Obama did ramp up enforcement and then he ramped it down, to the point where he was rebuked by the Supreme Court
Gang violence and joblessness are not valid reasons to plead asylum
What's a valid reason? It's not simply just gang violence they're trying to escape, either.
How the US-Led War on Drugs Ravaged Central America
The United States has dumped billions of dollars into Central American security forces in recent years in the name of a militarized war on drugs. The approach, now widely regarded as a failure, has increased corruption, deteriorated human rights and exacerbated conditions that led to mass migration, with nothing to show in terms of the stated goals of curbing trafficking.
According to drug policy expert Sanho Tree, a fellow with the Institute for Policy Studies, the prohibitionist approach is doomed to fail because it does not tackle the underlying social issues driving the drug trade.
“Will never stop this war by amplifying the motivational feedback loop of the very adversaries that we are trying to stop,” Tree told teleSUR by phone from New York, adding that poverty, despair, and alienation are key factors behind narcotrafficking. He argued that prohibitionist drug policy is an “equal opportunity corrupter” for governments and security forces.
Central America also has a history of socially exclusionary societies that have long concentrated economic and political power in the hands of a small number oligarchic families. Not only does this gross inequality push some with bleak futures to get involved in illicit activities, but many elite figures, including large landowners, business moguls and politicians have been linked to drug money in the region, corrupting political will to solve the problem.
With the help of U.S. funds and militarization, Central America’s drug war has not only failed, but upended whole societies as collateral damage...
The Link Between America’s Lax Gun Laws and the Violence That Fuels Immigration
The ready availability of guns in America is often discussed as a domestic-policy matter. But it is an international issue, too. Every year, guns that were initially sold in the U.S. are used in thousands of crimes in Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean, according to the
Center for American Progress. It’s estimated that some two hundred thousand American guns are smuggled across the southern border each year. The region that’s been hit the hardest is Central America, where gun laws are relatively strict yet homicide rates are among the highest on earth.
Gang wars, massive state corruption, and murderous criminal syndicates are to blame for the violence, but American firepower facilitates it. “Unlike other forms of contraband, American weapons don’t just pass through Central America but engulf it in storms of violence,” Mark Ungar, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College and an expert in the region’s gun violence, told me. This violence, in turn, has fuelled a refugee crisis. Since 2014, more than a hundred and fifty thousand unaccompanied immigrant children from countries in the region have fled to the U.S. seeking some form of asylum.
Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras do not have substantial gun industries of their own. The governments of these countries rely on imports from abroad to supply their militaries and security forces. Most of the guns otherwise in circulation on the street are illegal and unregistered—and many come from sellers in the United States. Seventy per cent of guns recovered by authorities in Mexico, for instance, were originally sold in the U.S.—most of them in Texas, California, and Arizona, according to a Government Accountability Office
report.
Forty-nine per cent of weapons recovered in El Salvador
came from the U.S., compared to forty-six per cent in Honduras and twenty-nine per cent in Guatemala. Harry Penate, an American adviser to the A.T.F. based in San Salvador, told
The New Republic, “I feel as bad about guns going into Central America and Mexico as good, hard-working Colombians feel about cocaine going into the U.S.” There are at least seven hundred licensed gun dealers
along the U.S.-Mexico border, and the illegal firearms trade in Mexico
generates more than a hundred million dollars in annual revenue for U.S. gun makers.
Go after the employers that are hiring them or quit whining.
