Children Shouldn’t Be Dying at the Border. Here’s How You Can Help
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I believe this is a direct result of the incentives we provide by allowing families to stay, minors to be provided free transport along to waiting relatives (who may be in the country illegally themselves), and ultimately the promise of deferred action and citizenship. But all of this is contingent on having a child with you when you cross, or children crossing alone, which is totally ludicrous.
Over 50,000 unaccompanied minors in the last year have crossed over that we know of. Assuming these children are not being returned back home, they obviously need to be sheltered while their relatives are located and screened. This is an incredibly vulnerable population which has grown exponentially and therefore now greatly exceeds the capacity of the network of non-profits which used to provide temporary shelter and housing.
Parents in the US who leave their kids unattended in the car while they run in for groceries risk having their kids taken and being charged with child endangerment. Parents who cross into the US illegally with their kids get a free pass.
Even aside from the question of “first safe country” - we have a legal system for processing asylum claims, and historically (going back several administrations) the types of people crossing do not qualify because they are mainly economic migrants.
The best way to stop kids dying at the border is to stop encouraging their parents (or coyotes) to take them there.
I'm tired of this emotional manipulation. It's perfectly reasonable for a country to have a border and to defend it against illegal entry. To suggest otherwise is literally to attack the very concept of a nation and to eschew any sense of respect for the existing tax base.
Of course the nation with the greener grass is also free to exercise a rational value of preservation of position, especially if scaling isn’t cheap or easy. In an increasingly disparate world nations may find themselves building more fences.
Sure, but this needs to include a risk calculation - how tall is that fence, and what happens when you don't make it over, versus other options like migrating somewhere else more local, or refocusing your efforts in your own community.
Camps are only a small part of the problem. What do you do next ? The question is how do you handle such big influx of people without collapsing and without treating them like cattle, the answer to that is: you can't and you'll never be able to.
What people don't seem to understand is that a homeless dude in Germany has it better than 80% of the world outside of the US/EU. Is it unfair ? yeah sure, can you solve it though massive migration ? No, you couldn't fit 10% of the third world in the US/EU without making it collapse.
Seeing other comments downvotes it seems like this topic isn't even open for discussion anymore. Why does everyone have to go emotional and compare everything to Nazi Germany ? When you want to "march" on something you first have to understand why it's there and how it came to be. The cold truth is that this topic is extremely complex and all the solutions that are less than XX pages long can be completely ignored on the spot.
This rhetoric has been turned up to 11 recently and it is far more worrisome than any so-called white nationalists are, who at best have ineffective and lame demonstrations that most people ignore.
Having a cultural narrative of guilt for actions of others imposed upon the descendants of people who actually fought them is insane and it will end up with a reaction of its own. There's only so long you can call people horrible names before they lose their power, and you end up with young people like youtuber Soph who are _so over_ caring about being labelled in this fashion. When the words lose their power, and when continual attempts to silence dissent fail, what's next?