Tag Archives: border shutdown

International news, national news

Border shutdown or not? Let’s go with ‘not’

Donald Trump is a malleable man. He says he intends to do one thing, then backpedals . . . sometimes furiously.

Repeal the Affordable Care Act now? Sure, but wait! Let’s do it after the November 2020 election.

Shut down the border with Mexico? Yep! Right now, or else. But, whoa! Let’s wait a year and see what happens, shall we?

The president was adamant that we should close the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. Then someone musta got to him, telling him what he should have known already: Closing the border, Mr. President, is going to cost this country tens of billions of dollars in business with one of our largest trading partners.

Then he backed off. He said he doesn’t “play games.” He had vowed that he would close the border, “100 percent.”

Not now.

Actually, the one-year delay likely means the border won’t close at all. I’m OK with that. Shutting down our border with Mexico is going to do far more harm than good.

Trump calls the closure threat a national security matter. He says security is more important than trade. I agree with that. However, is there an actual “national security threat” being presented at this moment? I remain highly dubious of that assertion.

So, for now the president has backed off. Good. I hope he stays backed off for as long as he is in office.

International news

Border shutdown does more harm than good

Donald Trump wants to make good on his boast that he intends to stop illegal immigration altogether, no matter what, no matter the measure he intends to implement.

So now he’s threatening to shut down the southern border. All 2,000 miles of it. From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. From California to Texas. He’s gonna shut ‘er down!

OK, but at what cost?

The trade that flows between the United States and Mexico contributes billions of dollars each year in income for businesses in both countries. I long have thought that Mexico was a good neighbor.  I still do. The president of the United States acts as though Mexico is that annoying next-door neighbor who plays his music too loudly or whose dog poops on his yard.

You may spare me the comments uttered by Jeh Johnson, homeland security secretary in the Obama administration who says the border crossing numbers have reached a crisis proportion.

Shutting down the border isn’t the way you fix a problem. You don’t punish an entire nation the way Trump wants to punish Mexico. Make no mistake, the damage he intends to inflict on our southern neighbor is going to ripple into four border states: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

He wants Mexico to stop the immigrants traipsing through its land from Central America. They can stop it, he says. If they don’t, he intends to shut down the border. “I’m not kidding around,” the president said.

I get it, Mr. President.

It’s not going to stop the drug flow that comes into this country through legal ports of entry. You know, airports and maritime docks . . . those kinds of places. Indeed, that’s where most of it enters the United States, not on the backs of asylum seekers fleeing repression in Latin America.

Send in more agents. Deploy more technology. Round up illegal immigrants, frisk ’em and then send the bad guys back. I have no problem with that.

I simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of a phony “national emergency.” It doesn’t exist. Shutting down the border is a solution in search of a problem.