In this episode of High Noon, John Daniel Davidson joins the podcast to take a deep dive into the crisis unfolding on our Southern border and U.S.-Mexico relations going all the way back into the nineteenth century and beyond.
Davidson and Stepman detail the worsening catastrophe at the border, as well as adding historical context to the entanglement between the American West and Mexico going back centuries, and the divergent fates of the two nations.
Davidson is the Political Editor at The Federalist and has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He has been reporting from the border in person, writing dispatches that elucidate the human cost of our immigration crisis on both sides of the national line.
High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. Inviting interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. My guest today is one of the very few people actually doing real reporting on what’s happening on our Southern border. John Daniel Davidson is the political editor over at The Federalist. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and then the Texas Monthly, and he lives in Texas most of the time. And right now, today he’s in Alaska, but all Western, all Western states. He has been publishing regular dispatches from our Southern border in which he’s been highlighting the developing crisis there, the lawlessness, the humanitarian situation that’s developing there.
And I brought John on to talk about this exactly because although I’m sure that he does have views on the subject, he’s largely avoided writing about this issue from the perspective of the domestic cultural battle about immigration, not because that conversation and battle isn’t important domestically, but I feel like it’s so often held in a vacuum that has a sort of lack of understanding of what everyone involved, but on both sides of the border is actually going through and facing on the ground. And also as a fellow westerner here, I think a lot of the conversation that happens, especially in the Acela Corridor or on the East Coast sort of lacks an understanding of what it’s actually like to live in the border region of the United States.
So we’re going to have that in-depth discussion today about what the situation down there actually is, why it got that way, and hopefully some things that we might be able to do about it if we can muster the political will. And John is definitely the best person to guide us through that conversation. So welcome to High Noon, John.
John Daniel Davidson:
Thanks for having me. I don’t know if I’m the best person, but I’ll do my best.
Inez Stepman:
One of the best certainly. So let’s just start with the current state of the border right now. It’s Friday, August 13th when we’re recording this. And you just have a brand new piece up at The Federalist talking about how this crisis is not slowing down at all. So what’s actually happening right now in mid-August on the border, and what do we expect in the next few months?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah, it’s good that we’re recording this today because yesterday U.S. customs and border protection released their July numbers for the border. So all the numbers of apprehensions, arrests, and just their general kind of monthly statistics for the border, which they do every month. And people who watch the border and cover the border have been anxiously awaiting for the July numbers, and because generally speaking this time of year, we would expect the numbers of arrests at the border to start going down. That’s true almost every year that they’ve been keeping track of these kinds of border statistics, you see the same seasonal pattern. Illegal immigration increases in the spring, it peaks often in April or May, and then as the summer gets going and the temperatures rise in South Texas, it begins to drop off and sometimes can drop off quite quickly once we get into July and August, we’re talking triple digits, very dangerous conditions in South Texas and in Arizona for people crossing on foot.
That’s not what’s happening this time. We’re seeing a very unusual trend in that illegal border crossing continues to increase as the summer drags on, and not by a little bit. The increase from June to July was drastic. 188,000 total apprehensions at the border in June, more than 212,000 in July. And that’s very unusual. Like I said, we would expect a decrease, but even if we saw an increase, we wouldn’t expect that much. So something is happening on the border that is very unusual, and there are forces at work here that’s I don’t think most Americans understand. And quite frankly, I don’t think a lot of the people at the higher levels in the Biden administration fully understand. Certainly, the policies they’ve put forward don’t show any kind of an understanding about what’s happening or what their initial policies on coming into office have created.
