Tag: immigration reform

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Opinion Viewpoint

You Lose, Cruz.

We doubt that Senator Ted Cruz will win the 2016 Republican nomination, much less the presidency, and he’ll lose because of the hypocritical position he’s adopted on immigration. Everyone who follows politics can see this, except Ted Cruz.

Cruz is a well-educated man with an undergraduate degree from Princeton, a law degree from Harvard, and a judicial clerkship with former Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Despite this, and the fact that Cruz and his family have benefited from generous immigration laws and policies in the United States and Canada (his father emigrated from Cuba to the U.S. in 1957, Ted was born in Canada), he offers zero creative leadership in addressing a broken U.S. immigration system.

Senator Cruz’s focus is on “border security.” He sponsored a bill to increase, by 300 percent, the number of immigration agents at our southern border. He’s also called for abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and sending all revenue agents south to secure the border. We really don’t need an army of accountants at the border, and Cruz, of course, ignores the fact that the border patrol is already five times larger than it was 20 years ago. Next, Cruz calls for overturning President Obama’s executive orders on deferred action, which allows millions of undocumented people to live, work, study, and keep their families together (at least temporarily) in the U.S. Cruz also signed onto a friend of the court brief in support of the lawsuit brought by 26 states that has halted the President’s “Deferred Action” program.

Cruz’s gaze south is disconcerting at best and racist at worst. His emphasis on militarization of the southern border suggests that threats to our national security originate in our geographic south, though there’s no real evidence to support this.

Cruz’s position of more security and penalties for undocumented immigrants who have “jumped the line” to come to the U.S. will not play well with Latino voters. Such voters want Latino citizens, visitors, and the undocumented treated respectfully by American politicians and citizens. They want educational opportunities — such as tuition equity policies — they want access to basic health care, and they want a pathway to succeed in our nation through hard work, not via handouts. Cruz’s inability to grasp the extent of his own immigration privilege has led him into a Latino lasso from which there is no escape.

The difference between Cuban-Americans and other Hispanics among us is significant and requires some historic perspective. First, the 1959 Castro revolution in Cuba, which started out nationalist and quickly turned Marxist-Leninist, has deeply influenced United States immigration policy toward that island nation. Essentially, Cubans who fled Cuba in the aftermath of the revolution have been welcomed and supported by the United States’ people and government. 

The path of Cuban immigrants contrasts sharply with that of immigrants from the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, many of whom suffer serious social deprivation in their homelands. For example, Haitians are treated unkindly by our immigration system despite United Nation-supplied social statistics that show deep economic despair: Life expectancy in Haiti is 64 years, compared to 80 in nearby Cuba. Public expenditure on health care in Haiti as a percentage of GDP is 6.4 percent (in Cuba it’s 8.6 percent), and the population living below minimum level of dietary energy consumption is 51.8 percent in Haiti, in Cuba it’s 5 percent.

People of Mexican descent living in the United States are neither impressed nor energized by the Cruz anti-immigration rhetoric. Of the roughly 54 million Hispanics living in the U.S., 64 percent are of Mexican descent. By comparison, 3.7 percent are of Cuban descent. Mexican Americans, Haitian Americans, and others who wish to come to the U.S. recoil against sanctimonious speak from those who have enjoyed special immigration privileges. Cruz, like any candidate seeking to win a national election, can only succeed by building a strong coalition with Hispanics across racial, cultural, and socio-economic boundaries. He’s unlikely to sway anyone in the U.S. with tired, hollow talk of militarizing the border. Only bipartisan, thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform can help create a sane, equitable, and humane system. The Texas senator has energetically fought against this sort of reform. For this reason alone, Ted Cruz seems determined to lose.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Republicans at the Crossroads

When it comes to the Republican Party’s immigration divide, the more things stay the same, the more they stay the same. 

The 2016 campaign has begun, and Jeb Bush, a pro-immigration-reform candidate, is believed to have raised the most money. Yet Republicans in Congress are under pressure to roll back the president’s executive action that conservatives consider amnesty. Republicans don’t have the votes to do it. The issue promises to dog the GOP from now at least until Election Day.

