The whole top half of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times featured the victimhood struggles of foreigners whom Biden and previous diversity-admiring administrations have admitted. The headline under the photo reads Migrant Kids Left Waiting for Days, a typical media sob story about illegal aliens.
More alarming in a way is how the article on the right indicates a failure of basic language learning among foreign and/or hispanic students. The piece omits certain helpful information, such as citizenship and time of residence, and instead concentrates on the problems caused by the pandemic.
But when a 13-year-old who has “attended Los Angeles schools since kindergarten” and still cannot speak English, the problem is something other than the virus.
The situations of education failure described are concerning, particularly with what’s coming in a few months — thousands of illiterate foreign children admitted via Biden’s open border will arrive and schools will have to cope. Previous diverse kid dumps have proved expensive to local school districts across the country.
Plus, another strategy of diversity enthusiasts has been to promote a bilingual America which has never been popular among citizens.
A looming catastrophe is about to strike America’s schools. Hopefully the press will report how citizen kids are directly cheated by Biden’s open border. They shouldn’t be forgotten in all the tiresome overdone media concern about foreign children.
The Los Angeles Times supplied hint of what’s coming (reprinted by Yahoo.com, below):
In California, a million English learners are at risk of intractable education loss, by Paloma Esquivel, L.A. Times, April 4, 2021
Aida Vega’s 13-year-old daughter, who has attended Los Angeles schools since kindergarten and is in eighth grade, still struggles to read and write English.
Vega has long pushed for extra help so her child can master the language. Early last year, she felt confident that a breakthrough was at hand — her daughter’s teachers had a plan to start additional tutoring in March.
Then schools closed. Tutoring was canceled, except for a short stint during the fall semester. Vega says her daughter’s schooling became a constant struggle. There are days when Vega has found her in tears next to her computer. In the fall, after teachers said her daughter was failing all of her classes, Vega began taking jobs cleaning homes and offices to pay $45 an hour for a private tutor. But she worries her daughter is still falling behind.
“It’s tough to see the light,” Vega said. “The impact of this time is going to be big. It’s going to be bad.”
More than 1.1 million students in California, nearly 20%, are considered English learners. By almost every measure of academic success — graduation rates, college preparation, dropout rates, state standards — these students rank among the lowest-achieving groups. And that was before pandemic-forced campus closures. One year later, this massive population of students is at great risk of intractable educational loss, experts said.
“It’s an educational pandemic,” said Martha Hernandez, director of Californians Together, a nonprofit that advocates for English learners. “We already had issues of an achievement gap, opportunity gaps, lack of access, lack of equity. Now that’s just exacerbated, and it will be a huge challenge. It will have a big impact for many, many years.”
She and other experts, parents and educators say schools must make immediate and swift interventions to salvage the education of English learners — 80% of whom speak Spanish — including improving distance learning for those families that choose to continue online and extending the school year and school days to allow for additional learning time.
An abundance of reports in California and throughout the country show the dire toll distance learning has taken on these students.
The Los Angeles Unified School District educates about 120,000 English learners, or 20% of its students, and reported that in spring 2020 fewer than half of English learners in middle and high school participated in distance learning each week — a gap of about 20 percentage points compared to students who are proficient in English.
Last month, the district reported that 42% of grades earned by English learners in high school were Ds and Fs, an increase of 10 percentage points from the prior year — greater than any other group except homeless youth. Middle schoolers saw a 12 percentage point increase in Ds and Fs.
And fall interim assessment results indicate that more than 94% of the district’s English learners in middle and high school were not on grade level in reading and math, according to a report this week by the advocacy group Great Public Schools Now, based on district data. (Continues)
Sunday’s New York Times front-paged a curious story that demonstrates an ideological flare-up between different leftist beliefs. On one side was the traditional sob story approach toward illegal aliens, that they are suffering world citizens who should be rescued by too-rich, too-white America.
The newer, more controversial viewpoint is that only the victims or actual tribal members should be allowed to speak because non-diverse people are taking up too much space in the marketplace of ideas and opinions.
The book in question is American Dirt: A Novel, written by Jeanine Cummins, “who has a Puerto Rican grandmother,” the New York Times observes — which clearly is not sufficient for some people.
The Times published a front-page photo of the author, a person “who identifies as white and Latina.”
On Monday, the Los Angeles Times included a front-page story about the fracas, ‘American Dirt’ was supposed to be a publishing triumph. What went wrong?, noting the “angry charges of cultural appropriation, stereotyping, insensitivity, and even racism against author Jeanine Cummins.” So the mainstream media must think that Immigration Diversity is too important to have disagreements.
One complaint was about barbwire floral arrangements at a book promotion dinner because it would disrespect illegal alien invaders, or something.
The New York Times article explained how complicated it can be for the publishing business to accommodate diversity ideology — including having “sensitivity readers” on staff to catch any politically incorrect bits that might upset someone, somewhere.
As ‘American Dirt’ Racks Up Sales, Its Author Becomes the Story, New York Times, January 25, 2020
“American Dirt” seemed poised to become one of this year’s biggest, buzziest books.
When it came up for auction in 2018, the novel — about a desperate Mexican mother and son who flee for the United States border after a drug cartel massacres their family — set off a bidding war and sold to a publisher for seven figures. It drew rapturous endorsements from novelists like Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros, and got glowing advance reviews from industry publications that hailed the book as propulsive and heart-wrenching.
The author, Jeanine Cummins, has said she hoped the novel would drive discussions about immigration policy, and open “a back door into a bigger conversation about who we want to be as a country.” Since then, “American Dirt” has certainly ignited a vigorous conversation — but hardly the one the author and publisher intended.
