Why is the so-called "border crisis" such a matter of "hysteria" for some people In a country where rule-breaking and lawlessness is an accepted part of everyday life?

 

This country is all about the “rule of law,” huh? Every time I get on the bus I pay my fare like any law-abiding citizen, in accordance with the threat of “fines or imprisonment” as stated on a placard for non-fare payers. So I watch maybe two-thirds of the people who get on the bus just walk past the driver without paying fare. Most drivers ignore them, while some insist that the non-fare payer at least be nice enough to inform the driver that they don’t have money, and give him a chance to  “forgive” the non-payment.

Today the driver was trying to calm down some mental case when he notice the woman sitting behind him, and told her she didn't pay her fare either; she showed him a transfer, and he apologized to her. I noted that at least he correctly remembered that she in fact didn’t pay fare—but I had to remind him that he gave her the transfer so she wouldn’t have any “trouble” with the next driver--thus a "reward" for breaking the "law."

Of course that is the “black and white” world we live in. The mental case was a white male who claimed he couldn’t pay fare because he was “homeless”—probably because of his “condition”—and the woman was black. Later when I was picking up some packages, there was trouble in the store with a black male apparently with mental issues who just came in and started gibberishing and refused to leave. He was eventually escorted out by a roving security guard, a white male, who I heard tell the man that the employees in the store were “stupid.”

I went back inside the store and told them what the security guard had called them; another customer retorted that the security guard was being “smart.” Is that right? He was snooping on the Mexican-looking guy who might be a “car-prowler” and followed him into the store, and didn’t leave until he left. The security guard wouldn't have even known there was a real problem in the store until he went snooping on me who was actually in the store for a legitimate reason, as I have been for the past 20 or so years.

We can probably multiply those little incidences of rule-breaking and lawlessness millions of times or more a day (and for some people, multiple times a day) and it is forget and move on, knowing that it is a fact of life in this country—some people think they are “entitled” to ignore the "rules" because of whatever "society" has "done" to them.

So in this country we are a bit hypocritical, with an ex-president calling for the suspension of the Constitution being more evidence that he is delusional and believes that he can run the country like he does his “business”—like a dictator with no limits to his power.

But there are worse things we need to be concerned about, like the “crisis” down at the border, largely the creation of misguided  nativist American immigration policy and idiotic temporary work visa restrictions.  So I was sitting in the laundromat on Friday watching a cable news program when a segment on the “border crisis” was breathlessly discussed, with the hysterical (both in terms of hilarity and paranoia) claim that border crossings had risen 256 percent since last year, which is obviously meant to excite hysteria.

First off, 256 percent sounds a lot more fearsome than, say, 2.5 times, even though they mean the same thing. It also doesn’t mean that twice as many migrant are crossing the border as last year; it is just a number taken out of thin air by anti-immigrant groups with their own agenda. The media follows suit by deliberately using terms that make the story more "newsworthy." 

But the U.S. is hardly “bursting at seams” with illegal immigrants, in fact the only people who take notice of anyone who looks like they could be “illegal” are nativist fanatics with "aliens" on the brain, like Stephen Miller. In fact the numbers even at their “worst” have to be taken in context; this graphic shows that the supposed number of illegal immigrants in the country went down measurably during the Obama administration…

 

…and presumably further decreased during the Trump administration, with the principle increase in illegal immigration at all being people from outside of Latin America (principally Asia) overstaying their work visas. The fact that illegal immigration increased at all since 1990 is due to the 1986 immigration law that dramatically curtailed the usual cross-border traffic by making it more difficult to apply for legal temporary work visas.

The “remain in Mexico” and Title 42 policies during the Trump administration kept the numbers of those attempting to cross the border lower than usual, so that scary “256 percent” number says little of significance relative to past experience. In fact, I have searched high and low for the source of that “percentage,” and the closest I came to it was a story last week about the current state of asylum decisions from the website Trac Immigration, which have more than doubled from 2021 to 2022. According to the website

Total decisions more than doubled from 24,810 in FY 2021, to 51,607 during FY 2022. And the number of individuals granted asylum by Immigration Judges increased from 8,945 to 23,686. This was the largest number of individuals granted asylum in any year in the Immigration Court's history.

That certainly must really be “exciting” to anti-immigrant nativists, who we may suspect are “reinterpreting” what those numbers signify and passing them on to media outlets not doing their homework. But this graphic shows a greatly disturbing “trend”: asylum seekers from Europe, Asia and Africa have asylum approval rates of 80 percent or higher, while those from Latin America have an average of 25 percent approval…

 

…which generally would indicate that people who insist on crossing over don't have many legal options. Is China more “oppressive” than, say, any Central American country where the U.S. has deported its home-grown violent gangs to where previously the only violent “gangs” were U.S.-backed right-wing murder regimes?

Immigration "reform" is of course something to avoid. Some far-right website called City Journal claimed that is the “wrong time” for amnesty. I wrote this comment…

It's always the "wrong time" for "amnesty" for nativists. After millions of Europeans entered the country illegally after the 1924 immigration law, the U.S. passed an "amnesty" law for them that lasted almost 20 years. The only "amnesty" law since then was the 1986 law, after the Reagan administration exacerbated the cross-border situation by making temporary work visas much more difficult to get.

…which was almost immediately deleted by the “moderator.” I sent another comment wondering if the these people were afraid of the truth, and that was immediately deleted as well.

Oh, it’s horrible. Illegal immigrants, we are told by researchers who have actually studied the "problem," contribute to economic growth, pay more in taxes (including Social Security) than they receive from public services, and reduce businesses' motivation to offshore jobs, manufacturing inexpensive products and services right here instead of importing them. And let’s not forget about food production either. Oh, the horror!