Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of migrants from all over the world have crowded into Mexico to enter the United States of America.
The Border Patrol was overwhelmed as waves of people speaking dozens of languages crossed the border illegally to surrender so they could ask for asylum.
But this is not the fault of the Border Patrol. The Constitution gave Congress the power to make the necessary immigration laws, but nothing has passed. Sharing the blame is the President of the United States, who has offered few substantive new ideas to send to Congress.
However, the blame is not Joe Biden’s alone. Donald Trump aggravated the situation with his futile efforts to build a “beautiful wall” that Mexico would “pay for.” He never stopped illegal border crossers. The only thing he did was to aggravate the problem by forcing migrants to wait on the Mexican side of the border while he violated federal law by splitting children from their families.
And before Trump, President Barack Obama actually deported more people. He also split families at the border. The only good thing Obama did on immigration was to create the “Dreamer” program that paroled people brought into the U.S. illegally as children. Permits for qualified Dreamers allowed them to work and attend school while they were processed for legal status.
The Dreamer program is supported by a large majority of Americans, including many Republicans. Unfortunately it was not energetically supported by Obama. The House supported the Dreamer bill, but it missed approval in the Senate by five Democratic votes. Senator Harry Reid, a longtime Mexican hater from Nevada, did nothing to bring those five Senators into the “yes” column.
Biden doesn’t seem to have the energy to either complete the Dreamer program, handle the border, or ask the President of Mexico to meet him to organize something to solve the crisis.
On the other side of the political equation is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appears too stupid to discuss the border logically. His efforts on the subject amount to chasing Mexicans out of Florida. They are fleeing from agricultural jobs because of anti-immigrant laws signed by DeSantis.
Young Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswammy is apparently dumber than DeSantis, so nothing intelligent comes from him on the migrant situation. I wonder if he knows that his south Asian ancestors were forbidden from immigrating to America until 1952.
As for Nikki Haley, she might do something good. She is, after all, a lot smarter than Biden, DeSantis and Ramaswammy combined. Moreover, she has more courage — more guts — than all of them combined. Want proof? There’s no longer a Confederate flag over South Carolina’s statehouse.
That leaves Trump and 44 separate criminal charges filed by the United States against him plus 47 criminal state charges in New York and Georgia. He’s too busy fending off prison to be truly concerned about illegal border crossers.
There’s a lot of blame to go around as Americans wait desperately for Washington to craft a long-time solution to the migration crisis.
Raoul Lowery Contreras is a Marine Corps veteran, political consultant, prolific author and host of the Contreras Report on YouTube and Facebook.