Putting troops on the U.S.Mexico border is another Trump impulse that ill serves the purpose.
Sadly, the president we have is not interested in fixing the immigration problem.
So where’s ol’ Black Jack when we need him?
In 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson sent Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing into Mexico at the head of a punitive force of 12,000 soldiers, he at least had a plausible, albeit debatable, rationale for his mission. Mexican revolutionary Francisco “Pancho” Villa and his Villistas had transgressed the border at Columbus, N.M., burning the little town and killing 18 Americans. Pershing went after him, but after nine months of chasing Villa through the rough, rocky terrain of northern Mexico, the frustrated general cabled the president: “Villa is everywhere, but Villa is nowhere.”
President Donald Trump may or may not know about Pershing’s futile expedition, but ignorance is irrelevant with this president. His decision to dispatch the military to the U.S.-Mexico border — yet another impulsive action by the most ill-informed, ill-equipped chief executive in American history — will be just as futile as Pershing’s mission, in large part because it’s a trumped-up rationale. It was inspired by a report the cable TV-obsessed president saw on “Fox & Friends” about a “caravan” of illegals making its way toward the U.S. border. Shortly after ordering the military to the border, the president reinforced his warning about illegals on the move by reverting to his “Mexican rapists” meme. Women are “being raped at levels that nobody has ever seen before,” he told a rapt West Virginia audience on Wednesday night.
The facts about border security and undocumented immigration? Oh yeah, the facts: Illegal border crossings are at their lowest level since 1971. Most members of the group headed north are women and children fleeing violence and poverty in Honduras and El Salvador. The group likely will disperse before it reaches the U.S. border, thanks in part to efforts by Mexican immigration officials to assist them. Oh, and they’re not headed to the United States to get in on DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) as Trump claimed; only young people who got here before 2007 are eligible.
The facts, of course, are superfluous to the man in the White House. What’s important is that mid-term elections are looming, he hasn’t built his “big, beautiful wall” and he needs a scapegoat to divert the attention of his potentially restive, true-believing base. Time to send in the troops.
The presidential pronouncement is a textbook example of how decisions are made in this White House: Fox News sets the agenda, a Pavlovian president with demagogic tendencies responds with lies and ridiculous hyperbole and Cabinet secretaries with earnest mien and grave remarks scramble to implement ill-conceived policy. The new normal in this fractured nation would be laughable if it wasn’t such a perversion of good and thoughtful governance.
“Until we can have a wall and proper security, we are going to be guarding our border with our military,” Trump said, adding, “that’s a big step, we really haven’t done that before, or certainly not very much before.”
Of course, that’s not true either. In 2006, President George W. Bush responded to requests from border governors by deploying 6,000 troops to help with support activities. Four years later, President Barack Obama sent 1,200 National Guard troops to the border to support operations against drug and human traffickers. Gov. Greg Abbott and his predecessor, Rick Perry, also dispatched National Guard troops to the border, where they almost died. Of boredom.
Imagine a president who prides himself on his salesmanship, who seems to be becoming more aware of the power of the White House bully pulpit; imagine that president making a sincere effort to repair this nation’s broken system of immigration. He would be pushing Congress to resolve the plight of the Dreamers, streamline our visa bureaucracy, reform our immigration courts, implement a functioning guest-worker program, find a path to legalization for the 11 million undocumented who are living among us as good neighbors and, yes, fortify the border in a sensible way.
Sadly, the president we have is not interested in fixing the immigration problem. He prefers to demagogue the issue, concoct make-believe crises and skewer scapegoats.
An old Army buddy of Pershing’s once observed: “Stupidness and vagueness irritated him more than anything else.” That faint rumble coming from Arlington National Cemetery these days may not be traffic on a nearby parkway. Given the times we live in, it could be an old soldier rolling in his grave.