“Dismay after Trump moves to cut aid to Central America” (BBC):
Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop migration into the US.
If we let anyone who sets foot on U.S. soil enter the asylum process, how is it El Salvador’s fault that people leave to take advantage of what is likely to be a lifetime of means-tested housing, health care, and food welfare?
What do we want them to do? Build a wall to keep their own citizens in? So that a future Reagan-like U.S. president can implore them to tear the wall down?
The article says
Aid advocates argue that the best way to stem migration from the region is to stimulate economic development
But as noted in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/03/13/if-liberals-wont-enforce-borders-fascists-will/, it may well be that as the source countries get wealthier there be more asylum-seekers. From the quoted Atlantic article:
immigration is accelerating so rapidly in the 21st century less because of pervading misery than because life on our planet is improving for so many people. It costs money to move—and more and more families can afford the investment to send a relative northward.
Maybe we should cut off foreign aid because it is generally harmful to foreigners, but I don’t see how it makes sense to cut off aid to countries whose citizens are smart enough to show up in the U.S. for the unlimited lifetime welfare buffet.
Is it truly the case that the Land of Freedom (TM) is asking Central American countries to imprison their own citizens?
It would help if we stopped training and supporting government-run death squads in El Salvador, Honduras and elsewhere. Oddly enough, the prospect of being murdered is a stronger motivator for emigration than economic reasons alone.
Similarly, Americans’ seemingly unquenchable thirst for illegal narcotics, and the profits it fuels for drug traffickers, has destabilized a huge swathe of Latin American countries, from Mexico to Colombia and beyond.
With the “do nothing approach”, which is consistent with the owning of your own body, which is the layman’s understanding of the legal underpinning of Roe vs Wade, new designer drugs would have been legal, which would have killed the profits.
It takes an act of Congress to change the asylum law (8 U.S. Code § 1158. Asylum ). Since that isn’t going to happen with Democrats in control of the HoR, the tools the President has available to him are limited. If we’re sending aid to the Northern Triangle and it isn’t working in terms of slowing the onslaught of asylum seekers, why are we doing it? To maintain some kind of leverage that obviously doesn’t exist? Or work? Imaginary leverage? Virtual work?
For the people who don’t want Trump to do this, I guess their answer would be *more* aid, not less. That would make sense from their perspective. But you omitted what I think is the most important part of your first quote from the BBC article:
“Aid advocates argue that the best way to stem migration from the region is to stimulate economic development and reduce violence there, and that it is ***too early to judge the impact of the aid,*** which was boosted in 2016 under President Barack Obama.” (Emphasis mine.)
So Obama boosted the aid in 2016, nobody can say if it has worked yet, it’s too early, but it appears not to be doing much at all, so what should we do? Increase it? We can’t change the asylum law to make it less attractive for the migrants to take advantage of. They’re too smart. We can’t distribute leaflets telling them to go home because the world is actually getting better where they’re from, which is why they can afford to leave. They don’t care about that. And we can’t shoot them. Nobody wants Trump to close the border. So what other tools does he have?
Maybe telling the people who receive the aid money in the Northern Triangle that if that want more they have to try a lot harder to stem the flow and stop 600 people a day from marching into El Paso will work, maybe it won’t. We’re going to find out.
The tools are there, data mining to identify illegal aliens and their employers, allow non lawyers with special training to prosecute, do whatever it takes to streamline the process, fine and imprison the employers, and the demand for illegal alien labor disappears.
Deport like its 1950s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback
Given this is not happening, my working hypothesis is that Trump has been captured by the deep state.
If it could be impressed upon the Democrats in the House of Representatives that we have enough problems of our own here in America without having to handle the asylum claims of 600 people a day in El Paso alone, we might have a chance at reforming the law. That’s an uphill battle to say the least. Absent a true groundswell of outrage of what is going on, they have have nothing to fear, this is all serving their larger goals.
Peggy Noonan is one of my favorite people. A few days ago she observed that we are in a time of unprecedented partisan maximalism. There isn’t any compromise and there isn’t going to be between the parties, absent a major groundswell of public outrage at what is going on. She actually uses the term “Fight to the Death” and it’s not far off the mark.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-two-americas-have-grown-much-fiercer-11553816463
@Viking: I don’t know about the Deep State, but he has a hard time getting any of his actions portrayed or debated fairly in the media. I was going to joke about the BBC’s headline: “Dismay after Trump Moves to Cut Aid to Central America”.
The reality in 95% of the media in this country and around the world is more like:
“Dismay after Trump Doesn’t Just Quit and Die”.
