What I Saw in the Darién Gap
theatlantic.comWhen commenting about how this affects economic policy, immigration reform, military involvement, the causes of why we’re here, laws, title 42, migrants, justifications, and everything in between..
Remember that these are people just like you and I. They, like all humans, are seeking safety and stability for theirselves and families. The difference is that they were born, or ended up in, situations so dire they felt they had better odds trekking through the dangerous jungle(!) on foot for hundreds of miles (followed by thousands of more miles) rather than stay in their current situation.
It’s easy to get lost in the thousand foot view and giving opinions while sipping coffee & working on a laptop commenting on hacker news. Not to say any of our opinions aren’t valid - but rather just think about the people before jumping to any conclusions
Edit: This is not an argument for or against anything or any policy. Rather just a reminder that whichever side you are on, or whatever you are advocating for, just to remember we are talking about humans. That’s the only point I’m making.
I understand what you're saying, I was particularly moved by the story of the Vietnamese woman who lost her son crossing a river. It's heartbreaking.
For some of these people it's better odds. Particularly I'm sympathetic to people living in places like Venezuela or central Africa. But for the rest, people from places like Vietnam or China or Chile, their situations are most certainly not worth the risk. They were either sold propaganda that it was easy, or they are risking their family's lives irresponsibly for the prospect of financial gain on the idea that they can become sensationally rich in the US. I've personally known people from both of those sets, and I've been to some places in the world (and not as a military person or something like that) and seen things about as horrendous as are outlined in this article.
Losing your job during covid is not a solid motivator for a rational person to decide to do this. It takes intense desperation, delusion about the danger, or the idea that it will be incredibly worth the risk. Only people in the first circumstance can justify doing something like this when it's all said and done. The rest, they'll be traumatized in the best case scenario and then wind up in the same situation they were in back home, living in crime riddled ghettos paying too much in rent and working dead end shit jobs to barely scrape by. For many that's a worse existence than they left. There's a siren on the shores of the US, and it's song is "the land of opportunity." I've had people tell me that they literally believed the streets here were paved in gold until they arrived. The truth is, in most of the countries where these people come from, day to day life is pretty comparable, and your chances of hitting it big are about the same.
The only real benefit to those but the truly desperate is arbitraging the labor markets between countries using remittances. You can send money home to your family and they can move up and then when they're set you can return and have a higher class life. I don't believe it's moral to risk the lives of your small children for something like that.
Its a difficult challenge to try to define for someone else what their balance of risk and reward should be. I can say that it is hard for me to imagine deciding to risk this journey, but I wouldn't tell someone else they shouldn't.
The problem, as I see it, has nothing to do with whether people should make this journey or how much immigration is "enough" immigration. The underlying problem is the imbalance between entitlement programs and immigration. Entitlement programs create an incentive to be inside the country's borders that doesn't otherwise exist.
Both politicians and most media outlets have done a great job focusing discussion and debate on symptoms rather than root cause, that may have been intentional or unintentional. We can run in circles debating who and how many we want to allow to immigrate legally. That debate will never end when its based entirely on personal opinion.
A country with any entitlement programs has to control their borders at limit immigration. An interesting question is what to do when borders and immigration can't be controlled effectively. In that scenario, can the country continue to have entitlement programs without government debt spiralling out of control?
Yeah I'm 100% with you on the cause. I will tell someone they shouldn't if they have little kids with them. Risking your own life is fine, making changes for your family necessarily comes with risk, but carrying a small child through this jungle is downright irresponsible unless your child is going to starve or be harmed living in the place you left.
I say this from personal experience in medicine - many of them come here under highly auspicious circumstances e.g. "I claimed asylum because XYZ, and XYZ just so happened to be at the time I was 8.9 months pregnant, which circumstantially will just so happen to make my child a US citizen and thus qualify me for welfare, WIC, and free food, vis a vis my citizen-child, of which I definitely won't have 10 more of once I'm here"
The issue isn't asylum or american dream, both are fine. The issue is 10-20 million people milking the housing, welfare, and medical systems -really hard-. In the clinics, some days, 100% of patients were Spanish only speaking i.e. recently arrived here or not-so-recently arrived here and never bothered to learn english. Which is a cost to the public coffers. Not the baseline medical cost, a Spanish interpreter is legally required according to another medical related law, an additional cost.
