RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.us/borders-us-immigration-policy/
Despite what Beto thinks, the United States doesn’t have an obligation to every distressed mother with a four-month-old

As the teeming mass of mostly male, partly criminal, humanity stews about on Mexican side of our Southern border, entertaining itself by throwing rocks at US border officials, emoting for CNN cameras, and periodically rushing the fence in an effort to break through to America, it is worth stepping back to ask a few large questions.

But first, let’s step out of the rancid pool of sentimentality with which the media, in its anti-Trump frenzy, has surrounded this episode. That sentimentality ranges from the astringent, Jim-Acosta sort, in which a reporter barks little virtue-signaling rhetorical bombs at the President of the United States, to the truly emetic effusion by Robert Francis ‘Beto’ O’Rourke, failed senatorial candidate, who began with this heart-tugger:

It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her four-month old son to come here. Should tell us something about our country that we only respond to this desperate need once she is at our border. So far, in this administration, that response has included taking kids from their parents, locking them up in cages, and now tear gassing them at the border.

‘This administration,’ Beto? Surely you know — but will not say — that the Trump administration has been doing exactly what the Obama administration did. Remember those photos of kids behind wire fences? CNN pretended they were contemporary. In fact, they were from 2014, when the great Calmer-of-the-Seas was in charge. The policy is the same: separate children from illegal alien adults when keeping them together would pose a danger to the children. Let me pause to point out that if you don’t want to be separated from your child (when she is your child and not your underage sex toy), do not enter the Unites States illegally.

As for ‘tear gassing them at the border,’ that’s another trick that the Trump administration has — rightly in my view — taken over from the Obama years. As far as I know, this was the first time the Trump administration used tear gas on migrants who violently assaulted the border fence in an effort to gain illegal entry to the United States. Maybe there are other instances. During the Obama years it happened about once a month, but Beto somehow neglected to mention that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/storming-the-southern-border-1543277802

Migrants on Sunday stormed the U.S. border near San Diego, and from the media coverage you’d think the culprits were the Border Patrol agents who used tear gas to disperse the mob and defend themselves. But the officers were right to repel the crowds, and the tragedy is that such lawlessness will undermine support for legal asylum in the U.S.

Hundreds of migrants overwhelmed Mexican law enforcement and rushed north, and some stormed the car lanes at San Ysidro, the Western Hemisphere’s biggest land-border crossing. Others surged through gaps in the nearby border fence.

The United States can’t tolerate migrants who rush the border or assault officers with rocks. Members of the same caravan defied officers last month to push through the Honduras-Guatemala border and later the Guatemala-Mexico border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection spent weeks preparing for a similar rush, and to its credit no one sustained serious injury on Sunday.

President Trump responded with typical overkill, threatening on Twitter Monday to “close the Border permanently if need be.” That may have been an attempt to get Mexico’s attention, but closing the border would hurt the U.S. too. More than 100,000 people cross north legally each day at San Ysidro, and Customs and Border Protection estimates that 33 such travelers create one American job.

By Monday morning Mexican authorities had already deported around 100 migrants over Sunday’s fracas and said they’ll do the same to others involved. Mexican immigration officials added that, far from helping Central American migrants, such acts “undermine the legal migration framework and could result in a serious incident at the border line.”

That’s also a message for U.S. immigration activists who too often sound as if migration anywhere is a natural right. Sunday’s real victims are Central Americans who have respected U.S. law even as they flee genuine persecution, and who are waiting in Tijuana to seek asylum legally at the U.S. port of entry.

Violence and lawlessness erode public support for a generous asylum policy. Germany is the cautionary tale. Even Hillary Clinton recently acknowledged that Chancellor Angela Merkel erred by admitting a million Middle Eastern migrants in 2015. The result has been a political backlash that has abetted the far right and turned many Europeans against non-passport transfers within Europe.

Mr. Trump is also being vilified for seeking to keep asylum seekers inside Mexico as they wait to have their requests reviewed by U.S. agents. But 69 of the migrants who rushed the border Sunday made it to U.S. soil. They were detained and will be prosecuted, but the Immigration and Nationality Act allows them to apply for asylum now, despite their lawlessness.