22.06.2023

Venezuelans wanting to escape conditions in no small part triggered by US sanctions

Bussing and abusing

More and more Republican states are cynically treating migrants as political pawns. But what lies behind the surge in numbers coming over the border? Daniel Lazare blames wars, global warming, economic meltdown and the booming illegal drugs trade

Instead of solving problems, America’s increasingly decrepit political system prefers moving them about - literally.

Undocumented migrants are the latest example. As the number flowing over the US-Mexican border has zoomed, politicians have responded by bussing them to different states, moving them to affluent suburbs, or even dumping them on the Canadian border - anything and everything, that is, as long as it stirs up resentment and avoids anything resembling a genuine solution.

The game began 14 months ago, when Texas governor Greg Abbott - an arch-reactionary who believes in banning abortion and legalising guns - rounded up 30 asylum-seekers from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and sent them on an ‘all expenses paid’ bus trip to Washington DC - some 1,700 miles away. “Texas should not have to bear the burden of the Biden administration’s failure to secure our border,” Abbott declared. So let the White House handle it instead. Over the next nine days, he sent nine busloads more.

Not to be outdone, Arizona governor Doug Ducey - a Republican who is every bit as conservative - began sending busloads of migrants from his state’s border towns to Washington as well. Ron DeSantis - the Florida governor vying for next year’s Republican presidential nomination - went one better in September by putting 48 undocumented migrants on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard (a pricey vacation spot off the coast of Massachusetts, where Barack and Michelle Obama have an $11.75 million summer home). The manoeuvre generated scads of publicity and established DeSantis as the up-and-coming bad boy of the ultra-right - even worse, maybe, than Trump himself.

Then the Dems started doing it too. Katie Hobbs announced that she would start bussing migrants out of Arizona as soon as she took over from Ducey as governor in January. After Texas sent migrants to Colorado, Democratic governor Jared Polis responded by sending them to New York.¹ New York mayor Eric Adams (also a Democrat) sent busloads to Canada and then began transferring them to the city’s affluent northern suburbs, where local police vowed to block them at the border.

After pushing through a draconian state law banning illegals from entering the state in the first place, DeSantis finally began flying planeloads across the continent to Sacramento, where California governor Gavin Newsom - yet another presidential hopeful, this time for the Democrats - seized on the gesture to launch a war of words against Sunbelt Republicans. As he put it in a recent fundraising appeal,

Eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates are red [ie, Republican] and gun deaths are almost two times as high in red states. The Supreme Court has stripped women of their liberty and let red states replace it with mandated birth. They ban books, silence teachers and make it harder to vote ... The reason Republicans like Ron DeSantis are fanning the flames of culture wars is to distract from the fact that Florida has higher murder rates, worse education, and worse healthcare outcomes than states like California.

He is right. Sunbelt Republicans are caught up in a death cult that they are now trying to spread to the country as a whole. But the system is so broken that Newsom and politicians like him are helpless to resist. After hurling an insult or two, all they can do is put in place meaningless palliatives that make them look even more foolish than before.

Underlying causes

Not that the American liberals are alone in this respect. On the contrary, rising migration rates are a storm raging across the globe. Britain, France, Israel - there is no advanced capitalist state in which far-right forces are not making the most of the crisis to batter down democratic defences.

The reason is that, the more capitalism breaks down, the more it unleashes policies that are so punitive and destructive that millions of people are sent fleeing for their lives. Although the process has been growing for years, the period since the 2008 financial meltdown has seen a vast intensification, as a recent report by the UN Refugee Agency makes clear. In late 2012, for example, the number of displaced people around the globe stood at 42.7 million. By late 2022, it topped 100 million, better than one person in 80 worldwide and more than double the level of just 10 years earlier. For 23 countries with a combined population of 850 million facing high or medium-intensity conflicts, war was plainly a driving factor.²

But it’s not just war per se, but war as a manifestation of capitalist crisis at its most concrete. The 2015 refugee crisis (the greatest since World War II), for instance, was a direct outgrowth of the military violence that the US unleashed in Libya, Syria, Yemen and other the Middle Eastern countries from 2011 on - violence that put millions of people to flight and which was ultimately about a struggle for control of the region’s vast energy resources. Burkina Faso, which now has two million displaced people out of a population of 22 million, is similarly the victim of war in the form of a growing, lethal Islamist insurgency.³ But the insurgency did not arise out of thin air either. On the contrary, it is a direct by-product of Nato intervention in Libya in 2011, which, by toppling strongman Muammar Gaddafi, reduced the country to anarchy and allowed rebels to grab and then distribute millions of small arms across the region from Nigeria to the Sudan. Burkina Faso is an innocent bystander caught up in a Nato-instigated coup.

Burkina Faso is also crippled by drought, but it is an innocent bystander in this respect as well. The climate crisis, which is causing temperatures in the central Sahel to rise 50% faster than the global average, is not Burkina Faso’s fault, obviously, but the result of massive carbon emissions that advanced industrial nations are forever promising to curtail, yet which they never quite get around to doing.

