Let's start with a statement about a number. This is from something put out from the White House, titled for idiots, "What You Need to Know About the President’s Authorization for the National Guard to Deploy to the Southern Border." The document gives a number. Two of them, really: "More than a thousand people a day and more than 300,000 a year violate our sovereignty by illegally crossing the border."
As many people on the Twitter and elsewhere have pointed out, there is a huge fuckin' difference between 1000 a day, which equals 365,000, and 300,000 a year, which is closer to an actual, reported number, 303,000 (or 800 a day). Now, here is where things get a little tricky, and by "tricky," I mean, "factual." Because, see, we don't really know how many people cross the border illegally. We can estimate, sure. What we do know is how many people the Border Patrol has apprehended at the southern border, and that's the number Trump is referring to.
Now, in that screaming, hysterical document and the screaming, hysterical order, as well as Trump's screaming, hysterical tweets, as well as the screaming, hysterical rhetoric coming from other screaming, hysterical Republicans (who are, in truth really screaming and hysterical over the possible 2018 blue wave sweeping them into the political ocean), we're told, "The situation at the border has now reached a point of crisis" because of drugs, gang members, and children (no, really, this administration has a boner for fucking over kids, especially unaccompanied minors).
The problem is, of course, of course, of fucking course, that the situation hasn't reached a point of crisis. By no stretch of whatever warped, savage imagination Trump might have is it a crisis. In fact, it's so far from a crisis, that it's goddamned laughable. You know how I know that? Because of the motherfucking numbers. From the motherfucking Border Patrol. In the year 2000, they apprehended 1,640,000 people at the border, which, by my amazing ability to do math, works out to roughly a metric fuck-ton more than 303,000. Or over 5 times as many as were apprehended last year.
And, despite the firehose of shit Trump is spraying on President Obama over the border, that number, which had been cut in two by the Bush administration, went from 705,000 in 2008 to 408,000 in 2016. The number was in the 325-425k range for the last few years of the Obama presidency. The reason it went up and down has to do with the economy in the United States, the economy and the living conditions of the countries the migrants were coming from (especially Mexico), and, yes, the strength of border security. Bush amped it up and Obama continue the amping. There are fewer apprehensions because there are fewer people trying to cross the border. It's that fucking simple. It's not a crisis. It's a relatively reasonable expectation, easily managed, not a reason to go bugfuck on the troops.
Any other reading of these numbers is merely there to het up the blood of the yahoos ahead of the midterms, to go back to the same racist well that Republicans (and, sometimes, yes, Democrats) go to time and time and time again. Brown people will always be scary to those hogs who wallow in mud puddles of white ignorance.
What about drugs? Drugs get in here by planes and ships and trucks that cross the border legally with illegal shit in them. Your National Guard members wandering around the streets of Laredo ain't gonna do shit about that.
What about violence? Yeah, drug cartel and gang violence sucks. But the only thing that even makes it on the same planet as a crisis is the proliferation of guns, which is something that the United States is doing to itself and to Mexico. You wanna do something about that? And maybe about poverty? And maybe about drug legalization?
What about caravans? Get the fuck outta here with that. Those were refugees from the fucking violence that Trump talks about. If Fox "news" and Breitbart keep screaming in your face, you get filled to your fuckin' tits with this bullshit.
Trump's gonna use this issue, though. He's gonna get in front of his idiot hordes who will hoot and holler as he dances a jig about his worthless wall, the same fuckin' hoodoo he conjures when he's whipping up the rubes, a fading rock star performing his one hit.
