THE BOSTICK REPORT-Recent news coverage of undocumented border crossings over the Texas border has focused heavily on the idea that President Obama’s “unclear” deportation enforcement policies are to blame for tens of thousands of women and children found crossing the treacherous desert path to America. But, it’s a misinterpretation to categorize the overall number of border crossings as a surge and it’s fallacy to say that these developments are recent.
The underlying issues driving this exodus of women and children are a complex confluence of our drug policies, the rise of imprisonment as a US industry, an immigration system that has been chaotically enforced and driven by the politics of American business interests, and the resonating inadequacies incited by these factors in small Central American countries. These issues have been festering somewhat independent of each other for over 30 years and it is a mistake to politicize the current crisis we face in Texas as a partisan battle or the fault of one president.
The question shouldn’t be; how do we stop these women and children from coming into the United States? It should be; how have our domestic and international decisions conspired to exacerbate this humanitarian crisis?
We know that California’s historic passage of our 1994 three strikes law was a mistake. Understandably, voters felt threatened and the sense of danger created by the 1980s crack epidemic and subsequent recession was a strong motivator for harsher sentencing, among many reasons. Fear frequently, and sadly, drives public policy.
Unfortunately, laws like three strikes coincided with the development of the prison industry and the growing trend towards a for-profit system of incarceration driven by the interstate commerce of inmates. As laws like three strikes came into play, corporations met the demand for prison space in places like rural Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska where jobs were scarce and the opportunity represented by this new market was embraced.
Compounding this development was inequitable sentencing of relatively similar drug offenses (think crack versus cocaine), a judicial system largely driven by your ability to hire a lawyer versus depending on a public defender, decreases in job training programs in our public schools, and a general abandonment by our governments to fund rehabilitation and long-term assistance for the mentally ill and impoverished.
Internationally, there is a long history, fairly well documented, of our failed policies in Latin America. Arguing over CIA conspiracy theories, to me, is not really worth our time. But, it would be productive to acknowledge that we have failed in our promises to assist Latin American countries with economic development and our tendency to support bad governments in exchange for the preservation of our own interests has created an instability in the region that has been the breeding ground for a humanitarian crisis.
The fallout from our strong black market for illicit drugs and corresponding efforts to imprison the problem away have wrecked horrible societal devastation in places like Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
The mechanisms connecting instability in Latin America with crime in the US are rooted in a lack of legal economic opportunity there that fuels farmers’ efforts to cultivate drugs like marijuana and cocaine for the narcos and drug cartels who enlist mules to bring them to large distribution systems here in the US that are controlled by groups such as Mara Salvatrucha, or MS 13.
Clearly, organizations like MS 13 have festered within our prison system and spread internationally because of our inability to follow through on promises in Latin America and our overly punitive prison sentencing here at home. And both the political left and right that are to blame because they react to voters reactions instead of steering us toward sustainable, social and economic growth-oriented policies for the region, not just the US. They have also fallen into the cycle of crisis management and protectionism instead of investing in long-term visions of growth.
The ramifications of the development of these lawless markets, however, have caused the degeneration in the ability of countries like El Salvador, home of MS 13, to provide lawful economic opportunity to its citizens. Much like in Afghanistan, groups like MS control these populations through intimidation, fear, and the destruction of a formal school system. Without education or formal market security, citizens are driven into the arms of the criminal networks or they flee, to the US.
Things have gotten bad, but to categorize this recent uptick in border crossings of women and children as a surge in border crossings is a mischaracterization. The year 2011 was actually a watershed year in the number of non-documented immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol, but it was a watershed LOW number – the lowest in 40 years despite a massive increase in border patrol agents following the 9/11 attacks.
The issue today isn’t the volume of border crossings. It is the number of women and children crossing, a number that has exploded from 24,000 in fiscal year 2013 to 52,000 so far in fiscal year 2014. And it is indicative of yet another international crisis abroad that must be approached from the perspective of long-term societal problems, not from the position of an isolationist government that thinks it can simply close the borders and wish away a problem or from politics designed to drive a reelection campaign.
President Obama isn’t to blame because record numbers of women and children are choosing to flee their home countries on the rumors of our national compassion. He should be held to blame for his inability to lead on this issue. He could be held accountable for his choice to respond to this crisis with the short term solution of sending what are essentially refugees back to the danger zone of their home country.
We can blame President Obama for choosing to adhere to a political calculation that he must appear “tough on immigration” because he sees that calculation as a necessity to pass some imaginary immigration reform bill that is less likely with each step he takes towards this kind of false salve for an immigration crisis that has consistently suffered from similar political calculations.
This isn’t just about immigration reform. This humanitarian crisis is illustrative of a desperate need to reform our drug policies, to reform our incarceration techniques, to begin fostering a stable, fair Latin America, and to our general need to stand up as the country of hope that these women and children are looking for.
(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 53
Pub: Jul 1, 2014
