OBAMA’S MANUFACTURED BORDER CRISIS: 250 CHILDREN APPREHENDED PER DAY

The surge of illegals seeking the amnesty they are entirely correct to believe Barack Obama will give them is staggering in its dimensions.  The Washington Free Beacon has some staggering numbers from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson’s testimony this week:

The number of illegal children crossing the border has more than doubled since last year, when some 24,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended. More than 52,000 illegal children have crossed from October to mid-June, according to Johnson, who admitted that the unprecedented influx is stressing DHS resources at the border.

More than 250 children are being apprehended every day along the southern border; U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimates that more than 150,000 unaccompanied children will illegally enter the U.S. in the next year.

The massive wave of illegal border crossing has taxed DHS and CBP in the past several months and prompted outrage on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers maintain that the Obama administration’s lax immigration policies have fueled the influx.

“The president needs to immediately send the National Guard to the southwest border to deal with this crisis,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the Homeland Security Committee’s chair. “Patrol stations are not set up to handle this massive and growing number of detainees. Let alone children.”

“This is a crisis. It’s a crisis that’s been in the making for years,” McCaul said. “One that we should have seen coming. But few concrete actions have been taken. The Department of Homeland Security and the United States government as a whole has been slow to act, turning a blind eye to the warning signs.”

Let us pause to note, as observed previously, that some of these “children” are well into their teen years, and quite a few of the older ones are gang members.

Citing a report that says 95 percent of the new arrivals said they came because they (again, correctly) believe women with children, and unaccompanied minors, get a free pass into the United States, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte said on Wednesday, “Apparently, word has gotten out that once encountered by Border Patrol agents and processed, thanks to this Administration’s lax enforcement policies, one will likely never be removed.”  He quoted the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director’s assessment that “if you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.”

“It is often said that Nero fiddled while Rome burned.  Unfortunately, it seems Obama fiddles while our borders implode.” Goodlatte added.

Both McCaul and Goodlatte are being far too polite.  President Obama and his ideological fellow travelers wanted this.  They weren’t blindsided when tens of thousands of people showed up to accept the invitation Obama extended.  An ad placed by the Department of Homeland Security in January to hire “escorts” for the “resettlement” of approximately 65,000 unaccompanied alien minors tells us there were preparations being made months ago, and those preparations manifestly did not include deportation.  Obama isn’t fiddling while the border implodes; he’s watching the illegal alien surge disperse across the United States, becoming effectively impossible to reverse, and checking off a box on his “transformation of America” to-do list.

The amount of pressure these new youthful “refugees” will bring to bear against opponents of Obama’s immigration agenda will be staggering.  You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again, even louder: we can’t possibly deport these people, we can’t let them live in the shadows, they became “undocumented Americans” (the new term of art) the instant their feet hit our soil, we have to give them educational benefits so these young “Dreamers” can realize their full potential, it would be inhumane to lock them out of our social welfare system, we can’t very well have them overwhelming hospital emergency rooms so they’ll need ObamaCare coverage…

Pick out any story about illegal immigrant activists from the last few years, then add a few hundred thousand children to the population they’re talking about, and imagine what’s going to happen to anyone who resists their demands.  This isn’t an unanticipated side-effect of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program – it was the point of the exercise, along with the usual political pandering.

Even those who don’t appreciate the fine points of Obama’s Cloward-Piven strategy to force collectivist “reforms” by overwhelming (small-r) republican systems wouldn’t have to be geniuses to anticipate the response Rep. Goodlatte described.  Not only would common sense anticipate it, but opponents of amnesty have been tirelessly warning about it for years.  As with gun control, the stubborn and arrogant refusal to hear what the other side is saying has led to disaster.

Crime is almost always based on a cost/benefit analysis.  When the benefits of crime far outweigh the risk of capture and punishment, it gets worse.  This is a true for violation of American immigration law as for any other law.  Remember what happened when liberals pretended to forget that criminals are largely rational, and rewrote the justice system to treat crime as the unstoppable result of social pathologies caused by the selfish actions of law-abiding people?

