WashPost Op-Ed: Girl’s Death Shows Americans Are a Threat to Migrants

Seven-year-old Guatemalan girl dies in US custody: report
AFP
Neil Munro

The death of a migrant girl shows that Americans are a threat to migrants, says Never Trump author Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post.

“It’s a cruel irony that [President Donald] Trump has portrayed refugees as a threat to Americans. In fact, the reverse is true,” Rubin wrote in a column that slammed any barrier or regulatory curbs on the flow of economic migrants into the United States.

Rubin’s column was headlined “Horrifying indifference to children’s lives,” and it cited the death of seven-year Guatemalan girl, Jakelin Caal, who was brought over the New Mexico border by her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cuz. The subheadline on the article declared: The Trump administration certainly is responsible for death of a child in its custody.”

Fewer migrants will die while sneaking across the border if the federal government just provides a better welcome and easier asylum rules, Rubin argues:

With adequate border security and staffing, a sufficient number of immigration judges deployed to handle the caseload, reversal of the administration’s deliberately cruel policies … the current, intolerable situation should improve.

Rubin ignored the alternative policy of discouraging migration by careful enforcement of the nation’s laws against illegal migration and the employment of illegals.

Rubin also did not mention the thousands of illegal migrants who are rescued by the border patrol each year, nor the tens of thousands who are by border agents to file clearly fraudulent cases which are subsequently rejected by judges.

Also, Rubin did not mention the moral responsibility of the child’s father who brought her through the desert in an apparent effort to use the catch-and-release Flores loophole to get past border guards. The loophole was created by Judge Dolly Gee who has ordered border officials to release migrants after 20 days if they bring a child with them.

The AP reported that the father was an economic migrant:

Family members in Guatemala said Caal decided to migrate with his favorite child to earn money he could send back home. Jakelin’s mother and three siblings remained in San Antonio Secortez, a village of about 420 inhabitants.

Economic migrants are not eligible for asylum.

But Rubin posted a litany of complaints by open-borders groups, including the ACLU and America’s Voice, who argue that curbs on illegal migrant force migrants to take more dangerous routines through the scrubland into the United States. Rubin cited the ACLU’s complaints:

In 2017, migrant deaths increased even as the number of border crossings dramatically decreased. When the Trump administration pushes for the militarization of the border, including more border wall construction, they are driving people fleeing violence into the deadliest desert regions.

Rubin exemplifies the open-borders advocates who hide their views underneath a blizzard of nit-picking complaints about minor aspects of the nation’s popular border-control rules. For example, she quoted one activist’s complaints that the temporary holding centers along the border are characterized by “freezing temperatures, no beds, lights left on, no showers, not enough toilets or toilet paper, filthy conditions, horrible smell, inedible food and not enough clean water to drink, and [are] run by insulting and abusive agents.”

But Rubin declined to say if the United States has a right to protect its borders or to deport foreign migrants from the United States. She showed indifference to the huge economic and civic costs to ordinary Americans of cheap-labor migration into the nation’s blue-collar and middle-class workplaces,  neighborhoods, hospitals, welfare centers, and K-12 schools.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News:

The Democrats are using this [death] cynically as a cudgel against the very idea of immigration enforcement. It is shameless. It is really shameless.

The left is objectively in favor of open borders. They deny it if you ask them straight out, but they are opposed to any meaningful measure to enforce the borders. Any time there is a tragedy like this they immediately turn it into an excuse for weakening the borders — and say at the same when you point to an illegal immigrant criminal [as a reason] for tightening the borders, they charge you with acting irresponsibly.

…

The logical conclusion of the Democrats’ outrage over this is that there should be no border enforcement because any rules about border control will also create people who evade them, and it is an evasion of the laws that is the responsible (mechanism] for this tragedy. The only logical conclusion is that we must have open borders.

For example, Democrats are now describing the detention centers used to hold migrant parents together with their children prior to their release or asylum hearings as illegitimate “internment camps.”

This “internment” claim comes after Democrats decried the governments’ release of children to government-run shelters while their parents were detained prior to court hearings.

Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real-estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.

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