The Uniparty’s Misbegotten Border Wars, Part 3

The hideous pile-up of sorely needed potential workers at the Mexican border is purely an artifact of America’s busted immigration system. It’s not an “invasion” from south of the Rio Grande; it’s the fruit of endless partisanship and stupidity on the banks of the Potomac.

The problem stems from a huge mismatch. To wit, the legal slots that are available are based on family reunification and narrow skill and professional categories. But the overwhelming bulk of desperate migrants at the border are there in pursuit of everyday jobs and a better life for their families—so they must attempt to squeeze through the portal of “asylum”, which is not even remotely fit for purpose.

So anyone not bamboozled by America’s current mindless partisanship might wonder why Washington doesn’t do the obvious. To wit, set-up a large-scale Guest Worker program, including an orderly mechanism at the border for matching-up willing job-seekers with employers needing additional labor anywhere in the US. Such a system would send them to where the jobs actually are, not to blue-state “sanctuary cities” which offer free lodging, food and support, thereby encouraging the likes of grand-standing politicians such as Texas Governor Greg Abbot to buy these putative “asylum-seekers-in-process” one-way bus tickets north.

The reason we are confident that a large-scale Guest Workers program would end the current border-area chaos is that the throngs now flooding the border have been told an unfortunate truthful point: Namely, to get a job in America outside of the narrow green card categories you must first illegally cross the border and then become one of the CBP’s “apprehension” statistics, where you either get deported or go into a labyrinthian asylum processing pipeline that can take months and years to complete. And the worst thing is that the whole process is designed to prove why the migrant who is subject to this mindless bureaucratic ordeal is in mortal danger back home, when the only real issue is their capacity to contribute to the economy and society on this side of the border.

Indeed, the immigration control system is stupid, dysfunctional and utterly unnecessary, but it endures because both Republicans and Democrats want it that way. At the end of the day, it’s really not about asylum, employment, national security or the so-called rule of law.

To the contrary, it’s plain and simply about votes. The GOP shitcans its own free market principles when it comes to migrant labor because it fears immigrants will eventually become naturalized and vote Democrat. And the Democrats are happy to maintain chaos at the border because the lack of an orderly Guest Workers program mollifies organized labor and allows it to posture as the political defender of immigrant voters and the broader Hispanic and other minority communities which are presumed to identify with them.

But of course, the Washington politicians are not about to confess that they have weaponized the immigration machinery for electoral advantage. So the GOP immigrant bashers, especially, have concocted a medley of myths, memes and lies to obfuscate their grossly political approach to the issue. This includes the false claims that today’s jobs-seeking immigrants are—

• fiscal parasites who gobble-up welfare and unfairly burden law-abiding taxpayers.

• job-stealers who deprive the native born of employment or higher wage rates.

• incipient criminals who threaten the security and safety of America’s neighborhoods.