The New York Times correctly envisions a Biden administration as having a far more forgiving border, unlike the illiberal sovereignty enforcement of the current president. In fact, the cartels are “telling migrants ‘border will be open’ when Biden takes over” according to Rep. Henry Cuellar.
The Times’ December 14 front page featured a sob-story style photo of a sniffling illegal alien about to be returned to his actual country of citizenship.
We wouldn’t expect him to work with his fellow citizens to improve their home societies, as was the case in years past: Latin America had many freedom fighters who worked for positive change in earlier centuries. But that was before it became easy to invade the US, steal jobs and obtain free stuff from the welfare office.
Interestingly, the article quotes one foreigner early on that “We are not bad people. We come to work.” But there is no mention that millions of Americans are still jobless because of the China virus shutdown of businesses. The press ignores that there is no need for more workers during this time of high unemployment among citizens. Nevertheless, adding more immigrants remains a top task for scribblers.
Once again, the media pursues its Diversity First agenda rather than supporting law and order. The press evidently believes that the United States should be welfare office to the world, or as the Times remarks “a safe haven for people fleeing persecution.”
Remember that the Third World population continues to grow by millions every year, so the pressure to invade the US will only increase.
As Biden Prepares to Take Office, a New Rush at the Border, New York Times, December 13, 2020
SASABE, Ariz. — By the time the Border Patrol spotted the two migrants in a tangle of shrubs on a frigid December morning, they had been meandering aimlessly in the desert for six days. They had lost their way on the final leg of a monthlong journey from Guatemala, encountering only herds of javelinas, lone coyotes and skin-piercing cactuses as they staggered north. Exhausted, thirsty and cold, they did not resist arrest.
Less than two hours later, agents had already processed them and deposited them back across the border in Mexico. Alfonso Mena, his jeans ripped at the knee, shivered with his companion on a bench less than 300 yards from Arizona and sobbed uncontrollably.
“What wouldn’t you do to help your children get ahead?” he said. A landscaping job in Houston awaited him, he said, and his family was counting on him. “We are not bad people. We come to work.”
It was not the first time he had tried to enter the United States. And it was unlikely to be the last.
Unauthorized entries are swelling in defiance of the lockdown President Trump imposed on the border during the pandemic and shaping up as the first significant challenge to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s pledge to adopt a more compassionate policy along America’s 1,100-mile border with Mexico.
After a steep decline in border crossings through much of this year, interceptions of unauthorized migrants along the Arizona-Mexico border are climbing again: Detentions in October were up 30 percent over September, and .the figure in coming months is expected be even higher, despite the biting cold in the Sonoran desert.
The rising numbers suggest that the Trump administration’s expulsion policy, an emergency measure to halt spread of the coronavirus, is encouraging migrants to make repeated tries, in ever-more-remote locations, until they succeed in crossing the frontier undetected.
And they are likely the leading edge of a much more substantial surge toward the border, immigration analysts say, as a worsening economy in Central America, the disaster wrought by Hurricanes Eta and Iota and expectations of a more lenient U.S. border policy drive ever-larger numbers toward the United States.
New migrant caravans formed in Honduras in recent weeks, defying that country’s coronavirus-related lockdown in a bid to head toward the United States but were prevented from leaving the country. And the pandemic has decimated livelihoods in Mexico, prompting a rise in migration from that country after a 15-year decline.
“The pressures that have caused flows in the past have not abated and, in fact, have gotten worse because of the pandemic. If there is a perception of more-humane policies, you are likely to see an increase of arrivals at the border,” said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, director of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at the New School in New York.
“That doesn’t mean that those flows cannot be adequately handled with a comprehensive set of policies that are quite different from Trump’s,” said Mr. Aleinikoff, “but you need a well-functioning bureaucracy to handle it.”
Mr. Biden has vowed to begin undoing the “damage” inflicted by the Trump administration’s border policies. He has said he will end a program that has returned tens of thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico and restore the country’s historical role as a safe haven for people fleeing persecution. (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)
Monday’s San Diego Union-Tribune included a front-page article with the headline MIGRANTS WRITE OF TERRIBLE DETENTION CONDITIONS which referred to illegal aliens who broke into the country and were incarcerated.
These days, Victimhood is a top value among the left, and their open-borders prescriptions are augmented with sob stories that proponents believe negate the routine illegal entering, job theft and welfare abuse that afflict more advanced nations today.
One example given is a man from Cameroon in the armpit of Africa who complains of violence at home because he is an English speaker. Funny, but next-door Nigeria is an English-speaking country, so he needn’t have travelled all the way to the United States to speak his language (and incidentally visit first-world welfare offices). Or he could have instead relocated to Europe, since invader routes are established.
