Patrick L. Smith provides much-needed context on Obama's stunning ignorance and paternalism surrounding this issue:
“Do not send your children to the borders,” President Obama said in a television interview the other Sunday. “If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More important, they may not make it.”
I find this remark not short of disgusting for its several subtexts. Central American parents are so stupid and loveless that they must be instructed to care for their offspring. Their decisions are calculated — suspect, that is. These mothers and fathers are ignorant of the dangers facing their emigrating kids. The best place for them to be is in the environment — to which no reference — they are escaping on orders from the calculating parents.And:
To address the recent surge in undocumented migrant children without reference to the historical phenomenon permits our officials and journalists, and in turn all of us, to put it down to such problems as gang violence. “Gang violence, fueled by the drug trade” is the favored explanation over at NPR.
Mealy-mouthed, this stuff. For me, “gang violence” starts to take on aspects of the term “terrorism,” my least favorite word these days. Nothing more need be examined. It is implicitly “other.” Instantly one lands in the safe, eternal present, where one is clean of it all.The United States' Latin American policy is--and always has been--atrocious. For decades, the US funded civil wars, dictators, and death squads, and never atoned for these horrifying sins. These decisions continue to create environments where dangerous undocumented immigration is a rational choice. Today, from drug policy to NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States, and no one else, bears responsibility for creating this humanitarian disaster.
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