Kamala Harris is going to the border.
But not just any part of the border. The destination of choice for Biden's migrant-surge czar in her quest to find all those "root causes" of illegal migration from Central America is...El Paso.
One problem: It's not the destination of choice for Central America's illegal border-crossers. Some do cross there, but most of those apprehended by the lawmen in El Paso come from someplace else.
Here's the Border Patrol's statistics for 2021 on who's crossing in its El Paso corridor.
So even by Harris's own reckoning, that as border czar she's focusing only on Central America's role in the border surge, you can see that she's going to a place where the majority of illegal crossers are coming from nations other than Central American ones. Central Americans from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala form less than a third of the Border Patrol "encounters" with illegal crossers in that area. About a third come from Mexico, which has proximity to the States, but most come from countries well outside the area Harris is supposedly focusing on.
So when she comes to the border, she's more likely to meet Venezuelans, Cubans, Indians, Nigerians, Brazilians, Ecuadoreans, and Haitians than actual Hondurans, Guatemalans, or Salvadorans.
The Border Patrol chart doesn't have a precise breakdown by country, but there are indicators elsewhere that suggest that it's mostly Venezuelans and Cubans, fleeing election fraud, and socialist economic rubble, who are doing the most surging on in at the El Paso corridor. Those migrants aren't going to be able to give her too much information about root causes from Central Americans that she can use for political purposes, given that many are likely to be blasting the evils of socialism rather than the evils of global warming, which is what she's looking for.
Now let's look at the places she could be going to if she wants to focus on Central Americans and all those "root causes" she says she's still boning up on. Here's the Rio Grande Valley, where the border surge is the worst:
Now, there's a place where the Central Americans are surging on in. And Harris has several corridors she can pick from where at least one Central American country (or Mexico) makes up the majority of the surgers — Big Bend, Laredo, Del Rio, Tucson among them, and the two California corridors are almost exclusively Mexican. Only El Paso and Yuma's smuggling corridors have "other" as the leading place of origin as their top category, and sure enough, Harris picked El Paso.
Nearly all of the corridors on the Customs and Border Patrol's chart — you can click them here — show Central Americans in the majority on the eastern parts of the U.S. border and Mexicans in the majority on the western part, with the "other" category in the middle, in El Paso (and the Yuma corridor). It tells a lot about the organized way in which cartel smuggling gangs, which carve out "territories," operate, which might be why you'd want to go to where most Central Americans are surging in if you were serious about knowing the actual reason why they're coming.
In other words, you don't go to someplace like El Paso if you want to find the root causes of Central American migrant border surges. You go where the Central American migrants actually are surging on in.
Harris isn't doing that. She's fundamentally unserious about finding root causes of migration from Central America because she isn't even going where the most significant numbers of Central Americans are coming in.
That tells us this trip is about photo ops, sanitized imagery, and maybe succoring political cronies, going to particular districts in exchange for particular favors. She's not serious. She'll go, take her Instagrams and selfies, and get gushing coverage from Lester Holt, who's still suggesting that he's the reason for the whole change of heart from Harris about going to the border and now has reason to follow her around on her travels and get more coverage. Holt will be fooled easily about the motivation for this useless stunt and fail to ask why she's going to a part of the border where Central Americans are not in the majority. However, the rest of us won't be.
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