Sadly, I don’t mean “bloody” in the informal British sense.
By Bradley DEVLIN
America’s current immigration regime, created and willed into being by our elites, simply manned at the moment by the Biden administration, finds itself morally responsible for yet another tragedy.
A thought that might jump into someone’s mind is the conditions in migrant detention facilities have led to an untold number of deaths. Substitute “Biden” for “Trump” in that first sentence, and it sounds exactly like allegations you heard hurled at the Trump administration from 2018 on. (Remember “kids in cages”?) But, while conditions are rather poor in migrant detention facilities around the Southern border, as they are at nearly every refugee camp in the world, this post isn’t about anything like that.
More than 50 Central American migrants, likely heading for the U.S.-Mexico border, were killed and nearly 100 more injured after a truck rolled in Chiapas, Mexico on Friday. The trailer truck was reportedly stuffed with upwards of 150 people when it turned too sharply at high speeds, causing the vehicle to flip, then crash into a pedestrian bridge. The carnage left bodies strewn about in the street, as the trailer reportedly ripped the container in half and tore off its roof.
This single, human tragedy is responsible for nearly twice as many lives than people who have died in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities since 2018—most of them likely due to illnesses or circumstances suffered prior to ICE custody. What’s more, this crash is far from an isolated event. Multiple crashes taking the lives of double-digit numbers of suspected migrants in transit to, or within, America’s borders have reportedly occurred in the past year.
Chiapas, the most southern state of Mexico, borders Guatemala. The other Northern Triangle countries lie only a short ways away. As migration to the U.S. has become more popular from Northern Triangle countries via land routes over the past few years, Chiapas has become a hotbed of migrant activities. Large caravans that seek to make their way from Guatemala to Mexico, and then to the United States, often seek passage through Chiapas. While the state may not be as violent as some other hotbeds of criminal activity in Mexico, Chiapas sees its share of criminality, such as human trafficking, stemming from the flow of migrants. That flow has been stable since Biden’s inauguration and has remained relatively stable since, despite initial efforts by the Biden administration to convince the public that the record-breaking numbers of migrants flooding across our southern border was just part of another seasonal surge. The Biden administration and its allies in the corporate media, abandoned that effort long ago. Now they think it best to ignore it.
Last time I brought up the topic of immigration, also on TAC’s State of the Union Blog, I brought up an anecdote about an interaction I had with a water taxi driver I had in Cabo San Lucas named Miguel. Miguel laughed as he told me he had been deported from the U.S. when he got caught illegally working in Las Vegas. In reflecting on my experience with Miguel, I wrote:
Maybe, if more Americans had his understanding of the motivating factors of immigration, our country would be more clear-eyed about the steps necessary to protect American workers by stemming the tide of low wage labor surging across our southern border.
I still believe clarity on the immigration issue is sorely needed. However, seeing reality for what it is does not mean that we should simply eschew all human emotion. If we do, that only serves to hand the immigration debate over to people I disparagingly call the “chart people”—the economists, consultants, and market-makers—which I’ve written about before. The chart people have already controlled the right’s perspective on immigration for the past 40 years, if not longer. Look where it’s gotten us.
Our approach, like most things, should lie somewhere in the middle.
For the past few years, it has been fashionable in young conservative circles to talk about objectivity, objective truth, and how facts should always come before feelings. However, conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of the youth’s claims that conservative moral outrage is passé when it comes to any issue—especially that of immigration. Indeed, something worthy of our moral outrage is happening right now regarding our Southern border. We must not let it blind us, but channel it. If we fail, then we should expect more of the same: The left will keep its monopoly on appeals to emotion and justice in our immigration debate. They will get away with making illegal immigrants working in violation of the law the victims of a cruel, fascistic immigration regime, rather than the true story that the 50 plus migrants killed in Chiapas, and thousands more like them, are the victims of lawlessness ushered in by liberals at hemispheric proportions.
