excalibur
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- Mar 19, 2015
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This is not a flaw but rather a plan. Cloward-Piven.
www.nationalreview.com
A wave of humanity is starting to tame the jungle by trampling it, and the Biden administration is not prepared.
The most important barrier to illegal entry to the United States is so impassable that only one normal car has ever crossed it. Sixty-two years ago, a Land Rover made the journey. And it took five months to do so, crawling along at just over a tenth of a mile per hour. This barrier is guarded ferociously day and night, with truly deadly sentries who are indifferent to human life. And it’s not even on the American border — it is the no-man’s land that exists between Central and South America, the Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia. It is the only place between Prudhoe Bay in Alaska and Ushuaia, Argentina, the world’s southernmost city on planet Earth, that cannot be driven over.
There is not a single road that joins North and South America, precisely because the geography of this place is so forbidding. The 100 kilometers between the city of Turbo in Colombia and the town of Yavisa in Panama is a dense equatorial jungle, rising quickly into treacherous mountains. It is crisscrossed with rivers that regularly become flash floods because the Darien Gap is one of the rainiest locations on Earth. It’s often over 95 degrees during the day and usually at 100 percent humidity. The wildlife is treacherous — including poisonous snakes and frogs, any of which can induce a medical emergency in a place that is hundreds of miles from the nearest human habitat. And then there are the billions of mosquitos, many of them carrying malaria or dengue. There is no cell service, so nobody can use modern cellphone maps or GPS trackers to figure out their exact location or whether they are going in the right direction. The only moderately safe way to cross the gap is to take boats or planes to bypass it entirely. But that costs significant money, and rules out many hundreds of thousands of those most desperate to escape crumbling regimes in South America.
The Darien Gap has stopped Colombia’s drug-trade dysfunction from spreading north into Panama. It’s also been the one thing, including massively tightened visa restrictions into Mexico, stopping a tsunami of potential migration to the United States from South America. And not just South America. After the collapse of Haiti’s government in 2021, Haitians began pioneering a route to the southern border of the United States using the Darien Gap.
Since Covid, a number of countries have become drastically more unlivable, and hundreds of thousands of their citizens are now following in those Haitian footsteps, whether from Venezuela, Ecuador, Gambia, or China. And this wave of humanity is starting to tame the jungle by trampling it. Increasingly, drug smugglers and paramilitaries are organizing the gap for migration. It’s estimated that as many as 400,000 will cross the Darien Gap in 2023; 90,000 have already done so. People are coming from all over the world as well. According to the Guardian:
Just this week, the Biden administration announced a joint 60-day campaign with the governments of Panama and Colombia to stop the flow of migrants through the gap. The Biden administration faces another potential exacerbation of the border crisis because the pandemic-related rules that it has used to slightly contain the chaos will end on May 11 of this year.
Unfortunately, just as the Biden administration has tried to end the border crisis by spreading it to random hotels and destinations around the United States, so the White House is advertising that its solution to the crisis at the gap will include “new lawful and flexible pathways for tens of thousands of migrants and refugees as an alternative to irregular migration.” One particularly futile-sounding part of the announced plan was a joint operation to “reduce poverty” in the border communities of Colombia and Panama to dissuade people from the booming human-smuggling business around the gap.
If these plans fail, and the Darien Gap becomes a major land bridge for migration, it will expose and pressurize the other “gap” in immigration enforcement, which is the simple unwillingness of Democratic administrations to vigorously enforce the laws that distinguish between U.S. citizens, lawful visa holders, and illegal migrants.
What Happens When the Darien Gap Is Overrun? | National Review
A wave of humanity is starting to tame the Darien Gap by trampling it, and the Biden administration is not prepared.
www.nationalreview.com