Even before the book hit shelves this past week, a growing chorus of online critics was challenging the hoopla, accusing Ms. Cummins, who identifies as white and Latina, of having exploited the experience of migrants and repackaging it as opportunistic “trauma porn” for a predominantly white publishing industry.
Criticism intensified on Tuesday, after Oprah Winfrey anointed the novel as her next book club pick, in a splashy joint appearance on “CBS This Morning” with the author, whom Ms. Winfrey said she hoped to interview near the border for her book club program.
It was an extraordinary convergence of forces: Industry hype meets charges of cultural appropriation meets one of the most combustible political issues in America today, immigration.
And that was before a photograph from a lavish book promotion dinner last spring, showing a faux-barbed-wire floral decoration, began circulating on Twitter, where it was vilified as “border chic.” So was a resurfaced tweet from last fall in which Ms. Cummins cheered a fan’s manicure inspired by her book’s cover, complete with more barbed wire.
The controversy lands at a moment when debates about race and representation are front and center across the cultural and political landscape, from the Academy Awards, which faces yet another #OscarsSoWhite outcry, to the National Football League, where the number of minority head coaches is falling, to the Democratic presidential primary, where the most diverse field of candidates in history has narrowed to a nearly all-white group.
It also falls right into the roiling argument over art and cultural appropriation — how the stories of marginalized people should be told and who should be given the platforms to tell them. Social media has elevated more voices, but also brought greater scrutiny to the decisions of businesses and tastemakers like Ms. Winfrey who are trying to build broader audiences.
Opinions are hardly monolithic. When the white painter Dana Schutz drew fire for “Open Casket,” a painting of Emmett Till included in the 2018 Whitney Biennial, some black artists denounced her for exploiting black pain, demanding the work be removed or even destroyed. Others defended the artist’s right to take on any subject.
The literary world has been wrestling with the same questions, particularly in the young adult sector, where authors and publishers now routinely rely on sensitivity readers to help defend against potential racial and cultural blind spots. (Continues)
Saturday’s Los Angeles Times had a major sob story claiming President Donald Trump has somehow made North Dakota unfriendly to the refugees already residing there.
In fact, the only thing that has changed is that Trump increased freedom for local communities to opt out of refugee resettlement if they wish.
The change shows the elite Rescue Project is no longer the sacred cow it once was. Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently announced that his state will no longer accept refugees after taking in 10 percent of America’s total for the last decade. (Breitbart News: Texas Governor Greg Abbott First in U.S. to Halt Refugee Flow into His State).
This declaration followed the odd news earlier in January that 18 Republican governors requested more refugees even though the foreigners cost taxpayers $1.8 billion annually. Go figure.
Interestingly, the great majority of the asylum seekers have turned out to have fake claims: their acceptance rate has fallen to less than one percent. So the already squishy category of Victim immigrants has shown itself to be worthy of suspicion among Americans who are paying attention.
Plus, on a planet approaching 8 billion residents, America cannot be the welfare office for all the needy. People need to stay home and work for reform, as once was the norm before cell-phones and easy transit.
The Times should be ashamed of an article where the city being discussed is misspelled once (Bismark!) and it reports Trump said “many refugees are criminals” which is not accurate — though he may have said “some” which is certainly true.
North Dakota was an immigrant haven — until Trump was elected, Los Angeles Times, January 9, 2020
BISMARCK, N.D. — For decades, this conservative, predominantly white capital city has played host to refugees from around the world.
Immigrants greet shoppers at Walmart, process beef at the Cloverdale Foods plant, run the register at Arbys, clean the Holiday Inn and drive for Uber.
Nobody used to pay them much mind.
“Life was getting better,” said 20-year-old Tresor Mugwaneza, who settled here four years ago after fleeing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and eventually enrolled at the University of Mary.
Things started to change with the 2016 election of President Trump, who has suggested that many refugees are criminals and has extolled his belief in putting “America first” by drastically reducing the number allowed to enter the United States.
The rhetoric has trickled down from Washington into smaller, quieter parts of the nation, as citizens and local politicians embrace it and places such as Bismark start to reassess their relationship with the newcomers.
Now, because of a federal policy announced in September, the 49 states and 600 counties that have welcomed refugees — only Wyoming has never taken part in federal resettlement efforts — each have the power to decide whether to continue doing so.
Just a year ago, the biggest controversy in Bismarck — home to most of the 95,000 people in Burleigh County — was whether to allow the construction of a wind farm. That was nothing compared to the debate that erupted over immigrants.
Suddenly, on the cusp of winter, when life quiets down and temperatures may stay below zero for days at a time, it seemed refugees were all that residents could talk about.
“These people come and destroy everything they touch,” said a post on a local Facebook group, Bismarck’s People Reporting News, which gained thousands of members and became an outlet for concern as well as fear and misinformation.
The mayor, Steve Bakken, became a leading proponent of closing the door on more refugees, arguing that homeless veterans need help more than those fleeing war on another continent.
“If we can’t meet the needs of people here, why bring new ones in?” he said in an interview. (Continues)
Saturday is a slow day for newspapers, so the Washington Post apparently thought it could throw up some easy Trump-bashing with a sob story about asylum seekers.
The front-page photo featured a lone toddler wandering a cruel Mexican street — say, shouldn’t that child have a parent nearby? Or do the family values of diverse foreigners not extend to minding the kiddies?
After noting the “sick or despondent” children in the camp of 1600 asylum seekers, the Post blamed the Trump administration’s policies for the suffering.
