López Obrador has said that he conditions his collaboration to find a solution to the chaos that exists on the border between the US and Mexico on Washington allocating 20 billion dollars to Latin American countries and suspending the trade embargo on the Havana regime, as well as granting legal status to 10 million immigrants who have entered the country irregularly.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) statistics record more than 8 million migrant encounters since the arrival of President Joe Biden to the White House in January 2021, an unprecedented figure that creates destabilization in large cities such as New York and Chicago due to lack of shelters and the budgetary burden it implies for taxpayers. A crisis that Republicans point directly to the policies of Biden and the Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the latter being investigated by Congress “for failing to comply with the laws of the country.”
Just months before the presidential elections in which Biden is running for re-election, the president is looking for how to stop immigration, one of the main electoral campaign issues. He is calling for more support from Mexico because of failed White House measures that have only resulted in temporary drops in migrant numbers at the border.
At the end of December, Biden sent a delegation to Mexico led by the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas; Secretary of State, Antony Blinken; and Presidential National Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall. There were no concrete promises from those talks, only that they would meet again at the end of January and the opening of border posts that were closed due to the wave of migration.
But López Obrador did present his “list” of requests. It is a plan in which the United States should allocate 20 billion dollars to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, suspend the embargo on Cuba, eliminate all sanctions on the Chavista regime in Venezuela and grant legal status “to at least 10 million of Hispanics living in the United States.”
“Abandon those fears of terrorism. What danger could it mean for the United States, Cuba or any other country? And how is a people sacrificed for political and ideological interests? What, there can’t be dialogue? What, there can be no understanding? “What, there can’t be a relationship of respect?” said López Obrador, who stands out as a defender of the dictatorships of Cuba and Venezuela.
For López Obrador it is a “humanitarian issue”, and in his opinion “enough resources” must be allocated to address the issue, the immigration issue, and we are going to continue doing so. And they are looking for options and always understanding the causes, why people leave their towns, and also looking for these fundamental solutions,” he said.
“The US does not need Mexico”
Republican analyst Frank Rodríguez maintains that the United States can solve the immigration problem without help from Mexico, only by applying the law. In his opinion, political will is needed to apply existing laws.
“This is a relaxation, people arrive (at the border) and say they want political asylum when they do not qualify, it is absurd. If there were a president who demanded that no one be allowed to pass at the border until it is certain that he is a persecuted person, the problem would be eliminated. The United States does not need Mexico’s help. By enforcing the laws, word will spread that they are not letting anyone in and people will turn back or never make the trip.”
The Democratic analyst, Isadora Velásquez, estimates that the proposal of the president of Mexico may have the best intentions, but it does not adjust to reality, “under the political climate we live in today, it is an unrealistic proposal, it is an immigration reform which has been tried to be discussed previously and has not been successful.”
The 20,000 million
“Tyrannical communist regimes cannot receive money, they would have to go to democratically elected countries with which the United States has good relations, now even Honduras and Colombia have leftist governments, Venezuela and Nicaragua are leftist and dictatorial regimes. On the other hand, the amount of money that López Obrador talks about is enormous, like the United States having money left over when the opposite is true, it is a debtor country that is asking for loans,” Rodríguez stated.
In Velásquez’s opinion, the plan proposed by López Obrador is “a little ambitious”, I do believe that the 20 billion for countries in Latin America and the Caribbean is something that the vice president originally tried to implement, but there was not much discussion. He believes that “the only thing that could be successful is granting funds, but supervision is needed to have the desired result.”
The United States has allocated $4.2 billion to the Northern Triangle countries (Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala) since 2021 to stop immigration. In addition, it promotes different “legal migration” programs so that people “do not have to pay smugglers” such as ‘Humanitarian Parole’, ‘Family Reunification’, ‘Safe Mobility’, the CBP-One application that serves 1,500 people per day they seek asylum at the border.
Thousands of people have managed to enter through Biden’s programs without the greatest scrutiny. 317,000 immigrants have arrived through Humanitarian Parole in a period of 1 year. Secure Mobility has approved more than 9,000 cases in less than 1 year through offices in Costa Rica, Guatemala, Colombia and Ecuador, according to official data.
But Biden’s immigration policy has been unsuccessful, thousands of people arrive at the border every day despite the millionaire funds allocated and immigration programs.