So we have a 20-year high in August for monthly apprehensions that followed a 20 year-high in June for apprehensions. So we haven’t seen these kinds of numbers on the border in 20 years, and we’ve never seen this makeup. So 20 years ago, we had one and a half million people arrested at the border. They were almost all men from Mexico. Now the mix is much different where it’s families, there’s children, there’s people from all over the world. So it’s a very different situation than it was 20 years ago.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. You’re actually anticipating what I wanted to ask you next, which is we talked about this issue as though essentially it hasn’t changed from 10 or 15 years ago. We still think about, a lot of people still think about this issue as essentially economic migrants who are not necessarily even looking to stay in the United States, but are mostly single men who are crossing the border to find work and maybe send money back to their families. I mean, you mentioned that the profile of your typical migrant crossing the border in 2021 is quite different than in 2001. In what way, you already have said they come from different parts of the globe, I mean, where do they come from? How are they crossing the border? Is that as different from in the past? I mean, how has all of this developed over the past 20 years that makes it different?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. I’ll say before I go into that, I’ll say that your comment at the beginning is well taken and absolutely right. I’ve always thought that Americans don’t really understand the border. And really in many cases are not all that interested in understanding it, and neither are a lot of corporate media outlets that cover the border. We use it as a proxy for our culture wars and our political battles, but understanding the border on its own terms and as a sort of really interesting and complicated and historically rich region and dynamic is not something that the media or the American people really have a firm grasp on. So I’m glad we’re having this discussion. As to your question about how it’s changed, you’re right, 20 years ago, the vast majority of the people who crossed the Southwest border were Mexican men who were looking for work.
And there’s a lot of history here, including NAFTA, including the development of a lot of industry in Northern Mexico as a result of NAFTA, but also involving the changing economy of South Texas as a result of increased trade and the flow of goods back and forth between factories in the United States and in Northern Mexico. But all of that dynamic is not the dynamic that is primarily driving the border crisis now. What we didn’t have back then and honestly the customs and border protection back then, which it was the immigration and naturalization service, actually back then prior to 9/11 and the creation of Department of Homeland Security, which was boring and not really important, but they didn’t even keep track of the categories of migrants that they keep track of now, statistically.
So family units, unaccompanied minors, accompanied minors, single adults. They didn’t break it down like that. But they do now. And part of the reason they do is because, beginning in 2014, we had something happened at the border that had never really happened before. Large groups and a large volume of unaccompanied minors just showing up to the border without their parents, or without any kind of legal guardian or adult. And this was under Obama. And initially, the Obama administration had no idea what to do and didn’t understand why this was happening. And detained these kids, tried to get them deported. The courts intervene, said because of this Flores settlement from the ’90s, you can’t detain these children for more than 20 days. And so they started with finding sponsors for them, family members, relatives, legal guardians, vetting these people, transferring them to HHS.
A whole bureaucracy kind of grew up out of what to do about this problem on unaccompanied minors in 2014. Well, that dynamic has evolved in the years since 2014. And in 2019, the last time we had a big surge at the border, we saw unaccompanied minors and we saw a huge volume of family units, an adult with one or more children coming across and claiming asylum. And the whole asylum thing, which a lot of people don’t understand because it’s complicated, is almost like a whole new category of people at the border who are arriving with children on purpose and filing an asylum claim, knowing that they will be released in a very short period of time, because they know if they have children with them, then they can’t be held for a long period, they can’t be held more than a couple of weeks. And so they will be released usually with a court date to begin an asylum process that now can take up to three years. Usually it takes three years.
So there’s a huge incentive that no one set out to create, but it’s just a result of sort of bureaucratic evolution and torpor over the past eight years or so, and backlogs in our immigration courts that have created a situation where there’s an incentive. If you get across the border with your children, or if you can get your child unaccompanied across the border, you can be released in the United States pending the outcome of a case that will take years to adjudicate. And that is not a circumstance that we were dealing with back in the year 2000, when we had 1.6 million arrests at the border. That dynamic didn’t exist in the same way at all. And so it brings up all of these questions about where to house unaccompanied minors? What to do with families that are seeking asylum? How many people actually show up for these hearings? How many people actually get granted asylum from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala? It’s like 15% of people get granted asylum. Everyone else gets rejected.
