The “border crisis,” if you believe Donald Trump, is an unstoppable flood of violent criminals, escapees from prisons, mentally ill people, drug dealers, people bent on voting Democratic, and others that we Americans should be hysterically angry about. If you believe your lying eyes, the refugees arriving at our southern border don’t fit that description.
Watch televised coverage of border events and you’ll see fathers carrying toddlers wading across muddy rivers, holding the hands of youngsters stumbling along behind them, followed by moms with bags of their belongings. People crowded against a border wall, looking through at a land where they’d hoped to find work, safety. People sleeping on streets. Under bridges. Waiting, hoping, for a chance to apply for legal asylum. Coming from places like Guatemala where my in-laws, hardworking civilians, are caught up in recurring machine-gun fights between drug gangs and the police.
How about helping those good, desperate people at the border? By hiring more admissions counselors, judges, setting up transient housing facilities, job training and citizenship classes?
It would cost less in a year than the billions we spend in aid helping Americans devastated by even a single hurricane.