Ideally, this fellow should be deported ASAP to spread the word that America is a heartless place and unwelcoming to the increasing number of poor on earth who want to avoid the hard work of reform at home.
That would be a good message to send since illegal immigration from Africa is lately on the uptick.
Note that only one word in the article recognizes the lawbreaking of the supposed “migrant” characters — “unauthorized.”
Letters from immigration detention centers, ‘break my heart every time I open an envelope,’ volunteers say, San Diego Union-Tribune, December 16, 2019
Volunteers and researchers have been collecting thousands of letters from people in immigration detention centers to show people the conditions of the men, women and children inside.
Decades from now, when historians try to make sense of how the U.S. government treated detained migrants, they will be able to hear directly from the men and women in federal immigration detention centers.
At least that’s the hope of Lisa Lamont, head librarian at San Diego State University who oversees a collection of more than 1,700 letters written by migrants in detention centers.
“In 20, 30 or 40 years or even longer down the road, when researchers are researching this time in U.S. history, I think these letter are going to be invaluable,” she said.
The population of people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody has grown significantly since the beginning of the Trump administration. During fiscal year 2015 there were 28,449 unauthorized immigrants in detention facilities. That number increased to 38,106 and 42,188 in the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years, respectively. Projections show that number is expected to increase to 52,000 by the 2020 fiscal year, according to data from the federal government.
The letters, mostly hand written on blank sheets of paper, detail poor conditions inside detention centers such as detainees being served rotten food, receiving poor medical treatment and harsh treatment by staff. Additionally, the letters shed light on current events driving migration to the United States.
For example, a letter from a 29-year-old Cameroonian national who has spent more than 15 months in detention describes violent conflicts between English-speaking Anglophones and the French-speaking population.
“I came here in U.S. seeking for protection because of what is happening in my country Cameroon because my country is a bilingual country where the English minority are been (sic) torture, kill, arrested and jail for a very long time or arrested and kill by the french government in Cameroon all because the Anglophone minority called southern Cameroon want secession from French Cameroon which cause many of my English Cameroonian to escape for their dear life,” he wrote.
According to his letter, the man could not be released from the detention center because he could not afford to pay a $50,000 bond. (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)
Illegal alien sob stories in the news media certainly are undergoing a renaissance under the porous borders permitted by the Trump administration. One frequently see emotive front page articles in the press with photos of cutesy and/or suffering kiddies to appeal to readers’ sympathy.
One such appeared Tuesday in the San Diego Union-Tribune, complete with adorable foreign child who recently was “suffering,” and that was somehow America’s fault instead of the moocher mom dragging the girl all the way from Honduras. The photo was enormous, taking up four out of five column widths, thereby emphasizing how highly the paper values diversity rather than US law and sovereignty.
I chronicled these journalistic principles in my 2002 Vdare article titled The Style Guide To Writing A Sensitive Immigrant Story, and not much has changed in the intervening years, except the planet is now home to more than a billion additional residents (6.3 billion then, and 7.7 billion now).
Instead of explaining the worsening planetary push factors or categories of harm to Americans, the Union-Tribune presents a compassionate story of migrant travails and their hopes to reach the promised land of Uncle Sucker dispensing lots of free stuff. Also, the public health issue of tuberculosis coming across the border is mentioned, but not until late in the article — paragraph #33 by my count.
Chicken pox and flu: Migrants are getting sick at the U.S.-Mexico border, San Diego Union-Tribune, August 19, 2019
Tijuana, Baja California — On her first day out of quarantine Thursday, 6-year-old Fernanda Martinez was ecstatic. She raced a mini-green quad up and down the hall outside the dark room where she spent four weeks separated from everyone because of a severe case of chicken pox.
Greeting all the other children at the Agape Misión Mundial shelter in Tijuana, Martinez decided they were all her best friends. She announced she was equally excited to see everyone.
Her scabs aren’t completely healed, but a doctor gave her the green-light to finally leave the room where people have been quarantined with varicela, or chicken pox.
“She cried and cried and cried because she could not go around any of the other children,” said her mother, Jasmine Martinez, a 34-year-old from Honduras. “I was crying for her because it was so hard seeing her suffering.”
Martinez said after fleeing gangs, traveling a rough road from Honduras, spending about a week in U.S. detention and then being returned to Mexico, where she and her two children don’t know anyone, coming down with chicken pox in a crowded Tijuana shelter was the challenge that finally caused her 6-year-old daughter to break down into tears.
Pastor Albert Rivera, who runs the Agape shelter, said at one point there were up to 40 people with the highly contagious virus that causes an itchy rash and small fluid-filled blisters. Now there are around five people who still have to remain in quarantine, but there are a total of 73 people sick with other illnesses of the 225 migrants sheltered at Agape, he said.