A few weeks back, House Republicans passed a bill that would defund parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to block President Obama’s executive order shielding up to 5 million people from deportation. The bill would restore funds that expire in February to the rest of the department. Though the bill can’t pass the Senate, with all Senate Democrats united against it, GOP leaders there promise to bring it up anyway. 

And “Plan B,” they say, doesn’t yet exist. Failure to pass a bill before February 27th will allow Democrats and the president to claim Republicans risked funding vital national security functions in a time of rising terror threats, concerns that register high in polls of voter priorities. 

Some Republicans argue a lapse in DHS funding would make little difference, because most of the department’s employees are considered essential and would remain on the job with their pay delayed. But creating an avoidable cliff, especially for GOP leaders who have promised an end to them, is foolish in light of the unavoidable cliffs that are up next on the calendar.

Conservatives are likely to fight their leaders and push for more confrontation over the debt ceiling in March, the Medicare “doc fix” in April, and the Highway Trust Fund in May — all must-pass bills that conservatives will view as opportunities to gain leverage over Obama.

Meanwhile, to soothe conservatives, the House prepped a border security bill that would effectively eliminate hope for comprehensive reform, requiring the DHS to secure the border completely — blocking 100 percent of entries — in five years. But conservatives dismissed it for failing to include interior enforcement measures for immigrants already here illegally. The bill was pulled.

The latest concession was Speaker John Boehner’s recent announcement that the House would sue the president over his executive action. It’s hard to see that token move assuaging angry conservatives.

Some momentary reflection and reconsideration of immigration followed GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 — a devastating 71 percent to 21 percent wipeout among Latino voters — but faded rapidly, and two years later, the party is more divided than it was then. The “autopsy” by the Republican National Committee suggested passing reform and stated, “It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs, or the economy; if Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.” The warning went nowhere.

But immigration reform remains a goal for those who influence and fund presidential campaigns. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal and Fox News Channel, recently gushed at remarks by Bush on the benefits of immigration reform. Murdoch, and influential casino magnate and GOP funder Sheldon Adelson, both took the remarkable step of urging the party to pass reform in high-profile op-eds published within one day of each other, after freshman Rep. Dave Brat (R-Virginia) used the immigration issue to topple former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a June primary election.

Republicans won’t be passing any immigration reform, but it will remain the subject of contentious debate for the next two years, from the halls of Congress to the campaign trail — much to the delight of Democrats.

A.B. Stoddard writes for The Hill, where a version of this column first appeared.

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Editorial Opinion

Light in the Legislative Tunnel

Okay, so what happened to gridlock? In Washington, there was the passage of the so-called “Cromnibus” spending bill, which provides safe passage for $1 trillion in federal expenditures through 2015. No showdowns, no filibusters or cloture battles, no threats to shut down the government.

Granted, there are some objectionable provisions, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) inveighed valiantly (but in vain) against one of them — a proviso that seemingly opens the door for big financial institutions covered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to resume the trading in derivatives swaps that contributed so much to the Big Crash of 2008-9.

But congressional Democrats didn’t want another shutdown battle and, for a change, neither did Republicans, who may, after their virtual sweep at the polls this year, simply want a chance to prove they can actually govern. There is still a gridlock of sorts. The word “cromnibus,” incidentally, is an amalgamation of “continuing resolution” and “omnibus.” The former term, often abbreviated as “CR,” denotes a decision to continue with the previous year’s spending and authorizations in lieu of an agreement. But only one aspect of this year’s omnibus bill had to be dealt with in that manner — funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which the GOP held up so as to leverage DHS funding next spring against President Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Still, the end-of-year spending bill hearkens back to what, in comparison to gridlock, were the good old days of bipartisan wheeling and dealing, mutual backscratching, and backroom deals. That’s what constitutes “progress” in our time.

And in Nashville … After two years in which the state’s new Republican super-majority successfully blocked acceptance of millions of dollars in annual funding for Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the GOP’s acquiescent  but well-intentioned Governor Bill Haslam has somehow wriggled his twisted arm free and cut a deal with the feds! And even Ron Ramsey, the arch-conservative state Senate speaker and lieutenant governor who has more or less directed legislative policy during Haslam’s tenure, has professed himself open-minded about the plan that the governor is calling “Insure Tennessee.”