For some reason, millions in the Third World regard the United States as their personal rescue service, despite America’s primary responsibility to its own citizens. And if the whole family gaggle can’t get accepted in the US, then “concerned” moms send the kids over the border alone — as if raising abandoned foreign children is the American taxpayers’ job.
Fortunately, some help is on the way. As Breitbart reported a few days ago (U.S. Creates Sanctuaries for Migrants in Latin American Countries):
A new regulation will allow U.S. border officers to send asylum seekers to several Latin American countries instead of being released into the United States.
Similarly, the Associated Press wrote: Tougher US asylum policy follows in Europe’s footsteps. No surprise there — Europe has been inundated also. The First World cannot rescue the billions of poor Third Worlders through squishy immigration.
The deal isn’t exactly new news, since President Trump has been working out arrangements with a few Latin American countries including Mexico to accept some of their region’s wanna-be illegal aliens to the United States.
It would be better to end the asylum/refugee scam altogether, since it helps only a tiny fraction of poor people in the Third World. If there were no possibility of rescue in the First World, then millions would demand reform in their home nations which could lead to a better outcome for more people.
But that’s not the political choice being made. In fact, the point of the Post article is that foreign parents are dumping their sick children onto the US taxpayer for expensive healthcare. Many citizens would prefer to see down-on-their-luck Americans get better treatment.
It’s interesting that the most common health problems named were respiratory illnesses — perhaps due to being dragged from Central America to the US border?
The Post story was reprinted by MSN, linked below:
In squalid Mexico tent city, asylum seekers are growing so desperate they’re sending their children over the border alone, By Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, November 22, 2019
MATAMOROS, Mexico — In the middle of the largest refugee camp on the U.S. border — close enough to Texas that migrants can see an American flag hovering across the Rio Grande — Marili’s children had fallen ill.
Josue was 5. Madeline was 3. The small family was huddled together in a nylon camping tent with two blankets last week when the temperature sank to 37 degrees. The children started coughing, Marili said. Then their fingers and toes turned bright red. The camp’s doctor had begun to see cases of frostbite.
Like most of the roughly 1,600 asylum seekers at the informal camp, Marili and her children had crossed the border into the United States this summer only to be sent back to Mexico to await their asylum cases — part of a year-old U.S. policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols.
In recent weeks, dozens of parents have watched as their children, sleeping outside in the cold, have become sick or despondent. Many decided to get them help the only way they knew how — sending them across the border alone. As Josue and Madeline grew sicker, it was Marili’s turn to make a decision.
These cases illustrate the the Trump administration’s policy and suggest the United States, Mexico and the United Nations were unprepared to handle many of the unforeseen consequences.
Marili, fleeing gang violence in Honduras, knew that unaccompanied children were admitted into the United States without enduring the MPP bureaucracy and the months-long wait. The 29-year-old mother — who, like others here, asked not to be identified by her last name, for fear it could affect her asylum case — believed that returning home would be suicide. So she bundled up her children in all of their donated winter clothes and scrawled a letter to U.S. immigration officials on a torn piece of paper.
“My children are very sick and exposed to many risks in Mexico,” she wrote. “I don’t have any other way to get them to safety.”
She pressed the letter into Josue’s hand, she said, and pointed the children to three U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in the middle of the Gateway International Bridge, the span across the Rio Grande that connects Matamoros to Brownsville, Tex.
“Josue told me, ‘Please don’t send us,’ ” Marili said, crying at the memory. “But as a mother, I knew it was the best decision for them.”
Then she sprinted to the bottom of the bridge and watched through the fence as her children turned themselves in, weeping and wondering when she would see them again, hoping they would find their way to her husband. He had entered the United States and applied for asylum before MPP was implemented. He was allowed to stay. [. . .]
Global Response Management, the Florida-based nonprofit that runs the small medical clinic under the blue tarp, saw a surge in patients, most of them children. The most common cases were respiratory illnesses, said Megan Algeo, the doctor on call at the time. In one case, Algeo said, she persuaded U.S. immigration agents to admit a child for emergency care.
Sunday’s San Jose Mercury News featured an illegal alien sob story (with soccer subtext) on its front page — as if failing California doesn’t have more important things to deal with.
The story is filled with sleep-inducing legalisms and soccer rules, but the reader should remember that the star character Sergio Rivas is a Mexican citizen and he can play there. The idea that he is a “Dreamer” covered by DACA is bogus, since its creator President Obama admitted more than once that the program was illegal. In fact, DACA is on the Supreme Court docket for this term, and the fact that it needs a top court ruling shows how far the United States has fallen from being a “nation of laws.”
The Constitution clearly states, “The Congress shall have Power To…establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization….” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4), so Obama’s king-like creation of the DACA category was entirely unlawful, but he did it anyway. It was a major abuse of our founding document, causing increased illegal immigration of thousands, but there was little dissent from the Congress or press.
An August Breitbart story notes, “The lower courts’ decisions to preserve the DACA amnesty adds at least 500,000 foreign workers to the labor pool and harms Americans’ ability to raise their wages.”
So there are real costs to citizens of government generosity to illegal aliens.
Hopefully, the Supreme Court will declare Obama’s DACA to be a monstrous violation of the Constitution and end the thing entirely.
Here’s a clip from the Murky News’ snoozy soccer sob story:
A “Dreamer” draft pick for the San Jose Earthquakes faces an uncertain future, San Jose Mercury News, September 29, 2019
RENO — Sergio Rivas, a promising young soccer player drafted by the San Jose Earthquakes in January, strolled past the flashing, jangling slot machines in the lobby of Harrah’s Reno, where he is currently living on the 18th floor.
