Yes, it is YOUR fault children are dying on US-Mexico border

Immigration debate in the US has now been reduced to emotional manipulation with photos of dead or suffering children. Anything to distract from the actual causes of human suffering: broken immigration laws and bad foreign policy.

Valeria Ramirez, age 2 or thereabouts, is the latest martyr for the cause of open borders. She drowned in the Rio Grande when her father tried to swim across and enter the US illegally. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, 25, wanted “money to build a house,” in the words of his mother Rosa, so he took off from El Salvador with his wife and child and headed north. 

It is tempting to blame President Donald Trump for the deaths of Oscar and Valeria. Just chant “Orange Man Bad” often and loud enough, invoke the Holocaust and “concentration camps,” and you will signal your virtue to all the woke friends and family, and feel better afterwards. But it is you who killed them. This is your fault.

Why? Because the cries of “think of the children!” from people like you led to the Flores settlement, which prohibits the immigration authorities from detaining minors who trespass across the border for longer than 20 days – effectively forcing the release of illegal migrants into the US.

And no, they are not “undocumented,” don’t try to blur the lines with euphemisms. There is a legal way of immigrating into the US, and this ain’t it, chief.

It was also the cries of people like you that drove the Trump administration into publicly renouncing “family separation” policies a year ago, telling the entire world that showing up on the US border with a child in tow – your own or otherwise – guarantees entry. So the world came, not just from El Salvador, Honduras or Guatemala but from Africa and Asia as well. But whereas in the past they would try to avoid the authorities and sneak through the desert, they now turn themselves in and say the magic words, claiming asylum.

Asylum rules

How many of you know anything about asylum laws and rules? I happen to know quite a bit, having spent almost nine years as an asylee, as my residency got tangled up in the post-9/11 chaos. It is not a pleasant or enjoyable process, but it ultimately does what it’s designed for.

Well, it would if it was allowed to work, that is. Flooding it with literally hundreds of thousands of people claiming asylum after illegally crossing the border guarantees that their claims will not actually get processed for years – and by that point, the asylum seekers who fail will nonetheless stay because they’ve given birth to American citizen children and swear they’re law-abiding pillars of the community, every single one of them.

This is not an immigration system. It’s madness.

Invade and invite

It would be one thing if people who chant “No ban, no Wall, no USA at all” admitted they wanted open borders. One might then even be able to argue with them over the merits of advocating both that and socialism, which – for the record – I believe are mutually exclusive due to lived experiences, though I am certainly open to be persuaded otherwise. 

Yet hardly anyone will openly admit advocating for open borders, even as they do so in practice. Don’t even get me started on arguments that the US is irredeemably racist, so obviously that means all these people from other countries have to come here and become victims of that racism, or something.

No, what really gets me is that the very same people who want to invite the world also want to invade it. Somehow, because the US once backed death squads in El Salvador, that makes it American responsibility in perpetuity to both send money to its government and admit anyone who wants a better life here. It also means the US must “bring democracy” to places like Cuba and Venezuela. Wait, what?

I’ll readily agree that the US tendency to set up puppet governments, or prop up corrupt ones, has contributed to decades of misery in Latin America. But that means the ideal solution would be for Washington to butt out of their business altogether. Whether it is regime-change interventions, sanctions choking off economies, embassies interfering with election results, or subsidies sent to corrupt officials distorting prices and driving poverty – US “aid” is only making things worse. 

America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own,” John Quincy Adams famously wrote in 1821, when he served as secretary of state, and before becoming president. Would that his successors had heeded his advice!

But they didn’t. At some point, enough Americans like you demanded that the government “do something” and “think of the children,” resulting in trillions of dollars in their tax money being spent on the Pentagon and setting in motion all the wars, sanctions and coups, as well as the chaos on the border with Mexico. 

Now a river of humanity streams towards the Rio Grande, with children along as human shields, and they sometimes die in the process. And none of those dollars spent on “defense” can do a penny’s worth of difference in dealing with it.

But you don’t really care about that, do you?

Nebojsa Malic

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