On-topic: It's poverty that pushes all those hordes to the US border
Obama Asks for $3.7 Billion to Aid Border...
Behind the thousands of brown people flocking to the southern US border there are thousands of stories - many of them about people living on a couple of dollars per week in countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. People with no prospects of a future, people barely making ends meet, and dreaming the American dream. Some rely on growing corn and coffee, many are permanently jobless, and the younger among them have left north a long time ago. There is no future for their children. So they venture into the drastic step of taking all the risks that come with a trip to the US border.
...Only to be yelled and spat at by angry locals, in turn heirs to immigrants to the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, who had arrived there decades and maybe centuries ago. If those immigrants of old ever saw how their successors are "welcoming" the new newcomers, they would probably turn in their graves, throw their hands in the air, yell "bah humbug" and sail back home.
A recent piece at The Daily Show concluded that America is a place where older immigrants can hate on newer immigrants. Jon Stewart also compared the Statue of Liberty to a bouncer. Food for thought indeed.
Obama has been yelled at, as well. He has grown accustomed to it. Now that he has requested additional funds for urgently handling the influx of immigrants, he is also planning to tighten control on the southern border, and accelerate the deportation procedure. The purpose is to somehow convince these newcomers to stay in their home country and not take the risky trip. As if threats of deportation could tackle desperation.
Many are blaming Obama for having sent a signal to these foreigners that they cannot be turned back, once they have used the "loophole" of sending their kids alone first, and then following in their footsteps. The immigration reform does need a comprehensive overhaul, granted. And urgently. What it does not need is preserving the status quo, because the situation obviously cannot get better before it has become worse. Of course, given the almost complete ineffectiveness of the current Congress, most people are right when they are feeling utter scepticism about this.
Nearly 52 thousand unaccompanied kids from Central America have been held at the US border with Mexico. That is double the number of last year. It's reasonable to assess that many more have already managed to pass through, without being caught. The so called "coyotes" are themselves spreading rumours that the attitude to pregnant women and children is much better in the US, which would allow them to stay, although Obama's administration insists they'll have to be turned back. The rumours are that the US is helping children and their parents enter illegally. There are entire villages in Central America that have caught the bait and have been virtually depopulated, the bulk of their inhabitants already either crowding the border or already spreading through the south-west states. Entire neighbourhoods are emptied in those villages, many of them consisting of large family houses that had been built by former guest-workers who had spent some time in the US, and then got back home to spend the money they had earned with heavy labour in their home country.
Many of them have worked on the crop fields, doing jobs almost no US citizen would ever think of doing these days, for salaries about 7.5 dollars a day. It is just seasonal work, like picking up the corn or coffee crops. Outside the season, that job just isn't available. But compare that to the fact that almost 1/5 of Honduras lives under 1.25 dollars a day. And it's not just poverty that urges those people to seek the risky road: health-care is in a disastrous condition in their countries; armed youth gangs control entire sections of the larger towns, and they have among the worst criminal homicide rates in the world.
This is a classic example of a region being kept in complete and utter misery, and this problem coming right at the developed world, hitting it on the back of the head like a very nasty boomerang. The response of many at the developed side of this story is also quite endemic, showing the short-sightedness of First-World societies, who fail to see how trying to tackle the symptoms of the problem would ultimately turn out to be far costlier and more painful than actually trying to deal with the root cause of the problem.
The recent changes in US immigration policies have additionally fueled all this confusion, and contributed to the problem. Back in 2011 the US immigration authority gave its employees a blank check at weighing a number of factors when deciding who gets detained and deported for illegally crossing the border, especially in the case of minors, essentially relaxing the requirements. Then in 2012 the government announced that young illegal immigrants who have been in the US since 2007 and have fulfilled the requirements, including to stay away from criminal activity, could apply for a two-year permit to stay in the country. All of that, coupled with the fact that only a few children ever get deported, is encouraging many people in Central America to genuinely believe that the US is somehow loosening its immigration policies.
That, of course, does not remove the risks that come with the dangerous trip north: murder, theft, sexual abuse, slavery-level exploitation, etc. While fewer and fewer Mexicans arrive illegally in the US lately, the number of people from Central America is growing exponentially. The southern border is 3200 km long, which makes it extremely hard to guard, even if it gets completely lined up with a wall. And, while for years the illegal immigrants have been crossing through remote places, many youngsters are openly giving themselves up to the border authorities, because they know in most cases they would be sent to live with their relatives anyway - at least for the duration of their hearing. For example, the most popular crossing point is the valley of Rio Grande, where more than 30 thousand unaccompanied children have been detained between last October and this June.