The young Mexican-born athlete might seem to be living the high life, were it not for his status as an undocumented immigrant, which has left him with an uncertain future as a professional player.
Rivas is a “Dreamer” — part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, an Obama-era program that protects children who entered the country illegally from deportation. For now, he is allowed to work in the United States legally.
But his complicated immigration status clashes with the way Major League Soccer customarily fills its roster slots, and that has limited his ability to play in North America’s top professional division.
So Rivas, 21, is living at the casino and playing with Reno 1886 FC, the Earthquakes’ minor league affiliate, which has an arrangement with Harrah’s to house many of its players. San Jose officials send most of their young talent to the second-division United Soccer League team for development. But those other players have a clear path to success, and Rivas does not.
“I wish things were different but if I can’t control it then what can I do about it?” said Rivas, who entered the United States with his family 14 years ago, when he was 7. “I’m trying to figure out ways, and there are not a lot of ways, especially with the President and the way things are going.” (Continues)
It’s a disturbing trend in the worldwide movement of moochers that increasing numbers of Africans are coming to the United States. What’s wrong with Europe? It’s closer and far more welcoming.
One seriously bad thing about African aliens is there’s a billion more where they came from.
Sunday’s Los Angeles Times had the usual sob story presentation on the front page with plenty of boo hooey stories of alleged suffering — so predictable.
Here’s a snapshot from the story, showing a masked man with a cellphone, one of dozens protesting who “demand” visas to travel to the US.
Why can’t they fix their own countries? The United States wasn’t created great — it took years of work to make it so. But aliens want to walk right in and get a full tray of freebies.
In the text below, note the “record 4,779 migrants from Africa” in the first seven months of 2019, a near quadrupling of the same period last year — this is not the direction we want.
America needs Zero foreigners from anywhere because smart machines will be doing much of the work very soon.
African migrants stuck in southern Mexico, their American dream on hold, Los Angeles Times, September 22, 2018
“Africa weeps. Free us.”
That’s the message handwritten in French and Spanish on a protest banner at a tent city here in the southernmost tip of Mexico.
The tents belong to some 250 African nationals who crossed jungles, forded rivers, sneaked across borders and dodged militias and thieves to get here in hopes of eventually reaching the United States. But now they are stuck, because Mexico has denied them the travel visas necessary to proceed north.
Mexican national guard troops and riot police keep close watch over the multi-hued camp, where mosquitoes swarm in puddles. Rain and a fetid stream provide cooking water and many complain of rashes, stomach cramps and other ailments.
“We are fed up,” said Diop Abou, 33, a native of the northwest African nation of Mauritania. “None of us want to be here in this miserable place.”
In the saga of migrants trying to reach the United States, the dominant narrative of late features Central Americans, who account for the vast majority of the 100,000 foreigners whom Mexico has deported this year under pressure from the Trump administration to prevent them from reaching the U.S. border.
But Mexico’s effort to accommodate Washington — and avoid tariffs that Trump threatened to impose — has also targeted thousands of other foreigners, including more than 1,000 Africans who have amassed in southern Mexico over the last several months.
The tent city was erected in protest more than a month ago at the entrance of Tapachula’s federal immigrant detention center, which is called Siglo 21, or 21st Century.
The lockup is reserved primarily for people awaiting deportation, mostly Central Americans.
Mexican authorities apprehended a record 4,779 migrants from Africa in the first seven months of this year — nearly four times the number detained during the same period in 2018 — but deported only two.
The difficulty is that many African countries have no embassies or consular representatives here, and some of the migrants possess no verifiable identification. And so the majority remain stranded.
Those interviewed here said they fled violence, persecution and poverty, ethnic and religious strife and political repression back in their homelands. (Continues)
Over in the mainstream media, there’s no crime worse than a Republican president enforcing the law against the left’s favorite victims, illegal aliens. The arrests earlier this week consisted of a few hundred job thieves who were unlawfully employed in Mississippi food-processing plants, so that action would presumably open up hundreds of jobs for American workers. A recent chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Mississippi as having the second worst unemployment rate among the states as of June, 5 percent, so that would be good news for anyone caring about Americans, right?
Not for everyone, judging by Saturday’s Los Angeles Times front page, which featured a sob story about the suffering children with the requisite “tears rolling down.”
Funny, I don’t recall any sob story journalism back when President Obama was deporting more illegal aliens than President Trump. Open-border types called BHO the “Deporter in Chief” back in 2014 before there was a Trump to blame for everything.
Memories are short in the newsroom.
Elsewhere, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi Michael Hurst stated, “We are unaware of a single child that is without a parent today.” All aliens who said they had a minor kid were released, around 300 out of 680.
So perhaps the media squealing is a little overblown. You never hear this sort of caterwauling about American kids whose parent is arrested — the extreme shrieking is utilized only when the liberal media wants to bash Trump.
Plus, if there were a employment visa category for newsroom workers, the scribblers might be more sympathetic to other Americans who have been negatively affected by excessive legal and illegal immigration. But the real harm to citizens is never mentioned in these emotional stories, which are really political tracts, aimed at wearing down the loyalty of the citizens to law and sovereignty.
The Times article was reprinted in the Morning Call paper of Allentown, Pennsylvania, so click away:
Mississippi raids split families and leave children adrift: ‘I just want my mom and dad’, Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2019
Leaning against the kitchen counter, Juana Andres, 12, rubbed her thumb and index finger anxiously across her father’s cellphone.
