As tens of thousands of immigrant children continue flooding into the United States, we should not ignore the role that U.S. statist policy has played in this phenomenal event.
Consider the drug war, one of the longtime favorite statist programs. It has turned Latin America into a hellhole of violence, bringing into existence violent drug gangs, gang wars, turf battles, murders, assassinations, kidnappings, robberies, extortion, burglaries, thefts, and political corruption. In Mexico alone some 60,000 people have been killed in the last 6 years—not because of drugs but because of the war on drugs.
Consider the U.S. support of brutal regimes in Latin America. That’s what foreign aid and the School of the Americas is all about. The State Department puts U.S. taxpayer money into the hands of the dictators, and the Pentagon trains their military and intelligence forces so that they can establish “order and stability” within the nation. Such “order and stability” is a pseudonym for pro-U.S. dictatorship and tyranny. It consists of violent crackdowns, including torture and rape, of people who dare to question the dictatorship and tyranny. That then produces an endless cycle of violent resistance to the tyranny and then violent crackdown on the resistance.
Consider U.S. regime-change operations by both the Pentagon and the CIA, by which U.S. national-security state officials destroy democracy in Latin America when Latin Americans vote socialists into power who U.S. officials disapprove of. We’re talking about U.S.-supported coups, assassinations, foreign aid to opposition groups, civil wars, and invasions.
The fact is that the U.S. government has converted Latin into a cauldron of violence, dictatorship, tyranny, murder, assassination, rape, detention, robberies, extortion, and corruption, all with the enthusiastic support of those compassionate “love the poor” statists, who tell us, “We’re not responsible for the deaths of those children because we should be judged by our good intentions, not by the actual results of our policies. Send those kids back now and we’ll hope for the best for them.”
If the deaths and suffering of tens of thousands of innocent children and the callous insistence that they be forcibly returned to face an early death don’t cause the American people to question the existence of drug war, the U.S. foreign policy of empire and interventionism, and the concept of the welfare state, what will?