That's to say, let's eradicate all financial governmental "free money" type motivations +/- "free citizenship to anchor babies" motivations as to why a person would come here. People wistfully point to Ellis Island as the spirit of America, in that spirit, let these immigrants make their way on their two feet with their two hands, without support, as those of Ellis Island, as those before, did.
The big pain of it is many of these people come from collapsed socialist countries, but maintain some degree of socialist ideals, so they try very hard to extract socialist benefits in the US. It's like guy, why did you think you country collapsed? Oh sorry, you don't speak English, el guy-o, el-why-o el country-o el collapso?
If you want to see actual video of crossing the Darien Gap - this guy makes great videos. He did the crossing himself.
+1 on this, I'm a big fan of his videos, and the Darien Gap crossing must be one of the most interesting that he's done. I still think it was beyond stupid to attempt this, both him and his companion admit that they could have just died multiple times while there and no one would stop to help. On the other hand, they brought the experience of what it really looks like for thousands of migrants trying to cross every year to the millions on youtube - an experience you wouldn't be able to see otherwise.
(For what it's worth, so did the author of this piece).
Sometimes I like to imagine what the US would look like if we took a fraction of the trillions of dollars we wasted in Iraq and Afghanistan and used them to help our southern neighbors develop and modernize. Happy and content people don't risk their lives to cross the jungle.
It's a bit late for that these days, what with all the climate change and all that. Migration (in likely huge numbers) is coming and likely already largely underway around the world. There's gonna be more and more places humans simply cannot physically survive anymore and that alone will drive people to move elsewhere. This of course will likely lead to violence, because that's what far too many humans do when other humans try to "muscle in on their territory". It's a sad fact that unless most of the human race grows up and starts acting like adults for a change, we're likely in for war pretty much everywhere soon enough.
Just in time for election season, these "human interest" pieces casually begin to appear, surreptitiously stoking anti-immigrant sentiments.
The Darien Gap is still "wild" because not a lot of migrants crossed it historically. Most US migrants came from Mexico.
However, migration from Mexico has greatly decreased in recent decades. The net flow is around zero. [1] That's because Mexico is no longer an undeveloped country. Its nominal per-capita GDP is above Russia's and China's. [2] NAFTA was an important component of its success.
Mexico offers a blueprint for what needs to happen in Central and South America before we no longer face the temptation of putting children in cages at the border.
There are only a few countries left that fit the bill, such as Guatemala and El Salvador. Brazil and Venezuela have been recent additions (hence the Gap crossings.) Parenthetically, we have Putin to thank for a few of these, especially Venezuela.
I think we should reconsider the "hands off" attitude that (with a few exceptions) has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Political deference, while culturally sensitive and insisted upon by some US-weary groups, has not turned out so great.
Direct US participation should be at least as much as in Europe and Asia, particularly financially. The IMF and World Bank don't have enough teeth, and it certainly beats spending money on cages.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/07/09/before-co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
We have seen very similar story to Mexico in the EU. After 20 years of membership, Poland for example is a much more attractive place to live for Poles, so immigration from there to UK/DE/NL is massively down on where it was in, say, 2006. Same for Czech Rep, Slovenia, etc.
The answer to immigration is indeed to improve the countries that are the sources of migration but I think this should be by making the world fairer, more equal and less profit led. History shows that direct or indirect intervention by the US fails terribly as much, if not more, than it succeeds and those failures lead to immigration.
The United States' post-9/11 wars have resulted in mass population displacements and widespread regional instability. Afghanistan: failure, Iraq: failure, Somalia: failure, Yemen: failure, Libya: failure. And that's only in the last few years. The West keeps thinking that it can destabilize a country, choose which side they want to win and somehow that country will emerge as a stable & successful ally without any side effects. That's delusional thinking but our governments keep doing it. We need to try something else and we know prosperity creates a more stable peace than any army.
> The West keeps thinking that it can destabilize a country, choose which side they want to win and somehow that country will emerge as a stable & successful ally without any side effects. That's delusional thinking but our governments keep doing it.
Yes, but also Germany, Japan, South Korea—places where we did try that and it worked. So it's not delusional thinking, but also what we did in those places, and what we did in more recent places, isn't exactly the same. There was a lot more follow through after WW2 and the Korean War.
There seems to be some intense brigading going on, particularly for a human interest article that's not related to Russia on paper. I guess it's only going to get worse for the next 3 months.
