Posted on June 26,
2018
Borderline Insanity
Crisis confronts immigration fallacies
by
Daniel
Clark
The controversy over separating children from their detained
illegal alien parents has not been one of the more successful episodes of the
Trump administration. Or has it?
To be sure, President Trump has done a remarkably poor
job of explaining the issue. First, he
blamed Democrats for refusing to fix “their law,” a factual misstatement
attributable to what might charitably be called the president’s fuzzy
comprehension of American civics. It was
a consent decree negotiated by the Clinton Justice Department that created the
policy that unaccompanied minors be released “without necessary delay,” and a
2016 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that extended this policy
toward all detained minors, accompanied or not.
In Trumpian parlance, in which he often refers
to judges “passing laws” and congressmen “signing laws,” an agreement made by a
Democrat attorney general, and expanded by activist liberal judges, equals a
Democrat law. (How’s that for
“seriously, but not literally”?)
After
days of insisting that he didn’t have the power to solve the problem through an
executive order, Trump issued an executive order instructing that illegal alien
families be kept together in family detention centers, which had been the
policies of the Bush and Obama administrations prior to the circuit court
ruling. By disallowing the detention of families, the court left only two
options: separate the children from their parents, or revert to a wholesale
catch-and-release policy. President
Obama had chosen the latter. By calculatus eliminatus, so, now,
has Trump.
Yet, for all of Trump’s day-to-day incoherence, he has
scored two victories against the conventional wisdom of the harrumphing
class. First, in their zeal to damage
the president, the media have given extensive coverage to the large numbers of
illegal aliens crossing our Southern border.
In the absence of such a visual demonstration, arguments that the number
of illegal border crossings is actually fairly small, and that enforcement
should focus predominantly on people overstaying their visas, might sound
reasonable. Today, they don’t.
In addition, the romanticized image of the honest,
salt-of-the-earth “undocumented immigrant” has been soiled by the adult
illegals’ willingness to subject their children to conditions that the liberal
media are describing as Nazi-like. Those
adult illegals could keep their families intact if they would accept immediate
deportation. It’s their insistence on
applying for asylum, for which they shouldn’t even be eligible, that triggers
the requirement that their children be removed.
In short, they’re the ones who are directly responsible for the splitting
of their families, and they understood the consequences of their actions before
taking them. That doesn’t make them very
nice people.
Trump
has taken lots of flak for referring to the “bad hombres,” like violent
criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers, who have been sneaking across
our border, but that is in fact how they get here. They aren’t among those illegals overstaying
their visas. Heck, most of them couldn’t
even get a visa.
The typical characterization of an illegal alien is
someone whose one and only dishonest act was to sneak into our country, but
apart from that, would be a model citizen if only he were allowed to be. Undoubtedly, there are those who fit that
description, but when the only thing we know about a person is that he broke
the law, he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt that doing so was out of
character. It’s far more reasonable to
assume that someone who breaks one law to enter our country will have little
compunction about breaking others. Even
the incidence of nonviolent crimes like identity theft and social security
fraud more than justifies that assumption.
Whatever the liberal media, and especially the network
morning shows, think they’ve accomplished through two weeks of maudlin
demagoguery, they haven’t. This is not to say there’s going to be a wall across
our entire Southern border, with a “big, byoo-dee-full door” for those who want to enter “lllee-gally,” because there
isn’t. And by now, it should go without
saying that whatever border security we have, Mexico will not be paying for
it. Nevertheless, the necessity of
physical barriers across the border, combined with a greater commitment of
manpower to border security, could hardly be made more obvious.
The pro-Trumpies would have
us believe this is another example of his being an eleventeen-dimensional
chess grand master, who is many steps ahead of the opposition at all
times. More realistically, he’s the
accidental beneficiary of the serial ineptitude of his enemies. It all works out the same in the end, though.
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