Anyway, that’s a long answer to your question, but the dynamic is drastically different than it was 20 years ago, and yet we’ve made almost no changes to federal immigration or asylum laws in the meantime, to like actually meet this new challenge.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. It really seems like there are a lot of unintended consequences of U.S. policy that we set here, or even that isn’t really policy. But for example, somebody running for president or the current administration will make statements about what they are and are not willing to do for a domestic political debate, and then that has ramifications for people who essentially they show up because they have an expectation that more than likely they will be able to enter this system where they’re released into the United States. And then they have, at least, as you say, two, three years here, if they were showing up for the court dates, and if they’re not, they can just sort of disappear and become one of the millions of people who are living illegally in the United States.
John Daniel Davidson:
It’s a reasonable expectation, I should say. They’re not wrong. Like if I lived in Honduras, I would do the same thing. They’re not wrong to have that expectation. And the reason, I think the reason right now that we’re seeing so many more people coming and as the summer goes on is a word is getting back to the sending communities that, yes, if you get across the border, you’ll be detained it, but you’ll be released. I think that drives it. It’s networks and family networks and communities of people in the United States that are sending word back saying it worked, we got in, we’re released, we got to where we were going. That is much more powerful than any message, any sort of idiotic message from Kamala Harris of don’t come. Nobody’s going to listen to the vice-president. They’re going to listen to their neighbors and their relatives.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. One thing we haven’t talked about yet in terms of what’s different between now and 20 years ago is the development of the role of the cartels and into essentially human trafficking. As a money-making enterprise, can you talk a little bit about what the role of the cartels is here? What it was, let’s say, a decade or two decades ago versus today? I mean, because it seems to me that it’s amazing how little we talk about the cartels when we’re talking about any kind of border situation, when it’s the talking heads on sort of the Sunday Talk Show type situation. And to the point where I think it was Trump who brought up coyotes, smugglers, in the debate, and then there was some, I can’t remember who it was, but somebody on one of these talking heads shows was like, why is he talking about animals? Right?
John Daniel Davidson:
That was pretty funny.
Inez Stepman:
But what is the role of the cartels now as opposed to 20 years ago?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. I’ll say the reason that you don’t hear the talking heads on CNN or whatever talk about cartels is because it’s counternarrative. I feel like the left is desperate to maintain this narrative that the people coming across are victims, they’re asylum seekers, we should welcome them there. And often the reality is they are victims, but they’re victims of cartels and smuggling organizations that are taking advantage of them. And so yes, the cartels in some places along the border are making just as much off the smuggling of migrants as they are the smuggling of narcotics. It’s because they have created an industry from the demand, which will come as no surprise to anyone who follows these cartels.
As you say, they’re money-making organizations and we don’t think about them the way that we should, right? In some places they’re like gangs, but it’s better to think of the cartels as like Halliburton but instead of running logistics and supply chain management for global corporations, they traffic narcotics, weapons, cash, and people. And not just that, they also steal fuel and are engaged in massive extortion and kidnapping, those sort of programs. They have diverse income streams. They’re multinational corporations with nearly unlimited resources, highly sophisticated, highly technologically advanced and organized, and have quite a bit of firepower and sort of capability in terms of their operations on the ground. Not only that, over the past a year and a half during the pandemic, they’ve provided social services and aid to communities in Mexico, out in the open with the cartel logo on the side of their trucks kind of coming into the city square to distribute food and water during the pandemic.
So we need to think of them. They are more like what Hezbollah is in Lebanon than they are like a gang or a criminal gang. It’s not to say they’re not criminals, but their capabilities, I don’t think most Americans quite understand. The former U.S. ambassador to Mexico during the Trump administration, Christopher Landau, some months ago in a forum said that 35% to 40% of the geographic territory in Mexico is controlled by cartels. Now think about what that means when we talk about Mexico as a sovereign state, or as a partner in dealing with illegal immigration. 35% to 40% of the territory is controlled, not by the Mexican state, but by the cartels. What are we really talking about when we talk about partnering with Mexico to control illegal immigration? The cartels are making millions of dollars every day, hundreds of millions of dollars a week on illegal immigration.