Beside her, older brother Eduardo, 14, stared into his iPad, tears rolling down his cheeks.
It had been about 36 hours since federal immigration agents with guns had burst into the Koch Foods Inc. chicken processing plant in the heart of Morton, Miss., rounding up their mom and dad and fastening plastic zip ties to their wrists before packing them onto buses and hauling them off.
Some locals said the workers — immigrants without papers to live in the U.S. illegally — had been rounded up with little more dignity than the chickens that enter the plant in rumbling 18-wheelers. But Juana had little to say about politics or race or immigration.
“I just want my mom and dad to come home,” she said quietly.
Juana still did not know where federal agents had taken her parents — Guatemalans who have lived and worked in this small Deep South town for about eight years. She did not know whether they would come back to their cozy four-bedroom ranch home, decorated with lavish shrines to the Lady of Guadelupe, red and green Christmas baubles, plush toys and cherub figurines.
Her dad’s old AT&T phone was their only lifeline.
Hours after her mom and dad were taken away, it buzzed with an unknown number and Juana quickly handed it over to her uncle Pedro.
It was her mom. Sobbing, Ana Andres delivered a simple message to her brother: “Take care of the kids and give them food.”
Anguished families
A sixth-grader, Juana had just started her second day back at middle school Wednesday when federal agents poured into the sprawling Koch Foods plant just a block away. As the tardy bell rang and she settled into her math class, her dad was finishing up his night shift and her mom starting her work day.
In a scene that played out at poultry and other food-processing plants across Mississippi, federal agents gathered hundreds of other Latino workers into rooms to question them and screen for anyone who was in the U.S. illegally. Across the state, about 680 workers were detained in the largest workplace raid in a decade.
Nowhere was the anguish more visible than in Morton, population 3,600. After 200 workers were detained, anxious families gathered in the sweltering heat outside the hulking plant, an ugly patchwork of corrugated metal buildings and trailers sealed off from the rest of the town by a strip of chain-link fence.
“Government, please show some heart,” an 11-year-old girl sobbed in a widely shared video. “Let my parents be free like everybody else, please…. I need my dad and mommy.” (Continues)
The parents can be “free like everybody else” in their home countries. The US cannot be the welfare office and job shop for the Third World when there are billions on earth who might like a “better life” in this country.
There’s nothing like an emotional self-deportation sob story to lift the spirits of sovereignty defenders crushed by Trump’s open borders, and a recent item from the San Diego Union-Tribune is encouraging.
In particular, we hear from foreigners complaining at length about their treatment in rough shelters when they apparently thought they would get deluxe accommodations. Where would they have gotten that idea?? Perhaps from the cartels that charged them thousands of dollars for a trip north?
Alien-smuggling is big business for the criminals — as detailed by The Federalist in Report: Illegal Immigration Is Earning Billions For Smugglers
Earlier generations of Latin Americans fought revolutions against oppression for reform and a “better life,” but today’s young men are satisfied to steal US jobs from citizens and mooch benefits from taxpayers. Perhaps the omnipresent homeland flags one sees carried by caravansters show a tiny bit of guilt — or a promise to send home lots of remittances. The foreign flags certainly do not indicate a plan to assimilate to American values.
Below, invasive foreigners carry the Honduran flag to America — in hopes of conquering the welfare office?
But today, the dreams of grabbing jobs, welfare, education and assorted free stuff from America have faded for some who are packing up to head home.
They should put some of that energy for a better life into fixing their own countries because the United States can’t be the World’s Welfare Office on a planet of nearly eight billion residents.
Central American migrants are giving up on asylum; returning home, San Diego Union-Tribune, August 4, 2019
30 year-old Nery Hernandez, left, and another Central American migrant who had decided to abandon their quest for asylum in to the U.S. negotiated a price for bus tickets to return them to Honduras from Tijuana where they had been staying in the Agape Mission Mundial shelter in Tijuana. They left for the trip home later in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 24, 2019 in Tijuana, B.C. Mexico.(John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Tijuana, Baja California — Danny Mejia was wiping the tears from his eyes by the time he arrived at the El Chaparral port in Tijuana, just on the other side of San Ysidro, California.
It wasn’t the scorching heat or the way journalists buzzed around him or the mistreatment he said his 8-year-old son endured during their eight-day stint in U.S. custody that finally broke him.
“My dream is gone,” said the 35-year-old Honduran, as his wife and son collected water and snacks under a tent set up by volunteers outside the San Ysidro pedestrian border crossing. “I have to go back to Honduras.”
Mejia said he didn’t know how he was going to get home or where he and his family were going to sleep for the night. He was handed over to Mexican immigration officials in Tijuana at the El Chaparral border crossing on July 22 without any money, food or even a phone number of someone he could call in Tijuana.
“We don’t know anyone. We don’t have any money. We don’t have a place to sleep. The only thing we can do is go back to our country from Tijuana,” said Mejia, whose first appearance in immigration court was set for October 28.
If the Trump administration’s goal with its new immigration policy, Migrant Protection Protocols, is to encourage large numbers of migrants to abandon their asylum claims and return home, it appears to be working.
[. . .]
Honduran farmworker Edin Santos Martinez, 38, and his 15 year-old son came north to join his brother in Los Angeles, who had managed to cross the border illegally only a few months ago.
Santos Martinez and his son were kidnapped twice along the way: In the southern state of Veracruz, where they were held for three days until they paid $6,000 and again on the border in Tamaulipas where they were held for a week until they paid $8,500. That’s in addition to the $10,000 Santos Martinez paid smugglers.
