Border Crisis Distortion

Writing in Statewide Publications Seem to Fail to Grasp Complexities

If you pick up the Houston Chronicle, or visit the Texas Tribune’s recent coverage of a 2-Billion dollar border spending bill that’s making its way through the Texas Legislature, you’re liable to think it’s not only going to accomplish nothing, it’s going to be worse than simply ignoring the border crisis.

To sum the coverage up, it amounts to more of the same old drumbeat that goes a little something like this: “The Border Crisis is less of a crisis, and more of an attempt by the Governor to stir up his voters.”

Even as they quote Val Verde County’s Sheriff, testifying how he has ranchers asking him “When can I shoot,” they keep pointing to how no one is being charged with smuggling— how no one seems to be facing any charges more serious than trespassing.

It is as if they are being willfully ignorant. Perhaps that is all it is. Ignorance. Ignorance of just how buried Border Deputies and Courts are. Ignorance of just how impossible it is to prove a case of human smuggling when a case may take more than a year just to come to trial, and there’s no way right now to compel witnesses and victims to appear in court. With no witnesses and victims, good luck proving a case.

What is to be done? Nothing, if you follow the conclusions these others attempt to lead you to. They suggest illegal immigration is inevitable, and perhaps it is, so long as no one seems willing to truly punish employers that hire illegal workers. But, even if illegal immigration is inevitable, is it truly advisable not to attempt to reduce it somehow? In this time of COVID-19, would it not be advisable to try and bottle up as much of the illegal immigration as we can?

Border activist journalists seem to want to have it both ways: Illegal immigration is a thing driven by forces impossible to curb, and COVID-19 isn’t a concern in the migrant population.

Any statistics on COVID in the illegal alien population are necessarily suspect. Deputies and Border Patrol don’t seem to hardly have the time to identify illegals, let alone get them tested. It is a statistical problem similar to the lack of serious criminal charges being filed: Overburdened lawmen and courts don’t have the time or the facilities to quickly and accurately process and prosecute the illegals they do catch, nevermind the ones who slip past them into the interior of the country.

Back in the 1990s, Border Patrol Agents in the Laredo sector said the most generous estimate was that they probably caught 40% of those crossing. It’s anyone’s guess what that number looks like now, but one doubts it’s anywhere near that high.

What is to be done? The Tribune and Chronicle are calling for ‘meaningful’ reform of border policy, without there being any consensus on just what that would look like. Opening the border and a general amnesty is a non-starter as far as most conservatives are concerned. Punishing employers is likewise a non-starter for moneyed interests. Militarization of the border is also a non-starter for most left-leaning activists, and those who view it as immoral. Caught in the middle are the ranchers and small border communities drowning in the present crisis.