And they’re doing it by making sure that everybody who crosses the Rio Grande, if you cross the Rio Grande, you have to pay a tax. So you pay what you paid to the smuggler, but then the smuggler adds a tax for the cartel that controls that area. And they’ve gotten very sophisticated about this. In 2019, during the last migrant surge, there were so many people crossing and such large groups that were crossing that the cartels missed out on a lot of income. And so this time around, they have gotten organized, they are risk fans, there’s a whole risk fan system and a database where they’re collecting information from every migrant, their phone number, where they’re going in the United States, the phone number of their family members back home, they verify those phone numbers. Most of the migrants crossing are indebted to the cartels. So these are not people that have thousands of dollars in cap just that they can spend. So they go into debt. So you have people coming in that are in debt bondage to multinational criminal organizations.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. I mean, what implications does what you just said… I mean, to summarize what you just said, you’re basically saying that our neighbor to the south is getting pretty close to being a failed state, right?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yes.
Inez Stepman:
That it is a kind of narco-state where the government actually does not have a monopoly on the use of force or power, very difficult to negotiate as your example about Hezbollah shows, right? Part of the problems in the middle east that have been ongoing is because it’s very difficult to find a negotiating partner, right? If you have essentially terrorist groups that are controlling territory and the government doesn’t have a strong way of dictating to them what they should and should not do, it sounds like we’re getting somewhere close to that in Mexico. I mean, how should we think about our relationship with Mexico? I mean, they achieved independence a mere 45 years after us. We’d had a tumultuous but blended history alongside that border region.
I think, again, people who are from the East Coast or haven’t spent a lot of time on the Southern border don’t realize how much there is so much sort of cultural overlap. And in a lot of times you’re talking about like the same “people” on both sides of the border, and yet this very clear demarcation of systems, right? Where on one side, they’re in… Obviously United States has plenty of problems and we discuss those all the time on this podcast, but there is a semblance of the rule of law. There isn’t as widespread corruption on the other side. There’s, as you say, basically is being partially ruled international cartels, drug cartels, right? So how should we be changing how we think about Mexico as a negotiating partner? And how should those changes in our thinking affect U.S. policy towards Mexico, ultimately as two sovereign nations?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. It’s a good question. It’s a big issue. I wish people talked about it more because it’s a big, complicated issue. We definitely need to change the way that we think about Mexico as a partner. And maybe this will be a kind of controversial or shocking position, but I’ll say it anyway, because that’s what I think. We need to stop thinking of Mexico as a reliable partner in managing the border. It’s not. It’s not maybe as bad as sort of Lebanon where you have like a parallel government and Hezbollah, and we may not be there yet, I think that we’re trending that way, but we need to stop thinking that we’re sort of have like an equal partnership with Mexico and that our interests are aligned. And the reason that I say that is because obviously the interests of the cartels that control much of Northern Mexico, that their interests are not aligned with the American national interests, no matter what Mexico city says. And increasingly Mexico city is not the one who’s in charge of Northern Mexico.
And it’s not as though, and I don’t want to be mistaken here, it’s not as though these cartels are sort of standing up a parallel government and they’re like revolutionaries or something, they’re corporations. What we’re seeing increasingly is the co-opting of local and state governments by the cartels. And this has been true for as long as there’s been cartels going back decades. But increasingly, we see cartels paying off and co-opting elements of government at every level, even going up to the national level and that the trial of El Chapo exposed some of that, and then the arrests that came after the arrest of Garcia Luna, who was the equivalent of like the FBI director in Mexico under the Calderon presidency, who turns out was taking bribes the whole time from the Sinaloa Cartel.