“If anything happens to us over here, it’s the responsibility of the government over there,” he said, pointing to the U.S. from the border in Nuevo Laredo. “What else can we do?”
After five months of the Migrant Protection Protocols program, not a single asylum seeker has been granted refuge in the United States, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration court records.
Researchers found that of the 1,155 cases under the Migrant Protection Protocols program that have been decided, only 14 of them had legal representation — that is just 1.2 percent.
The message is being heard loud and clear.
“We don’t have a chance,” said a 41-year-old Honduran in Tijuana.
Alexander Hernandez said he came to the U.S.-Mexico border mostly looking for economic opportunities to support his three children and wife back in Honduras. He said U.S. border agents told him his chances of being granted U.S. asylum were close to zero.
Hernandez plans to return home on Wednesday with a group of 19 people.
[. . .]
Single mom Elisa Reyes fled Honduras with her 14-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son to join family in Los Angeles, but after spending 10 days watching her children vomit and shiver in Border Patrol detention and a day in Nuevo Laredo without food, she was leaving on a bus for Chiapas headed for home.
She called the U.S. immigration system “a deception.” “They treat us worse than animals,” she said.
Alexander Hernandez, who plans to leave Tijuana on Wednesday, said some things were better in Honduras, after he said he witnessed U.S. border agents grab migrants’ hands to force them to sign their immigration paperwork.
“In my country, sure, it’s a very violent country, but not like that. They wouldn’t treat you like a dog,” he said.
 Wednesday’s Washington Post gave front-page coverage to its sob story of poor coffee farmers in Guatemala who claim to be driven from their land by low prices for their crop.
The article says the “price of coffee has crashed” although the beverage is the important personal fuel of many millions in the First World. The press reports every few years that climate change may cause the extinction of the blessed coffee plant eventually, which you would think would raise its value, but that’s not what is happening now.
Of course, the upshot is that still more illegal aliens — a “staggering number” according to the Post — are now headed north to break into the US, but they have an excuse that the Post finds acceptable regarding the illegality of their entrance.
The Anchorage Daily News, linked below, reprinted the Post story:
Falling coffee prices drive Guatemalan migration to the United States, Washington Post, June 12, 2019
HOJA BLANCA, Guatemala – From his wooden hut in the foothills of the Sierra Madre, Rodrigo Carrillo can see the product of his life savings: A vast green sea of coffee plants, sprouting red berries like tiny Christmas ornaments.
Those plants once seemed a life-changing investment. Carrillo joined a cooperative that sells beans to Starbucks and several certified fair-trade organizations. In Guatemala’s fertile highlands, there was no faster way out of poverty than to supply American coffee drinkers.
But in recent years, the price of coffee has crashed, leaving Carrillo, 48, with a choice to make.
Last month, he pulled out a wrinkled map of the U.S.-Mexico border and pointed to the spot on the edge of Arizona where he plans to cross with his 5-year-old son.
“I’m leaving in 11 days,” he said. “There’s no money in coffee anymore.”
Guatemala is now the single largest source of migrants attempting to enter the United States – more than 211,000 were apprehended at the Southwest border in the eight months from October to May. Here in western Guatemala, one of the biggest factors in that surge is the falling price of coffee, from $2.20 per pound in 2015 to a low this year of 86 cents – about a 60% drop. Since 2017, most farmers have been operating at a loss, even as many sell their beans to some of the world’s best-known specialty-coffee brands.
A staggering number of those farmers have decided to migrate.
President Donald Trump has blamed weak border security in Mexico and loopholes in America’s asylum system for the increase. The deal by Mexico and the United States last week focused largely on deterring Guatemalan migrants through tougher enforcement. But many here are still considering the journey – and falling incomes are a major part of the calculus.
More than half of Hoja Blanca’s 100-person coffee cooperative have either migrated or have children who have migrated in the past two years. Abandoned coffee farms lie fallow along the dirt roads that wind through the region.
“What we’ve seen is that the migration problem is a coffee problem,” said Genier Hernández, the head of Hoja Blanca’s coffee cooperative.
He’s not alone in making that connection. In working to combat migration, the U.S. Agency for International Development has funded programs to assist coffee producers. Trump has threatened cuts to those efforts.
When acting homeland security secretary Kevin McAleenan traveled to Guatemala in May, he invited coffee growers, including Hernández, to meet with him. The growers showed him a PowerPoint presentation, titled “Coffee and Migration,” with graphs illustrating how much farmers were losing.
“I asked him what he could do about the price,” Hernández said. (Continues)
Is the immigration sob story genre making a comeback? As I pointed out in my 2002 article, The Style Guide To Writing A Sensitive Immigrant Story, emotions are foremost, showing the humanity of foreigners who are illegally present in this country, because liberal ideology is not interested in such details.
The New York Times featured a front-page illegal alien tear-jerker on Memorial Day that was filled with migrant family travails as they rode the Greyhound to their new home in stupid-generous America.
On Tuesday, the Washington Post responded with another kind of family story, where Mexican grandparents visited offspring stuck in America by their unlawful immigration status. (Wait, isn’t Mexico prosperous these days with its #15 GDP ranking?)
The State Department set up the travel deal, revealing itself as one of the many anti-Trump, anti-sovereignty centers in Washington.
