Mexico waves through a 15,000-strong migrant caravan
Our friends the Mexicans, as one might call them, have shown their "friendship" with the U.S., and more specifically the Biden administration, by waving through a huge migrant caravan for illegal entry into the U.S.
According to Fox News:
The organizer of a massive migrant caravan attempting to make its way to the United States says that the Mexican government has offered work visas to migrants, which would allow them to travel freely through the country.
Caravan leader Luis Villigran told Fox News that Mexican officials have told him it will begin issuing 1,000 temporary work visas a day to the migrants in the caravan — which are estimated to number approximately 12,000 — as early as tomorrow.
The caravan is headed to the States from southern Mexico, stretches 32 miles, and is said to have up to 15,000 "asylum seekers," waving the flags of the countries they are desperate not to be sent back to.
Prior to that, the migrants had been holed up in Tapachula, supposedly awaiting their permits for work in Mexico, or asylum claim adjudication, having largely been stopped and put there after illegally breaking through Mexico's Guatemalan border.
Now organizers of the caravan say Mexico is issuing the permits, whose chief value to the migrants is not the opportunity to work, but as a travel pass. News outlets report that most migrants will ignore the work offer and move right on through to the U.S. border. Once they illegally cross, they know that with Joe Biden's border policies, the goodies will flow, and they can stay. Who'd want to stay and work a low-wage job in Mexico instead?
It comes just as the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas is on, and Mexico's president has snubbed attending, a big absence, given Mexico's importance to the hemisphere, ostensibly on the grounds that Biden has not invited socialist hellholes Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua to the gathering. It was indeed a stupid move, given the potential Biden would have had, as host, of holding up the socialist failures of those places to the other attendees in a big public forum, particularly as large numbers of Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans are fleeing to the U.S. in that caravan.
But Biden — and Mexico's president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador — are socialists themselves, so it is not going to happen. They like the socialism.
This isn't the first time Mexico has done this. The Mexicans are obviously sending a message to Biden.
Back in September, Mexico released a huge caravan of as many as 15,000 mostly Haitians to cross illegally into the U.S. at Del Rio, Texas, waiting for entry to the States as asylum-seekers and generally getting it.
Todd Bensman at the Center for Immigration Studies found that it was a deliberate act by Mexico to send some kind of message:
The surprising answer, which the migrants provided independently in different places and at different times, was universal: on Sunday, September 12, the Mexican government effectively sent a mass of migrants it had bottled up for months in its southern states up to the American border. This move, which appears to have been done under the cover of Mexico's independence week of celebration known as El Grito, essentially foisted a humanitarian problem onto the Americans in a single week.
Perhaps it was a protest at Joe Biden's disorder-at-the-border policies, releasing a number so huge that the cameras are not going to miss it. Perhaps it was displeasure at other things. What we know for sure is that Biden has mismanaged relations with Mexico, which President Trump was able to handle with migration deals that stopped huge border caravans from coming through. Biden only offers incentives for illegal border-crossing, and as a result, Mexico is flooded with migrants from more than 100 countries who used Mexico as a launch point. Perhaps the message was for Biden to stop and restore the Trump-era agreements on migration, given the burden the waiting migrants pose on Mexico. Perhaps it is another factor. Mexico has shown itself willing to respond to straight talk and a hard shutdown of the border. Biden has offered no such resolution.
Now he gets twin humiliations on the public relations front — Mexico boycotting the summit, and Mexico sending in the caravans. The loser? The American public. Thanks, Joe — you did that, too.
Image: Screen shot from Fox News video via YouTube.