Never mind that Insure Tennessee may or may not be an ideal way of coping with the problem of uninsured Tennesseans or of applying the substantial federal subsidies that come with acceptance of this aspect of ACA. The plan’s complicated methodology has a Rube Goldberg-like look to it — one that will, we hope, get spelled out via debate during the special legislative session Haslam has called for in early January.

The point is that if the GOP’s legislative super-majority, which has granted itself veto power over any proposed version of Medicaid expansion, can be brought to accept Insure Tennessee, and, if the feds do follow through with a waiver for Haslam’s alternative, there are real benefits. Most importantly, TennCare, the state’s version of Medicaid, would get a badly needed infusion of operating funds, enough to help rescue Tennessee’s hospitals, so many of which are teetering on the edge of insolvency.

Make no mistake: Neither in Washington nor in Nashville is right-wing tunnel vision over with. In some ways it may be just beginning. But maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel — something worth groping toward, anyhow.

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (November 27, 2014)

Our borders are so porous that they have become nearly impossible to police. Thousands of aliens sneak into this country every day and head for border towns where they can blend in with people of similar color who speak a similar language, making it impossible to detect who is and who is not a documented citizen.

The border is so long that no fence short of the Wall of China could even begin to stop the migrating hordes that seek sanctuary in the USA. They have infiltrated every major city, and many illegals have had children here so that they can automatically become American citizens. These are the “anchor babies” you’ve heard so much about. There are so many aliens already here that you could never round up and deport them all. And the number of good jobs that they take away from able-bodied Americans is scandalous. They have begun to dominate entire business sectors and have affected popular culture so much that our children are exposed. The lure of cheap drugs has caused Americans in border towns to flock to pharmacies across the border in order to smuggle drugs back into this country.

They talk differently. Their food is different. Their national sports are different. Let’s face it, these people are different than we are. I strongly believe, and many other like-minded patriots agree, that it’s about damn time that we crack down on this endless stampede of Canadians invading our land.

They come across in border towns like Detroit, Buffalo, and Rochester, but those who really want to enter undetected use the wide swaths of land that are too remote to patrol. They enter in places like Duluth, Minnesota, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, and I understand that the farther west you go, the more hardcore the trafficking is in illegal drugs, particularly marijuana. Demand has fallen totally off in Washington state, but I’ve heard about Canucks with calves the size of saskatoons from smuggling backpacks full of dangerously potent cannabis from Vancouver across the border. The Canadians call it “B.C. Bud,” or at least that’s what I was told. And not only are their legal drugs cheaper, I get at least 15 emails per week enticing me to buy them. You can even order them through the mail, flouting the law. And what is this Vicodin they keep wanting me to take?

Canadians don’t care about our laws. They were all bootleggers during prohibition, and some of the most prominent families made their fortunes supplying illegal hooch to Al Capone. Every time our country enters into one of our periodic righteous wars with somebody we don’t like, it’s always Canada that openly welcomes our cowardly draft-dodgers into their midst, especially during that pesky Vietnam business.

Over the past 40 years, there has been a stealth campaign among Canadians to infiltrate and take over the entertainment industry, beginning with the Toronto immigrant Lorne Michaels. In the mid-1970s, he invented a subversive television program called Saturday Night Live, and ever since, he’s relied on Canadians to spread his irreverent message – people like Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Norm McDonald, and Mike Meyers. This opened the floodgates for Canadian comedy with imported shows like SCTV, featuring perverted comics like John Candy, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, and Eugene Levy. Following their migrant trail came Jim Carrey, Howie Mandel, and Tommy Chong who began to take over our movie industry.

If our government had been vigilant enough to keep these freeloaders out, we would never have had to suffer through Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Wayne’s World, or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Canadians spend half their lives listening to Gordon Lightfoot and the other half watching hockey. They drink beers called Moosehead and Labatt and live on a diet of bacon and maple syrup, which they pour over everything. They refuse to speak American. Instead of “out and about,” they say, “Oot and aboot.” They swear allegiance to the British crown, and even have a state that wants to secede, where they force everyone to speak French. And now they want this XL Keystone Pipeline to transport Canadian oil across our great country into the Gulf of Mexico so they can sell it to the Russians and Chinese. Of course, there’s absolutely no danger of an oil spill in the Gulf, right?

