The Immigration Crisis: Making Victims

“Placing the cart before the horse”. Every time I think about the immigration situation all over the world, I think of that saying. Past and present immigration policy is over complicated and fails to consider population, services, infrastructure, and logistics. Refugees are the carts. They are the part of the equation that needs to be moved. The horse is the mechanism needed to facilitate movement. The problem in this country is too many carts with not enough horses. Our Immigration system brings in more carts than it has horses. This is fundamentally flawed. 

Tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants are already in this country. We can’t account for or support those individuals. It’s impossible to integrate them into society as contributors but they do burden public service, economic, and infrastructure systems. It’s not a lack of compassion. It’s not racism. It’s math.

America is not alone but we are failing to learn from the mistakes of other countries. According to Security Management, “Around 1 million refugees- mainly from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria arrived in Europe in 2015 alone, straining resources and raising security concerns”. Germany now has an estimated 100,000 migrants to deport and the European Union (EU) has now signed an agreement with Afghanistan where Afghanistan has agreed to accept an unlimited number of refugees whose country of origin is Afghanistan. By ignoring drastic reversals in immigration policies of countries similar to our own, the United States is making a mistake proven to be dangerous for the American public.

The article “Minor Migrants” was informative and brought-up many interesting points. European countries have been accepting refugees at a staggering rate and now we are seeing an alarming rate of terrorist, anti-social, and criminal activity being carried out by perpetrators from those areas or who have been indoctrinated with anti-western philosophies. These individuals have failed or refused to integrate into society. Allowing people to enter the country who are not willing to integrate into American culture is dangerous and we are starting to see how dangerous it can be. Europe has suffered around 30 acts of terrorism in the last seven and a half months. That is approximately 4 terrorist acts per month.   

The vast majority of refugees and immigrants are productive and positive members of society because they want to be Americans. Legal immigrants and refugees come to America to live a better life and be in a place where their families could live peacefully and thrive. 

In my experience, immigrants, here legally, share the above concern. They left their countries of origin to find something different, something better for them and allowing people to come here and diminish what this country offers is highly offensive.

“Minor Migrants” focused on how this process relates to unaccompanied minors. According to the United Nations, 35% of asylum seekers in 2015, in Europe, were minors or under the age of eighteen. This causes an enormous logistical problem. These refugees will almost certainly be burdens to the system and will require a massive amount of funds, resources, and services of all kinds. Imagine child services, states, and local government and community crisis resources having an increased workload of 350,000 children in one year and not one of those was already in the system or an incoming child from this country. 

If they were divided evenly among the 50 states that’s approximately 7000 children per State. Some needing more extensive care than others but that means each state is using tax money to finance 7000 children for roughly 10 years until they are old enough to process out of child services. According to childrensrights.org roughly 670,000 children were in foster care in 2015. That’s about a 52% increase in the workload and expense that the child protection services would incur. Child services would encounter the same problems that overcrowding prisons are facing. Prisons have to let violent offenders out and child services would have to cut services, accept less American children in crisis, and put young adults out that may not be ready to survive on their own. 

“Minor Migrants” highlighted the frightening journey and terrifying results of the lack of efficient and adequate immigration mechanism for minors.  In Europe 10,000 children “went missing” after migrating to Europe. Missing folks! There is no way to account for, track, or identify 10,000 human beings that came from countries where terrorist are known to recruit, train, and have safe haven. This is terrifying. They could have been abducted, abused, sold into slavery, killed, or even recruited into criminal enterprises such as gangs and terrorist extremist groups. They could be anywhere and we would never know because they don’t exist on paper. If this can be accomplished with children, criminals and terrorists can accomplish it. Without the proper screening before they get here and without proper housing, educational programs, and processing mechanisms we create another problematic and dangerous situation.

Massive amounts of disheveled, tired, malnourished, uneducated, frustrated, and hopeless individuals, especially children, are prime targets for recruiters from extremist groups. By not having the proper logistics in place we add to the conditions that drive people to crime and extremism. We gather vulnerable individuals and pack them into small confined areas. We are so desperate for help, we bring in crowds of people to assist, talk to, and care for these vulnerable children and that’s how the recruiters walk right in and recruit, entrap, and smuggle the next wave of terrorist. We are unaware of what is going on because there is a lack of supervision and screening of those we accept assistance from. They use us, victimize the children and we thank them as they leave and we invite them back for the next influx of refugees. 

These children are highly sought after by smugglers, criminals, and extremists. Young males are indoctrinated and put to work as soldiers and young women are put to work producing children to fill future ranks within the cause and the process is self sustaining and just keeps repeating.

In Europe they have sanctuary countries. America has self-proclaimed sanctuary cities. Some may think that is a nice idea but sanctuary cities give these refugees a reason to seek out and cooperate with criminal street gangs, organized crime, and smuggling networks and often provide a service to those entities and never make it to a sanctuary city because they are killed as a means to an end or just as a means of convenience.  Those arriving in the sanctuary cities are often indebted to their new masters, the criminals who brought them, and become criminals themselves. This situation leads them to the prison system where they are again thrown in with massive amounts of people, only this time it’s worse because the vast majority of there new daily life is filled with being further educated in the various arts of crime, hate, and institutionalization. Once refugee children, now full blown criminals or terrorists, who believe the life they have is all this country has for them, remain angry, hateful, and aggressive towards anything that is authoritative, established, or representative of the system that failed them. 

These children started out as carts without horses. It is both ignorant and arrogant to think and behave this way as a society. We have to fix the process first and not overrun it while doing so. If not we are leading more people in the wrong direction, a dangerous and self-destructive direction. America needs to recognize its limitations and develop a system to effectively serve the migrating population correctly. Right now, the horse can’t pull one cart much less multiple carts. If America wants to continue being America and if people want to come here to be Americans, we must get a system in place with enough horse-power to safely pull each cart all the way through to citizenship and successful integration into American society.