Unintended consequences from an immigration law…
The mess on our southern borders with the unaccompanied illegal immigrant children illustrates the Keystone Cops attitude of many bills coming out of Congress and/or proposed by the Executive Branch. You’d think that most of these people who, after all, are usually lawyers (albeit failed ones, for the most part), could word the legalese and implement it in such a way that these things don’t happen.
The problem of child pornography and child prostitution in this country led to a “feel good” bipartisan bill back in the latter Bush era (i.e. not Papa Bush but Dubya) that promised to take care of unaccompanied minors until their cases were settled, all in order to protect them. The law didn’t become effective until Obama became president. Not knowing the details of that law, I presume “settled” means that immigration workers, judges, and their assistants would treat each case on a one-by-one basis to prevent abuse to these kids, or even sending them back to war-savaged homelands.
Abusing children, even kids who are legally here in the U.S., is a huge illegal industry that must be stopped. It’s a bit like the drug industry. There are users—the johns who want to have sex with a minor, the creeps who like to watch minors having sex with adults or other minors, or-horror of all horrors—those who watch torture and snuff videos. The law doesn’t come down hard enough on them. There are also the sleazy business people who see this kind of stuff as a way to make lots of money, albeit illegally—pimps, porn video makers, freaky websites, and so forth. The sentences for this kind of illegal activity are far too light. For some of the internet stuff, the authorities can’t even keep up with it, due to lack of budget and personnel.
The exploited, American or foreign minors, justifiably paranoid, don’t often rat out the people who put them in these dire straits, even if the authorities try to arrest the creepy users or sleazy business people. You can imagine what a child, or even a teen, who often speaks no English, is thinking in this kind of situation. It doesn’t take much for a person with good intentions to want to put a stop to this exploitation of minors. The law was written to halt the latter in the case of unaccompanied minors who come into the country, often sent alone by desperate parents hoping their children will have more opportunity in the U.S., parents who can’t begin to imagine the potential horrors awaiting their kids.
What happened was that these parents and relatives knew that this was a work-around the standard immigration system, which is dated but does have some checks and balances and personnel to implement it. Kids won’t be sent back before they’re processed, and that takes a long time. Sure, even if the parents are aware of the potential dangers, they think that’s better than seeing their children die at the hands of Honduran or Salvadoran gangs, or drug violence in Mexico, to name a few groups of better known thugs. I can understand their logic.
What I can’t understand is the government’s lack of foresight. It’s not hard to see, even in the previous steady-state situation existing before the law, that implementation of that law would require more immigration personnel and infrastructure. Putting kids into concentration camps to wait for their processing is no solution. Dumping them back across the border, creating a problem for Mexico, is no solution either, especially if they return to their origins steeped in violence. Just the costs of either policy are prohibitive without more funding, and there’s no social justice in either policy either.
As often happens, we’ve opened Pandora’s box here. This is a complex problem with no easy solution. Some GOP members and a few irate U.S. hotheads along the border are claiming that this is Obama’s fault and therefore his problem, even saying that he encouraged parents to send their children. This is absurd. No one is to blame for the problem—not Obama, not Bush, but just people trying to do some good and not seeing understanding the consequences, precisely because the problem is so complex.
But, again, like the drug problem, three groups share the blame for what happens to some of these children. The first is government officials who don’t do enough to prevent sex crimes perpetrated against minors or the sale of minors into virtual slavery. The second is comprised of all users—they’re creepy, sadistic bastards who are pond scum, sick animals who don’t deserve to be called human beings. The third is comprised of those people who exploit these children to make money selling little bodies to the second group. They don’t even deserve to be called human beings either because they’re worse than pond scum.
Things I’m passionate about often find their ways into my books. I’m not an author promoting an ideological or a political platform. I’m beyond ideologies because there’s ample evidence that their adherents are fanatical savages who are destroying everything that can be good in life. Every ideology is debunked, emotional doggerel offering a lot of sound and fury and signifying nothing. I’m an author who’s against morally reprehensible attitudes in modern society. I use the only soapbox I have to expose them—my novels.
While the sex trade involving minors is a theme in my new “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco” novel (themes underlie plots but aren’t the same as them), The Collector (see the excerpt in Aristocrats and Assassins), I don’t propose any solutions—they must come from society. Consider my books to be entertaining morality plays in the style of the original Star Trek, plays that get you, the reader, to think about certain issues with your personal involvement reading an entertaining work of fiction, so that some of you will be motivated in your non-fiction lives to find workable solutions. The latter is hard—I’m not qualified for many reasons, but, if we all start thinking about these problems, we’ll find some who are qualified.
When you see problems like this—victims of gun violence, victims to drugs, victims of the sex trade, and victims who fall prey to debunked ideologies and cults—you just know our society is really sick. If you don’t at least accept that, you’re part of the problem. It’s time to fix things. It’s time to get our priorities straight. We also need to see the big pictures so that our solutions don’t have unintended consequences. That’s a social imperative that’s hard to fulfill. I know that, but I can hope.
And so it goes….
