September 20th, 2022: Kids in Cages?

The DeSantis flight to Martha's Vineyard was a political stunt that was not nearly stark enough to highlight the horrors that our political leadership has created through their failures in immigration.

We have more children being trafficked than at any time in our history.

We have more women being sexually assaulted and raped due to failed immigration policy than at any time in our history.

The "kids in cages" that ended up being Obama era pictures falsely used against Trump was a tiny drop in the bucket compared to where we are today.

If you wrote about "kids in cages" then and are silent now, you should be ashamed. Most of you are kind people of good faith who are not aware of how you are being manipulated but take this as your wake up call.

How many people died this year at the border that we know of for certain? Would you be surprised that it is an all time record?

Over 750?

How many children have been lost who were FLOWN by the U.S. government and released ostensibly still in our custody?

Less than 50 people flown to Martha's Vineyard who caused a crisis for rich hypocrites. Do you know how many more children released from last October 2021 to July 2022 in my home state of Tennessee? More than 4000 (link below).

The massive failures around immigration in our country have created massive incentives around sending children to pay enormous sums of money to criminals who get them across the border often after abusing them. These traumatized young people are then flown to stay with people who are supposedly vetted to provide their care. A staggering number of them (tens of thousands a year at this point) then disappear and the government does not know if they are being fed, or educated or cared for, or loved.

Kids in cages? America now has kids in ditches. Kids being beaten on by alcoholic uncles who don't think they are working hard enough. Kids who are living with people who started being treated as adults at 13 or 14 when they were growing up who treat these kids the same way.

The 10 year old Biden referenced who was pregnant? Raped by an illegal immigrant.

These activities are not happening in a vacuum.

There are massive numbers of amazing people in the United States who are here illegally and yet are kind and compassionate and hard working and in short everything you would want in a neighbor and friend.

They also exist in a system that pushes them out of law and order and that incentivizes in large and small ways not paying taxes, not seeking help when they are victims of a crime, not reporting criminals who are in their family who may be deported if their regular drunken abuse comes to light etc.

There is a better way. There are solutions to these problems. Policy incentives are skewed in awful ways that make it so that people in countries send for their kids and kids who aren't even related because they know that unlike adults, they can get to them and start working quickly.

I would like to see the death penalty for Coyote rapists. I am not sure we can get there, but as long as the best paid least dangerous jobs in Los Zetas is being a serial rapist, we will see the horrors continue. Hurting people also hurt people. We see traumatized people who need years of help because of the nightmare they endured getting to the United States.

An expanded guest worker program would help enormously.

A program that allowed children in need of asylum to apply in country (which is always how those programs are supposed to happen) and actually get a hearing in a timely manner would make a huge difference as well.

Currently our system is overwhelmed and broken. The VAST majority of people coming to the United States illegally are not fleeing certain death or political persecution, they are seeking economic opportunity. They have been prepped to lie about their reasons, because they can often work for years and get lost in the system once they are here, earning in a 4 year period what they could not in 40 years in the village they came from.

The illegal immigrants I know personally are hardworking people. They come from places where the justice system is corrupt. They come from places where if you do not want to work for criminals in the drug trade, you will be poor like your family has been for 500 years. They come from countries where their group lost a civil war that was in large measure over the fact that they have been denied economic opportunities on purpose by rich people who own the political power to keep them working as serfs with no possibility of economic or social mobility.

They come here and with a smile on their face, they work diligently, not taking jobs from others, but doing work that lazy, entitled Americans refuse to do. They have come from incredible hardship, and know oppression in a way Americans have only read about, and yet they see themselves as victors, not victims.

When I am in Home Depot with friends from Guatemala, every time people come up to me and ask me if I can connect them with workers. Construction, landscaping and agriculture are all areas where the Republican party seems captured by scummy rich people who benefit from keeping illegal immigrants illegal, while at the same time, Democrats want to sign up illegal immigrants for the same programs that already destroyed communities in the United States for 50 plus years and in some cases destroyed the countries that our immigrants are fleeing.

A realistic compromise feels impossible because the uniparty we have in D.C. is content with the status quo. What Joe Biden has created is the worst immigration system in my lifetime. Will the Republicans fix that if they take over in November?

For everyone I know who posted about "kids in cages" you better hope so. We cannot afford to continue seeing exploitation, and rape and death. Our immigration system is immoral. It must be fixed.

I have friends who live in other countries who want to come here and cannot. They are willing to do jobs (and do them well) that you cannot fill here for $20 dollars an hour. They also do not believe in the myth that everyone needs a one bedroom apartment of their own, and are willing and enjoy living and working together as a family that shares housing that many Americans would never consider (despite the fact that it is nicer than the housing most of our grandparents lived in).

The nomenclature around these debates is also stupid. "Uh Clayton, if you truly are helping illegal immigrants you would know that your language is problematic, because undocumented is preferred and no person is illegal." Wrong. That is not the way legal terms work. A person with a gun they are not legally allowed to have is an illegal gun owner, not an undocumented gun owner. A rapist is not an unconsented sexual partner. "Undocumented" sounds as out of touch as Latinx, because all of my friends who are illegal immigrants have plenty of documents, and are regularly headed to Atlanta to get renewed papers, or to Oregon to get a drivers license etc.

A system that allowed legal status while not allowing welfare benefits and that still allowed for deportation of those committing dangerous crimes would be welcomed by every illegal immigrant I know.

They do not want a handout. They want opportunity. They do not want rapists and abusive drunks to be allowed to stay, and if they were deported when reported, my strong suspicion is that our newly legal guest workers would within a year have self policed into a group that is the most law abiding in the United States.

Here is the final piece that I think would shock most of my friends as much as it shocked me. If you made the guest worker status renewable and transferable and only took it away due to crime, you would see an enormous shift of wealth and of the labor pool itself. Many of the incredible people I know who are from Guatemala or Honduras would love to go back to their home village, but they cannot legally travel. They have missed funerals of their loved ones. If they were given legal status, they could invest in the places they left and build them into places people did not desperately flee. They were denied opportunity by oppressive wealthy people who knew that they would remain in power forever over the coffee farms of Huehuetenango for example because the workers could never buy a plantation themselves. That broken dynamic would change overnight if people who own homes and trucks and mowers and businesses with great net income could sell them and be full participants in the economy with the rest of us. Americans assume that everyone here illegally wants to become a U.S. citizen, but that is not the case. They want opportunity, and they want their children to have more chances than they did. We should be fighting to make that happen.

You cannot have rule of law without law. You cannot have a country without borders. America is broken today in our immigration system. Fixing it will take courage and will unmask the powers that profit from the injustice that is the status quo. Let's roll up our sleeves and get to work. Happy to hear your own suggestions below, take the time to read the links if you want to know more.

Feel free to share, and feel free to argue, but please do not feel free to remain apathetic to the critical brokenness that is our immigration system in the United States.