It’s past time to round up all your Avril Lavignes, your Ryan Goslings, and your Anna Paquins and begin arranging their transport home. It’s shocking how deeply they have burrowed into our society. William Shatner is Canadian. I mean, Captain Kirk is an alien, for God’s sake. Even the hip-hop artist Drake comes from the mean streets of Toronto.

We refer to Mexicans as “illegal aliens,” but Canadians are always, “our friends up north.” I think it’s time to send these toque-wearing, cheese-eating, Celine Dion-listening ice skaters back into their own wretched country. Especially this Seth Rogan fellow, whose “nerd gets the girl” movies have caused young men to resort to gun violence. It’s time this invasion came to an end and relocations are in order.

I only have one request. When the government starts deporting Canadians, please deport Justin Bieber first, aye?

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Opinion Viewpoint

On the Beat

It’s a question I’m more than occasionally asked: “How come you don’t do much news anchoring, Mr. Smith?” My reply is simple: If I’m going to report on the action, I want to be where it is. Last week the diversity of news I covered as a general assignment reporter only reinforced why I think what I do is the best job in journalism. So, consider this a reporter’s notebook, with my impressions at the time I was on assignment.

Monday: Even for reporters, it’s sometimes hard to jump into Mondays with a lot of enthusiasm. But hearing about six shootings that resulted in two murders in four days in Brownsville, Tennessee, piqued my interest. Were they drug- or gang-related?

When you’re doing a story in a small community, you usually aim high when it comes to gathering information in the short period of time you’ve got to make it happen. Mayor Bill Rawls, who we reported on after he was elected as the first African-American mayor of Brownsville in June, was candid about the shock people were feeling over the shootings. Nearly all of them involved young black teens, including the random shooting of a 17 year old by another 17 year old following an argument over a cell phone.

In a town the size of Brownsville, where the black population is primarily self-segregated into a certain area of town, asking who knows what — and who did what — can quickly produce solid leads for the police. Mayor Rawls was taking a personal interest in all the cases, so much so that he was patrolling the streets in his own car trying to find names. “Wow,” I thought. How refreshing to have a mayor giving more than lip-service to crime-fighting in his community.

Tuesday: I hate dealing with law enforcement when it comes to news conferences on drug busts, identity theft, or check-cashing scams. Late in the afternoon, former Shelby County District Attorney Bill Gibbons and current D.A. Amy Weirich were among those on hand to tout warrants that had been issued for the arrest of 99 people involved in a phony check-cashing scheme targeting Walmart stores. Most of the suspects made a couple hundred dollars each after splitting the profits from cashing checks totaling around $41,000. As usual, the questions from the media were plentiful, while the available details were sketchy. However, I did have a good hamburger for lunch that day.

Wednesday: Venerable WDIA radio did a live remote from inside the Shelby County Corrections Center, where there were more county officials than inmates, who made up a literally “captive” audience. Radio personality Bev Johnson asked insightful questions of a hand-picked group of inmates, who told the tragic stories of their bad choices that landed them behind bars. Memphis Councilwoman Janis Fullilove managed to provide some comic relief with her own reflections from when she’d been incarcerated at Jail East. In a way, I guess her honesty about her own human frailties makes her strangely endearing to her constituents.

Thursday: In anticipation of President Obama’s immigration speech, I talked with local immigration attorney Barry McWhirter about what I think is the Pandora’s Box Obama has dared to open with his executive order. McWhirter made a strong case that Obama’s ultimate intent was to keep families together, rather than having them victimized by deportations. To me, Obama’s approach was another example of his tunnel vision, one that feeds into the criticism that he’s failed to develop much political finesse in his six years in office. Why now? Why this method?

Friday: Week’s end brought a frenzy of new leads for possible big stories. On my way to cover a ground-breaking for a new park in Frayser, I was waylaid by a call from the assignment desk. Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong had called an impromptu news conference. I had to make my apologies before the Frayser event, which would have been a great feel-good story. Then on the way to see Armstrong, an informant gave me two bombshells: The first was that Shelby County Juvenile Court Clerk Joy Touliatos had filed a lawsuit against Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael. The second was that District Attorney Weirich had been accused of withholding evidence from the defense in a case that was on appeal and would have to testify in Criminal Court.

