Still Going On

Move along, nothing to see here. Oh, wait. Right. Stop. Read:

Earlier this summer, as unaccompanied Central American children poured into the United States at a rate of more than 350 per day, President Obama and Republicans agreed: This was a crisis that Washington needed to address immediately. And then nothing happened. Surprising almost no one, the least-productive Congress in history went home for the summer without striking any kind of deal. Obama was left without the extra $3.7 billion he said he needed to deal with the situation at the border, and the existing immigration law that both the president and his conservative critics blamed for the calamity remained untouched.

Two months later, the number of minors being arrested at the border has dropped significantly. But what was a problem then remains a problem now. The big difference is that the summer’s “humanitarian crisis,” once the subject of innumerable press conferences and op-eds, now goes mostly unmentioned in Washington. To be sure, one major reason for the relative silence is that our attention has been pulled to Ferguson, Missouri, and the Middle East. But given the rhetoric and handwringing on display in June, late August’s relative silence is staggering.

Obama did touch on the topic briefly during a press conference this Thursday, in the context of how the crisis will affect his plan to reshape the nation’s immigration system through executive action. As the president noted, the flood of migrant children has slowed substantially in recent weeks. According to the most recent data from the Department of Homeland Security, the border patrol apprehended 5,508 unaccompanied children in July—nearly half the total of the previous month and the fewest since February. Still, these are huge numbers. The amount of unaccompanied minors from Central America arrested at the border last month was more than the number of Central American minors taken into custody in a typical year as recently as a half-decade ago.

(Voorhees)

To the other, before anyone panics, it is not really anything to panic about. But as we keep calm and respawn, perhaps we might spare a moment for those who cannot and will not respawn, and you know, given enough moments maybe someone will think of something useful. For our own part, we’ve got nothin’ at the moment.

Damn.

Appalling

There is a reason Amanda Marcotte is so angry:

There’s been a major boneheaded failure already in these nascent attempts at pretending to have “compassion” for the migrant children and pretending that the desire to send them back is borne out of this “compassion”. Adam Kwasman is one of those frothing-at-the-mouth anti-immigrant state legislators in Arizona—naturally, he’s also running for Congress—and he was trying to strike the “I just care so much about these kids!” pose by describing what he said was a bus full of migrant children that he believed were afraid.

In pure politician bullshit mode, Kwasman said, “I was actually able to see some of the children in the buses. The fear on their faces …. This is not compassion.” He went on to imply that the Obama administration is somehow failing at “border security” and that being stricter about it in some abstract way would prevent the “sad” kids, presumably by allowing them to die quietly in the desert instead of make it across the border. Compassion!

There is, of course, a punch line. And do you really want to know?

Really?