Caravan to Nowhere
Activists are exploiting migrants
THE activists behind the latest migrant caravan dream of dissolving national frontiers. But all they’re doing is hardening existing borders — and the hearts and minds of Americans fed up with such stunts and the worldview that inspires them.
The sight of more than 7,000 mostly Hondurans and Guatemalans trekking across southern Mexico, en route to the US, is sure to rouse the GOP base, which is why most Democrats are keeping mum two weeks from the midterms. The images also lend credence to heartland anxieties about organized, systematic efforts to pierce US sovereignty and flood the southern border with newcomers.
And make no mistake: This is an organized effort. A Mexico-based outfit called Pueblos Sin Fronteras (“People Without Borders”) has been arranging route logistics and publicizing the exodus, though you’d be hard-pressed to find references to the group in most mainstream coverage of the caravanistas. Liberal reporters and editors, I suspect, think a spontaneous caravan makes for a more heart-tugging story.
But much as Pueblos would like to disclaim responsibility, this many people don’t decide willynilly to travel 2,500 miles on foot, no matter how desperate they might be. Mass movement on this scale is a tremendous feat of coordination, and Pueblos has been perfecting the art for several years, long before Donald Trump’s election to the White House.
Pueblos talks a lot about “solidarity” and resisting the “militarization” of borders — rhetoric that’s catnip to the global left. But in practice, they are as irresponsible and unscrupulous as the human-smuggling rings that facilitated the movement of more than a million people from the Middle East and Africa to Europe just three years ago.
The smugglers stuffed dozens of migrants from places like Libya, Syria, Iraq and Iran into unseaworthy dinghies and dispatched them across the choppy waters of the Mediterranean. Most made it to the other side, but many sank to a watery grave. Still others paid thousands of euros but never made it out of camps on Turkey’s western shore and the Greek isles.
It was money that motivated the smugglers; for Pueblos, it’s the utopian ideology of a borderless world. In both cases, exploited migrants bore all the risks.
And what do the caravan activists expect will happen? Do they think amassing thousands at the border, Gaza-style, will force the US to throw the gates open? Americans rightly expect an orderly system for considering claims for asy- lum. Even at the turn of the previous century, when Ellis Island received upwards of 1.25 million newcomers annually, there was a process in place.
If Pueblos is permitted to succeed, it will only incentivize more attempts to throw bodies at the border. That, in turn, will endanger more innocents. Which is why the Trump administration is exactly right to take a hard line.
Again, the European experience of a few years ago has lessons for the US. There, German Chancellor Angela Merkel short-circuited the European Union’s so-called Dublin rule that requires asylum seekers to press their claim in the first EU country where they land. Instead, she telegraphed that she would accept as many Syrians as could make it into Germany.
The result was utter chaos. At the height of the refugee crisis, several thousand newcomers poured into Europe daily and made their way from Greece through the small and fragile Balkan States to finally reach Germany and Sweden, the two countries with the most sympathetic governments (and the most generous welfare provisions).
Soon it was impossible to tell who was a real refugee and who an economic migrant trying to pass himself off as a victim of Bashar alAssad and Islamic State. Many of them were real victims, but there were also Islamists, petty criminals and young men looking for a life on the dole.
At various points, different European governments would open and close their borders, sending confused signals to the migrants and creating more disorder. Filthy camps became a fixture of many a charming Old World town square. All along, the smugglers made a killing.
Many of the factors in Latin America are different, to be sure. But it’s easy to envision some of the same problems reproducing themselves here. In this case, the best way to help the Hondurans and Guatemalans is to offer assistance on-site in Honduras and Guatemala. In a broken world like ours, the most humane solutions aren’t always the ones that the NPR-tote crowd prefers.
As for the politics, chalk this up as more proof that Trump, whatever his flaws, has the right instincts on one of the defining questions of our age. If mainstream Democrats don’t like that, they should encourage their activist fringes to cut it out and tell the caravanistas to stay put.