By Paul Nachman
08/17/2016
Summarizing observations from her 6,200-mile cross-country driving tour to see, firsthand, pockets of (refugee-driven) dysfunction, refugee-resettlement maven Ann Corcoran recently wrote:Industries in need of cheap immigrant labor are changing the face of America — not as a grand experiment in promoting the joys of diversity and not to help the downtrodden — but to line the pockets of those running large global corporations (with the help of “charities,” the US State Department and the blessings of lackeys in local government).Ms. Corcoran was writing there about the "pull" factor that brings "refugees" to the U.S. But most of these newcomers aren’t genuine refugees in the first place (which is why I used quotation marks around the word in the preceding sentence). This is a point that I've written about before, and Ann Coulter made it quite memorably on page 248 of her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan To Turn Our Country Into A Third World Hellhole:
One hundred percent of refugee and asylum claims are either obvious frauds or frauds that haven’t been proved yet. The only result of our asylum policies is that we get good liars.(Ms. Coulter often uses overstatement to make a point, but in this case her overstatement is, at most, a few percent.)
Readers at large are catching on, too, judging by some comments left at a typically clueless article at The Atlantic online, Obama’s Last Attempt at Immigration Reform, by assistant editor Priscilla Alvarez on August 8, 2016. Ms. Alvarez displays fundamental ignorance at several points; the one pertinent here is where she cites an apparently equally-clueless professor:
For years, the United States has relied on a deterrence policy, discouraging people in Central America from making the journey to the U.S.-Mexico border, said Rebecca Hamlin, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies law and immigration politics. Still, many migrants continue to make the journey to the southern U.S. border. While the number of undocumented immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border has fluctuated in recent years, concerns linger that another surge, like that of 2014, could happen again. Since October, more than 51,100 people traveling as families and more than 43,000 unaccompanied minors have been caught trying to cross the border, according to the Associated Press.But why don’t these supposedly mortally-imperiled Central Americans stop once they're out of "danger"? That’s the contradiction recognized by at least a couple of readers of Alvarez’s lame article. Wrote commenter Jimbo28:“It’s a realistic recognition that actually deterrence policies don’t work,” Hamlin said. “They might work when someone’s only motivation to migrate is economic, but they really don’t work — and this is consistently found all over the world — when it comes to people who are fleeing what they believe to be potentially a life-or-death situation.” [Links in original.]
“They might work when someone’s only motivation to migrate is economic, but they really don’t work — and this is consistently found all over the world — when it comes to people who are fleeing what they believe to be potentially a life-or-death situation.”Another commenter, N. Flagrante, made the same point and more:If that’s true, why aren’t those people stopping when they reach a safe country? Why are they undertaking the long and dangerous journey to the United States instead of remaining in Mexico, Belize, or Costa Rica?
“They might work when someone’s only motivation to migrate is economic, but they really don’t work — and this is consistently found all over the world — when it comes to people who are fleeing what they believe to be potentially a life-or-death situation.”Consistent readers of VDARE.com should be well-prepared to contribute similarly to immigration-related conversations online, making calmly-stated comments that will help open the eyes of our distracted fellow citizens.The problem with this argument is, they are fleeing "a life-or-death situation" only until they reach their neighboring Central American country, with a shared language and similar culture. After that, when they chose not to stop there and head for the US, they become economic migrants.
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