This is why there’s the term Freaky Fridays. And it’s why during this Turkey Day week, I’m thankful I am a reporter, not an anchor — so I can gobble, gobble.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The Raging Bull in D.C.

It’s ironic that one day after his reelection to a sixth term as senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, the soon-to-be Senate majority leader, characterized the Congress as an angry, raging bull. In a stern, public admonition, McConnell warned President Obama against invoking executive action to alleviate our chronic immigration crisis, comparing such action to “waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

Ironic and sinister. The Republican leadership, which gained control of the U.S. Senate in the November 4th election and now controls both houses, blocked all attempts at reasonable immigration reform during the most recent session of Congress. Then, they blamed the president for any and all immigration crises, including the arrival of thousands of women and children from Central America this past summer. Then, they accused the president of being weak/soft on immigration and as frustration set in, the president’s numbers with Hispanics fell precipitously. Then, the day after their victory, the Republican leadership warned the president against taking much-needed action to solve our broken immigration system — action favored by the majority of Americans.

This script, written in Washington, seems to have emerged out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel. 

President Obama has the opportunity to lead via executive action, and he should do so immediately. He can end deportation of those in the country under irregular circumstances, excluding, of course, those who have committed serious, violent crimes. Rolling through a stop sign should not be grounds for deportation. He can put in place a program whereby millions of people are offered authorization to remain in the country, if they wish. They could apply for work permits; they could pay taxes with greater ease, and live here — temporarily — in relative peace.  

Obama’s ratings with Hispanics dropped 20 percent during the past two years. People are frustrated by the lack of action on immigration reform, and they blame one man, the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, rather than Congress, with its many faces, multiple agendas, and 50 shades of long-term deception on the immigration issue.

Executive action on immigration is not what any of us had hoped for as the solution to our broken system. But it looks like it will happen, and any executive action can be signed away by the next executive. It’s entirely possible the next executive will be a Republican, assuming Democrats behave as badly and awkwardly as they behaved in the most recent election cycle.

The most cited example involves McConnell’s Kentucky opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, who wouldn’t say whether she voted for Obama, when asked by reporters. It’s not a trick question, and it’s not an unfair question for a woman running as a Democrat for the United States Senate. Democrats lost (Grimes lost by 16 points) because they refused, in many places, to run as Democrats or to champion the many accomplishments of the past six years. Instead, they ran as lite, low-calorie Republicans, and many moderate Democrats and Independents simply voted for the real thing.  

On immigration, Democrats need to hold together as a party and support a president who has very few options at this point. Democrats need to develop a short-term strategy to support those with irregular immigration status who want to live and work here. Then, the Democratic leadership needs to develop a long-term plan to win the White House in 2016, retake the Congress, and pass comprehensive immigration reform. Americans are demanding this type of activist, bold leadership. The American people are much further ahead of their political leaders on this issue, and when the Democratic Party realizes this, they’ll return to power.

But it might be time for some new ideas within the Democratic leadership. Many pundits assume that Hillary Clinton is a lock for the Democratic nomination, but Clinton’s glide-path to the White House is fraught with turbulence. Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts, claims she’s not running, but we’d like to see her energy, brilliance, fearlessness, charisma, and leadership in the White House.

Can the nation endure an actual liberal from Massachusetts in the White House? We know what we can’t endure: the raging bull that’s de rigueur in D.C. these days.

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Opinion Viewpoint

It’s the Demographics, Stupid

George P. Bush visited Memphis last month to kick off Hispanic Heritage Month and to help raise funds for “Latino Memphis,” the Memphis advocacy group that supports the local Latino community. The Texas-based attorney with the famous last name (his grandfather is George H.W. Bush, his uncle is George W., and his father is Jeb) said nearly nothing in a 14-minute speech designed to be apolitical.