The Post’s front-page story featured a colorful photo of a Mexican granny, emphasizing diverse family values:
The Post story was reprinted in Stripes.com (a US military website, hmm) so click freely if you are not a paid-up Post subscriber:
Elderly Mexicans visiting their undocumented children in US with State Department approval, Washington Post, May 25, 2019
CHERAN, Mexico — María Dominga Romero León bent over a small black suitcase and packed her things, one by one: a folder of photographs, a half-finished blouse, a bag of wooden toys for the grandchildren she’d never met.
She sighed.
“They’re probably used to America by now,” she said.
Romero León, 68, hadn’t seen her daughter Guillermina in so long that she was starting to lose track of the years. Had it been 15 or 20? She wasn’t sure. What she knew was that Guillermina was an undocumented immigrant in a place called Germantown in Illinois with three children of her own. Two were U.S. citizens; one was a beneficiary of the federal program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Romero León knew that U.S. immigration laws made it impossible for her daughter to come back to Cheran without jeopardizing the life she had built in the United States, because she didn’t have papers to move back and forth across the border.
That’s why Romero León was packing her bags. She had never been on an airplane, or been to an airport, or seen an escalator – she’d never left her home state of Michoacan. But now she was getting ready to fly to America.
The U.S. government – the same government from which Romero León’s daughter was hiding – had surprised her with a tourist visa.
Officials in Michoacan call them Palomas Mensajeras (Messenger Pigeons.) They are parents and grandparents in Mexico who have not seen their undocumented children in the United States for years, even decades.
Since 2017, officials here have been working with the U.S. State Department to reunite those families for three-week visits in cities and towns across the United States.
For many here, it is an unlikely American olive branch amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it has been welcomed by immigrant families grappling with a crisis that has rippled across both countries: The elderly parents of the estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are dying alone in Mexico while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border.
Romero León’s husband died of complications from diabetes a year ago. During his final days, she held a phone to his ear so their children could speak to him from the United States. Three of the couple’s six children were undocumented immigrants living across the border.
“It was hard for him,” Romero León said, “to be sick, to be dying so far away from them.
“I thought, ‘Will it be the same for me?’ ”
Still, when she learned that she would be joining 21 other elderly residents from around Cheran on a flight to Chicago, she found it hard to understand. Why had the United States granted her a visa? Was it a trick to apprehend her daughter?
“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “Are they going to use this to arrest them?”
___
The U.S. government hasn’t specifically endorsed the program, a State Department spokesman said in a statement. But officials last year began designating special interview days at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City for elderly visa applicants who “frequently travel in groups to the United States for a variety of reasons including tourism, cultural programs, and to visit friends and family such as U.S. citizen grandchildren.”
The spokesman made no mention of the generation between the Mexican grandparents and the American grandchildren. But in practice, the Palomas Mensajeras program is exclusively for elderly Michoacanos who live in Mexico and have undocumented children in the United States.
Trump – of the border wall proposal, family separations and the national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border – has taken a different approach toward the undocumented. “Please do not make yourselves too comfortable,” he tweeted this month, “you will be leaving soon!”
The State Department spokesman declined to answer questions about why the United States is facilitating reunions between Mexicans and their undocumented children. (Continues)
Leave it the New York Times to insult Americans on Memorial Day by featuring an enormous sob story of an illegal alien family being transported through America to their destination. By comparison, other liberal papers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times front-paged patriotic stories of remembrance suitable to the occasion.
Below, highlighting a Guatemalan moocher family was more important to the New York Times than honoring American military patriots lost in war defending this nation on the day remembering them.
And yes, foreign kiddies are arriving by the thousands, who will strain local schools with their inability to speak English, health concerns and needs for special treatment. Local communities will be forced to either raise taxes or cut services to citizen students.
Actually, the family profiled by the Times should complain that they had to ride the bus: the Associated Press reported that DHS has been flying aliens to various American cities.
Who knew open borders now include transport unblocked by the US government into the interior? This is not how I imagined the Trump Presidency.
The Times story was reprinted elsewhere, linked below:
1,600 miles, 85 hours: A migrant family takes a Greyhound across America, by Miriam Jordan, New York Times, May 27, 2019
DALLAS — By the time it pulled into Dallas, the bus from Arizona was two hours and 47 minutes late. It had left Phoenix overbooked, turned away passengers with tickets in Tucson, rolled through El Paso at 2am and finally disgorged its human cargo — a busload of exhausted migrants, mostly from Central America — shortly before dusk the next day.
A sign in the Greyhound bus terminal listed the ongoing routes that were already facing delayed departures: San Antonio, Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Atlanta, Brownsville. All of them would be late; most of them were full. Those who had missed their connections would need to wait in line, an agent announced, as the disembarking passengers — many of them with no food, no money and no possessions beyond what was in their slim backpacks — listened in stunned silence.
“My God, we are going to have to spend two nights here,” Zuleima Lopez, recently arrived from Guatemala with her husband and three children, murmured as she surveyed the ragged tableau inside the terminal. Refuse had long before overfilled the available trash bins, and a rank odour wafted out from the restrooms. Mothers, fathers and children huddled together on scraps of cardboard, atop tattered blankets and splayed jackets. Feverish babies with runny noses fussed in their mothers’ arms.
At one end of the station, several passengers jostled for $7.50 meal vouchers — 19 cents less than the cheapest cheeseburger combo — until, halfway through the line, the agent announced that there were no more vouchers.
A Greyhound road trip across the country has long been a hallmark of the American experience, a “leave the driving to us” way for those who couldn’t afford airfare or a car to come home from college, start new jobs, get to the coast, leave problematic situations behind.
But along the border and deep into parts of the nation’s interior, the Greyhound buses plying the interstate highway system have become an essential element in an extraordinary new migration.
