Border crisis

Biden’s border blues

When hundreds of thousands of migrants surged to the southern border soon after Joe Biden took office, administration officials urged patience. Donald Trump had “dismantled” the system, homeland security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insisted when asked about chaotic scenes at the border last March. “It takes time to rebuild it virtually from scratch,” he said. Well, the Biden administration has now had plenty of time — and there is no end to the border crisis in sight. Eighteen months on from Mayorkas’s assurances, the numbers are no less staggering. In June alone, Customs and Border Protection reported more than 200,000 apprehensions. So far this year, law enforcement has encountered more than 1.5 million migrants in attempted border crossings.

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Stop enabling the crisis junkies

Did you make good use of the neatly palindromic 2/22/22? To refresh your memory, it was a day that turned out be the narrow window between the moment when the evolving “science” suddenly allowed Democratic governors to start lifting their states’ mask mandates, and Vladimir Putin launching his special mission to “protect the people” in eastern Ukraine. I hope you enjoyed it, because given the way the mainstream media portray the news these days, it may be a while before we’re all allowed our next respite from the seemingly permanent existential crisis that runs as a through-line to our human condition.

crisis

Whipping up a crisis

'It’s a little thing, but a big little thing.’ I’ve been using this not-exactly-eloquent phrase lately to describe a category of observation that could be written off as nitpicking, but which isn’t, really. If you notice enough big little things, you might just be able to explain how the world works. One big little thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately comes from ‘Another Crisis at the Border’, the September 27 edition of The Daily, the blockbuster New York Times podcast. The episode was hosted by Astead Herndon and was mostly a conversation between him and his fellow Times reporter Michael Shear. They discussed the growing crisis at the US/Mexico border, and the large group of mostly Haitian migrants fleeing political and natural disaster.

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