The child “immigration crisis”
July 14, 2014 3 Comments
It doesn’t take too much reading to learn that the child immigration crisis is a refugee crisis as much as anything. So many of those kids are fleeing incredibly dangerous countries right now. Of course, that doesn’t stop Krauthammer from claiming this is all simple. Jonathan Cohn responds and provides context:
Hey, everybody. You can stop struggling with the moral and practical complexities of the border crisis. Charles Krauthammer has it all figured out.
On Friday, Krauthammer’s Washington Postcolumn carried the headline “The Immigration No-Brainer.” Sometimes headlines are too simplistic. This one wasn’t. “Stopping this wave is not complicated,” Krauthammer wrote, referring to the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors arriving from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. All it would take, Krauthammer said, was changing the 2008 law that forbids U.S. officials from returning these kids immediately, as they do routinely for kids that show up from Mexico. “A serious president would go to Congress tomorrow proposing a change in the law,” Krauthammer wrote. “When the first convoys begin rolling town to town across Central America, the influx will stop.” …
There’s another part of the story—one that Krauthammer and a lot of his conservative buddies barely acknowledge.
The conditions in those three countries really are brutal, in ways that are nearly unique. Gang violence and the miseries we associate with failed states have made El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras three of the deadliest countries in the world. As my colleague Danny Vinik has pointed out, the homicide rate in San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, dwarfs the rate of even the most violent American cities…
These conditions don’t simply tug at the heartstrings. In many cases, they trigger provisions of U.S. law that grant asylum or special immigration status to juveniles—provisions that have been in existence for a long time, because they are consistent with American values of compassion and promotion of human rights…
Addressing the border crisis won’t be easy. We don’t want to turn away kids fleeing dreadful conditions, particularly after such a harrowing journey. But we can’t possibly let in all would-be immigrants fleeing poverty or violence. And we don’t want to encourage more parents to send their kids in the first place. Finding the right balance among these imperatives requires, first and foremost, acknowledging the complexity of the situation. That’s why Krauthammer, and those making similar calls, are doing us such a disservice.
What– you mean it’s complicated? No simple magic bullets to solve the problem? Damn liberals– can’t they just see that the world is nicely simple, black and white?
Recent Comments