It doesn’t matter what he does. If he had increased aid to the Northern Triangle they would have found experts on the subject who said: “President Trump believes that his pittance of increased aid can buy off the leaders in these Latin American countries to help advance his election agenda. After all his racist rhetoric he will find it difficult to persuade anyone.”
The media never loses in this country, and even when they lose, they claim it was wrong that they lost. There are too many different experts they can call upon for a quotable opinion and lambaste Trump for whatever he does. They can set the tone for the rest of the coverage in the headline and then cast it in stone by the end of the first paragraph, which is as far as most people read in the age of Axios.
Maybe he shouldn’t say things like noise causes cancer, “totally exonerated”, the media is the enemy of the people, etc and thereby lose all credibility.
Not a job of investigators to exonerate, they bring charges. We have bottom line: there was no Trump collusion with Putin. So yes, Trump is “totally exonerated” from charges that were brought by fake opposition research order in that regard. Press will spin, there are organization like this, not unique to media. They can “do no wrong” and spin all they want by changing clear outcomes until they drove themselves into ground (and ask for taxpayer help). Quite common.
“So yes, Trump is “totally exonerated” from charges that were brought by fake opposition research order in that regard.”
I disagree, given he asked for Russia’s assistance on national TV. Whether or not that rises to criminality is one thing, but its plain as day.
> Maybe he shouldn’t say things like noise causes cancer
I can imagine the Donald agreeing to take back the statement that the Demos cause cancer for a lump sum of $5.8 billion for the wall (or at least the first 200 ft of it).
By the way, does the Democratic Party really cause cancer or is it just a mere rhetoric? Discuss.
“It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we have a president today who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe, and who is a religious bigot. I wish I did not have to say that. But that is the damn truth.”
Bernie Sanders, 4/5 2019
He forgot to accuse Trump of being a rapist and a war criminal, and that comes from a senator and a serious presidential candidate.
What goes around comes around: can you imagine what kind of accusation the GOP will be willing to make in 2024?
M, maybe they’ll accuse a veteran of being un-american? Ah too late.
Republicans have no high ground to whine about being called names, especially when those names fit the bill.
@bazza I agree to some extent. It’s always been a concern of mine that Trump never made the switch from his raucous and bombastic, over-the-big-top red-meat campaign style to anything more Presidential once he took office and I think he’s harmed himself because of it. There was a lot of hope in the early days of the Administration that the seriousness of the task would align with the realization that he was not elected in a landslide and lead him to adopt a more measured public persona. Particularly because he literally shocked the living daylights out of so many people, he really instilled a kind of fear into them that I have never seen.
I’m one of the people who thought early on that his use of Twitter as a modern day bully pulpit was a very dangerous game. I wonder this: let’s say he changes his tone between now and 2020 and gets reelected. If he continued the new, “kinder, gentler” Trump into his second term, would it make any difference to people who hate him so much now?
It was inevitable that big-shot politicians would start using Twitter to bypass the media. It’s what so many others in the entertainment business have done: use social media to completely sidestep the customary social gatekeepers, publicity makers, kingmakers, queenmakers, buzz generators, opinion overlords and so forth. I think one of the reasons so many in the media are panicked is that their longstanding role of setting the parameters for public discourse and adjusting the lenses through which many people perceive the world – including the political world – have been ripped away from them. They have been disintermediated, and they’re scrambling to come to terms with that. So it was bound to happen, but Trump started it off setting the bar very low, and it’s a real shame. In a sense he proved all of his worst haters right. I think it has been a net negative for him.
That may be the only thing in the universe I agree with Alec Baldwin about right now. He said it in an interview the other day. He said 1/3rd but I think it’s more like 10%, regardless: he could have had a lot more people supporting him with a few modest adjustments.
Aid mean a short term help for a short term problem. In most cases (all?), once an aid is offered to a country (or a group) it becomes permanent. Why? Humans like free stuff and get addicted to it. Even worse, it makes those who are reviving the aid more dependent on it and want more of it just like being addicted to drugs. And when you try to withdraw the aid the receiving party goes into hangover just like drugs.
As for Americans “thirst for illegal narcotics” from South America, well, there are other countries south of America (and even in USA) who can grow and sell illegal drugs but yet those countries don’t and those countries do not have this migration issue. Thus, drugs is a problem but it is not the root of the migration problem. The root is the corrupt government that are really an organized gang at the top of the pyramids. Either the government has to change or the citizens of that government have to change it. There is nothing anyone can do from the outside to help such people or government. Some examples from as little as 10 years ago are countries such as: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Even with our military and policy interventions, Iraq is still a corrupt country and worse, their citizens are far worse off today than were under Saddam.
“Even with” – or because of? Shocking that killing hundreds of thousands and putting U.S. puppets in control didn’t lead to unicorns and rainbows.