Fear Thy Neighbor
“I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come. The United States will continue to enforce our laws and secure our border.” [Vice President Kamala Harris, June, 2021]
The U.S. has spoken. Is anybody listening? We have already seen that prospects for a sane and humane solution to the border controversy aren’t on the agenda of the new administration. Failure seems to be bi-partisan. In one term, Joe Biden deported more immigrants than Trump did in his first term. Kamala Harris, when she was the democratic presidential campaign, doubled down on Republican talking points praising a bill (never passed) to authorize $650 million to continue building Trump’s border wall.
On the campaign trail, Trump, at his most bellicose, announced — “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals [undocumented immigrants] in the history of America.”
After a trip to the grocery store, particularly if you bought eggs, you might be wondering why people would risk their lives to come to the U.S. The mainstream media has the answer — The range of reasons why people move to the US from different parts of the world… Some are seeking economic opportunities. Others are fleeing violence, persecution or climate disasters. [CNN, April 15, 2023]— But who is to blame for all this misery? According to the mainstream media, if it’s not the immigrants themselves, it’s the failure of their leaders (most of them hard liners installed by the US).
No mention of the part the U.S. empire plays in the life-or-death struggles to reach the border. You won’t hear the truth from the former vice-president (or the present one for that matter), not President Trump or the media folk. The U.S. has a sordid history of intervention in and destabilization of Central America starting almost from the moment the empire came into being.
It started in 1823 when James Monroe, the fifth U.S. president and his plutocrat buddies decided they owned the entire American continent. The Monroe Doctrine, which survives to this day, warned former colonizers, the European powers, that there was a new sheriff in town. South America would henceforth be considered the U.S. back yard. No more take-overs by outside forces. The U.S. was bent on endless self-enrichment.
The CIA is the US advance man organizing invasions and coups in Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia and Venezuela to name their most egregious operations. These coups replace democratically elected governments with dictators, usually military strong men. The people are the big losers. Austerity is the new normal, social programs get the axe. Economic inequality is rampant as the rich get richer and poverty increases. Desperation sets in and people take to what they decide are greener pastures. Can you blame them for believing it lies across the border?
Not surprisingly, two of the countries whose governments were targeted by U.S.-supported coup d’etats have the highest rates of people trying to immigrate to the U.S. Decades ago the US toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala and set off a series of civil wars which to this day has led to endless misery in the lives and fortunes of its people. In 2022, 675,000 undocumented Guatemalans crossed the border into the U.S.
Venezuela is another country that has suffered mightily from US efforts to effect regime change. Ten years ago, Barack Obama slapped punishing sanctions on Venezuela aimed at their economy. As per usual, the people were the losers. In 2016, President Trump tried to replace democratically elected President Maduro by naming an “interim president.” He also put a $15 million bounty on Maduro’s head. Biden continued the vicious assault. His Secretary of State announced “[the U.S.] does not recognize Nicholas Maduro as the president of Venezuela.” Biden one-upped Trump by raising the bounty on Maduro to $25 million. As a result, the U.S. must take “credit” for 82% of Venezuelans living in poverty, 53% in extreme poverty. Disease and death are rampant. The U.K. also has blood on its hands. True to its reputation as a U.S, lap dog, the U.K has frozen $1.95 billion of Venezuelan gold reserves in its central bank.
The evil genius of the U.S. is boundless. Even though Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, U.S. sanctions have cut a crater-sized hole in its oil exports which are 95% of its revenues. From being one of the most prosperous countries in South America it has become one of the poorest. In 2022, 270,000 Venezuelans fled their decimated country and entered the US as undocumented immigrants.
Perhaps the saddest story of all is what happened to America’s neighbor, Mexico, with whom it shares a one-thousand-mile border. It’s the Bad Neighbor policy on steroids. This tale of horrors dates back to the nineteenth century when the U.S. stole over half of Mexico and created the states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming. In the early part of the twentieth century, the U.S. Congress passed a series of immigration acts which wreaked further havoc. One was especially cruel forcing the repatriation (expulsion and deportation) of 300,000 to 2 million Mexicans who lived in the U.S. Unbelievably over half were American citizens.
The worst was yet to come. In 1954 one of America’s war criminal presidents, Eisenhower, hauled out Operation Wetback. That’s right a nice touch of racism to add to the shameful proceedings. Operation Wetback used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century and some were American citizens, Operation Wetback sent them back to Mexico.