The “soft” apologists for illegal immigration – those who aren’t active supporters of the Cloward-Piven attack on our system – made the same mistake when they assumed violations of immigration law wouldn’t get worse when the cost/benefit analysis shifted.  The increased “benefit” of escaping from mis-governed gang-infested Central American hellholes is surely part of the equation too… but again, that situation is no surprise whatsoever to the President of the United States, with powerful intelligence services at his disposal.

There’s also some cost/benefit analysis going on when corrupt American politicians decide which constituency to serve.  To put things in economic terms, the marginal benefit of expending political capital on behalf of American citizens, to protect the border and defend the integrity of citizenship, is very low, especially for Democrats.  They view it as a thankless task.  Border security is one of those things nobody notices when it’s working.  The people most likely to appreciate it are largely constituencies Democrats have either written off, or actively dislike.  But the marginal benefit of bringing in a wave of illegal aliens and working on their behalf is gigantic: more warm bodies to give Democrats leverage against the American taxpayer, more potential voters, cheap labor for the Chamber of Commerce crowd, and the delightful benefit of being able to slander your opponents as racists for refusing to get on board.  You can see similar cost/benefit analyses grinding behind the foreheads of politicians when just about any unprofitable duty to the American people comes up, but it’s particularly noticeable in this case.

How effectively is Obama’s Cloward-Piven attack overwhelming the system?  The feds want to house the tidal wave of migratory children in the Border Patrol Academy.  Fox News reports:

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, a sprawling campus in the arid dirt plains of western New Mexico known for oil and dairy farms, could soon house hundreds of children and families that have crossed the southwest border. Tens of thousands of immigrants have crossed in through Mexico primarily from Central America, where they appear to have been led to believe that once in the U.S., they will be allowed to stay. The government is scrambling to accommodate them, but some critics say putting them up in the academy turns government policy on its head.

“Where they appear to have been led to believe that once in the U.S., they will be allowed to stay?”  Is even Fox News so nervous about stating the obvious truth that it must be reduced to goo-goo ga-ga baby talk in its news articles?

“Housing illegal aliens who have taken advantage of lax immigration enforcement on the same base where Border Patrol candidates are being trained to enforce our laws is a mixed message,” said Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “It’s a real life lesson – and a demoralizing one – for men and women who have sworn to uphold the law only to be stymied by political pressure from the Obama administration.”

Yes, I suppose having your law-enforcement academy commandeered to serve as a boarding facility for lawbreakers – until such time as they can be granted amnesty and sent on their merry – is rather demoralizing.  Don’t think that’s entirely accidental, either.  The ideological war against American citizenship, which is an aspect of the Left’s endless war against taxpayers, gains ground when it creates the impression that law and order are futile.

Victor Manjarrez, the retired chief of the U.S. Border Patrol sectors of Tucson and El Paso, among the busiest in the country, said he can’t understand how training of border agents can take place in the very facility where Uncle Sam is putting up illegal aliens.

“It seems ironic that the detainees will be held at the same location where Border Patrol Agents are trained,” Manjarrez said. “Operations will be disrupted just in the fact that the focus is not strictly training.”

Shawn Moran, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, said he doesn’t mind the federal government using the facility to handle illegal aliens – as long as they are processed and sent back to where they came from.

“While the choice of the Border Patrol academy may seem ironic, if it means that illegal aliens will be processed, detained, and then deported we would not oppose the choice of that site,” Moran said. “The important detail is to make sure we close the loophole bringing these groups to the US by not releasing them into society.”

Dear Lord, is there anyone who still believes this will all end with military transport planes full of illegal alien children, plus a sprinkling of their mothers, taking off for Honduras and Guatemala?  If something even remotely resembling that repatriation airlift does happen, it will be because Obama was forced into it by pressure from terrified Democrats, who were forced to demand action by their enraged constituents… and they’ll have to yell loud enough to overcome both Obama’s ideology and the interest groups (including Big Business) who would oppose mass deportation with every ounce of their energy.

