Stinking Border Politics
by Michael Reagan

Here’s a modest proposal for solving the “Children’s Invasion” on our southwestern borders.

Next time a planeload of “unaccompanied alien children” from Honduras or Guatemala is being dispersed to their relatives in the U.S., the pilot should divert the flight and land at Ronald Reagan National Airport in downtown Washington.

If the politicians in DC were forced to deal with the effects of the immigration mess they’ve made for a few days, they might be more interested in fixing it.

Instead of dispersing 52,000 illegal Latino kids around the country, or hiding them from sight on military bases, maybe the politicians in DC could house a few thousand Latino kids in tents on the east lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building. They could call it “Obamaville.”

OK, I’m dreaming…

But once again we can thank Washington for creating a problem for the rest of us that it can’t or won’t fix.

Emperor Obama is the culprit in chief.

He’s been playing pool and reading Teleprompters at fundraisers while people in the border towns of Texas, Arizona and California are being burned.

It’s the innocent citizens of the Southwest who’ve been forced to bear the costs of “welcoming” the Central American children who’ve risked their lives to hoof it to the U.S.A.

The big winners in this cynical political game will be the president and Democrats in Congress. The big losers will be the rest of the country.

Everyone knows what’s going to happen when you disperse the Latino kids to their relatives and give them an order to appear at a court hearing. Mostly nothing. If 10 percent appear, it’ll be a miracle.

Doesn’t anyone in DC know that most of the illegal immigrants in the country are here not because they waded across the Rio Grande but because they overstayed their visas?

When you have a country with no immigration policy and a flock of political chickens in DC, this is the kind of border crisis you get.

The Republicans are afraid to even touch immigration policy. And the President and Democrats in Congress won’t try to solve the current crisis because for them it’s a great political opportunity to be exploited.

With congressional elections coming in the fall, and with their party facing certain disaster, Democrats know immigration is one of the few issues that can win them a few points at the polls.

Every Democrat in office wants every Hispanic voter on the planet to see that he is a lovable, bleeding-heart humanitarian. And that every Republican is a coldhearted meanie who just wants to send child immigrants back to where they came from.

If Republicans in Washington are forced to OK the $3.7 billion in emergency appropriations the president says is needed to address the border mess, they at least need to try to put some teeth in it.

They need to insist that the Border Patrol begin stopping the children’s invasion at the U.S.-Mexican border, not after the border has been crossed. And they need to get President Obama to hold Mexico accountable for not stopping the invasion on its side of the border.

Mexico won’t do any such thing, of course, because every single one of its border federales is being paid off by the Mexican drug cartels.

This border disaster was made in Washington by gutless politicians who are unable or unwilling to do anything on immigration but play stupid politics with everyone.

I’m tired of politics. We need to wake up and smell the stink coming from DC. If this border crisis doesn’t do it, nothing will.

Copyright ©2014 Michael Reagan. Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan, a political consultant, and the author of “The New Reagan Revolution” (St. Martin’s Press). He is the founder of the email service reagan.com and president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Visit his websites at www.reagan.com and www.michaelereagan.com. Send comments to [email protected].
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This column has been edited by the author. Representations of fact and opinions are solely those of the author.