Let's Know Things

This month we talk about the Mexican-American War, the Texas Revolution, and Haiti.

We also discuss earthquakes, the US Border Patrol, and the Northern Triangle.

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Transcript

The border between the United States and Mexico is about 1,954 miles, which is about 3,145 kilometers, long.

This current border was established in the wake of the Mexican-American War, which kicked off in 1846, ended in 1848, and was sparked by the United States' annexation of Texas—which is an official way of saying the US took territory that Mexico considered to be theirs, even though about a decade earlier, in 1835, a group of American colonists and Hispanic Texans led a revolution against the Mexican government—in part to preserve the legality of slavery, after Mexico banned the practice, but also because of a collection of rights that Mexican citizens lost as the government centralized power, which limited, among other things, the ability to immigrate to Mexico from the US—and this revolution, today called the Texas Revolution, led to a bunch of battles, among them the now-famous, and often histrionic-laden Battle of the Alamo, and the eventual extraction of this body of land, north of the Rio Grande River, into the United States as the 28th state in the union; an extraction that the Mexican government didn't recognize when the revolutionaries claimed it, or after the US accepted those revolutionaries into the larger union.

That revolution and lack of recognition of the, from Mexico's perspective, stealing of a huge chunk of their territory by their neighbor to the north, led to the aforementioned Mexican-American War in 1846, and when that ended in 1848 with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico agreed to officially recognize the secession of Texas, and also surrendered a huge chunk of land that makes up all or part of what are today the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and a tiny part of Wyoming.

This lost land accounts for nearly 15% of modern United States territory, but represented about 54% of Mexico's total territory, at the time; though much of that territory was claimed but not really managed in the sense of having troops in the area, collecting taxes, and so on—what was then called Alta California, the region that became most of those non-Texas states I just mentioned, before this war kicked off, was sparsely populated and not assiduously governed—so there weren't many people there, and the area lacked any significant infrastructure; it was a lot of open space, but it wasn't like they gave away any big, important cities or known resources.

Five years later, the Gadsden Purchase, which was undertaken because the US wanted to build a transcontinental railroad that would pass through what is today the southern portion of Arizona and New Mexico—and the Southern Pacific Railroad was indeed completed in the late 1800s—that purchase allowed that building to occur, but it also helped resolve some ongoing border disputes between the US and Mexico, and marked the last substantial territorial purchase that added land to the continental United States; that was completed in mid-1854, and largely defined the modern Mexican-American border.

So the contemporary iteration of this quite-long border looks how it does in part because of purchases made by the US in its early years, primarily from France, partially from secessionary, revolutionary activity by a group of Americans and Mexicans who didn't want the Mexican government to tell them what they could and couldn't do, anymore, and was partially the consequence of a war between the US and Mexico, during which the latter lost a significant portion of their total landmass, followed by a relatively small purchase of land in the southern portion of that conquered region.

And the US gained what would eventually become some of its most populous, wealthy states and cities because of this bundle of conflict and commercial activity; though not until after a fair bit of time had passed, and oil had become a thing that everyone wanted; which was what initially led to Los Angeles' success, in its early days, and then made Texas the energy-industry powerhouse it is, today.

Notable, too, is that that final purchase of land included what is today Tucson and Yuma, both in Arizona, and both fairly vital to that state's modern day shape and economic viability.

What I'd like to talk about today is what this border looks like, as of the latter-half of 2021, a bit of immigration-related recent history, and why this border is seeing a new wave of would-be immigrants from across the Caribbean, South America, and Central America.

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The article I'd like to start with today comes from The Wall Street Journal, and it's entitled:

Latin American Migration, Once Limited to a Few Countries, Turns Into a Mass Exodus

The United States Border Patrol, the federal law enforcement wing of the US Customs and Border Protection agency, was established with the passing of the US Immigration Act of 1924.