But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A bi-partisan screwing was next on the U.S. imperial agenda: the War on Drugs and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). The War on Drugs was President’s Nixon’s (R) nifty idea. Nixon declared drugs to be “public enemy number one” giving him the excuse to dump a massive amount of money into militarizing the Mexican border (not the Canadian border) and throwing in a miniscule bit of funding for drug treatment programs. Everyone agrees 50 years later that like all the shooting wars the US has fought and lost, this one too has been an abysmal failure creating sky high rates of violence among emboldened drug cartels, but not stopping or even slowing the drug trade. The War on Drugs was used as a way to steal valuable Latin American farmlands and resource-rich areas, criminalize the indigenous population living there, make way for wealthy American capitalists to move in. Where dirty dealings are afoot, count in the CIA. In 1998, the CIA’s own Inspector General concluded that the CIA was aware of and ignored the drug smuggling operation allowing drug cartels to blanket Los Angeles with crack cocaine setting off the “crack epidemic” of the 1980s.
Count on “I feel your pain” Clinton (D) to inflict more pain on Latin America. As his contribution to the U.S. bad neighbor policy, he created the world’s largest free trade zone between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. It was meant to reward corporate thugs (mostly his campaign donors) whose “generosity” catapulted him into the White House. The Mexican people were collateral damage. Job losses in agriculture and mining soared. Millions of Mexicans were forced off the land and into U.S-run sweatshops in the cities. With no check on their labor practices, unions being excluded, U.S. employers paid starvation level wages.
America being America, its own people didn’t escape the effects of this ruinous policy. “You implement NAFTA, the Mexican trade agreement, where they pay people a dollar an hour, have no health care, no retirement, no pollution controls and you’re going to hear a giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country.” [Ross Perot, libertarian presidential candidate in 1992]. He was right. The U.S. lost upwards of 850,000 jobs from 1993-2013. Jobs losses and the decline of workers’ wages in both countries devastated families and whole communities.
Desperate people make desperate choices. From 1993, the year before NAFTA to 2000, annual immigration from Mexico increased from 370,000 to 770,000. With annual immigration on the rise, the total number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico living in the United States increased from about 2.9 million in 1995 to 4.5 million in 2000. The upward trajectory has continued. By July of 2023 11.7 undocumented (the left-leaning media prefers to call them “unauthorized) immigrants were in the U.S. Four million (37%) come from Mexico.
What does the U.S. do now? President Trump has promised to extend Biden’s recent get-tough policy on immigrants. By January 23, three days after his inauguration 1,000 immigrants had been rounded up and were headed for deportation. His future plans include restoring the “remain in Mexico” policy, end “catch and release, invade” sanctuary cities, including schools and churches, declare a state of emergency allowing federal troops to mass at the border and declare drug runners “terrorists.” In a final irony, Trump has announced that he will cut off all U.S, aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador which after Mexico are the leading countries of origin for undocumented immigrants. How do you think that will work?
How about the U.S. boasting about its generosity to poor nations? In reality the U.S. is very miserly when it comes to doling out money to its neighbors. All the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean (with the exception of Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia who get zero) split $2.5 billion in US foreign aid. Not nearly enough to restore the damage U.S. interference has caused the people of Latin and Central America. Quite the reverse, U.S. foreign aid is directed towards shoring up the rule of military dictators and comes with massive strings attached. Little of it goes to humanitarian assistance. In an ironic twist, U.S. “generosity” often results in conflicts and violence promoting migration rather than stemming it.
It’s a different story when Israel and Ukraine come calling. Between 2022-2024 Ukraine, considered the most corrupt country in Europe, has been gifted with $183 billion in foreign aid. Israel is a perennial beneficiary of taxpayer largesse. In one year from October 2023 to October 2023, the U.S. spent $17.9 becoming Israel’s partner in the war crime of genocide. [Cost of War Project, Brown University] Two countries thousands of miles away that have little or no strategic value to the U.S. are the recipients of $200 billion taxpayer dollars while the U.S. starves the neighbors it has pauperized and creates a major problem for itself.
Will the new President solve the immigration problem with his tough guy, take no prisoners approach? The U.S, has been down this road before. With little success. What do you think are the chances for success this time around?
