Why the Border Crisis Is a Myth

*It’s taken a while for reason to surface through the muck and misunderstanding flowing around this child immigrant story.  I think there is a crisis, but it’s a crisis in the immigration courts, where there aren’t enough judges to handle the number of cases. That’s not a border crisis, it’s an immigration courts crisis. El Paso County JudgeVeronica Escobar makes a good point. Read on. VL

By Veronica Escobar, New York Times

EL PASO — TO hear the national news media tell the story, you would think my city, El Paso, and others along the Texas-Mexico border were being overrun by children — tens of thousands of them, some with their mothers, arriving from Central America in recent months, exploiting an immigration loophole to avoid deportation and putting a fatal strain on border state resources.

There’s no denying the impact of this latest immigration wave or the need for more resources. But there’s no crisis. Local communities like mine have done an amazing job of assisting these migrants.

Rather, the myth of a “crisis” is being used by politicians to justify ever-tighter restrictions on immigration, play to anti-immigrant voters in the fall elections and ignore the reasons so many children are coming here in the first place.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo by CBP Photography/flickr]

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