Who Is Really To Blame For The Border Surge?

The Answer May Surprise You

The surge of migrants at our southern border is the latest fuel feeding the blame game in the United States.

Republicans blame President Biden. Arguing this wasn’t a problem when Donald Trump was president.

Biden blames Trump. He says his administration is inheriting a mess that began before he took office.

But if we push both of those propositions aside for a moment we may be able to focus on two “animals” that are actually responsible for what’s happening on the border. Coyotes and Russian bears.

Coyotes are people who other people pay to smuggle them across our border. The Russian bear, of course, refers to Moscow.

The coyotes dupe people in Central America into believing our boundary with Mexico is open and the Russians are engaging in a disinformation campaign designed to discredit the United States and to create more confusion about the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

Our government is now fighting back with a marketing campaign of its own. The government has bought 17,000 radio ads telling Central Americans to not start the arduous journey north because the border is not open.

Of course for the thousands who have already made the trip, this message is too late.

“We were tricked,” one mother who traveled from Guatemala to the Mexican border with the United States told NPR.

At least that woman made it safely to the border. According to the International Organization for Migration, desperate refugees are at danger of being trafficked or forced into slave labor. (This is a global problem not limited to those seeking asylum in the United States).

And a U.S. Justice Department report says human traffickers “transport undocumented migrants into the U.S. for work in licit, semi-illicit and illicit industries.“ The report calls this a “growing problem.”

Republicans are correct that President Biden was slow to acknowledge how serious the problem is at our southern border. Now his approval rating is starting to slip.

But now that the election is over it’s time for us to recognize the best way to solve our major issues - whether it’s the pandemic, mass shootings or an overwhelmed border control system - is to put the partisan pointing fingers down and work together to resolve them.

In this case, Democrats and Republicans should stop wasting energy accusing one another. Rather they should come together to try to retard the work of the coyotes and vigorously fight the same Russian propaganda machine that so effectively divided us during the last two presidential elections.