It seems to me that we are trying to solve our immigration problems on the border by not going to the root of the problem. After all, a 20-foot wall just creates demand for 22-foot ladders.
We lived in South Texas off and on for 12 years, and crossed the border countless times. I even floated the Rio Grande River, and watched as Mexicans floated a refrigerator across from the USA to Mexico. Believe me, the border can’t be closed.
Oh, you can make it more difficult, but the job is just too big, even for a country as rich as America. But even if we could dedicate a trillion dollars and build a 30-foot electrified fence from coast to coast, it would be a horrible waste of money, and it wouldn’t stop illegal immigration.
But there is a way to solve the problem that is becoming a bigger every day, and to do it, we must attack the reasons why thousands upon thousands of migrants are flocking to our southern border. Why are families so desperate that they are willing to separate children from their parents to get into our country? The majority of these migrants are from Central America, and if we look closely at those countries, I think we can understand why parents would resort to such drastic measures.
To understand why families would abandon their homes and land and desperately walk hundreds of miles through dangerous, drug gang infested areas with little hope of actually getting into our country requires an understanding of why they are so desperate. They are willing to break up their family, hoping at least their children will get into the United States. What would make families go to such extremes?
Guatemala is one of the key countries whose residents are fleeing. To understand why, we must look closely at these migrants, and how a good percentage of them make their living.
Very simply put, many of the thousands of Guatemala citizens who are flooding our borders are simple small plot farmers. Their key crop is corn. However, for the past three years, there has been an extreme drought in Central America caused by Global Warming, and the corn crop has almost completely failed.
These families are desperate beyond our understanding. They are facing starvation, and even though it is only a glimmer of hope to enter our country, they will walk hundreds of miles to the border, and let their children cross knowing they have a better chance of being allowed to stay in America.
These migrants are different from the ones in the past, who were mainly from Mexico. These are true refugees desperately trying to escape bone-wrenching poverty. They don’t want to flee their county, but because there aren’t sufficient resources in the various Central American countries, they turn to the United States.
If 20-foot or 30-foot fences aren’t the way to solve the problem, how do we return to a time some 50 years ago when the border had very little in the way of preventing migrants from entering our country, and we didn’t have thousands of them flooding the border? What is the difference? We lived within an hour and a half drive from the border and frequently drove down, crossed and re-crossed multiple times. The border didn’t have long lines, and it was safe and orderly. If we want the border to return to a 60s era border, what do we need to do?
This is my suggestion: don’t spend another nickel on the border wall. That is truly money wasted; instead, go to the root of the problem. Help the Central American countries whose farmers are starving during a time of unprecedented drought, and you will remove a big part of the reason for them to go through hell just to send their kids across the border.
Of course, that will take an unprecedented amount of direct foreign aid, which would be focused on these desperate, starving families. If the billions already spent to build the border wall had been sent directly to help the starving Central American farmers, we would have greatly reduced the unmitigated disaster we have today. Of course, we need to do more than just feed hungry farmers for a season. We must have an aid program in place until the drought conditions subside.
We should have the funds for this proposed aid program after leaving the military mess in Afghanistan, which has cost our country an estimated two trillion dollars. That follows the Vietnam War, which costs only God knows how much. Those forays were horrible investments. Vietnam is communist, and the Taliban controls a large swath of Afghanistan. Trillions of dollars were spent, and we have nothing to show for it. Just think if those dollars had been spent to directly help struggling people in Central America and Southeast Asia how much better would our world be today.
But we must do more to secure the border than just give aid to Central American countries. During this time, when America’s economy is recovering from the pandemic, and jobs are readily available, the draw to come to the USA pulls thousands of desperate migrants to the border. They know that if they can cross, they can easily get a job, and that is the case right now.
So, we need more than an aid package. We should tighten the job market available, because it would take thousands of new government workers to properly document the able-bodied men and women who come by the hundreds of thousands to take the jobs available in the USA.
There is only one way to make those jobs available only to fully documented migrants. We have laws on the books, which penalize companies that hire illegal immigrants, but enforcement is spotty and fines are minimal. The solution is very simple: greatly increase the fines the companies must pay if they hire an undocumented worker, make the fine mandatory, and funnel the collected money into the aid package.
If our country will take this two-prong approach to our immigration problem, the border will return to its 60s status, because the starving Central American farmers won’t be so desperate that they will leave their country and homes to attempt to enter our country, and companies will stop hiring undocumented workers because of the stiff fines.
Let’s quit wasting money on useless walls, which won’t solve the problem, and on foreign wars. This country has the resources to help starving people, and we have the military might to protect our country and our allies. Hopefully, we will learn from useless walls and disastrous foreign wars how to do a better job protecting our citizens, and responding to hunger in the world. We can do it properly, as we did with the Marshal Plan at the end of World War II.
When I watched on TV as someone dropped at three-year old child from the top of a wall 15-feet high to be caught by someone on the other side, I was encouraged to write this column.
Richard Mason is a registered professional geologist, downtown developer, former chairman of the Department of Environmental Quality Board of Commissioners, past president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, and syndicated columnist. Email [email protected].