The Bipartisan Border War is Turning America into a Prison
Image by Barbara Zandoval.
I write this screed during the waning hours of an election season that has made me thirst for the taste of a blue steel shotgun barrel like a newborn craves mother’s milk. I hate all of you people so fucking much and I will never forgive you for doing this to me every four years. But I digress…
Chances are that by the time you read this you will have done one of two hideous things which will likely end in the same tragic outcome. You will have voted for Donald Trump for some stupid fucking reason or another, which will give him the mandate to carry out the largest mass deportation since Josef Stalin, or you will have voted for Kamala Harris to stop him even though she has more or less promised to do the same goddamn thing in slow motion with a side of joy as displayed by her administration’s recent attempts to slam the border shut like the jaws of life.
All of this is fucking insane and what makes it even crazier is that it is driven by tabloid stoked popular demand. Around the country, Republicans and Democrats alike are flipping out over the border. Why, most of my neighbors in rural Pennsyltucky have never even seen a Venezuelan and yet they still seem to believe that scores of them are coming scuttling down the chimney for their daughter’s virginity with freshly sharpened knives in their teeth.
All of this hysteria, what we now call the “border crisis”, is built on the fundamental lie consistently embraced by both parties that more “border security” aka “police state” equals less immigrants and a more orderly border. This is total bullshit, and it is easily disproven with pretty basic statistics.
Tax funding for a wide range of border security experiments has pretty consistently increased in this country over the last several decades with funding for the Department of Homeland Security between 2001 and 2020 more than six times as high as the previous twenty years.
This spending spree continued to increase under Biden and Kamala, with their 2024 budget for border and immigration enforcement breaking Trump’s record at $30.2 billion dollars, which is nearly double what it was in 2012. In fact, the “open borders” administration has forked over $28.1 billion dollars in private contracts for border and immigration enforcement since 2021 which is $8.2 billion more than Donald Trump’s $20.9 billion between 2017 and 2021.
Meanwhile, the border has only became increasingly ungovernable during this time. The undocumented population has more than doubled since the mid-nineties, growing from 5 million in 1996 to nearly 12 million in 2024. And this trend only continued during Trump’s reign of terror.
While that loud-mouthed terrorist sent children to concentration camps, illegal entry measured by apprehensions doubled between 2016 and 2019. In fact, the Cato Institute actually estimates that the number of immigrants who have gotten into this country without being caught increased during every year of Orange Man Bad’s first term.
So, what does all this bewildering math mean? Well, for starters it means that border security, at least over an area as vast and unpopulated as the Rio Grande is a fucking flop. It doesn’t work. It never worked. But we all keep shoving money into it anyway and the Democrats are far from a lesser evil on this scam. They fucking started it.
Bill Clinton’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act aka IIRIRA, unleashed with overwhelming bipartisan fanfare in the wake of his similarly fascistic Crime Bill, essentially created the modern-day deportation apparatus. Before IIRIRA deportations were actually pretty rare in this country. After it, they became a veritable cottage industry. Billions were pumped into migrant detection and removal with an army of heavily armed guards whose jurisdiction now includes any patch of dirt within 100 miles of either border.
As stated above, none of this worked. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Before 2014, your average border crosser was just some dude going back and forth across an invisible line for his day job. When the border became militarized, those dudes simply stayed where the work was and brought their families with them. In other words, IIRIRA only succeeded in making the border more chaotic and every administration that followed Clinton simply decided to double down and make it worse.
Despite the fact that every single one of the 9/11 hijackers was a green card holder who came through a legal port of entry, Bush used those attacks to move the flailing border Cthulhu from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security and juiced it up like Schwarzenegger with militaristic surveillance paraphernalia like drones and aerostats. And Barack Obama still holds the title belt for deporter in chief, building the concentration camps and turning ICE into the dick swinging gestapo that Trump used to raid kindergartens and children’s hospitals to fill them.
Of course, everything got way more complicated in 2014 when Central American women and children seeking sanctuary began to outnumber Mexican men looking to make a paycheck. The root causes behind this migrant sea change are not particularly hard to figure out when you consider that most of those families were fleeing from the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
All three of those poverty racked nations has been subjected to decades of American funded death squads and juntas, including the one that Obama put in charge of Honduras in a 2009 coup which pretty much openly colluded with local gangsters and Mexican cartels. However, by the end of Trump’s first executive killing spree, this deluge became just one small piece of a massive international refugee crisis, exacerbated by the Pandemic but largely born from the wreckage of two other disastrous American experiments known as the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.
And this is actually how America’s border crisis can probably be best understood. Just like the war machine and the prison state, the American border is a failure industrial complex. Nobody has ever been made safer by any of those rackets, but a very small group of corporations and federal bureaucracies have gotten very rich, and the sickest part of the con is that the worse the blowback from its fascist adventures gets, the more money the scumbags behind them get to clean up their own mess or fail trying.
Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans have taken this industry to new lows and they’re still digging. Whether that dayglow corporate crybaby wins or not, his party is now defined by an insane conspiracy to use war powers to evict 3% of this country’s population, and if Kamala has proven anything with her long miserable career as a glorified deadbeat cop it’s that her only real ideology is ‘just following orders’ unburdened by what has been. Either way, the border police state wins and no one should feel safe.
The federal government detains and deports thousands of American citizens every year and federal policy permits the use of racial and ethnic profiling to enforce migration restrictions in so-called “border areas”, which thanks to Bill Clinton and his Democrats now legally includes two-thirds of American territory. And for every honky sitting pretty on a porch swing saying, ‘not my problem’, let me remind you of the increasing diversity of the refugee crisis and the expanding battle lines of NATO’s proxy apocalypse in Ukraine. In other words, what’s going to stop the ATF from sending your pale ass back to the old country when Kamala comes to take your guns away, Jethro?
This is how borders work, especially when applied arbitrarily on a massive scale to govern nebulous colonial territories. They don’t do jack shit to keep people out because they aren’t designed to. They’re designed to police and control the people trapped between them and when imperialist maniacs in decline are manning the guard towers that nation in question might as well be a prison.
Happy Election Day, morons. Regardless of which asshole wins, we’re already fucked.
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