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The unintended (or intended) consequences and tragedies on the US southern border.

Our modern civilization and laws are designed mostly for ordinary occurrence of events not for extraordinary influx or occurrences. It is a well known (at least to practitioners) fact based on queuing theory or just common sense that any service system (immigration processing or otherwise) are designed to service arrival rate that are more or less normal. Any sudden increase in arrival rate requesting service can induce extraordinary delay and chaos growing at exponential rate. This is the case for immigrants seeking asylum in the US from Central America:

1.  Because of the criminal conditions in Central American countries such as Honduras or Guatemala, many people decided to escape with their life and children enduring all kinds of hardship to seek asylum in the US. To further complicate the situation, some criminal elements try to exploit the fact by exhorting money from escapee and to smuggle illegal immigrants and contrabands using the asylum route. This is all very natural behavior of human beings, good or bad.

2.  In response to this tsunami of human influx, the US government without too much forethought tries to stop this influx by using draconian measure of separating parents from their children to discourage the mass of asylum seekers. As a result some 4000+ children (since May 2018) including many babies are separated from their natural parents at the US southern border and housed in various camps in the US.

3.  However, the government relented due to enormous public outcry and agreed to re-unite the parents and children with no pre-planned methods for doing so (so far only some 500 cases have been resolved). The US court in the meantime ordered the unification be carried out in 30 day for grown children and 15 days for toddlers and infants – a basically impossible task.

4.  In the meantime, another US law kicks in to worsen the situation. The law says that no children can be incarcerated for more than 21 days. Otherwise, they must be place in foster homes.

5.  Concurrently, many of these asylum seekers are so desperate that (i) they are willing to seek illegal means to cross the border resulting in arrest (ii) plead to misdemeanor charges just to be united with their children.

6.  The final insult/wound occurs when another US law says that once a parent is guilty of a misdemeanor and have their children place with foster family, they lose forever their right to re-claim their children and must let the court decide the children’s future. The innocent children may never see their parents again forever.

7.  In the meantime, the enormous cost of housing the children and the parents in detention camp essentially indefinitely due to queueing delay are borne by the US taxpayers.

One cannot help but lament that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” ( I am being generous here in quoting this well known saying and giving Trump the benefit of the doubt that his one bad decision even though reversed was done without manipulative intent except to solve the problem)”.

You can now understand why Trump wants to build a wall at our southern border. We can close our eyes and ears about conditions in Africa (Europeans can’t). But leaving the people suffer and die at our doorstep is no solution.

Now, you may ask what is the proper solution to this human problem. To reduce the influx to normal situation you must solve the problem at the source. That is to improve economic conditions in these Central American countries so that their citizens do not escape out of desperation. That is FOREIGN AID by the US to these countries. This is the thesis of T. Picketty in his best selling book two years ago. Capitalism has built in inequality; the “haves” must help the “have nots” to balance out the inequality as a matter of enlightened self-interest. But here you face the problem of government corruption where significant portion of the US aid often goes to private Swiss bank accounts rather than benefiting the population and the countries. Even more drastic but impossible solution is to invade Central America and take over these countries and administer them as U.S.Territories (we basically did this with Hawaii and the Philippines in earlier times). Will the rest of the World accept this? Another solution seriously proposed is to pay everyone in the world a basic income for just being a human. Think about the problem of educating and convincing everyone out of their own self-interest to agreeing to this.

You cannot win!!

Us ordinary US citizens and legal residents can only be grateful that we live in paradise and rely on private charitable organizations to relieve a small measure of the problem/pressure.

Finally, let me end by quoting my wife who is always the ultimate authority in our home: “America is paved with gold, but one has to bend down to pick it up.  It does not jump up into your hands!”. There is no free lunch!