David Brooks Creates, Then Solves the "Immigration Crisis"

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By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

The World's Greatest Authority, Prof. David Brooks, took it upon himself to solve another vexing national issue to his satisfaction in 750 words.  This time, it was immigration.

Predictably, hilarity ensued.

 If you guessed that the problem was . . . Both Sides, you win an Italian sub lunch with the ol' Perfesser at a suburban DC location of his choosing, unless you are a working-class wretch in which case he will graciously treat you to Taco Bell.

According to Complete National Disgrace Brooks, the miserable treatment of Central American refugees and the incompetent management of their asylum claims is, wait for it, “paradigmatic of our politics right now. Both parties are content to adopt abstract ideological postures. Neither is interested in creating a functioning system that balances trade-offs and actually works.”

Actually that's not quite what CND said.  He, like so many lazy journalists in their flack jacket costumes, refers to what's happening as a “crisis.”

What crisis?

The reality is that Central American migrants are fleeing the charnel houses of their homelands desperate for refuge.  Under U.S. law, these persons have an absolute right to claim asylum and enter the United States.  If they are dangerous and not accompanied by children, they can be detained or released on bond.  If like most mothers and children of our acquaintance they aren't, they can be given a court date and released into the United States.

It's only a crisis when the corrupt Tangerine-Faced Bigot and his schondeh von der goyim henchmen concoct one half-assed scheme after another to undermine the law, like not letting asylum applicants make their claims in an organized fashion at ports of entry.  Then one of two things happens: either families are immured in misery in Mexico, or they sneak across the border to be detained by the Border Patrol, which has demonstrably failed to provide adequate facilities to handle harmless women and children.  Presto, a crisis!

So there's clearly a problem at the Southern Border created by the bigotry and ineptitude of the U Bum Regime. And this is the Democrats' fault because why?  Because they have been pushing for comprehensive immigration reform for years, which would include aid to the Central American failed states who are unable or unwilling to protect their citizens?

No it's because some Democrats have suggested that the cruel dysfunctional internal immigration police be disbanded and their responsibilities transferred back to the agencies that handled them prior to 2002.  The ol' Perfesser slyly slags off this proposal as a “gesture to the open border crowd” without actually accusing any Democrat of supporting open borders.  Because none does.

Also CND Brooks has a fact that he believes clinches his case: “The murder rate in El Salvador has fallen in half since 2015.”  We'll get to his murder rates in a minute but let's pause to collect some other obscure facts that the ol' Perfesser couldn't be bothered with, probably because they were so hard to dig up:

Unlike in much of the world, where most murdered women are killed by their husbands, partners or family members, half in Honduras are killed by drug cartels and gangs. And the ways they are being killed — shot in the vagina, cut to bits with their parts distributed among various public places, strangled in front of their children, skinned alive — have women running for the border.

Where could this recondite tidbit be found?  You guessed it: the same newspaper that publishes the ol' Perfesser's disquisitions, two days earlier. 

And as for the paradise that is El Salvador, let's ask some far left wing organization for their take:

Although the murder rate has consistently declined since 2015, El Salvador continues to have one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Crime statistics indicate the 2017 annual homicide rate — 60.07 per 100,000 inhabitants — was significantly lower than 2016’s 80.97 per 100,000.

That would be the travel advisory issued by the Department of State. 

Sixty per 100,000?  We wondered how that compared to things in the ol' Perfesser's neck of the woods.  There were 20 homicides in Montgomery County, Maryland in 2018, so let's see, 20 divided by the population of the county in 2017 (1,058,810)  gets you um 1.889 per 100,000.  So why would anyone flee a country with a murder rate 30 times higher than where Complete National Disgrace slices his sopprassata?

But don't say that the ol' Perfesser bases his Both Sides BS on just one fact.  He's got another: “only 20 percent [of asylum seekers] win the right to stay in the United States because they’d face persecution in their home countries.”

And this proves – nothing really.  The percentage for asylum seekers who are represented by counsel is just a scosh higher:

Represented immigrants were more likely to obtain the immigration relief they sought.

• Among detained immigrants, those with representation were twice as likely as unrepresented immigrants to obtain immigration relief if they sought it (49 percent with counsel versus 23 percent without).
• Represented immigrants who were never detained were nearly five times more likely than their unrepresented counterparts to obtain relief if they sought it (63 percent with counsel versus 13 percent without).

(Source: American Immigration Council (2016 data).)

Unlike the ol' Perfesser, we didn't go to the University of Chicago so our math may be a little rusty, but we think that 63% and 49% are higher than 20%, a figure which appears to reflect the lack of counsel available to asylum seekers seeking to thread their way through an immensely complicated field of law.

By the way, some of those asylum seekers may lose their cases on technical grounds, like the U Bum Regime argument that women shot in the vagina, cut to bits with their parts distributed among various public places, strangled in front of their children, or skinned alive don't constitute a “protected social group” for purposes of qualifying for asylum.

But that's enough facts for one column.  Let's move on to the Complete National Disgrace's policy prescriptions:

build new detention centers at the border; expand the capacities at the ports of entry; expand the number of judge teams, to speed through the backlog; create an orderly release procedure coordinated with humanitarian agencies; increase the number of counselors so refugees can navigate the system; vet children in their home countries for refugee status so they don’t have to make a fruitless trip.

A few of these ideas are unobjectionable and Democrats have been urging them forever.  But what's the point of new detention centers?  To detain whom?  To incarcerate women and children seeking asylum even thought they are no danger to anyone (and are barred by the Flores settlement)?

And wtf are “judge teams?”  Does he think that teams of immigration judges now hauling borax across the Utah desert can be taken out of harness and tied to the U Bum deportation railroad?  If he's saying he thinks we need more Immigration Judges (and that they should be supervised by article III courts like bankruptcy judges rather than corrupt Republican AG's), again it's hard to disagree with.

As for his idea to force women and children in fear of their lives in Honduras to apply at the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, let's just hope that they won't be shot in the vagina, cut to bits with their parts distributed among various public places, strangled in front of their children, or skinned alive whilst the agonizingly slow US immigration machinery processes their cases.

But it's no surprise that the ol' Perfesser's policy ideas are as usual a dog's breakfast of bromides and crap. He doesn't care about policy; he just wants to make sure you know that Both Sides are at fault.  We'll let him clinch his argument:

Designing a practical response that wins widespread support is, in theory, not hard. But it requires starting with a certain question: What can we do to help them? Much of today’s politics starts from a different question: What posture can I adopt that will reflect well on me? What can I say to prove I’m manly or woke?

This is what happens when the politics of practical action get replaced by the politics of performative narcissism.

Performative narcissism?  If you don't know what that is, not to worry: you can see it in action every time the ol' Perfesser publishes his column. 

But those who mourn her are surely comforted by knowing that David Brooks blames Both Sides.  Source: NBC News