So that’s the big shift, I think, that we need to make. And what that looks like in terms of policy, I don’t think that Americans are quite ready to accept what that means. The Trump administration took a lot of flak just for leaning on President Lopez Obrador to control to do something about illegal immigration and it threatened to 5% tariff on Mexican imports, which is basically threatening to cripple the Mexican economy, unless he sort of did what Trump wanted and put some controls at the Southern border with Guatemala and interdict some of these caravans. And it worked for a while, but I should say outsourcing U.S. immigration policy to the Mexican federal government is a short-term solution.
There was a time in U.S. history, not that long ago, about 100 years ago where U.S. policy toward Mexico was that we would not tolerate a state of lawlessness on the U.S-Mexico border. And if the Mexican state was not able to control the situation south of the Rio Grande, then we would in pursuit of our own national interests, not in pursuit of imposing some kind of a rule or conquest of Mexico, but in the interest of securing our communities and our rule of law and keeping our people safe. And I’m thinking of this because the other day on Twitter, somebody posted a video in Laredo, Texas, they were taking a video of the port of entry, standing in the U.S. looking toward the turnstiles and the port in Mexico, and you could just hear if you turn the audio on just a gun battle raging, just on the other side of the port of entry. Automatic machine gun fire explosions, there a running street battle happening in the way of a Laredo just across the border.
That is precisely the situation in 1918 that happened El Paso and the U.S. army barracks were immediately deployed into Juarez to secure the city because stray bullets were coming across the border into El Paso. It was an immediate reaction by the U.S. army that this situation was intolerable. The Mexican federal forces were fighting the revolutionaries, and the battle was starting to spill over into the United States. So there’s very similar things happening in Mexico now on the border. It’s not in the context of a revolution, but it is in the context of cartels and government forces or cartels versus cartels. And the effects on U.S. communities are very similar. And in an earlier time, not that long ago, it would have seemed and been intolerable to U.S. authorities. And so I think we need to think again and maybe revisit what is the threshold for chaos in Northern Mexico right on our border that we’re willing to tolerate.
Inez Stepman:
You’re referencing the last time this happened being 100 years ago, and I can’t really think of a time in the intervening 100 years where… I mean, there’s definitely been better times and worse times between Mexico and the United States, but I can’t really think of a time when Mexico was sort of completely stable. Why is it that Mexico hasn’t been able to achieve that kind of stability? I mean, if we listen to the sort of a Chomsky, I Left, they would say-
John Daniel Davidson:
It’s all our fault.
Inez Stepman:
Right. It’s all our fault, it’s American imperialism. Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States, right? Is there any truth to that perspective that Mexico’s de-stability is in some way connected to being so close to the United States? Or is there something else going on there? Why is it that Mexico seemingly cannot have, let’s say, five consecutive decades of relative stability?
John Daniel Davidson:
Well, Canada is close to the United States too. I don’t like these arguments because I think they’re condescending for one thing to the people in Mexico because it takes their agency away, and it supposes that all the agency lies with the United States and with Americans, and that we are the only actors who matter and our decisions are the only decisions that have consequences. And I don’t think that that’s right, and I don’t think it’s accurate at all. I think depending on how far sort of back we want to go, that a lot of the problems in Mexico really stem from the founding of Mexico. Mexico couldn’t have had a more different experience than North America in terms of its emergence into the modern world.
Mexico was conquered by Spain, which was a very different power than England and had a very different culture. And the cultural sort of inheritance that Mexico got did not set them up for success with democratic institutions and a republican form of government. They inherited from Mexico very hierarchical social institutions that took the form in the emergence of a modern Mexico of a patronage system where you had a powerful patron or boss who ran an area or a geographic region or a massive vias and Presidios and ranches. And that’s where power was located and power was hierarchical, it was vertically integrated, it was not diffuse, and society was very stratified. And in some cases stratified racially between Mexicans of Spanish descent versus Mexicans of indigenous descent. And all of that couldn’t be more different than the experience of the British colonists who settled America and who forged our institutions, which were very horizontally integrated where equality and diffuseness of power was the norm.