Like the forces that tore apart the Middle East in the 2010s, those ripping Burkina Faso to shreds today are largely exogenous - imposed, that is, from without by an imperial system in its death throes. Although all advanced capitalist countries are implicated, the US is putting its own special stamp on the process by militarising local conflicts more and more, by instituting trade policies whose purposes are to improve its own economic standing, and by roping regional powers like Australia, Britain or the European Union into strategic ‘partnerships’, whose aim is to subordinate them to American interests.

Closer to home, there is yet another US policy that is wreaking havoc throughout the western hemisphere and driving up the crisis at America’s southern border to greater and greater heights. This is the war on drugs. Within America, it has been an unqualified disaster ever since Richard Nixon formally declared it in 1971. As arrests have multiplied, the prison population has zoomed to the point where the United States accounts for 21% of the global population behind bars - even though it contains just 4.4% of the world’s people.⁴ With black drug users three times likelier to be arrested than whites, the policy is not only brutal, but racist in the extreme.⁵

Still, it would not be quite so bad if it made drug problems better. But it does not - it makes them worse. The problem is that prohibition encourages a shift to intoxicants that are easier to conceal, harder to detect, and which also yield more profits. As drugs have grown more potent, fatal overdoses have multiplied to nearly 108,000 a year - more than gun and highway deaths combined.⁶ It is a nightmare that grows worse with each new drug-war escalation.

Yet the results outside the US are even more nightmarish. South of the border, the homicide rate has more than tripled since the US and Mexico jointly announced the Mérida Initiative in 2007 - an all-sided effort aimed at stamping out the drug trade once and for all, but which only ended up exciting it to new levels. The homicide rate in Honduras has tripled since that country emerged as a major transshipment point in the 1990s. Haiti, another major transshipment point, has been convulsed by gang violence over the same period, as have Guatemala and El Salvador.

Then there is Ecuador - a country of 17.3 million that saw a rightwing coup last month, when president Guillermo Lasso disbanded the opposition-led national assembly in order to avoid impeachment on charges of embezzlement. Previously a placid bystander, Ecuador saw violence explode when coca production began surging in neighbouring Colombia after decades of eradication efforts and narcotrafficantes started looking for a new outlet to the sea. As local gangs warred over drug trade routes, the prison population quadrupled, while homicides nearly tripled between 2020 and 2021. But, with the above-ground economy still reeling from Covid-19, the only job opportunities are below, with the result that the drug trade can only expand. As it does, it is a sure bet that political instability will grow with it.

The results at the US-Mexican border are all too obvious. In 2012, 4,721 Ecuadorans were apprehended trying to cross. In 2021, the number hit 102,575, nearly a 22-fold increase. The number of Salvadorans trying to cross the border rose two and a half times over the same period, while the number of Mexicans rose 34 percent - from 520,000 to 696,000. All were fleeing conditions at home that the US is seemingly intent on exacerbating. In all, illegal immigration has more than doubled since 2012 - not despite the war on drugs, but because of it.⁷

Stupidity

All this is self-destruction at its purest - but not from the point of view of an ultra-right intent on using the crisis to bash liberals over the head. Sensing a winner, conservative Republicans are amping up anti-drug rhetoric to ever more absurd levels. Louisiana senator John Kennedy (no relation to the late president, by the way) recently called for a military invasion. Joe Biden, he said, should “call president López Obrador and make him a deal he can’t refuse to allow our military and our law enforcement officials to go into Mexico and work with his to stop the cartels”,⁸ He also wants to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations - as do Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, Texas governor Greg Abbott, plus senior republicans in 20 other states.

And, of course, there is Donald Trump. “This is the time for Mexico, with the help of the United States, to wage war on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth,” Trump tweeted back in 2019. According to Mark Esper, his former secretary of defence, Trump twice asked if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”, adding: “We could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs quietly. No-one would know it was us.”⁹ More recently, Trump has reportedly asked advisors to draw up a “battle plan” to attack Mexico if he is elected in 2024.¹⁰

And, lest anyone think that Democrats are better, secretary of state Antony Blinken said in March that the Biden administration is thinking about hitting Mexican drug cartels with the terrorist label too.¹¹

The stupidity is mind-blowing, especially considering that opiate cultivation in Afghanistan surged as much as 41 times during 20 years of US military occupation.¹² Given such a track record, why would anyone think that a US military invasion would result in anything better in Mexico?

The answer is that they do not. Republicans are not thinking about how to end the drug war, for the simple reason that they want to see it continue, so they can use the resultant mayhem to bludgeon Democrats all the more effectively. The more ultra-potent drugs that are sold, the more users die, the more refugees pile up at the US-Mexican border - the more such horrors accumulate, the more they can blame liberal permissiveness for causing them in the first place. All Dems can do is echo such proposals or shift the problem onto someone else and hope that voters do not notice.

The upshot is a bipartisan pas de deux resulting in one outcome only: mutually assured destruction.