Immigration surge makes reform less likely

A tsunami of desperate Central Americans, many of them women and unaccompanied children, is washing up on the U.S.-Mexico border just as sufficient numbers of U.S. elected officials seem to have lost the political will to address immigration, likely closing any window of opportunity for reform at this time.

Overwhelmed, government immigration enforcement agencies are dumping thousands of these immigrants who were detained crossing the border illegally on the streets of U.S. border towns, or keeping them in military bases or holding centers.

And hoping volunteers and aid groups will step up and somehow take care of them.

Authorities report the number of non-Mexican immigrants picked up in Texas’ southern Rio Grande Valley was nearly 97,000 in fiscal 2013 as poverty, lack of work and growing violence in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are prompting thousands to flee to the north.

At the current rate, the government estimates that as many as 60,000 children traveling alone could be apprehended by U.S. border agents by the end of the fiscal year.

One woman, who was released in El Paso, told Albuquerque Journal reporter Lauren Villagran that extreme poverty drove her to leave Honduras with her three children and make the treacherous journey through Mexico and into south Texas.

She and several hundred other adults and children were flown by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to El Paso, where they were processed, given a court date and then let go. Volunteers in El Paso gave the woman and her children toiletries, clothes and shoes for one of her boys who had arrived barefoot.

In Arizona, federal and state authorities are scrambling to care for hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children transported there and being housed in a warehouse that lacks enough cots and basic necessities — because there was nowhere else to place them.

A window for tackling immigration reform seemed to be open in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats controlled the presidency and both chambers of Congress, but for political reasons nothing was done.

Since then, the impetus to do something has further lost steam and President Obama’s administration has been busy deporting people in record numbers — and trying to pick up political points by blaming Republicans for not passing immigration reform.

Tuesday’s primary election defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R.-Va., who was accused by his opponent of being soft on immigration, could be the last sputter, at least for this Congress.

Meanwhile, border states are unfairly bearing the crushing pressure of dealing with what clearly is a growing national humanitarian crisis.

The United States cannot take everyone in. But it certainly isn’t going to deport 12 million people. And it isn’t inclined to simply turn away people who are in dire straits.

But ignoring the problem, as has been the case in Washington for far too long, won’t solve it. It just allows the desperation to get worse and makes the odds for reform more complicated and less and less likely.

— Albuquerque Journal