Want to Reduce Illegal Immigration to the US? End the War on Drugs. Roque Planas - The Huffington Post | |
go to original August 31, 2015 |
The drug trade in the Philippines is growing so much that even Mexican dealers want a piece of it. Al Jazeera's Marga Ortigas reports. (Al Jazeera)
Several GOP presidential hopefuls have over the last few weeks offered wildly extreme and generally unrealistic proposals for deterring illegal immigration - largely spurred by Donald Trump’s grandiose plan to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, then let a few of the “good ones” back in, all while building a giant, possibly self-branded border wall. Other ideas Republican primary candidates have pondered lately include eliminating birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the Constitution, because some argue that it acts as a magnet for undocumented immigrants.
While these ideas might energize the GOP’s conservative base, they wouldn’t do much to deter illegal immigration, for one simple reason: All of these propositions rest on the false assumption that most undocumented immigrants are crossing into the U.S. primarily to look for a better life and a higher-paying job.
Anyone who speaks to undocumented immigrants regularly knows that they invariably view the dangerous and expensive trip into the U.S. as a last resort, usually because something went horribly wrong at home - not because of dreams of having a child who is a U.S. citizen.
Most of those who have crossed the southern border illegally over the last few years are not looking for work - they’re fleeing violence in their home countries of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras. All four of these countries have experienced a sharp rise in drug-related violence, which is frequently deadly, over the last decade. In Mexico, for example, former President Felipe Calderón's frontal assault on the country’s cartels, continued by his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, has cost more than 100,000 lives, according to some estimates.
For the last five years, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have topped the list of countries from which the U.S. receives the most asylum applications, and in the last year alone the number totaled nearly 120,000.
When 68,000 unaccompanied minors, and a similar number of mothers traveling with children, crossed into the U.S. from Central America illegally, they generally didn’t disappear into the shadows, as the talking point goes. Most of them turned themselves in to border officials and asked for asylum or some other form of humanitarian relief. Those who manage to get access to a lawyer, which isn’t easy when you have no money and aren’t entitled to a public defender, usually win and are allowed to stay.
Read the rest at The Huffington Post
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