The wrong and right ways to address border mess
As senior officials in the Trump administration are quick to point out, the U.S.-Mexico border is dealing with a significant influx of people from the Central American nations of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
This is a major problem, but not one that lends itself to easy solutions. Many of these people fear for their lives back home, or believe that their sons will be abducted into gangs. To them, changes in U.S. policy are something of an abstraction.
Building President Donald Trump’s border wall, months or years from now, won’t help. By and large, the Central Americans aren’t crossing illegally into the United States; they are showing up at heavily populated crossings, which already have barriers, and trying to file for asylum or refugee status.
Cutting off U.S. aid to the three countries, as Trump has vowed to do, is worse than pointless; it’s counterproductive. These governments are largely powerless, having lost control of significant swaths of their territory to criminal gangs and paramilitary units that are terrorizing the population. Without the aid flowing in, the bad guys might capture even more territory and cause an even bigger exodus.
An even dumber idea is Trump’s threat to shut down the U.S.-Mexico border. This would be devastating for the economies of both countries, something the president seemed to recognize Thursday when he said he’ll delay closing the border for a year to give Mexico time to reduce the flow of immigrants and drugs.
Instead of arbitrary, capricious policies designed to draw attention and whip up emotions, the single best thing the United States could do would be to help the Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan governments reestablish control and order over their countries. This is admittedly easier said than done, but it is the surest way to stem the flow.
The second best approach — one that Democrats as well as Republicans should embrace — would be to amend a 2008 anti-trafficking law so that people from the three affected countries fall under the same restrictions that people from Mexico and Canada do.
Now, only people from America’s immediate neighbors can be sent home while their applications for asylum or refugee status are pending. This has had the perverse effect of causing some desperate Central Americans to think there is a green light for them.
Changing this law is presumably something Trump wants, and it might be what he referred to as “loopholes” in a tweet Wednesday demanding congressional action. But the president has never launched any kind of campaign to achieve this, even when he had sympathetic majorities in both chambers of Congress.
This latest influx of immigrants calls for approaches that are sensible and practical — in other words, the opposite of what we are likely to hear when the president visits Calexico, California, today to see recently reconstructed border fencing.