Entering the country at a rate of more than 5,000 each day, new arrivals from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are departing border towns by the busload. While President Donald Trump has made a point of threatening to send migrants from the border to inland sanctuary cities that oppose his immigration policies, it is an empty threat: Migrants are already travelling by the thousands every day to cities across the country — to Atlanta, Chattanooga, Orlando, Richmond, as well as to sanctuary cities, like New York, Los Angeles and Seattle.
After an initial 72 hours or so at Customs and Border Protection processing centres along the border, the vast majority of those entering the country now are released to nonprofit respite centres, where they are fed and clothed. From there, they are booked on Greyhound buses to destinations where they may have friends, family or the hope of a job. They pay top dollar, often $250 to $300 each, usually advanced by family members in the United States.
Long lines and bedraggled migrant travellers have become fixtures at bus stations across the Southwest — and a source of substantial new revenue for Greyhound, a company that had been struggling for footing in an era of cheap airfares and stiff competition on shorter-haul routes from companies like Megabus.
Currently owned by the British transport conglomerate FirstGroup, Greyhound filed for bankruptcy twice in the 1990s. More recently, the company introduced Bolt Bus express service, Wi-Fi access and other innovations, but falling fuel prices and the convenience of car and air travel continued to limit its ability to attract well-heeled customers.
Then came the crisis on the southwest border.
The Greyhound station in Dallas, the company’s headquarters, has been transformed by default into a temporary migrant shelter.
A similar scene has been playing out in cities across the Southwest. In McAllen, hundreds of migrants pack the station daily, lining up to board buses. In El Paso, hundreds at once have shown up at the terminal without warning, trying to find their way. In Phoenix, a swell in drop-offs by immigration authorities led Greyhound to restrict station access to those holding tickets, exposing families left outside to the rain.
Zuleima Lopez and her family had ridden a bus much of the way from Guatemala through Mexico, crossing into the United States with the help of a smuggler, but nothing prepared them for this new journey they would take through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee on a large, crowded bus. (Continues)
A front-page story in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle was a common staple in liberal journalism — the illegal alien sob story. In fact, it’s likely that the Trump Presidency will someday be understood as a golden era in the questionable genre.
A frequent touch in sob stories is the excessive use of emotive adjectives and descriptive images to portray the increasing presence of foreign aliens as acceptable, seen here in phrases like “vibrant immigrant community.”
Another distraction from facts is the complaint about the president who characterizes “undocumented immigrants in particular as killers, rapists, drug smugglers and job stealers.”
That approach was bad timing on the day when illegal alien Wilbur Ernesti Martinez-Guzman was arrested in Nevada for the murder of four Americans. That case illustrates that the body count of preventable illegal alien murders continues to mount because the Congress refuses to enact basic public safety on the border.
Below, the Chron pictured an illegal alien described as a “grape picker” preparing Mexican food in her Lodi home to feed her three anchor kids.
It’s rather unlikely that the taxes (assuming any) from the “grape picker asylum seeker” cover the education and other services that California taxpayers fund for her three anchor offspring — say $11,495 per-pupil in 2016 just for schooling x 3 = $34,485 annually. And why would California take seriously her asylum claim from Mexico when so many Central Americans resettle there because it is safer than their homelands?
In a non-sanctuary state, Floricel Ramos would have already been deported.
Notice how President Trump is presented throughout the article as the problem, not the lawbreaking presence of the Mexican grape picker and others of her ilk.
Amid push for border wall, many Latinos distressed by Trump’s tone, by Tatiana Sanchez, San Francisco Chronicle, January 20, 2019
As a soft rain fell in the Mission District on a recent morning, marking the start of another workday, dozens of the district’s Latino residents shuttled to bus stops while business owners opened up shop, carefully setting up jewelry displays, carting out fresh batches of sweet bread and unpacking fruit along the sidewalk. Mothers carried bundled-up toddlers. Friends met for coffee, speaking freely in Spanish.
This is the vibrant immigrant community that Carmen Sanchez wants President Trump to see. These are the people she wants highlighted in his prime-time speeches, spontaneous tweets and trips to the border.
But since his 2016 election, Trump has often painted a much darker picture of people crossing the border into the United States, characterizing undocumented immigrants in particular as killers, rapists, drug smugglers and job stealers. Trump — who proposed Saturday to extend protections for immigrants who arrived as children or were displaced by disasters in their home countries, in exchange for funding for a border wall — has leaned on that profile heavily in his push for the barrier, saying Saturday, “The lack of border control provides a gateway — a very wide and open gateway — for criminals and gang members to enter the United States.”
But his strategy has come at a cost, immigrants and advocates say. They say the heightened rhetoric has translated into hostility and violence directed at immigrants — whether or not they entered the country illegally — and Latinos in particular. The effects have been profound in diverse regions like the Bay Area, where there are an estimated 1.7 million Latinos, according to census data.
“If the president of the United States is speaking this way of Latinos, then of course some people are going to look at us like garbage, as if we bring in drugs, live off welfare and come here to do bad things,” said Sanchez, 58, a retired waitress who immigrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua in 1981. “That’s not the case. In the barrio of the Mission there are lots of people who came here to work and who own their own businesses.”
Floricel Ramos, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who has been in the United States for two decades and worked the fields in Lodi (San Joaquin County) picking grapes, said she is apprehensive about leaving her home at times.
“We come here to work and to give a better future to our kids. We want to live in peace,” said Ramos, 39, who has three U.S.-born children. “It’s frustrating that people like the president criminalize us for being here.” (Continues)
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