There Is No "Border Crisis"

Why You Might Want To Read This: There never has been a “border crisis”. It’s a made up “crisis” to distract working people here who are petrified that they won’t be able to pay the bills because of relentless class warfare. A few thoughts on how to talk about immigration.

Sometimes I wonder why I do these... debating irrationality, stupidity and lies is soul-draining. But, someone has to do it (I guess) so I went on this show—and I’ll explain below a bit more the key points; you don’t have to watch this unless you really crave intellectual abuse:

Main point: There is no border crisis—if by “crisis” you mean a threat to people living in the United States.

There never has been a crisis at the border—other than the danger faced by people who leave their homes for economic or political reasons and risk their lives trying to come to the U.S.

It’s always been a made-up political crisis aimed at distracting working people here who are petrified that they won’t be able to pay the bills. It’s a brilliant distraction—by “brilliant” I mean despicable—from the day-to-day realities of working for a poverty-level federal minimum wage of $7.25-per-hour while Republicans are cutting Medicaid so they can fund more war and tax cuts for people like Jeff Bezos who spend millions on a wedding.

What I didn’t get to raise in The Hill show—because it’s not always easy to direct the conversation—is the central point today:

Generally speaking, low-income people and those who struggle to survive economically do not *willingly* leave their homes and their communities (where they have long-standing ties, families, and relationships). They are mostly forced to do so.

The main reason for movement of people to the borders of the U.S., especially to the southern border with Mexico, is the combination of U.S. economic and foreign policy, and a relentless global corporate plan to impoverish people. If this country wanted to really end migration, it would have to stop the savaging by corporate powers of the livelihoods of people across the globe. Yeah, that ain’t happening.

And politicians in both parties don’t ever speak about the connection between migration, on the one hand, and economic and foreign policy, on the other hand, because they are, in the main, willing guardians of the current system. So, it’s a whole lot easier to spout phony talking points and outright lies (as my debating opponent did on the show).

Let me give you one specific example you can use: Bad trade deals (in the NAFTA model), negotiated on behalf of global corporations, hurt small Mexican farmers (many of whom grow their own food for survival) and small businesses. When NAFTA came into force in 1994, the Mexican peso collapsed—which was predicted by those of us who argued against NAFTA (graph via 1997 briefing paper from Economic Policy Institute):

This is pretty simple: With no options after NAFTA gutted incomes for millions, folks were forced off their land, or from their villages and towns, and headed north. Those folks have recovered. That NAFTA model has been replicated for the past 30-odd years, gutting the livelihoods of people in virtually every corner of the planet.

Which meant: if you can’t feed your family at home, you look to do anything to survive including risking your life to flee to another country.

The truth is trade deals are just a slice of the action. As I’ve pointed out before, it’s those magical “supply chains” that are central to fueling migration:

The entire global expansion of supply chains was a conscious decision by free-market politicians and corporate leaders…TO. PAY. SLAVE. WAGES.

To always be moving production to countries where wages are rock-bottom, where unions are weak, where authoritarian regimes open the doors to marauding corporations, where huge profits can be made.

Wal-Mart, to use a prime example, is a willing and enthusiastic trading partner with China because Wal-Mart can stock its shelves with low-priced garments, toys and other crap churned out by thousands of Chinese workers. That’s the real-life expression of a “supply chain”—poor, enslaved people working for pennies, barely able to survive, who deliver astounding profits to very rich corporate CEOs or owners.

And that drives people from their homes—if they are somehow able to cobble together the coins to actually move, paying the crooks who traffic human beings for a living.

So: stop impoverishing people and forcing them to find a new home, and presto, the so-called border “crisis vanishes like a fart in the air.

Your second point to use: When the U.S. prosecutes a foreign policy—at the behest of corporations, especially defense contractors—that arms repressive regimes (historically speaking, done in the name of “democracy” and to “stop communism”) who enslave their own folks to work in dangerous factories and/or kill and imprison their own citizens, then, it should not be a shock when people flee repressive countries.

So, this should be a no-brainer in a moral world: stop bombing countries, or arming to the teeth scores of other countries and their authoritarian rulers, and millions of people will stick right at home. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, tells us that,

“By May 2024, more than 120 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations” which is “equivalent to Japan's population, the 12th largest country in the world.”

To be sure, with yet another illegal war on the horizon, the chances that this country will either shift its global economic and military stances are quite slim.

But, it’s incumbent upon us to make the connections—the very same bad policies hurt plenty of people here. “Solving immigration” starts with seeing the whole picture of the corrosive policies that bring people to the U.S. and we should not succumb to the weak drivel foisted by the “opposition” party, which still tries to show it is “tough on immigration”, and regurgitates the nonsense of “border security” and the willingness to vote for billions to expand the security and police state.

This is the crisis:

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