What Would You Do?
I write this not to advocate for people immigrating to the United States or to campaign against them. This is a story about a desperate journey that tens of thousands are making, in spite of the cost or consequences. Because they feel they must. It is not about one person or group. I am using the stories of Venezuelans as an example because so many have fled their country and are coming to ours. In 2023, more than 260,000 Venezuelan migrants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Venezuela’s migrants represent the largest displacement crisis in the world.
The country’s precarious economy is heavily dependent on oil prices, which tend to be unstable. That coupled with Venezuela’s corrupt government has begotten an economic disaster compelling millions of its citizens to leave. The situation is so bad that some families are selling everything they own to raise enough money to get out.
It is not as if they’re fleeing without knowing the risks. The migrants have heard the horror stories of those who have traveled north: the robberies and assaults, the sexual violence against women, the walking, the endless walking. Think for a moment about how horrific life must be to consider abandoning everything and everyone you know and fleeing to another country, thousands of miles away, on foot. But also think about having no way to provide for your family in a country where a brutal authoritarian regime is routinely persecuting its citizens.
It is a 3,700-mile walk from Venezuela to the U.S.-Mexico border. The most dangerous section is the Darien Gap, a dense jungle straddling Colombia and Panama. The area is one of the rainiest places on Earth, where flash floods have carried people away in their sleep. Through this treacherous, muddy, and roadless expanse, the migrants must walk or be carried for some 60 miles with no place to buy food, treat wounds, or seek help.
If they survive the jungle — and, according to the Red Cross, many don’t — they still have 2,700 miles of walking, hitchhiking, or bus rides to go before reaching the border. The journey can take more than three months.
So imagine that after somehow enduring this three-month, 3,700-mile ordeal, they finally reach the U.S. border, where they encounter razor wire both in the water of the Rio Grande and spooled along the shoreline, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott. It stands to reason that anyone with the drive to survive that harrowing journey would not be persuaded to turn back because of a fence, even one made of the same material meant to keep inmates in prisons.
Last summer an account surfaced from a Texas trooper who was on patrol near Eagle Pass when he encountered a large group of migrants crossing the Rio Grande. According to The Texas Tribune, the trooper wrote in an email to his supervisor: “We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do. With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning. We made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico.”
The trooper also reported a pregnant young woman suffered a miscarriage when she became caught in the razor wire. Many have reported cuts and gashes trying to get to the other side of it.
The Supreme Court has said the U.S. Border Patrol can cut the wire, but Abbott is ordering more wire be laid in defiance of the court.
The matter of what to do about immigration gnaws at deep emotions. Few United States citizens wish would-be immigrants ill will. But some (of various political inclinations) believe the country’s security is seriously threatened by the border crisis.
Whatever we feel about the situation, this much we do — or should — know:
Walls won’t stop these desperate humans. Neither will wire. The solution needs to be comprehensive immigration reform. And that is now off the table until after the presidential election in November. It is a humanitarian crisis that has become a political football; something to be kicked around, this way and that, for political advantage.
President Joe Biden is worried that the immigration issue could cost him reelection. And he should be. Donald Trump and Republicans think they can win on this issue. So Trump has told Republican legislators to stop working on a border compromise until, most likely, after the election. House Speaker Mike Johnson said the immigration bill worked on for months in the Senate is “absolutely dead.”
Regardless of how one feels about immigration and the well-being of our country, this is not good news.
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I am not a very political person but watching the last few years I now know the Republicans in the House are a bunch of “do nothing” idiots. All they want is power and care nothing about actually doing some good for this country. They all need to be voted out.
I would think that, if he has a heart at all, Mike Johnson would be ashamed of himself. Following the dictates of the thrice married, multiple bankrupt, multiple philandering liar must, at least at some level, be offensive to his sensibilities. Unless, of course, those loudly professed sensibilities were all for show in the first place.