Thursday’s front page of the Washington Post featured Guatemalan illegal aliens “streaming to the U.S. border” because America has been mean to them historically and they have been unlucky regarding a volcano. Or something.
Naturally, when a volcano erupts, people in the area have to flee so they aren’t burned alive, Pompeii style. But the article notes, “Many of the survivors, with nothing left, headed for the United States” — as if there were no other alternative, although some volcano victims did indeed relocate within the country.
America has been generous to victims of war and natural disaster — perhaps unduly so. Now an unlimited welcome mat is expected, even though the population of the vulnerable Third World has grown by billions of humans in recent decades.
Here’s a shocker statistic from the article: “More than 250,000 Guatemalans — at least 2% of the country’s population — have migrated to the United States in the past two years.”
That’s not what I had in mind when I voted for candidate Trump in 2016. The Deep State clearly wants open borders, but the president could have pushed harder for enforcement over the two years when he had a Republican congress. And today it seems little has changed to keep out illegal alien invaders.
The article is one long narrative of Third World victimhood, because liberal scribblers cannot imagine brown people coping with adversity in their own homeland and who instead must be rescued by the big bad white United States.
Indigenous Guatemalans flee volcano, search for safer ground in Guatemala or United States [1], by Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, November 27, 2019
COLONIA QUINCE DE OCTUBRE LA TRINIDAD, Guatemala – In this village at the base of the Volcano of Fire, there’s a simple explanation for the surge in migration to the United States, and there’s a complicated one.
The simple explanation is that on June 3, 2018, the volcano erupted, killing hundreds of people in minutes and rendering a patch of Guatemala uninhabitable. Many of the survivors, with nothing left, headed for the United States.
But the more complicated story is the one that residents here discuss before leaving – a history in which the United States is intimately involved. It’s the story of how Guatemala’s indigenous communities have been displaced and dispossessed for more than a century – sometimes fleeing U.S.-backed soldiers, sometimes ferried in caravans funded by U.S.-backed aid groups.
It’s the story of how La Trinidad came to be relocated to the base of an active volcano, with the assistance of the United Nations, the United States and the Guatemalan government.
More than 250,000 Guatemalans – at least 2% of the country’s population – have migrated to the United States in the past two years. Of those migrants, analysts say, a disproportionate number are indigenous. More than two decades since this country’s civil war, which pitted Guatemala’s military against its native communities, the exodus points to one of Latin America’s starkest inequalities. It points to places like La Trinidad.
“We’ve been migrating for 100 years,” says Simeon Camposeco Aguilar, a 56-year-old coffee farmer here. “Sometimes it feels like this community is going to keep moving forever.”
Camposeco’s son migrated to central California two months after the volcano erupted. It continues to rumble every 15 minutes or so, sending a plume of smoke into the air and shaking the ground.
“It’s normal! It’s normal!” Camposeco reassures outsiders. That’s what the residents of Trinidad told each other until June 2018, when lava flowed toward them at 150 mph.
The Guatemalan government published a declaration this July: “The community is not appropriate for urban development,” officials said. The recommendation? “Total evacuation.”
Now, it was up to Camposeco and other community leaders: Could they find a new place to live in Guatemala, an alternative that would stop the flow to the United States? (Continues)