No. of Recommendations: 6
When it comes to the border, I trust and respect Jeh. If you want to insist Jeh is lying, we can just agree to disagree, this is on team Biden. Jeh has been warning us for four years, period.I'm not insisting Jeh is lying. I didn't say anything about Johnson, and I'm not aware that Johnson has ever stated that we didn't see significant increases in immigration flows from 2018-2019. Has Johnson claimed that we didn't see the first massive spike in migrants during 2019?
You can shut your eyes and not look at the data, if you like - but it doesn't make it go away. Nor does the fact that the current Administration still hosts the website publishing the
Trump Administration's own report - you can look at the archives, and see that it hasn't changed. The change in immigration trends that we're dealing with today
started during the Trump Administration. Despite his policies, and despite his rhetoric,
that's when they started coming in droves.
You are right, though, in that Jeh Johnson
has been warning us for four years. But you're forgetting that four years ago,
Trump was President. So here's Jeh Johnson at a roundtable, right before Covid hit, pointing out that you can't solve this problem with "border security" because the migration patterns are due to push factors in Central America:
JOHNSON: Yes, [the Trump] administration believes fervently that a deterrent message, or “consequence delivery,” as they refer to it, is the principal way to reduce illegal immigration. We want to make things so terrible for you that you would never think of coming here. But no deterrent message can overcome the desire to flee a burning building. That’s why we have to address the underlying causes.
* * *
JOHNSON: It has to be at least a 10-year project. There’s no quick fix to poverty, violence and corruption. We started this in 2016 with $750 million, really a drop in the bucket, but the money was helping coffee growers deliver coffee to the market, for example. It was beginning to have an effect. But the [Trump] administration has turned that money off now — the exact wrong thing to do.
The moral of the story is, there’s no amount of security you can throw on the southern border to end illegal migration. You have to address the push factors, period.https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/border-b...
