Another day, another moral panic in America. This time about the 2,300 illegal migrants under 18 held by the Feds who have been separated from their parents. Now it is fueled mostly by lies. Just as with previous moral panics, such as the epidemic of child abductions (800 thousand per year!) and Satanic Ritual Abuse. Journalists’ incentives encourage them to report lies to get clicks, feeding us the excitement we demand from them.
These carefully constructed media frenzies are often powerful tools to mobilize public opinion. They are an example of how our weaknesses make us easy to govern, a gift to our elites. Perhaps we will learn this time. Until then, here is an acerbic look at this episode by somebody boiling over with rage at what we have become.
“And soon, very soon – after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world. {Mexicans should} leave their towns and find a life in the United States. … {That is} a human right we will defend.”
— Andrés Manuel López Obrador, front-runner in the election to be President of Mexico. Source: English and Spanish original.
“Don’t Cry for Me, Rachel Maddow“
By James Howard Kunstler at his website. Posted with his generous permission.
The latest artificial hysteria cranked up by the Offendedness Cartel – re: detention of juvenile illegal immigrants – is the most nakedly sentimental appeal yet by the party out-of-power, a.k.a. “the Resistance.” I have a solution: instead of holding these children in some sort of jail-like facility until their identity can be sorted out, just give each one of them an honorary masters degree in Diversity Studies from Harvard and let them, for God’s sake, go free in the world’s greatest job market. Before you know it, we’ll have the next generation of Diversity and Inclusion deans, and America will be safe from racism, sexism, and Hispanophobia.
I won’t waste more than this sentence in arguing that official policy for the treatment of juvenile illegal immigrants is exactly what it was under Mr. Obama, and Mr. Bush before him. I didn’t hear Paul Krugman of The New York Times hollering about the various federal agencies acting “like Nazis” back in 2014, or 2006.
You’d think that ICE officers were taking these kids out behind the dumpster and shooting them in the head. No, actually, the kids are watching Marvel Comics movies, playing video games, or soccer, and getting three square meals a day while the immigration officials try to figure out who their parents are, or how to repatriate them to their countries-of-origin if they came here without any parents – say, with the assistance of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel. By the way, these make up the majority of kids detained in the latest wave of mass border crossings.
Actual political leadership among “the Resistance” is AWOL this week. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer failed to offer up any alternative legislative plan for sorting out these children differently. One can infer in the political chatter emanating from the Offendedness Cartel that immigration law is ipso-facto cruel and inhuman and that the “solution” is an open border. In theory, this might play to the Democratic Party’s effort to win future elections by enlisting an ever-growing voter base of Mexican and Central American newcomers. But it assumes that somehow these newcomers get to become citizens, with the right to vote in US elections – normally an arduous process requiring an application and patience – but that, too, is apparently up for debate, especially in California, where lawmakers are eager to enfranchise anyone with a pulse who is actually there, citizen or not.
Krugman of The Times really hit the ball out of the park today with his diatribe comparing US Immigration enforcement to the Nazis treatment of the Jews. As a person of the Hebrew persuasion myself, I rather resent the reckless hijacking of this bit of history for the purpose of aggrandizing the sentimentally fake moral righteousness of the Resistance. It actually diminishes the enormity of the Nazi campaign against European Jews. I daresay that commentary like Krugman’s will only serve to amplify a growing resentment of Jewish intellectuals in this country – including myself, increasingly the target of anti-Jewish calumnies and objurgations.
You’d think that Mr. Trump had offered to blow up Ellis Island the way the Resistance is clamoring to pull down statues of Thomas Jefferson.
One also can’t fail to notice that this latest hysteria was ginned up the very same week that the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and FBI Director Christopher Wray testified in congress about the gross and astounding misconduct in the executive suites of those sister agencies – literally a bastion of the Resistance (or Deep State bureaucracy). Some kind of giant worm is turning in that circle of the three-ring-circus US politics has become.
A lot of the characters who politicized the FBI – turned it into a chop-shop for election campaign shenanigans – will be headed for grand juries and some of them maybe even jail. It may be the sort of jail in the federal system that offers ping pong and bocce ball, but it won’t be the same as practicing law on K Street in a wainscoted office with coffered ceilings and lunch of poulet chasseur sent up from the brasserie downstairs. Those confined will have plenty of time to commiserate with the kids from south-of-the-border who were dragged into the USA one way or another by people who didn’t care what happened to them, or reckon on it if they did care.
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Accurate information is out there. If we want it.
Examples of the fake news driving the panic.
Moral panics produce an “anything goes” policy by journalists, encouraging people to exaggerate or lie. The stories go viral at light speed, while corrections move like snails.
