TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RECORD IS A CONSISTENT, UTTER FAILURE

Donald Trump has tackled his pet issue of immigration with all of the bluster – but none of the effectiveness – of the Big Bad Wolf.  He has huffed and puffed his way through dozens of lame attempts to keep brown and black people from entering the country.  Unlike the nursery rhyme villain who succeeded in demolishing two-thirds of the Three Little Pigs’ real estate, the Donald’s bloviation has accomplished absolutely nothing. On the contrary, he has managed to make a broken immigration system far worse than it was. 

Strategic thinking, of course, has never been in this president’s wheelhouse.  He’s a tactics-only man, the kind of guy who tosses fecal matter against the wall with no plan to make it stick.  So far, none of it has. As a matter of fact, there is no wall for it to stick to. Mexico won’t pay for it and neither will Congress. All of his tactics have imploded: a government shutdown, family separations, troops at the border, threats of sealing the border, firing Homeland Security officials for not being tough, asking immigration agents to ignore the law by refusing to let migrants into the country.  Now he wants to charge asylum applicants exorbitant fees and eliminate bail for those accused of entering the country illegally. 

Meanwhile, government officials processed more than 103,000 migrants last month, the highest level in more than 12 years.  Not since the Vietnam War, has an administration demonstrated such utter ineptness at problem solving.  Not only have Trump’s mindless and manic remedies failed miserably, they have exacerbated the very crisis that has defined his presidency.

There is nothing simple about America’s long-broken immigration system, but there is one basic truth that has permeated this issue for decades:  deterrence is no magic wand when it comes to keeping migrants out of the country.  Threats of indefinite imprisonment didn’t hold the Cuban or Haitian boat people back in the Carter and Reagan years.  Fences and intense border patrol policing during the Clinton and Bush years simply rerouted migrants through a deadly Arizona desert. The Obama administration’s Central American advertising campaign warning against family migration had no impact.  

Then along comes Trump and his innate inability to comprehend complexities.  His immigration policy consists of insults and an endless barrage of cruelty designed to keep the “animals” and “bad hombres” from entering the country.  He justified his gambit of pulling migrant children out of the arms of their parents as a deterrence mechanism. Never mind the moral ends-means conundrum.  The government’s own figures showed the caging of children separated from their parents had zero impact on the flow of migrants.  

It was almost as if Trump had no knowledge of the great Sonoran Desert diversion of the 1990s. And, of course, he probably didn’t.  Not many people did until New York’s public radio station, WNYC, produced an astounding Radiolab series called Border Trilogy.The documentary told the story of how government immigration officials used a combination of massive border patrolling and fencing to reduce illegal crossing through a swath of Texas.  The strategy was to reroute migrants through Arizona’s deadly Sonoran Desert, a treacherous path certain to produce serious injuries and death.  The thinking was that word of such adverse consequences would serve as a deterrent to entering the country.  Turns out that they had only part of the theory right. Desert deaths went from four or five a year to hundreds as soon as the plan was put into place.  But the migrants were not deterred.  The death toll went as high as 10,000, and may be even higher because many remains, picked over by vultures and other creatures, were never found.   If the threat of death doesn’t deter migrants in search of a better life, what would?

Deterrence theory is predicated on a behavior model foreign to the immigration context. It assumes that the decider is relatively rational and capable of applying a linear cost-benefit analysis to a contemplated action. Most migrants entering the country are fleeing Central America’s northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s an area where weak, corrupt and autocratic governance has yielded violent gangs, drug trafficking and rampant human rights abuses. 

One 15-year-old Honduran boy told Stanford University researchers nothing would stop him from trying to make his way to America. “Here we live in fear. . .I’ve thought of it a lot. I will go.” Why?  His sister was killed by gang members.  Five teenagers were gunned down outside of a youth center he regularly went to, and a grocer in his neighborhood had just been shot.  When that’s the only life you know, a cage or tent in El Paso is hardly a deterrent. It may not be what Janis Joplin had in mind, but it certainly fits: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

In order to understand that, however, policy makers have to be able to get out of their own heads and see the world through the eyes of the Honduran boy.  And that is something our empathy-deficient president is unable to do. So he just keeps flinging crap at the wall. For example, take the punitive action of cutting off foreign aid to the northern triangle countries. It may make Trump feel tough, but the result will certainly be a further deterioration in those countries, sending even more migrants to our borders. Similarly, the president’s overzealous approach to arresting asylum seekers, gives him the aura of the powerful new sheriff in town. Yet, the reality is that the country now has a backlog of 850,000 immigration cases, up by more than 200,000 since Trump took office. With fewer than 450 immigration judges, Central American families arriving now know they will have years to spend in this country until their case comes up, the very outcome Trump wants to avoid.

The ultimate solution to this crisis will come from neither all-cap tweets nor scorched earth, stick-it-to-them tactics.  There are multiple pieces to this puzzle and they need to be addressed in a comprehensive immigration-reform legislative package.  Sadly, even before the 2016 election, Congress was unable to rise to the occasion. Such an outcome now is about as likely as Trump replacing William Barr with Robert Mueller as attorney general.  Our only hope is that at least some of those Trump voters who believed their guy would singlehandedly resolve this immigration mess by building a big, beautiful, Mexico-paid-for wall has not only failed to deliver the goods, he’s made matters much worse.