> these "human interest" pieces casually begin to appear, surreptitiously stoking anti-immigrant sentiments
You don't usually see complaints about the right-wing bias of The Atlantic...
At least one podcast I listen to (If Books Could Kill) seems to place The Atlantic in the "reactionary center" or at least sympathetic to it. I don't fully grok the term, but it mainly seems to include people who sit near the center political, generally view themselves as progressives, but feel that things have gone too far and therefore push against the supposed excesses of the left.
In my circles it's Gen xer's coming into an unsettling acceptance of the type of conservative you become in your late 40's/early 50's where you've seen radicalism just not work like we were promised in our post-punk grunge teens.
We still want to promote a better world but we're a bit cynical that it's possible without completely destroying what we have and then leaving the pieces for the extreme left/right to conquer. What to do, says the slacker generation?
"Stuff" can happen in the unlikeliest places if it can make a difference, see e.g. the NYT's treatment of Hillary's campaign.
Huh, I see it quite frequently. In particular I see references to the anti-Palestinian bias with suggestions that the fact the editor in chief volunteered to join the IDF and served as a guard in a prison camp might be relevant.
In america at least, the mainstream/establishment left and right seem to be unflinchingly united on this topic.
On support for Israel, yes. Plenty of mainstream Americans think it's weird to volunteer to be an IDF prison guard as an American though.
> I think we should reconsider the "hands off" attitude
You seriously think the US has a 'hands' off attitude to South America?
> I think we should reconsider the "hands off" attitude that (with a few exceptions) has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. Political deference, while culturally sensitive and insisted upon by some US-weary groups, has not turned out so great.
The USA has a terrible track record when in comes to direct participation in the affairs of other countries.
Name a better track record, tovarich.
Besides, the participation is in the context of that of other countries, especially Russia. It's one thing to argue that we shouldn't pull bathers out of the lake. It's another to argue that we shouldn't pull drowners out of the rapids.
China? That seems to concentrate on building infrastructure in countries rather than toppling their governments...
Sure, but it's a bit of an unfair comparison in that China is coming to the (trans-regional) scene late, so they're kinda free riding on the dirty work that came before. Plus their support of Russia is bad enough to offset whatever good they might be doing. Not to mention North Korea.
Either way, more "infrastructure diplomacy" is not far from what I'm advocating for. A nudge here, a free trade agreement there, and all of Central America could look like Mexico within a decade.
BRI is certainly not a home run, and is basically playing the same game as the World Bank or other development initiatives, but without global oversight. It's track record is decidedly mixed, and usually favors Chinese interests.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman -- but this time using Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
> The truth seems to lie somewhere between these last two reasons. In recent years, there have been an increasing number of reports from BRI partner countries about construction flaws in major infrastructure projects, project cancelations initiated by BRI partner countries due to concerns over corruption and debt, project cancelations initiated by Chinese companies due to financial problems, and projects that have led to nowhere (in some cases, literally – such as a BRI-funded railway that ends in the middle of a field in Kenya).
That's all true, but the USA sets a very low bar. Being better is not hard at all.
Taiwan has entered the chat.
What's Putin got to do with the Americans going all ballistic against Chavez back in the day? It's all on them, on the Americans, and on the Monroe doctrine.
Which Chavez? Monroe Doctrine was in regards to saying that any European intervention in the Americas would be viewed as an act of aggression. That was 1823
> What's Putin got to do with the Americans going all ballistic against Chavez back in the day? It's all on them, on the Americans, and on the Monroe doctrine.
I don't know details about Venezuela but it sounds like you would agree Obama/Biden also got nothing to do with Russians going all Holodomor against Ukrainians back in the day
Stupid comparison, because the Monroe Doctrine is still active American policy when it comes to its Foreign Affairs (and, yes, it was/is also active during both the Obama and Biden presidencies). Please try and do better next time.
> surreptitiously stoking anti-immigrant sentiments.
That's a strange way to say reporting on illegal immigration reality
Michael Yon has been down there for about 2 years (?). Before that he was in HK and in Iraq. His reporting doesn't have a pro-globalist bias.
Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait the US imposed devastating sanctions on Saddam Hussein's regime that continued for over a decade until 9/11 was used as an excuse to topple a regime that really had nothing to do with 9/11 at all. Let's also remember that Saddam Hussein was a US creation, a foil against Iran. The US supplied weapons to Iraq to figh ta war with Iran that cost over a million lives. And why was Iran an enemy of the US? Because there was a revolution against the US puppet Shah regime after the US backed a coup against the democratically elected Iranian government in 1953.