And so I think that Mexico had a difficult time from the outset because what emerged from the Spanish colonies was a very different kind of society that was not well suited to democracy or republican forms of government compared to the United States. And I think that it’s a difficult issue to get into in-depth in a conversation like this, but I think that that, more than anything, explains the difficulties that Mexico has had from historical perspective. From a more recent perspective just looking at the last 40 years or so, you had the PRI in Mexico was this political party, a single political party ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. For 70 years, you had one party ruling Mexico, and the whole country was a patronage system for the PRI. That-
Inez Stepman:
Just let me interject here.
John Daniel Davidson:
Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.
Inez Stepman:
No, no, no, no, I want you to finish up this answer, but I used to laugh at the name PRI. I’m like, what does that mean? Party of Institutionalized Revolution? And now when I look at the folks here in the United States, I’m like, oh, okay, now I understand, it’s institutionalized revolution. I’m so sorry, go on.
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. And of course it becomes a parody of itself after 70 years because the revolution is just these entrenched, corrupt self-dealing elites and the patronage system that they built up to maintain power. That is not a situation in which… And along with this comes a lot of sort of leftist politics and socialist policies and the nationalized industries like the oil industry for many years. After 70 years of that makes it difficult to break out of that and to forge a real market-based economy, private industry and investment, and the development of major industry sectors like oil and gas. I don’t think that the problems… The problems that Mexico have are Mexican problems, that come primarily from Mexico’s own history, from the development of their own political institutions. Has the U.S. played a role certainly in the drug war? Yes, but I don’t think that we can lay the blame for the State of Mexico, which as you say, is better thought of as a failing state or an emerging narco-state.
I don’t think that we can lay the blame for that solely at the feet of the United States, or even primarily defeating the United States. I think that these are very old problems that have very deep roots and that don’t have easy solutions.
Inez Stepman:
I do want to get to the drug war piece of this conversation in a moment, but first I want to ask you, because you just went through in short version of the history of Mexico. And it seems like domestically, we talk about issues at the border and the differences between the United States side of the border and the Mexican side of the border in terms of sort of domestic racial terms. And could you maybe explain why that particularly doesn’t make sense for anybody who spends a lot of his time on the border?
John Daniel Davidson:
Oh, yeah. It’s very frustrating and really just stupid way to think about the border. In Texas, they used to talk about Tejanos and Anglos, right? The Anglos being the newcomers to Texas, and especially in South Texas, there are, I guess you would say Hispanic families, but traditionally Tejanos families that go back centuries, right? That were part of initial Spanish crown land grants. And these communities variously have seen themselves as Texan or Tejano for a long time. And when we kind of try to overlay our modern racial categories and certainly kind of our woke nonsense onto a place like Northern Mexico or Southern Texas, it just doesn’t fit at all.
I’ll give you an example. The corporate press will a lot of times talk about racial attitudes or disparities and focusing on black Americans and Hispanic Americans. And the problem that a lot of journalists get into, especially in Texas, is that after a few generations of being in the United States, the vast majority of Hispanics begin to identify as white. That doesn’t mean that they lose their Hispanic culture or even their language, although often they do, but they stop seeing themselves in terms of this category of Hispanic largely because the category Hispanic was sort of invented in the middle of the 20th century by the Left. And it is not a racial category as you well know, but a linguistic category. But in places like Texas, it doesn’t make much sense simply, as I said, because after a few generations, even families that arrive in the United States from Mexico after two or three generations, their children just identify as white, which is one of the reasons actually that the Hispanic population of Texas is not growing as fast as many people said it would because of this.
Inez Stepman:
Just have people marking different categories on the census forms.
