Today, President Trump signed an executive order to end the separation of immigrant families at the border.
But the separation of children from their parents by ICE--what many Americans on both the right and left have rightly called a "human rights crisis"--is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Most people--especially those with young children--would prefer stay in their home countries if they felt it was safe to do so; if they felt a sense of security and hope for a prosperous future. Wherever you see mass immigration leaving any nation, you can be sure that social, political, and/or economic hopelessness is the driving factor.
And while Central American immigration to the United States has traditionally been primarily economically motivated, that has changed in recent years. Now the most cited reason for immigrating is to escape violence, crime, and instability.
From Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, these people are driven north by terror. Their towns and cities are rife with gang-related (and state complicit) violence. Many of their neighborhoods are controlled by drug cartels and protection rings that offer "services" for a mandatory fee. (Sounds familiar, right?) In order to work, to operate a business, to go about daily life in relative peace, many people are forced to pay criminals who will brutally murder them if they fail to pay. Many families who can't afford to make the trip together send only their children, often in the care of relatives or coyotes, in an effort to save them from targeting by the cartels for recruitment or abuse.
This is the real human rights crisis.
And culpability for the crisis falls squarely on the shoulders of the U.S. government.
How did these gangs and cartels gather such wealth and power, that they can terrorize entire populations of people? While the countries' own governments aren't helping matters any (and in fact are almost always in bed with the gangs on some level), the whole shitty situation arises from the United States government's ridiculous War on Drugs.
Drug prohibition has the economic effect of increasing the profits to be made on the manufacture and sale of drugs to astronomic levels. The high profit comes with high risk of imprisonment, death, injury, and theft, so the criminals attracted to this line of work need to build strong organizations around their enterprises to ensure a modicum of security. As their profits build, their organizations grow until they are not only the richest people in town, but also the most powerful. They must deal violently with rival gangs, including local governments. They branch out into other cities, other states or provinces, and eventually they have de facto control of the entire country.
The United States drug law enforcement is one of the most anti-human rights policies in existence worldwide. Not only does it violate each individual's right to self-ownership by prohibiting us from voluntarily ingesting substances, but it creates reigns of terror in our own and other countries through economic warfare. Because of our drug laws, millions have been murdered. Because of our drug laws, very bad people are able to exert control over entire populaces. Because of our drug laws, people flee their home countries in hope of finding safety and stability within our borders.
And the politicians and their advisors are absolutely, 100% aware of this. If any president over the past two decades had been truly concerned with the human rights of immigrants, they could have ended the drug war with a flick of their pen. If any congress had really cared about the plight of our neighbors to the south, they could have introduced legislation to end this stupidity and watched the immigration "crisis" halve and then halve again.
But they haven't.
The option has never even been on the table.
Oh, sure, in recent years states have started, one by one, to end marijuana prohibition now that the majority of Americans support its legalization. But no one seriously considers ending prohibition of cocaine, heroin, or methamphetamines. The people, because they don't understand that it is the cause of so much death and destruction, and the politicians? Because they don't care.
Trump's new executive order is going to be confusing for a lot of people. Many of those on the left will have to decide whether to support the action, since it was what they wanted done, or to come up with a reason to protest it, since they hate and distrust Trump. And those on the right who previously spoke in support of separating families at the border "because it's the law" will have to decide whether to rescind their support to back Trump, or to argue against the executive order. Congress will go back to debating amnesty packages and expensive walls. And drug prohibition will live on to fuel the next human rights crisis, and the next, and the next.