Given the big news out of Washington three days prior to Mr. Bush’s speech concerning Hispanics and President Obama, Bush missed an opportunity to engage in one of the nation’s most complex, controversial, and politically miscalculated social issues: our desperate need for comprehensive immigration reform.

President Obama’s decision on September 6th to delay any decision on unilateral action designed to help Hispanics allowed Republicans to (correctly) claim that the president is “playing politics.” Hispanic groups and others loyal to the Obama agenda reacted as if the president had issued a militant fatwa. “Bitter disappointment,” “sold out,” and “shameful” was some of the calmer language used to characterize the president’s decision. Since a comprehensive overhaul of our outdated immigration laws is not going to happen this year, and is unlikely during Obama’s term, executive action is the only path left for a president who has been outflanked in the immigration imbroglio.

Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve recognized deep flaws in our immigration system, and people are probably willing to wait a couple of months, if executive action is bold and effective. The election of a Republican president in 2016 could immediately undo an Obama executive action. In the meantime, let’s hope the president slows his deportation program to focus on supporting and strengthening families living here, working here, seeking educational opportunities here, and contributing to our economy and society.

The vast majority of the 11 million undocumented persons in our country has aspirations of a better life, either here or back home, and presidential action should focus on supporting struggling families rather than the current deport and divide model.

It’s suprising to still see Republican inaction and hostility toward our immigrant neighbors. Republican maniacal insistence on “border security” has become almost comical, given the vast sums spent already (about 18 billion per year) and the evident inability of technology to solve all our problems. This summer’s northward migration of tens of thousands of undocumented children and women arriving at our border to seek political asylum represents a refugee/humanitarian crisis that no amount of “border security” could have prevented or adjudicated.

In his Memphis speech, Bush cited some well-known statistics from the venerated Pew Research Center but offered neither context nor political perspective to help his party navigate the looming Latino political imperative. For example, Bush noted that Latinos account for 15 percent of the national population but account for 50 percent of the nation’s population growth. Though Bush failed to acknowledge it directly, Hispanics have political power in this nation, and that power will increase with time.

Hispanics in America know this, but national Hispanic leadership cannot come from Marco Rubio or Bush, both of whom have to contend with a political base that sees only repressive solutions to the immigration issue: vast and expanding numbers of security officials, more drones, taller fences, longer detentions, and more division of families.

What would work better is a comprehensive immigration package, such as the bill that’s been sitting for 14 months in the Senate, awaiting some future House action. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, tasked with “scoring” bills to access/predict their overall impact on society, has stated that the Senate immigration bill would cut the budget deficit by $197 billion over the next decade and $700 billion one decade later through more transparent tax-paying. They predict a 5.4 percent growth in the economy and higher wages over the next 20 years, if we pass the Senate bill. But we won’t, thanks to Republican intransigence.

Republicans can only win on this issue when they embrace reality, when they face the stark numbers, when they stop genuflecting to their angry, myopic leadership that refuses to acknowledge a simple certainty: It’s the demographics, stupid!

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Retourno to Hippie Hollow

“Retorno.”

It’s a word you see a lot in Mexico on highway road signs. It indicates a place where drivers can turn around by making a U-turn through the median. Instead of big crossover exits, you simply make a retorno when you want to get somewhere on the other side of the highway.

My wife and I made a retorno to Mexico last week, spending a week south of Tulum in “eco-friendly” lodging — meaning no air-conditioning and showers that should more properly be called “trickles.” But the off-season rates are cheap; the beaches are beautiful and uncrowded; the sunrise, surf, and sea breeze soothe you awake; and the ocean is so close you can toss a cellphone into it from your cabana. Which is tempting.

I first went to the area 15 years ago, supposedly to vacation in Cancun, but I found it intolerably Myrtle Beached, so I rented a car and drove south 140 kilometers, until the road turned to gravel. Cabanas on the beach went for $25 a night then, sans electricity. I met ex-pats of all nationalities. They made coconut jewelry and candles, sold pot, and spent their days surfing and lying naked on the beach. I called the place Hippie Hollow. They called it paradise.

I’ve been back to the area a few times, and each year there are fewer hippies and more restaurants, bars, yoga spas, and cabanas with all the amenities, including wi-fi. The naked hippies have been replaced by topless sun-bathers (progress?). There are still a few places, like the one where we stayed last week, that retain some of the feel of the old days, but they seem doomed to fall to the resort-mania creeping down from Cancun and Playa del Carmen.