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And the other aspect of this, circling back to the border, is that some of the people in South Texas who are most against illegal immigration from Mexico and certainly from Central America are Hispanic people who have an established presence who have been in Texas for a number of generations. They are very much anti-illegal immigration. Many of them, as we saw in the 2020 election, voted for Trump. Many of them are moving out of the Democratic Party where they’ve just culturally been Democrats, like a lot of parts of the country for decades and decades moving into the Republican Party because of border issues and because of immigration issues. And it’s an under-covered story and again, under-covered because it’s a counternarrative.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. And another thing I think it doesn’t get reported. Oftentimes when you’re talking, for example, about interactions between border patrol and migrants, everybody involved is of Hispanic or even Mexican descent sometimes.
John Daniel Davidson:
Almost every border patrol agent I’ve met. I can only think of one border patrol agent who was a press liaison guy who was white, but other than that, almost every border patrol agent I’ve ever done a ride-along with, talk to in an interview, talk to on the phone are all Hispanic. And most of them are from Central Texas, like they’re actually from the communities where they work. So the kind of the racial overlay that I think a lot of the corporate media wants to put specifically on the illegal immigration issue at the border, it doesn’t work, but if you want to talk in terms of like groups, all these people are Hispanic. They all are Spanish-speaking, and there’s not a really easy racial difference that you can tease out here.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Let’s return to the drug question. Obviously, even though the cartels are moving into human trafficking as a major moneymaker, I guess one I’d want to ask you is that connected to the legalization of marijuana increasingly in the United States. And the second thing is what drugs are they moving into the United States? How are they doing that? What are the impacts in the United States from the drugs that are coming through the Southern border?
John Daniel Davidson:
The legalization of marijuana has had a big effect on the drug trafficking at the border. And one of the effects has been that the cartels have diversified their sources of income. And this isn’t new. The cartels have always kind of looked for ways of making money more efficiently. And people who have watched Netflix’s Narcos series know that, getting into trafficking cocaine from South America. But the legalization of marijuana has certainly reduced the amount of marijuana coming across the border and has increased the amount of fentanyl, meth, and opioids, and heroin pretty markedly. So we have record amounts of fentanyl seizures and meth and heroin seizures at the border right now.
And that is a result of the cartels figuring out that it’s much easier to move these drugs, they can manufacture these drugs themselves. They import the precursor chemicals from China, they make the fentanyl or the opioids in labs in Mexico, and they’re easier to transport. And most of them go through the ports of entry, hidden in commercial vehicles. And a few years ago, I visited the port of entry at Laredo, but people don’t realize this, but Laredo is the largest port of entry by volume, or it’s the largest land port of entry by volume. It’s the second-largest port of entry period after the Port of Los Angeles. Hundreds of billions of dollars of goods go through Laredo to and from Mexico and United States every year.
And when you stand on the catwalk at the port of entry on the commercial side, in Laredo, there’s like a little footbridge over this like eight-lane pathway that’s just commercial vehicles that have been cleared for as part of the fast program. And so it’s an unbroken stream of commercial vehicles, hundreds of them, continually in an unbroken stretching back for like five miles into Mexico that are just constantly flowing into the United States. So the cartels use that stream of commercial traffic to bring these drugs in. They have unbelievably ingenious ways of hiding drugs. They will dissolve drugs in gasoline and the gas tanks. They will hide them in compartments in the engine attached to the engine as other components. They will hide them as cargo in various ways.
And they know that U.S. customs and border protection will only catch a certain percentage, and they bake that into their business model. They know certain percentage is going to get caught, but the vast majority will get through simply because of the volume of traffic. You have to kind of go there and see it. It’s mind-boggling. We have Herculean efforts on the U.S. side to try to detect this stuff. X-ray machines, like warehouse-size x-ray machines, that x-ray 18 wheelers to try to find contraband. And they do, but it’s only a drop in the bucket. And so record amounts of fentanyl and meth are being seized at the border, which means record amounts are getting in. And I think we see that reflected in heroin and opioid overdose deaths, which continue to climb and reach record levels in the United States.
