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Shortly earlier than Christmas, an prolonged Venezuelan household of 10 crossed into the US from Mexico with a big contingent of different asylum seekers – a part of a December “migrant surge” that propelled the panties of US politicians and media into a large bunch.
On December 18 alone when US Customs and Border Safety tallied a file of greater than 12,600 “migrant encounters” on the southern border, Fox Information wailed, “1000’s flood into Texas.”
I had made the acquaintance of the Venezuelan household in early November in the city of Tapachula in southern Mexico close to the border with Guatemala and had met up with them once more later within the month on the Mexican isthmus of Tehuantepec as they continued trudging north to “surge” into the US.
After spending practically every week navigating “La Bestia” – Mexico’s notorious “train of death” – they tried to enter the Texas border metropolis of Eagle Cross from the Mexican metropolis of Piedras Negras however have been halted by US authorities. In response to the household, a standoff ensued that lasted a number of days and solely ended when folks within the group started fainting from lack of meals and water.
My mates have been then taken into custody and separated. One of many girls and some of the kids have been despatched to McAllen, practically 500km (300 miles) away, for “processing”. Ultimately, all members of the family ended up on buses sure for Chicago – one of many US cities right-wing Texas Governor Greg Abbott has decided ought to pay for President Joe Biden’s “refusal to safe the border”.
The household is now residing at a shelter within the metropolis – one in all many establishments that has needed to scramble to satisfy the wants of passengers arriving on the “Abbott specific”, if you’ll.
A January 5 press release from the governor’s workplace praised Texas’s “historic response to Biden’s border disaster”, which since August 2022 had included busing greater than 29,400 “migrants” to Chicago, greater than 35,600 to New York Metropolis and greater than 12,500 to Washington, DC, all cities ruled by Democrats. Some asylum seekers have additionally been flown by private plane.
After all, Abbott’s xenophobic orientation is extremely marketable in a state that prides itself on being on the vanguard of reactionary extremism. However whereas there may be clearly a “border disaster” beneath approach – as underscored by the unprecedented numbers of people deeming it essential to threat their lives to journey to the US – its dimensions don’t precisely align with Abbottian fantasy.
For starters, the Biden administration is hardly presiding over an immigration free-for-all. As The Washington Submit reported on December 29, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported greater than 142,000 immigrants within the 2023 fiscal yr, which was practically twice as many deportations as have been carried out the earlier yr.
Biden has additionally made frequent use of his predecessor Donald Trump’s beloved coverage of dumping non-Mexican asylum seekers back into Mexico and has resumed direct deportation flights from the US to Venezuela. These flights are anticipated to extend considerably in 2024, which implies that many extra Venezuelans will get to re-encounter the hardships of existence in a rustic beneath debilitating – and even lethal – US sanctions.
To make sure, what’s persistently excised from the discourse on immigration and asylum is that the US’s personal relentless and flagrant violations of different nations’ sovereignty performs a fundamental role in driving folks from their properties within the first place – and sometimes within the path of the US itself.
In the meantime, the concept that Biden is by some means dismantling the US border is definitely debunked by actuality: a actuality through which his administration waived a slew of federal legal guidelines and laws with a purpose to expand Trump’s wall, in contravention of Biden’s personal guarantees.
As journalist Melissa del Bosque writes in a recent dispatch for The Border Chronicle on the “profitable enterprise of ‘border chaos’”, the previous twenty years have seen the US border wall financial system “metastasise … right into a multibillion-dollar trade supported by each political events, an trade that enriches non-public contractors, navy distributors, tech billionaires, and politicians”.
In different phrases, the actual disaster shouldn’t be that there’s not sufficient border management. It’s that there’s an excessive amount of. And the frenetic militarisation of that border is what makes attending to it and thru it such a dangerous and expensive endeavor for these the US-led capitalist system has condemned to “unlawful” migration.
Within the meantime, a report from the US Chamber of Commerce reveals that “if each unemployed particular person within the nation discovered a job, we might nonetheless have over 2 million open jobs”. But the fearmongering rhetoric about “the migrant flood” surges on.
Late final yr, it occurred to Biden to bribe Republicans with guarantees of billions of {dollars} in border crackdown cash in change for his or her help for much more billions of {dollars} in assist to Ukraine and Israel. This, after all, was after the Israeli navy had commenced its newest assault on the Gaza Strip on October 7, which has now killed greater than 24,000 Palestinians.
Anyway, genocide isn’t low cost.
Provided that the US has such huge sources at its disposal, it might be good if the nation would assist folks fairly than kill them. The truth that Biden is being vilified as a softie on immigration simply renders the entire association all of the extra nauseating, shifting because it does the narrative even additional to the fanatical proper.
About the identical time that I rendezvoused with the Venezuelan household on the isthmus of Tehuantepec in November, I met a younger asylum seeker from Mauritania who was additionally traversing Mexico with a lot of his compatriots within the hopes of reaching the US border.
Having since made it to New York, he messaged me over the vacations in misery after spending an excessive amount of time perusing xenophobic vitriol on X. In control of very good English in addition to English slang – and intermittently addressing me as “bro” – he professed to be “shocked” on the on-line hatred emitted towards people who, like him, have been merely in search of a greater life.
As People proceed to internalise the US border whereas the US continues to violate everybody else’s, there’s a disaster afoot certainly.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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