This establishment followed a fairly tumultuous period along the US-Mexico border, in the late-19th century up through and beyond WWI, during which time US investment in north-Mexican commerce and industry, especially mining, took off in a big way, the Mexican Revolution occupied a lot of Mexico's attention for about a decade, that revolution kicking off in part because of how much of the country's economy the US was scooping up, and then the now-infamous Zimmerman Telegram was sent by Germany to the Mexican government, and intercepted by the British, who shared it with the US: and that telegram said, basically, hey Mexico, you should totally go to war with the US and take back all that land they took from you over the course of the past handful of decades if they declare war on us.

This telegram would seem to have had the opposite intended effect, helping to bring the US into the war against Germany, though it also increased tensions with Mexico at a moment in which near-constant pitched battles between military forces on opposites sides of the border had become common enough that both sides also started building fences and other fortifications along the border, to protect border-towns that were being regularly attacked and ransacked by forces from the other side.

These barriers, on both sides, were reinforced and extended through the 1940s, but at that point relations between groups on the border had normalized and the US and Mexican governments were on good enough terms to swap parcels of land along the border to balance things out as the Rio Grande River shifted, which messed with earlier border delineations that used the river as a set, cartographic feature.

Despite the many Presidential administrations in the US that have partially or almost entirely built their platform on the issue of immigration—with modern Republicans typically focusing on keeping people out, and modern Democrats often focusing on allowing more people in, and giving those who have already entered some kind of pathway to legal citizenship or other means of sticking around—there's no single, unified fence or wall or other type of obstruction across the entire expanse of this border; it's just incredibly big, and there are many geographic reasons why doing so is expensive and often ineffective and generally just doesn't make sense, in terms of the cost to build and maintain to benefit of having built it and maintaining it ratio.

Most of the efforts in this regard have oriented around a "funneling" style approach, which is meant to make it a lot more difficult and dangerous to reach the US from Mexico unless you go through an official port of entry, or traverse a dangerous desert or mountain. The numbers indicate this hasn't been terribly successful, and has probably led to a whole lot of deaths and abuse of would-be migrants attempting to take these paths, often with the assistance of so-called "coyotes," who are not always, but are unfortunately often criminals who take advantage of the people they're leading through these dangerous areas in some way.

There are 48 official US-Mexico border crossings, and 330 ports of entry between them. In an average year, hundreds of millions of people cross through these borders, making it the most frequently crossed international border in the world.

It's difficult, by definition, to determine how many illegal crossings occur, alongside those legal ones, but in 2012, the Border Patrol arrested more than 364,000 people who were illegally entering the US, according to data they've made public, and there are an estimated half-million such entries a year, which means they're catching a lot of people, but not all, and those estimates could be way off; there's no way to know for certain.

That said, it's estimated that there are more than ten million undocumented people in the US, today, and that they contribute hundreds of billions of dollars worth of labor to the economy each year; most such people have been living in the US more than 5 years, and often closer to a decade.

The number of people attempting to cross at the US-Mexico border illegally dramatically increased in 2012, which led to quite a lot of anti-immigration sentiment in the US, especially related to folks coming in from Mexico, and countries throughout South and Central America.

This wave of sentiment culminated with the election of now-former US President Donald Trump, who made building a substantial and all-encompassing wall across the US-Mexico border a fundamental pillar of his election pitch.

Some new border wall pieces were eventually built, but wildly variable estimates, cost overruns, and outright scams and scandals—none of which are unusual with government projects of this kind, it should be noted—were especially prominent with the process of getting this wall plotted out and built. At this point, a fair bit of money has been spent on moving it forward, but only a few example portions were finished, and it's unlikely a project of this scale and with this ideological motivation will be pursued or completed under the current administration; it's actually still not clear how such a wall would be completed, given the scale of the problem it intends to solve, and the problems already identified with this means of attempting to solve it.

That said, contemporary happenings at this border seem to have moved the needle at least a little in terms of the Biden administration's willingness to consider some type of barrier, in addition to the ones that already exist, along this once more increasingly popular national entry point.

That Wall Street Journal piece covers some of these contemporary happenings, including a fairly recent change in the composition of the people attempting to cross into the US at the border with Mexico, and a surge in the size of the group trying to do so.

