America's fake "border crisis"

It's been a bipartisan reality over many decades that America treats "illegal immigrants" crossing the Rio Grande with a nod and a wink. That's because both sides of the aisle are keen to give American farmers the cheap undocumented labour they need to make ends meet.

All that cheap undocumented labour has a welcome ripple effect far beyond the farm-fields of southern California. It serves to depress the wages of workers across the country. That's considered a happy thing among the political elite in both parties. After all, who wants to pay more for strawberries or tomatoes? And who in the finer counties of Connecticut or New Jersey wants to hire a landscaping contractor who uses only fully legal employees?

The costs would be through the roof!

Illegals have always been a welcome thing to America's ruling class.

So what has changed?

Two things.

First of all, the sheer volume of illegal immigrants has overwhelmed the usual job markets for them. The influx is overwhelming the uptake. That leaves a lot of illegals lingering in border detention, whereas traditionally they would have readily made their way to the vegetable plantations of California.

The increase in volume is more than anything the result of deteriorating living conditions in the countries of central America. And why are those living conditions deteriorating? Long story short, US meddling in the politics of central American states, always on the side of the oligarchs and never on the side of the masses, has made life intolerable for the working classes in much of the region. Combine that with the "war on drugs," which has largely militarised law enforcement while simultaneously giving rise to militarised drug cartels, and it's no wonder that you've got what you've got at America's southern border.

Secondly, the "border crisis" has become a useful trope for both sides in polarized America, and more than that, a blunt instrument in the hands of a money-losing media desperate to stir up controversies that will generate clicks and glue eyeballs to screens.

OH MY GOD WE'RE PUTTING CHILDREN IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS!!!

Well, how can that not be a headline grabber? Then the other side inevitably replies with;

BUT OBAMA DID IT FIRST!!!

Nobody, but nobody, remembers that both the Republicans and the Democrats have been totally hunky-dory with meddling in central America and turning a blind eye to illegal immigration for at least the last fifty years.

Crisis?

There's no crisis... it's just more of America's chickens coming home to roost.