The Patriot Post® · The Problem Is Up Here

Jonah Goldberg: “All you need to do is look at the headlines out of Central America to see why tens of thousands of children are ending up at our border. ‘In Columbia (sic), Rising Violence Breeds New Doubts’ (N.Y. Times); ‘Guatemala Seen Slipping Into a Haven For Drugs’ (LA Times); ‘Democracy Jeopardized as New Wave of Violence Sweeps Guatemala’ (AP); ‘The Volcano That is Guatemala’ (St. Louis Post-Dispatch); ‘A New Dark Age for Latin America?’ (Miami Herald); ‘Murder Soars in El Salvador’ (Washington Post); ‘Social Breakdown Turns Deadly in Guatemala’ (Washington Post); ‘Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala Raise Stake of Central American Drug-Addled Violence’ (States News Service); ‘Drug Cartels Take Toll on Guatemala’s Politics’ (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). No wonder we have so many refugees at our door. Except there’s one hitch: All of these headlines are very old. The first is from 1987, the last from 2007. And yet, over those two decades, we never saw anything like what we are seeing today. … [T]he new variable isn’t what’s happening down there, it’s what’s happened up here.”

Charles Krauthammer: “Stopping this wave is not complicated. A serious president would go to Congress tomorrow proposing a change in the law, simply mandating that Central American kids get the same treatment as Mexican kids, i.e., be subject to immediate repatriation. … One thing is certain. When the first convoys begin rolling from town to town across Central America, the influx will stop. When he began taking heat for his laxness and indecisiveness, Obama said he would seek statutory authority for eliminating the Central American loophole. Yet when he presented his $3.7 billion emergency package on Tuesday, it included no such proposal. Without that, tens of thousands of kids will stay. Tens of thousands more will come. … Comprehensive reform would not have prevented the current influx. Indeed, any reform that amnesties 11 million illegal immigrants simply reinforces the message that if you come here illegally, eventually you will be allowed to stay.”