essence it’s similar to a Cloward and Piven strategy overwhelming the border and forcing the federal government into action. How large will the numbers have to go before the tipping point is reached?
Pot Full of Frogs 