Millionaire load
Added to the above is the help received by thousands of immigrants who are arriving in the cities of the United States after receiving the benefit of parole at the border, which represents a high cost for taxpayers, amounting to an annual expense of 451,000 million dollars, according to a House Homeland Security Committee report presented in November.
The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) assures that the burden placed on taxpayers is increasing and this to help irregular foreigners. He assures that Biden’s policies reward “lawbreakers.” Migrants receive lodging, food, health care and education for their children.
“What’s in my head that people are going to stop coming with those programs. One of the things that Biden invented is that people from their computer can do the paperwork to come legally. I know of a case that came in 7 days, and this is what happens with Cubans, Venezuelans and Haitians. The solution he provides is for more people to come to the country legally, for cases to be processed faster, for them to be released at the border (detention centers) as quickly as possible, but not to close the door. “Who comes up with that?” asked analyst Rodríguez.
Giving amnesty to the 10 million immigrants proposed by the Mexican president is for Rodríguez the magnet to continue attracting migration. “When they realize that sooner or later they are going to be forgiven for having entered illegally, that further encourages immigration and sends the message that they can come and that finally the United States is going to have to recognize that they stayed and give them the benefits.” .
However, legal immigration suffers increasing delays, with thousands waiting years for a resolution to immigrate based on US laws.
Suspend the embargo?
For Velásquez, López Obrador’s proposal to suspend the embargo on Cuba is something that has been discussed for a long time, but political reality shows that lifting it is very unlikely.
“Even so, the United States will continue to demand that Mexico try to do its part when it comes to immigration. Recently, with the caravan of people coming to the United States, it was dissolved upon arriving in Mexico, but this particular proposal is too ambitious for the current political climate,” says the analyst.
Meanwhile, Rodríguez assures that suspending the embargo is a very complex issue. “It is part of a broader policy, people leave Cuba not because of the embargo but because of lack of freedoms, it is the same reason why they leave Nicaragua and Venezuela. “It is a total myopia, it is obvious that López Obrador is a leftist, he sees the world as if everything has to be solved by the United States based on money and all because that is what is best for him and his cronies in different countries,” Rodriguez said.
The analyst considers that this is blackmail by left-wing regimes that consists of continuing to send illegal immigration unless the United States disburses “an enormous amount of money that it is not even certain that they will pay,” he indicated.
“I don’t see that (López Obrador) says that it has to do with a sine qua non condition, that there should first be freedom in countries like Cuba and Venezuela. The Helms-Burton Act (the embargo on Cuba) establishes that it will be lifted once political prisoners are released, elections and political pluralism are allowed, then the United States will make loans for companies to locate in Cuba. There are preconditions to be met, López Obrador’s does not offer any,” he said.
Danger
According to CBP data, in fiscal year 2023, a total of 736 terrorism suspects were detained at the border, that would mean more than 60 per month, an average of two per day. The data does not include those who managed to enter by evading border posts.
Rodríguez points out that the crisis at the border and migration was the number one point expressed by voters in the Republican primary elections in Iowa, the economy came in second place.
“Those interviewed when leaving stated that their main concern is immigration because it has several aspects regarding national security, which includes terrorism, drug trafficking, dissolution of American culture, converting Texas – a border state – to vote blue, there are multiple reasons. causes of concern” for voters, noted the Republican analyst.
“It is logical to think that there have to be sleeper cells of terrorism that have entered, people who come from enemy countries, they are sending thousands of people, gang members, terrorists, drug traffickers who are going to cause many deaths must have entered, of course it is dangerous for national security, economic security because we have to keep these people who are entering, we are seeing it in Chicago, New York that they are bankrupting the cities, chaos is being created inside the country and now they are blaming them to the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, for sending migrants to Democratic cities and of course extraordinary chaos is forming,” he stated.
Pro-Hamas demonstrations
Around the protest in front of the White House, which groups of pro-Hamas protesters tried to enter, is another cause of concern for Rodríguez about immigration. “There are enough Palestinian immigrants to go protest, there are already so many that they can organize and recruit Americans to protest in Washington, New York and elsewhere,” questioned the analyst.
He considered that this means that the Islamic population has grown and has overflowed “and that goes against American culture and that is causing alarm among Republican voters, it is the main reason why they voted for Trump.”
Court cases
The accumulated cases in Immigration courts exceed three million. The figure is 3,075,248, according to data from the Transactional Records Information and Access Center (TRAC) at Syracuse University.
The number of Immigration judges also rose from 650 to 732, who are appointed to the 64 courts that exist in the country.
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