The government has not “lost” 1500 migrant children.
Outrage on the Left about this photo. Until they learned it was from 2014, during the Obama years. Then came the explanations. See the story at Business Insider.
“Tweeted photo inaccurately indicates boy ‘caged’ by federal government” by W. Gardner Selby at Politifact — It was staged at a protest.
This is what happens when a government believes people are “illegal.”
Kids in cages. pic.twitter.com/OAnvr9cl3P
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) June 12, 2018
About the TIME cover of the young illegal migrant girl and Trump: “Was migrant girl on US border taken from mother? Unfounded” by AFP. By “unfounded” they mean “a lie.” Here is what a correct version of the cover would look like.
Obama began the policy
R. Andrew Free briefly discussed this with Obama in 2015. Separations were a deterrent: “I’ll tell you what we can’t have. It’s these parents sending their kids here on a dangerous journey and putting their lives at risk.”
See this description of US policy from a NGO report dated 10 January 2017 (before Trump’s inauguration), in the section: Separating Families as a Method of Deterrence.
“As a matter of procedure and policy, border agents routinely separate family members, including intentionally, as punishment – or “consequences” – through what DHS calls its Consequence Delivery System (CDS). These consequences are meant to deter future migration, often regardless of international protection or other humanitarian concerns. The CDS has been implemented systematically since 2005. Common examples of CDS include Reinstatement of Removal, criminal prosecution for an immigration offense such as reentry (including Operation Streamline), lateral repatriation, Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP), and Mexican Interior Repatriation Program (MIRP).”
Life in the detention centers
The flood of minors — 2/3 male, many in the 15-18 — caught the government by surprise. As usual, it was slow to respond. Many of the early facilities were inadequate, and some were placed with poor-vetted vendors. Now most live in conditions far superior to those at home, and better than those of many poor Americans.
- “What it’s like inside the former superstore in Texas where the US is holding 1,400 immigrant children” by Bob Ortega at CNN.
- “PHOTOS: Inside Shelter for Illegal Alien Children Separated from Parents.“
Long Island News 12 looks at a facility housing migrant children separated from families.
“The Children’s Village is a federally funded foster care system that provides children with resources such as boarding and recreational and medical centers. News 12 is told 20 children, ages 9 to 17, were brought to the facility after federal agents separated them from their parents.
“The president of The Children’s Village says the children have been in contact with their families.
“Dr. Traci Gardner is the facility’s chief medical officer for immigration services. ‘When they come to me, they are nervous about getting a physical,” says Gardner. “Sometimes I am the first doctor they’ve ever seen or met.’ She says some children arrived on the 180-acre campus with minor health conditions, like colds and blisters and occasionally lice. Once they’re treated, Gardner says the biggest challenge is helping them cope with separation from their parents. …
“Trained staff guide the teens through a number of daily activities, including school and recreation, such as swimming and weightlifting.”
It’s not just Trump.
“Fact-Checking 4 Claims About Detaining Children at the Border” by Fred Lucas at the Daily Signal. Well-documented (links!) rebuttals to four of the most popular lies.
The Automatic Earth shows articles that put this hysteria in a larger context.
From the Obama years: ACLU Obtains Documents Showing Widespread Abuse Of Child Immigrants In US Custody.
“Theresa May’s brutal family separations would make Trump blush” by Satbir Singh at The Guardian.
About Australia’s holding facility: “Australia is wilfully damaging the health of children on Nauru to make a point – and it is appalling” at the Sydney Morning Herald.
Precedents from our past that have been put down the memory hole: FDR’s Mexican Repatriation. Perhaps a million or more were expelled across the border.
How these panics are used to manipulate us.
“Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — “Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers.”
“Pedophrasty: Argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures.”
About Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (Wikipedia) worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, before working as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he began writing books on a full-time basis. Kunstler is the author of 12 novels and has been a regular contributor to many major media, writing about environmental and economic issues. He is a leading supporter of the movement known as “New Urbanism.”
He has lectured at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT, and many other colleges. He has written five non-fiction books.
- The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape
- Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century
- The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition
- The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Cent
- Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation
For More Information
Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon.
If you found this post of use, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. Also see these posts about immigrants, about fake news, and especially these…
- Essential reading about hidden history: The history of immigration and America, lost amidst the more useful myths.
- Migration from the south into America: new people, new foods, new political systems.
- Immigration as a reverse election: our leaders get a new people.
- Look at immigration policy to see our government respond to its masters.
- The numbers about immigration that fuel Trump’s campaign.
- Immigration to the US surges. It’s good news for Trump.
- Trump wants to defend our borders. Democrats protest.
- The lies about immigration keeping the borders open.