The upside for the locals is that the tourist-based economy is booming. There were tourists from all over the globe, but the venues are mostly locally owned and the work-force is Mexican. We talked to a couple of bartenders and waiters who’d been to the U.S. and “retorno-ed,” then emigrated to the Mayan Riviera because there was work to be found.

And that’s what so much of the (non-refugee) immigration problem comes down to, doesn’t it? People will find a way to get to a place where they can support themselves and their families. Doing so in your home country is better; legal is easier. But if those options are not available, all the border security and macho political posturing in the world won’t stop the ingress.

We could all take a lesson from the effects of the economic boom of the Mayan Riviera — and from those Mexican highway signs. When it comes to immigration reform, we should make a retorno to common sense.

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Opinion Viewpoint

The USA: Detention Nation

Sometimes sport and politics clash in Latin America, but last month’s “Central America snub” was particularly revealing. Vice President Joe Biden flew to the region to meet with the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the midst of a deepening Central American human rights and refugee crisis. President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras was a no-show — too busy watching his national team play soccer in Brazil.

Over the past several months, tens of thousands of women and children, most of them poor and from those three Central American nations named above, have arrived at our southwest border. From October 2013 to May 2014, the United States detained nearly 35,000 unaccompanied minors at the border. This is up from a total of 21,000 for the entire previous year. Meanwhile, the number of women seeking refuge in the U.S. has increased to a point that 240 female detainees were transferred to a prison in Mason, Tennessee, because the detention centers at the border are at capacity.

We’re not solely blaming President Hernández for a migratory crisis, but the leader’s priorities reflect an unfortunate historic reality: The struggles of women and children, particularly poor women and children — are generally secondary to other more compelling national concerns. In this case, World Cup soccer.

Central America is suffering from demoralizing poverty and widespread violence. Honduras currently has the world’s highest murder rate and ranks first in the world in murders per capita. To appreciate the extent of despair there, imagine making the decision to send your 10-year-old daughter on a solitary journey north — for hundreds of miles — in search of refugee status in the U.S. rather than letting her face the dangers at home.

This crisis did not materialize overnight, as suggested in the mainstream U.S. media, nor is it an indictment of President Obama’s immigration policy; a feckless, unfocused Congress has refused to even consider the moderate immigration reform passed by the Senate last summer and supported by Obama.

No, this crisis is decades in the making, and until the U.S. adopts mature, reasonable immigration reform and sensible partnerships within Central America, we’ll continue to cycle through these crises.   

U.S. policy in Central America has hardly helped that region’s poor. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the U.S. pursued three wars in the region. At times, it became difficult to separate our allies from our adversaries. One thing was clear: The U.S. supported, with tens of millions of dollars in military aid and direct CIA intervention, anyone in the region who fought Marxism. We blindly backed the Contras in Nicaragua and the pre-modern militaries in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military, during the 1980s, even committed genocide. To this day, that nation’s Nobel Lauriat in Peace, Rigoberta Menchú, travels with a 12-man security detail. What kind of a nation would want to kill a Nobel Peace Prize winner? 

Our policies under President Obama have not pointed any closer to peace or security in the region. In 2009, for example, despite unanimous opposition from the Organization of American States, the U.S. — after briefly protesting — acceded to a coup in Honduras against a leftist regime. In Honduras, young, idealistic Americans (including one of the authors of this op-ed) once served in the U.S. Peace Corps, but the organization pulled out a few years ago, citing legitimate safety concerns for its volunteers.

The recent Free Trade Agreement frenzy, pushed by the U.S., the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, has not generated prosperity in the region: Some 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, and Honduras and Guatemala are the most unequal nations (in terms of overall distribution of goods and income) in Latin America. Almost 20 years ago, the bipartisan “Washington consensus” assured us that free trade agreements between the U.S. and Latin America would create more wealth, income, and prosperity for all in the Americas — and would have the added benefit of reducing migration into the U.S.  

