Columnist fails to see the root cause of issues surrounding immigration

To the Editor:

Jerry Shenk (“Seeking clarity on issues surrounding illegal immigration,” June 24) has run out of names to call his opponents, so he has invented a word (oikophobes) to argue that liberals are arguing against their own best interests. He sounds rather as if he wants to accuse his critics of liking the wrong brand of yogurt. Yet he fails to make a case that people who argue for the humane treatment and welcoming of immigrants actually are arguing against their own best interests. Instead his argument appears to be that he calls his enemies more interesting names than his enemies have been able to muster against Trump and his policies.

Shenk fails to take into account that the United States has consistently undermined the governments and economies of Central and South America — almost from the time of our nation’s founding. Certainly, from the time of the Nixon regime, where we had intervened to favor military coups in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, Brazil; and Reagan, who famously financed a private army of Contras with Iranian oil money while destabilizing neighboring Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. These were not orderly redistributions of power to upright moral military bastions of honesty but who fought their own people by dropping them from airplanes and helicopters over oceans and wilderness areas, after kidnapping them on the streets, and set up crony-capitalist kleptocacies. Yet Shenk and Trump blame the formation of gangs from this region as founded on Democratic leadership. It was Republicans who encouraged this corruption and yet were “shocked, shocked” when generals were found to be gambling with the future of their countries.

To make matters worse, NAFTA and CAFTA undermined and destroyed local agriculture in Central and South America, by demanding that countervailing tariffs could not be raised against subsidized American crops. Without being able to sell their own food crops, migrants came north to find jobs. Other farmers began to grow drug crops. We, in effect, have been exporting our fiscal deficit to feed a migration problem and a drug problem — which benefits mainly Red State agricultural economy and which we have allowed to be used as a whipping boy against public services and education. Jerry Shenk’s lack of perspective perpetuates these Republican myths on the origins of our immigration problems.