Inez Stepman:
Let’s wrap up by talking about moral responsibility here, because there’s so much human suffering going on in this entire kind of chain of prophecies, right? Whether it’s from the journeys that migrants are taking sometimes from halfway around the globe and then through extremely rough terrain essentially working with these vicious cartels to have themselves smuggled over the border, whether it’s the fentanyl and opioid overdose deaths that you just referred to. I mean, whether it’s just people dying in the desert attempting to cross or drowning in the Rio Grande. How do we think about because… I guess what I’m trying to formulate here is it seems like our sympathy and our natural instinct to want to minimize this kind of human suffering is always deployed as a cultural in one direction, right?
It’s if you feel any sympathy at all for somebody who might want to escape Honduras and build a better life for their families in the United States, then the only way forward is essentially open-border policy, right? We have to take all these folks in into the United States and let them make their homes here. And that is the compassionate thing to do. How would you sort of assess the morality of both our policies and the way we think about our own Southern border in context of all of this, I mean, frankly, human suffering that’s happening every day on our border?
John Daniel Davidson:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a hard subject. I think that in terms of U.S. policy, U.S. immigration and border policy needs to be for Americans. It needs to be in the best interest of Americans. That is, I think, fundamental to not just policy on the border, but all U.S. policy needs to have the best interests of the people who constitute the nation first. But what we have is a policy that creates suffering, it doesn’t matter which administration is in power or which party is in power, and doesn’t serve the interests of the American people. So it’s sort of the worst combination possible. I think that we do need to have borders. You can’t have a country without borders.
And I think that we need to be very clear in how we enforce and control those borders so that we have an orderly way and a regular way for people to come into the country and not this ad hoc impromptu, completely irregular, and in some ways, bureaucratically capricious system in which we have all these different categories of people who are on all these different tracks. We have programs like temporary protected status for refugees. It’s not temporary, this dates back from the 1990s. So we have these Kafkaesque euphemisms in our law of temporary programs that were meant to provide temporary relief for victims of a hurricane, which have been going on now for 30 years. So we need to clear our minds of can’t and see reality as it is, and understand that much of the world is poor and many people in the world, many more than we could ever receive in an orderly way, would like to come here.
Now, given that, I think that we need to also recognize that we have maintained, for many decades, a policy that you could call a policy of benign neglect for our Southern neighbors. It is not acceptable in my view and not sustainable that we would have a 2000-mile land border with a collapsing state. That is not a tenable situation. It is in our national interest to ensure and to take steps to make sure that Mexico is a stable country that we can work with. And we have not done that. We also have an interest in making sure that the countries of Central America, southern Mexico are stable and relatively prosperous, and that they are not in a state of collapse as they are now. It blows my mind that we would spend 20 years and untold blood and treasure in places like Iraq and Afghanistan but allow our Southern neighbors to descend essentially into chaos.
That is we have a moral responsibility to the people of this country to make sure that that doesn’t happen, and that we don’t have a rolling humanitarian crisis on the border that waxes and wanes with different administrations but that is always simmering there waiting to explode. That is unacceptable. And I think the American people, to the extent that they understand what’s going on, know that it’s unacceptable, which is why a clear majority of people are dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s handling of this crisis. But these are questions that we need to ask ourselves and we need to grapple with questions like what is our immigration policy? Who is it for and why? What is our border for, and who should it serve? And until we, as a country, can kind of really have an honest conversation about that, we are going to just continue with these rolling crises at the border that are completely unfair to the people who are crossing the border and completely unfair to the American people as well.
Inez Stepman:
John, I can talk to you about this for another hour. Thank you so much for coming on. We didn’t even get to COVID, we didn’t get to all kinds of things that are in the news, but hopefully this conversation gives people a little more background about the history between the United States and Mexico, and sort of a framing in which to consider all the various crises that, as you say, will continue to bubble up. So thank you so much for coming on High Noon. Thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcasts, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.