If anywhere near half of the underage illegal tsunami gets sent home, it would be a miracle.  According to information presented at Rep. Goodlatte’s House Judiciary hearing, ICE hasn’t been able to deport more than 2,000 unaccompanied minors in a single year since 2011.  That’s not even 2 percent of what’s coming at us over the next year.  That won’t do much to “correct” the “misinformation” being distributed by smugglers to lure illegals across the border (as the hot new talking point among Obama apologists puts it.)

Other sites around the country are being designated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Settlement for more permanent lodging. Those plans have drawn the ire of residents who don’t want an influx of unaccompanied alien children sent here in a bid to reunite with their parents and thus given refugee status, dropped in their midst. A plan to turn St. Paul’s College, a shuttered college in Lawrenceville, Va., into temporary emergency shelter for about 500 children was scuttled last week after backlash from local residents and officials.

Cloward-Piven at the Border Patrol Academy, Cloward-Piven at your quaint and shuttered local college, Cloward-Piven at the Department of Homeland Security – which the deputy chief of the Border Patrol warned could be “overwhelmed” if “the flow is not stemmed soon.”  Yes, this is a massive national security threat, on top of the political, economic, and humanitarian damage.

There isn’t much chance of effective action being taken if the American people accept the Administration spin that this is basically a natural disaster outside of their control, caused by human traffickers who didn’t read Obama’s executive orders carefully enough. To understand what a load of bull that is, you need only listen to what the new arrivals are saying.  Many of them are getting their read on the U.S. immigration situation from friends and relatives inside the United States, not opportunistic smugglers.  Here’s the story one of the kids told CBS News in Houston:

On the last day of school Gladys Chinoy memorized her mother’s phone number in New York City and boarded a bus to Guatemala’s northern border.

With nothing but the clothes on her back, the 14-year-old took a truck-tire raft across the Naranjo River into Mexico and joined a group of five women and a dozen children waiting with one of the smugglers who are paid $6,000 to $7,000 for each migrant they take to the U.S.

The women and children waited by the train tracks in this small town in the southern state of Chiapas until the shriek of a train whistle and the glare of headlights pierced the night. Suddenly, dozens of teens and mothers with young children flooded out of darkened homes and budget hotels, rushing to grab the safest places on the roof of the northbound freight train and join a deluge of children and mothers that is overwhelming the U.S. immigration system.

[...] The belief that women and children can safely surrender to authorities the moment they set foot in the U.S. has changed the calculus of tens of thousands of parents who no longer worry about their children finishing the dangerous trip north through Mexico with a potentially deadly multiday hike through the desert Southwest.

“The United States is giving us a great opportunity because now, with this new law, we don’t have to try to cross the desert where so many people die. We can hand ourselves over directly to the authorities,” Gladys said, adding that she hopes to become a doctor.

The smiling teenager with long black hair said she was more excited about seeing her mother again than she was scared about the trip. Her mother said she was aware of the dangers but finally decided the risk was worth it after five years apart.

Reached by phone at home, the mother said she decided to send for her daughter because “if she gets across she can stay here, that’s what you hear.”

“Now they say that all children need to do is hand themselves over to the Border Patrol,” said the mother, who declined to provide her name because she is in the U.S. illegally.

They got the message Barack Obama and the rest of the amnesty caucus sent them, loud and clear.  They’re not making a mistake.  Young Miss Chinoy’s odds of ending up at aWhite House ceremony are higher than her odds of getting shipped back to Guatemala.

Convene a bipartisan panel of expert commentators on American politics, from across the political spectrum.  Make it as big as you like.  Ask the panel if they think a “comprehensive immigration reform” plan including amnesty for at least young illegals, imposed by either Congress or executive fiat, is likely.  Ask them if they think it’s probably going to be a one-time deal that only affects minors brought here before a certain year, never to be repeated.  Ask them if they think any sort of border security “trigger” would be allowed to reverse the process once it begins.  And with those answers in hand, tell me again how the wave of illegal aliens surging across our borders have gotten everything wrong, and made a futile journey based on misinformation.

 http://www.humanevents.com/2014/06/26/obamas-manufactured-border-crisis-250-children-apprehended-per-day/