For the fiscal year 2020, in the midst of what we might now call the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were about 44,000 "encounters" with people from countries other than Mexico and Northern Triangle countries; Northern Triangle countries being Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, and "encounters" being the formal term for "border agents discovering people attempting to, or successfully crossing into the States illegally.

That was about 11% of all such crossings for the year.

In fiscal year 2019, there were 77,000 encounters, which was 9% of all crossings—so that range is pretty standard; most illegal crossings involve people from Mexico or Northern Triangle countries, most of the time, and again, this number represents people entering illegally from countries other than those.

From October 2020 until August 2021, though, not quite 300,000 encounters with people from non-Mexico, non-Northern Triangle countries were documented, and that was a fifth of all crossings.

So two things worth noting is that the overall number of attempted illegal entries into the US has been way up from October 2020, onward, but also the composition of people attempting to enter in this way his shifted toward folks from countries that don't usually try to enter the US illegally in such numbers.

The majority of the people who are part of this influx are from Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti—that last group by far the fastest-growing: 4,400 Haitians were arrested for trying to enter the US illegally across the whole 2020 fiscal year, and 28,000 tried from October 2020 through August 2021.

This surge represents a 20-year high in overall attempted illegal entries—and again, these are just the ones who are caught, so the true number could be somewhere around that, or it could be substantially higher—and if current trends continue, the number of arrests at the border are expected to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 million people for all of 2021, which is double what it was in 2019.

That the majority of this group comes from areas that have been hardest hit by a significant economic contractions in 2020 is no coincidence; 9 out of 10 people attempting to enter the US in this way are from countries that have suffered from some combination of economic collapse, spiraling inflation, government corruption and/or violence and discrimination, rampant non-governmental abuse and violence, from gangs and other sorts of militants, and/or a collection of environmental catastrophes.

Haiti, in particular, has had a very rough decade, beginning with an earthquake in 2010 that killed around 200,000 people, followed by years of weather- and corruption-related issues that have kept the country from ever fully rebuilding its tangible and intangible infrastructure; most recently, they had another earthquake in the summer of 2021, which killed 2,200 people, and their president was assassinated in July.

Many people left Haiti after that earlier earthquake and have been living in South and Central American countries ever since, some happily, but some retreating northward as many of those same issues began to emerge in their new homelands.

Likewise, Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans have been suffering under oppressive, authoritarian leaders, Brazilians have been struggling with widespread poverty and COVID infection rates, and Ecuador suffers from a chronic lack of economic opportunity—and that was made all the worse by the pandemic.

Many people who make it to the border have been told that the US is open and accepting asylum-seekers, or hope that this is the case, but they're then robbed or killed or extorted along the way, or they show up to find that this isn't true and attempt to make some other kind of crossing.

A larger and larger number of such asylum-seekers are being flown out of Mexico, back home, before they can even make it to US checkpoints; something the US government has been asking the Mexican government for their help with for a while, with varying degrees of success.

Mexico has also been stepping up efforts to stop the flow of migrants down at the southern tip of the country, in some cases just expelling them, and in others helping them out with resettlement options depending on who they are, where they're from, and sometimes pure political expediency.

The US has also been trying to stem this tide of humanity at its source, providing resources for the countries where these people are coming from, in an effort to stimulate more economic opportunity, and in some cases to incentivize those governments to take care of the other issues that're causing people to want to leave in the first place—some success has reportedly resulted from this type of effort, but it's difficult to gauge which efforts are leading to which outcomes, and how much of that optimism and those seemingly positive numbers might be the consequence of US politicians wanting to seem like they're making some progress on this, and the governments receiving the money wanting to continue to receive more money, and thus, sharing the flowery outcomes, but not the neutral or negative ones.

A recent facet of this story focused on a crowd of more than 14,000 Haitians who were camped out under the Del Rio bridge, which spans the border between the US and Mexico, all hoping to keep moving north, and some having been told that they'd be let in, because the Biden administration was open to asylum-seekers, unlike his predecessor; which hasn't been the case, at least not on scale.

