We Are To Blame For The Surge of Unaccompanied Foreign Children

On Sunday, the local tea party established its complete disregard for children by conducting a boisterous protest at the doorstep of Salisbury Township's KidsPeace, a facility that houses children who already have enough troubles. American children, by the way. In addition to this child abuse, they donned surgical masks and carried signs saying things like "Illegal Mestizos are Bringing in Leprosy and Scabies". They are playing to our base instincts. But why are those children here? Are they hear to steal jobs? Is it because President Obama wants to recruit more Democratic voters, as some of these fear mongers suggest?  According to four-star Marine General John Kelly, who heads up the U.S. military's southern Command, it's our fault. Those Central American children are running for their lives and away from the drug wars fueled by our own appetites.

Mary O'Grady, in What Drove The Children North, sums up General Kelly's views:

In a July 8 essay in the Military Times headlined "Central America Drug War a Dire Threat to U.S. National Security," Gen. Kelly explains that he has spent 19 months "observing the transnational organized crime networks" in the region. His conclusion: "Drug cartels and associated street gang activity in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, which respectively have the world's number one, four and five highest homicide rates, have left near-broken societies in their wake." He notes that while he works on this problem throughout the region, these three countries, also known as the Northern Triangle, are "far and away the worst off."

With a homicide rate of 90 per 100,000 in Honduras, and 40 per 100,000 in Guatemala, life in the region is decidedly rougher than "declared combat zones" like Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the general says the rate is 28 per 100,000.

How did the region become a killing field? His diagnosis is that big profits from the illicit drug trade have been used to corrupt public institutions in these fragile democracies, thereby destroying the rule of law. In a "culture of impunity" the state loses its legitimacy and sovereignty is undermined. Criminals have the financial power to overwhelm the law "due to the insatiable U.S. demand for drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin and now methamphetamines, all produced in Latin America and smuggled into the U.S."

Gen. Kelly agrees that not all violence in the region is linked to the drug trade with the U.S., but "perhaps 80% of it is." That's because of the insidiousness of the vast resources of kingpins. It's "the malignant effects of immense drug trafficking through these non-consumer nations that is responsible for accelerating the breakdown in their national institutions . . . and eventually their entire society as evidenced today by the flow of children north and out of the conflictive transit zone."

That migrant children are drawn to the U.S. when they decide to flee may very well have to do with the fact that they believe they will be able to stay because of an asylum law for children passed in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush. But refugees from the Northern Triangle are seeking other havens as well. According to Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, from 2008-13 Honduran, Guatemalan and Salvadoran applications for asylum in neighboring countries—mostly Mexico and Costa Rica—are up 712%.

Gen. Kelly writes that the children are "a leading indicator of the negative second- and third-order impacts on our national interests." Whether the problem can be solved by working harder to bottle up supply, as the general suggests, or requires rethinking prohibition, this crisis was born of American self-indulgence. Solving it starts with taking responsibility for the demand for drugs that fuels criminality.

I realize these facts are not what the tea party wants to read, so I expect them to ignore it.