A border scare
For all his protesting, President Trump may be the last person who wants a migrant caravan to turn away from the U.S. border. He’s heaping invective on the group, adding the unsupportable claim that the ragtag group harbors “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.”
With the days ticking down to national elections, Trump isn’t about to let the red hot poker of immigration drop unused. The asylum-seeking Central Americans are the ideal campaign issue: poor, disorganized and unable to fight back. As he has from the start of his presidential campaign, he doesn’t want a solution on border policy, only more fear-grabbing attention about a threatening wave of immigration.
The caravan, now numbering 5,000, is playing into his hands. It’s hardly a menacing band: families with small children, blistered feet, bedrolls and belongings in backpacks. Desperate to leave places where drug gangs and poverty rule, they aren’t aware of the November election calendar that the president is clutching.
Trump is construing the group, still hundreds of miles from the border, as a “National Emerg(enc)y” and concluding he may call out the military. He’s serving notice of a foreign aid cut to Central American countries he judges at fault for the migrant group.
It’s all punishment and no prevention. Add it to the list of Trump ideas that produce ridicule and cruelty but not solutions: his border wall which remains unfunded and a family separation policy that was withdrawn after thousands of children were pulled away from their parents during asylum hearings. Now the ill-timed caravan offers an event he can pump into a phony threat.
His cuts in foreign aid may only drive up immigration as asylum seekers believe they have nothing to lose by traveling north. Cutting off aid will only deepen poverty, instability and crime, the causes that lead locals to pull up roots and make the journey north.
Trump doesn’t believe any of this is true. He sees an oncoming wave, one that can’t be moderated but can be diverted to political advantage at an opportune time. That’s the definition of cynical politics. It’s also a description of failure.