Our wars, our trade policies, and now our inability to lead on immigration reform, combined with low levels of enlightened leadership in Central America are the true causes of the current humanitarian/refugee crisis in our region. We could help by passing a clear national reform to our outdated immigration laws, but Congress won’t act.  

The president has decided to act unilaterally, where he can. On June 30th, he announced that by late summer, he’ll move on some areas of reform that do not require congressional approval. But women and children fleeing Central American poverty and governments with a genocidal history can’t wait.

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Opinion Viewpoint

A Failure to Lead on Immigration Reform

Progressives are still celebrating the fall of Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader defeated in a June 10th primary by a sleeper candidate, an economics professor named David Brat. The national media, asleep at the switch on this one, rolled out an easy, unconvincing thesis to explain this political collapse: Cantor’s willingness to consider some sort of immigration reform.

Yet a comprehensive immigration reform bill, passed by the Democrat-controlled Senate last summer, continues to languish in the GOP-led House of Representatives. The leadership in the House, including Cantor, has refused to take up the bill, offering a myriad of stall tactics and maneuvers to slowly smother the legislation, without having to go on record as actually killing it. The bill is moderate, sensible legislation that seeks to regularize the immigration status of millions of people who live in the United States, pay taxes, and contribute to our culture and society. The majority of Americans (62 percent), and 70 percent of Republicans in Cantor’s district, support comprehensive immigration reform that includes a pathway for citizenship.

Cantor’s defeat is really related to his arrogance, his out-sized national political ambition, and his disingenuousness on the immigration issue. His refusal to actually lead on immigration, and his inability to produce any type of counter-legislation on this critically important question, exposed him to attacks as just another political opportunist. It’s no surprise, then, that Cantor’s negatives going into the primary stood at 63 percent. The surprise is the national shock over his defeat and the misappropriation of the meaning of this political collapse.

The national media, political pundits, and the Republican Party’s narrow focus on immigration as a factor in Cantor’s defeat has given the anti-immigration wing of the Republican Party an excuse to do nothing on immigration reform. Thus, a political implosion in a tiny corner of America means fear and fecklessness prevail in the nation at large: There will be no vote on a perfectly sensible Senate immigration bill this year.

House members are afraid of losing their seats if they vote on a politically perilous issue that’s become perilous only because we’ve let the bullies and the irrational define the issue. 

For example, Brat claimed Cantor would support “open borders” if elected to another term in Virginia. This is pure campaign fiction and political manipulation. By hiring and equipping thousands of additional border patrol agents, President Obama has done more to close down our Southern border with Mexico in the past five years than any previous president. Obama’s administration also has deported two million people in the past five years. Cantor has hardly supported this effort, or this president, but “Open Borders Cantor” is absurdist, magical rhetoric.  

But sometimes in politics, the truth is less important than people’s feelings and people — at least those in Cantor’s district around Richmond — are feeling besieged. Their public schools are collapsing, their Congress won’t support a raise in minimum wage, their purchasing power is declining, and good factory jobs left their city decades ago.  

We suspect the professor from Randolph-Macon College will be elected to the House of Representatives in November as an insignificant, back-bencher with no real Cantor-like political power. We can live with that. But we can’t live with the deception, disingenuousness, and lies that have become the new norm in American politics.

It’s truly disheartening to watch professors, tasked with seeking and telling the truth, become politicians and begin to speak in fiction. Professor Brat’s exaggerations have real consequences when the national outcome of a Cantor defeat is the concomitant tabling of much-needed immigration reform for our nation. Evidently, Brat is unconcerned with the millions of deportations, the tens of thousands of detentions, the separation of families, and the squelching of opportunity for kids who dream of studying and living in peace in the U.S.  

Cantor’s defeat points to the urgency of passing comprehensive immigration reform now. We can’t allow politics to be hijacked by cynicism, laughable exaggerations, and bullying of the most vulnerable among us. Comprehensive immigration reform is in our best interest as a nation. And it will happen. Politicians who tell half-truths and outright lies to score political points at the expense of urgent national policy are not patriots. They’re the enemies of free societies and open democracies.

(Bryce Ashby is a Memphis-based attorney and board chair at Latino Memphis, Inc.; Michael J. LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.)