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U.S. border agents made about 1.66 million arrests this past year at the border with Mexico, which marks an all-time high and proves our long-held prediction that the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent lockdowns would hammer the poorest countries the worst and force their desperate citizens to flee.
It was the cover of our 3 March Trends Journal: “CORONAVIRUS 9/11 – SPREADING TERROR.” We predicted that these unprecedented lockdowns will lead to a migration problem never seen before. (See “MIGRANT FLOOD. WHAT WILL BIDEN DO?,” “MIGRANTS: COME ON IN. COVID DON’T COUNT,” and “U.S. BORDER PATROL: CHILD BORDER CROSSINGS SPIKE.”)
The Biden administration has faced criticism by Republicans in Congress who say the team is not taking the border crisis seriously and is sending mixed messages to potential migrants. Critics say the Biden administration is encouraging migration by promising to undo former President Trump’s immigration policy, which was seen as restrictive.
President Biden was asked about visiting the region at a town hall on Thursday, and said, “I guess I should go” to the border, but has not been able to carve out time in his schedule.
Over the past year, more than 125,000 unaccompanied children have arrived at the border, which eclipses the previous high of 80,000 in 2019. The New York Post reported last week that planes ferrying hundreds of these underage children have been arriving during off-hours at New York’s Westchester County Airport. The secretive flights were seen as the result of lawlessness at the border.
“I’ve never seen it as bad as what it is right now,” Brandon Judd, the president of the union that represents Border Patrol agents, told NPR. “We just don’t have the manpower and resources to do what we need to do to both detect and apprehend everything that’s crossing the border.”
About 40 percent of the migrants nabbed at the border originated from Central American countries, namely Guatemala and Honduras. There was also a significant increase of those from South America, the Caribbean, and Africa, NPR reported.
More than half a million Hondurans, or 5 percent of the country’s population, have been nabbed at the U.S. border since January 2019, VOA News reported. Many of these individuals see little hope in trying to make a living in their home countries because of rampant corruption and a lack of job prospects. The COVID-19 outbreak has just exasperated the problem.
The UN refugee agency estimates that at least 82 million people were displaced from their homes at the end of 2020, which is the highest number since WW2, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“I don’t think it’s going to slow down anytime soon,” Laura Collins, an immigration expert at the George W. Bush Institute, told the paper.
TREND FORECAST: As we have long forecast, as a result of the COVID War that has destroyed nation’s economies and ruined the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, if not billions, the refugee crisis will continue to escalate across the globe.
Again, none of this was unforeseen, especially not by the Trends Journal; see, for example, January 2021’s “LATIN AMERICA FACES SLOW, PAINFUL ECONOMIC RECOVERY,” the March 2021 article, “BIDEN TO FIX BORDER SURGE?” or go back to October 2020’s “ILLEGAL BORDER CROSSINGS ON THE RISE.”
And now, with the poorer nations hit the hardest and our forecasts for worsening economic conditions, the refugee crisis will accelerate across much of the globe. In turn, as we have long forecast, there will be new anti-immigration, anti-vax, anti-tax populist movements that will challenge established political parties.
TRENDPOST: The Biden administration was slow to act on the border and allowed the situation to worsen to a point that it is not sustainable.
Immigration has always been the political third rail. If President Biden came out too forcefully and told migrants not to come, progressives from his party would criticize him as being a slightly more tolerable Donald Trump. If he opened the border, moderates would abandon him.
So he did what any veteran politician would do: put someone else in charge.
He tapped Vice President Kamala Harris to lead the administration’s effort to regain control of the border. She took part in a few photo-op video conferences with leaders from the Northern Triangle, visited Mexico, and even the border. Nothing was solved. She’s running for her own political life and does not want to be tied to its failure.
The situation has gotten so untenable that secret flights are entering the U.S. in the dead of night carrying unaccompanied children because there is simply nowhere else to stick them. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, downplayed the flights seen landing in the wee small hours of the morning as merely flights “earlier than you might like.”
The border issue is a serious crisis and must be met with a serious response. There is little the U.S. can do to stop corruption in Honduras and Haiti. You can’t blame these migrants for fleeing. But the U.S. needs political courage to tackle the problem, which Washington is lacking.
Solution
A key element in Gerald Celente’s Occupy Peace movement is to close America’s 800 plus military bases in foreign nations and bring home the troops to secure the homeland borders. This is both more effective and less costly than to build a wall.