Rivera said because the incubation period for chicken pox is 10 to 21 days, it’s unclear if migrants are getting sick in crowded conditions in U.S. detention or if they are arriving at the border from their home countries with the contagious illnesses.
What is clear is that illnesses typically spread very quickly among migrants in Tijuana shelters.
[. . .]
In the Agape shelter, the Department of Health in Baja California tested migrants for tuberculosis after a man crossed into the United States with the serious infectious disease that affects the lungs. He told U.S. authorities he had stayed at the Agape shelter, who passed the information on to Baja California authorities, according to Rivera.
“He didn’t tell them he was sick when he crossed over because he didn’t think they would let him into the United States,” said Rivera, who said the man only spent one night at Agape. (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.
 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)
Monday’s San Jose Mercury News shows that the pro-alien news story remains a popular #FakeNews genre. Plus, President’s tariff deal with Mexico may cut back the invader flood for a time, so the press must continue to pester the public with sob stories of suffering foreign lawbreakers who nevertheless are found to be admirable by liberal scribblers.
The Murky-News’ sympathy object is a Mexican student with a possibly pretend name of “Dafne” who is poised to steal a spot at UC Davis from some deserving American citizen. The alien is given the front-page treatment while pretending she has “a life in hiding” because of the meanie president who is defending law and borders.
The article is all sweetness and light, with no hint that there is illegality involved that actually harms other people, like the unknown person missing out on UC Davis and all the American high school kids who got less so foreigners could mooch an American education.
Make no mistake, the sudden influx of many foreign students into a school system requires a substantial addition and reallocation of resources. Those needs include free food, tutors, Spanish-speaking teachers, psychological counseling and healthcare. So either taxes go up or American kids are short-changed.
The Supreme Court case of Plyler v. Doe guaranteeing public school for foreign kids was decided in 1982 when world population was 4.6 billion — 3.1 billion fewer than today’s 7.7 billion — so perhaps it was easier to be generous then.
Plus, when hundreds of millions of people across the world are planning migration to America or Europe, that means they are not reforming their homelands. That scenario does not work given world population growth,
The current story is a reminder that the California taxpayer is dinged for the high school education of many thousands of illegal alien students, 27,000 of whom are graduating this year.
A student and a teacher: The struggles of being undocumented in California, San Jose Mercury News, June 10, 2019
About 27,000 undocumented high school students will graduate in California this year. They face uncertain futures.
Dafne, a high school senior in San Jose, is one of a small fraction of the state’s estimated 27,000 undocumented students graduating from high schools and enrolling in four-year colleges this year.
Barred from federal financial aid and facing the gnawing uncertainty she’ll ever be able to legally work in the U.S. even after earning a degree, Dafne, 17, knows firsthand the hurdles undocumented students face to succeed in higher education.
The basketball player and cheerleader was 8 years old when her parents brought her from Mexico to San Jose. This news organization is not using her full name to protect her identity.
In middle school, she realized why her mother wouldn’t let her go on a school trip to visit the Capitol or why she couldn’t get a job at fast-food chains like her friends. She said she felt ashamed and limited by her immigration status.
But now she’s trying to break free. She will attend UC Davis in the fall.
“I think, for me, college is my ticket. It’s a ticket for me to do something greater, to be something else than just my status,” said Dafne, who hopes U.S. immigration laws will change so she can work as a high school teacher one day.
Eighteen years ago, another local undocumented high school graduate contemplated the same prospect as Dafne. Julio Navarrete also dreamed of becoming a high school teacher, but wasn’t sure he could be legally employed.
Now 34, Navarrete has been named “Teacher of the Year” at American High School, the largest in Fremont.
Six years ago, he won political asylum in the U.S. and a life-changing work permit. By then Navarrete had earned a master’s degree in education and teaching certificate at the National Hispanic University in San Jose.
“Every day I wake up feeling grateful,” said Navarrete, in his fourth year as a Spanish teacher at American High. “Just the fact that I’m able to step into a high school classroom and be with my students and teach and be part of this community. That’s all I could ever ask for.”
Dafne and Navarrete are at different points of their strikingly similar paths. They were born in Puerto Vallarta and grew up in East San Jose. Their parents worked hard to barely scrape out a living.
They navigated college applications without the Obama-era program that allows nearly 200,000 unauthorized young immigrants in California to temporarily work and be protected from deportation. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals has been closed to new applicants and tied up in the courts after the Trump administration took steps to end it.
As more undocumented students graduate from high school without DACA, Navarrete said he encourages students in his classroom to pursue their aspirations.
“I tell them that nobody can take away their education regardless of whether or not in the future they’ll be able to work,” said Navarrete. “Education is our freedom, and we need to educate ourselves. And, when they finish university, maybe things will be different.” (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)
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