It is technically illegal to deny asylum-seekers the opportunity to do so: to present themselves to the system, basically, and go through the process to see if they'll be allowed in.

That rule has been blurred a bit during the pandemic, at least partially to keep out potentially infected people from elsewhere; but that blurriness makes what's been happening on the border, recently, all the more confounding, as reports indicate that at least a few hundred Haitians who were camped under that bridge have been allowed into that asylum process, while others have been either chased off by the threats or violence doled out by Border Patrol agents, or herded into planes and flown back to Haiti.

There are good arguments to be made for the many positions one might take on immigration.

Some think borders should be more porous, some think they should be ardently defended.

Leaving aside the ethical quandaries related to this issue, though, legally there are processes through which people are supposed to go through if they want to enter another country, and even more processes if they'd like to stick around in that country.

It would seem that in this case, at this moment, some of those processes are being denied to those who want to access them, some aren't operating as they should, and some are being ignored by people who are figuring out other ways to get inside, and stay inside.

There is a human rights component to all this, and the US, like any other country that's signed on to the collection of international norms that govern such things, is meant to adhere to those norms.

That's an issue here, and the most recent incarnation of these potential human rights violations arguably began in the Trump administration, but have been continued and only minutely adjusted by the Biden administration.

That said, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, and many government agencies, including the US Border Patrol and larger collection of immigration-related agencies are currently understaffed, overworked, and, arguably, under-funded. A lot of balls are in the air all at once, and there are a lot of unknowns and changing variables pretty much all the time, these days.

It was reported that some of these Haitian asylum-seekers were allowed in because the Border Patrol simply didn't have the resources to deal with everyone, so these few hundred people were apparently told to report to an immigration office within 60 days, but otherwise allowed to go free, into the US. That seems believable to me, and though we probably won't know the specifics of that report for certain for at least a little while, it makes sense that the folks on the ground dealing with these issues might look for flexibility in the system and make use of it where they can, even if the choices they make aren't necessarily popular with different groups for different reasons.

This situation—with all its complexity—seems new, but it's not.

Variations of this have happened before, at this and other borders around the world. And according to current estimates it will almost certainly get even worse in the coming decades as climate-related variables continue to shift and some places become less-habitable, conflicts arise over scarce resources, and formerly stable-seeming cities and systems and governments and relationships begin to soften and crack; in some cases the only rational thing to do under such circumstances is go elsewhere, when everything around you is dangerous or incompatible with life as you'd like to live it.

We're likely to see tides of humanity washing up on all sorts of shores, in other words, and in some cases we'll be able to point at a catalyst and say, yeah, that earthquake was what did it, I would get out of there, too—but in others it will be a slow creep of attrition and frictions that do it, and all sorts of balances will be thrown out of whack, slowly but surely, as a consequence.

This particular wave will likely crest as some of the triggering variables reach their peak and subside, but there are at least a dozen other, significant, similar immigration waves happening elsewhere around the world, simultaneously, so while it's unlikely any of them will be perpetual, ongoing things, such surges will probably become a reality we'll have to get used to in our rapidly changing, increasingly uncertain world—which also means we should probably look into refining and refurbishing these systems and their associated infrastructure, to prepare ourselves for that.

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Show Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War

https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=26

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_Purchase

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Cession

https://www.wsj.com/articles/latin-american-migration-once-limited-to-a-few-countries-turns-into-a-mass-exodus-11632323297

https://www.axios.com/del-rio-bridge-evacuated-haiti-migrants-17265a81-882c-4fc0-aa18-fa4074608cd7.html

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/biden-border-wall-hidalgo-county/

https://audacity.substack.com/p/the-delusion-of-borders

https://www.vox.com/22689472/haitian-migrants-asylum-history-violence

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-united-states-texas-el-paso-del-rio-3a8146cbcb47b9df7a31a19594df3ec6

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/23/more-ecuadorians-leaving-for-us-amid-burst-in-migration

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