Thursday, July 19, 2018

Immigrants — or Refugees?



Immigrants — or Refugees? 

Immigration is an overwhelming problem, the government and media insist, particularly at the southern border and especially when the newcomers don't first ask a bureaucrat's permission to enter the land of the free.

Most Americans agree. And all "solutions" inevitably call for more laws, more regulations and enforcement, more gargantuan bureaucracies  in short, more government. (Could that coincidence explain the harping on this topic?)

But so far, few folks have investigated a question fundamental to fixing what's wrong: the cause. Why are crowds on the move flocking to the U.S.?

"Because," smug nationalists say, "we're the best country on earth!"

Without doubt, we once were. And our founding philosophy of liberty is not only earth's best but history's as well. Yet we've strayed further from those ideals than a shack in Mexico is from Trump Tower.

"We're still better than whatever hellhole the illegals come from," smirks our nationalist.

Especially when the U.S. has bombed, meddled with, imposed police-states on, and starved those hellholes. For more than a century, American governments and their corporate cronies have abused nations in Central America (and elsewhere) as though they were vassals rather than sovereign. And the refugees that result seek safety, food, and peace in the very country that destroyed those blessings for them, ironically enough. 


For example, this past April saw "an attempt to overwhelm U. S. Customs and Border Protection, [with] over a thousand Central Americans ... marching through Mexico toward the U. S. border. ...the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants."

Predictably, the American right excoriated this "invasion." But they should have instead damned their own State Department.

Why? Because about 80% of these folks hailed from Honduras. And the U.S. State Department has wasted not only billions of our taxes but decades on rendering that country uninhabitable: "...the foreign policy disaster [of] American support for the Porfirio Lobo administration in Honduras ... Ever since the June 28, 2009, coup that deposed Honduras's democratically elected president, José Manuel Zelaya, the country has been descending deeper into a human rights and security abyss. That abyss is in good part the State Department's making. … [Honduras] now has the world's highest murder rate … corruption [has] mushroom[ed]. The judicial system hardly functions. … At least 34 members of the opposition have disappeared or been killed, and more than 300 people have been killed by state security forces since the coup …"

The catalog of crimes continues, through Obummer's praising a drug trafficker at the White House, increased financing (read: more of our taxes) for Honduras' police state, and other horrors. (I've drawn this portrait from one source, but I invite you to read a variety of reports about the Feds' malice towards Honduras.)

Why the State Department's fixation on this little nation? Because it's "crucial to the United States' military strategy in Latin America." In other words, the Feds recognize no limits  not life, liberty, law, or morals  when advancing their agenda to dominate the planet.

Let's suppose for a moment that Honduras and the U.S. were to change positions, that the evil our government has wreaked, Honduras had instead visited on us  all while Honduras itself remained relatively peaceful and prosperous. Would you try to escape such an American nightmare? Would you desperately flee to Honduras with your vulnerable children? What if the natives ridiculed your longing for peace and protection? What if they mounted armed guards on their borders  these voters and taxpayers who permitted their politicians to ravage your home?

We find the same sorry tale when we turn to another Central American country disgorging refugees on us: "The CIA has a long history of involvement in Guatemala, having helped to orchestrate the army's overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1954. … As the Cold War raged in the 1960s and '70s, the United States gave the Guatemalan military $33 million in aid even though U.S. officials were aware of the army's dismal track record on human rights, the documents show."

When the American public learned of that gift, "U.S. President Jimmy Carter cut off overt military aid. However, money and arms still got ... there through the CIA. When [Guatemalan] President Lucas Garcia began his fearsome regime in 1978, ...when death squads roamed the land and murdered at will, the CIA was there to help. … Near the end of the Reagan administration, another technique for repression was used  the war on drugs. While the program had no significant impact on drug production and trafficking, it had serious consequences for indigenous Guatemalans. The spraying of lethal herbicides by anti-drug helicopters and planes caused widespread damage, poisoning large numbers of people, animals, fish, and plants. To escape government violence, some of the tens-of-thousands of indigenous internal refugees in Guatemala at that time, banded together in remote areas. In the name of its anti-drug policy, the government bombed these areas, captured much of the population, and tortured and killed many of them."

Again, I Invite you to study the U.S.'s crimes in Guatemala. And if Guatemala's position in the world were switched with ours, if a secret Guatemalan bureaucracy had sowed the havoc here that the CIA did there, so that your friends "disappeared" and your children's future was sketchy at best, would you seek safety elsewhere?

Tragically, we could continue our survey with just about any region that's vomiting its residents onto our shores. The history of the U.S.'s malevolence abroad eternally shames us.

Which makes ending the influx simple: abolish the CIA, the State Department and all other bureaucracies responsible for these atrocities. Forbid the Feds from implementing any "foreign policy," and force them to abide by the Constitution's constraints.

But no politician and mighty few of their constituents would ever agree to such a reduction in American power. They prefer to continue creating refugees and then deny them succor.

How long before a heavenly Judge redresses this wickedness?

— Becky Akers 

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