So for a decade we got to see the impact of those sanctions and also get to look back at the aftermath. A report came out claiming that half a million children had died as a result of those sanctions. On 60 Minutes in 1996, then UN ambassador and later Secretary of State responded to this question [1]:
> “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
> “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
Did the sanctions topple the regime? No. They almost never do. Arguably they played a role in ending the apartheid regime in South Africa but other than that, economic sanctions are simply used as a tool to punish our enemies without using a single soldier.
Roughly 8 million Venezuelans have fled in the last decade as the country has descended into chaos. It's a big part of why there's been a more than tenfold increase in people crossing the Darien Gap. Also responsible is US bribing countries in Central America to deny visas to likely refugees, forcing them to make this dangerous journey.
The sanctions on Venezuela have crushed the economy [2]. They have created the very refugee crisis that is now a domestic political issue. And it's not the leaders of Venezuela who suffer. It's people like this who risk death to try and have a better life.
You might say "Maduro is a bad guy". I'll put that up agains tth elong list of "bad guys" the US is entirely happy to support and work with: Augusto Pinochet, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Ferdjinand Marcos, Pol Pot, Mohammed bin Salman, Benjamin Netanyahu.
This isn't a partisan issue either. Both politicla parties are pretty much united when it comes to US foreign policy. Sanctions on Venezuela have a history through the Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden administrations.
So if you read a story like this and have empathy for refugees fleeing chaos and violence or maybe you simply see the (completely made up) "border crisis" and don't understand what's going on, I would hope that you can see the direct connection between these migrants and the US policy that destabilized or destroyed the countries they're mostly coming from.
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...
[2]: https://www.wola.org/2020/10/new-report-us-sanctions-aggrava...
Quite relevant considering the Atlantic was pretty much the chief organ that laundered the case for invading Iraq in the noughts behind the bogus WMD conspiracy theory.
> the sanctions on Venezuela have crushed the economy
Maduro crushed their economy. The us can’t sanction oil producers into the ground as we’ve seen with Russia. It was their incredibly shitty economic policy that destroyed living standards in Venezuela. Absolutely no other reason oil production should be lower than it was a decade ago
> Absolutely no other reason oil production should be lower than it was a decade ago
Other than, you know, the sanctions that prevent them from selling their oil to most ofd the world?
Didnt stop Russia. More than enough countries willing to go against the US for oil. China alone would buy as much as Venezuela can produce.
Good overview and history of the Darien Gap migrant issue:
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/10/how-treacherous-darien-g...
Also, see the work of journalist Michael Yon.
On the "Center for Immigration Studies":
> The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is an American anti-immigration think tank. It favors far lower immigration numbers and produces analyses to further those views. The CIS was founded by historian Otis L. Graham alongside eugenicist and white nationalist John Tanton in 1985 as a spin-off of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). It is one of a number of anti-immigration organizations founded by Tanton, along with FAIR and NumbersUSA.
> Reports published by CIS have been disputed by scholars on immigration, fact-checkers and news outlets, and immigration-research organizations. The organization had significant influence within the Trump administration, which cited the group's work to defend its immigration policies. The Southern Poverty Law Center designated CIS as a hate group with ties to the American nativist movement. The CIS sued the SPLC over the designation, but the lawsuit was dismissed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies
And on Michael Yon in the Darién Gap:
> Since 2021, Yon has worked as a fixer in the Darién Gap, a dangerous stretch of jungle used by migrants entering the United States illegally. He has worked with figures such as Alex Jones and Laura Loomer, getting them access to the camps where legacy media are barred by security. A New York Times article noted that he targeted the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, quoting him as saying that "they’re coming across the border and it’s being funded with Jewish money.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Yon#2021-24_%E2%80%93_...
This is crazy and obviously has to be stopped somehow. Can't the US Army be sent down there to patrol the upper border of the jungle, so force the migrants to return?
They would just find another route. They’re already contending with cartels, bandits, profiteers, deadly terrain and the Panamanian army. The US army would be the least of the their worries. They’re not doing this journey easy, they’re doing it because they’re desperate and the limited rewards of reaching their goal are worth the great risk.
This is worse jungle than Vietnam, just as a reference point for how well the US Army might be able to control the territory.
Team America policing the world again?
When did America stop?