Diatribes of Jay: The “Caravan”

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As I write this post, a “caravan” of several thousand Central-American migrants is wending its way from the Southern Mexican town of Huixtla toward the US border. Our own press promotes so many lies and misconceptions about this migration as to make it seem more myth than reality. Yet real it is. It’s advancing relentlessly toward our Southern border with all the deliberate speed of a slow march—about three miles per hour. At this rate, at ten hours a day, it will reach our border in about thirty days, after our midterm elections.

Even its name is a lie. It’s not really a “caravan.” That word implies a collection of some sort of vehicles, if only primitive covered wagons. Real “caravans” are familiar from Gypsies in Europe or our own American Westward migration over the prairies in the nineteenth century.

But this “caravan” has few if any vehicles, not even animal-drawn wagons. There was no time to assemble or build them, and no money to buy the materials.

In fact, almost everyone in this “caravan” is on foot. The “caravan” is nothing more or less than a 1,500-mile group hike of penniless and nearly hopeless Central-American migrants seeking a better life.

The “caravan’s” reason for being is also a lie. Despite Trump’s usual facile falsehood, American Democrats had nothing to do with it. Only a moron could believe that Democrats would give Donald Trump a such a good reason to whip his rabid “base” into a frenzy just two weeks before the midterm elections. And American Democrats are hardly present in Central America, let alone in numbers or with a plan sufficient to organize such a grand march.

A final lie about the “caravan” also comes from the fevered brain of Donald Trump. In an early-morning Tweet he claimed that “Criminals and Middle Easterners are mixed in.”

As far as two crack reporters for the New York Times were able to determine from a day-long investigation, there never was any evidence for this bald assertion. It was based on the president’s own supposition—i.e., he made it up. Every attempt to check it led right back to the president’s Tweets and to average statistics on immigration generally from prior times, having nothing to do with this “caravan.”

In other words, the notion of criminals and Middle-Eastern terrorists in the “caravan” was an ipse dixit—a Latin phrase meaning “he himself said it.” The phrase comes to us from ancient times when there were no news media, facts didn’t matter, and Emperors could make things up out of whole cloth and have them serve as the basis of policy and action.

A recent honest report in the Washington Post did reveal the “caravan’s” true origins. They’re entirely local economic and social conditions.

There is no factory work in the failed states of Central America. The maquiladoras of the recently re-negotiated NAFTA (now called “USMCA,” the United States-Mexico-Canada-Agreement) don’t reach down there. They never did. And when locals try to make money in small businesses such as restaurants, violent gangs like MS-13 try to commandeer fifty percent of their profits and can kill them when they don’t pay up.

So there is no way for “little people” to make an honest living outside the peasantry in Central America. Only the rich with their bodyguards can escape violence and terror in the cities.

So by telephone, word of mouth, and social media they came together. They counted on safety in numbers. Rightly or wrongly, they thought that the coyotes and other parasites who regularly prey on migrants would not attack so large a group, let alone one that attracted media attention. They thought that, by walking, they could reduce to zero the coyotes’ fees of up $10,000—which often go for little more than being abandoned to die in the Sonoran desert or in overheated, locked trucks. They cast their fates into the hands of God and their own health and hardiness.

In consequence, the “little people” are marching northward through the killing fields of Mexico toward a land rich with a simple, basic promise. They hope to live, to keep the fruits of their own labor, and to raise their families without fear of mayhem or murder. That’s all they dream of. Dodging “La Migra,” with its red tape, jails and internment camps, is nothing but a relief from dodging the murderers and extortionists of MS-13 and corrupt government death squads. Walking over a thousand miles is doing something—anything—that they can do now that offers the bare promise of a longer and a better life.

Under these circumstances, no wall in creation can stop the flow. They will climb over it, swim or sail around it, blast or cut through it, or burrow under it to secure a life free from extortion, murder and fear. They will wait months or years in the shadows, until a gap in the wall opens up, or until persistent parasites offer a way over, under, through or around it for a fee.

They will keep coming unless and until the failed states where they were born begin to offer people like them some semblance of a decent life. Yet there is no current prospect of that and no current plan in our nation, or in Mexico, to foster any such prospect. So they come.

The phenomenon in Europe is much the same. There migrants regularly flow in “caravans” from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa toward the relative peace and stability of the European Union. The driving force is precisely the same: the desire to live by the fruits of one’s own labor without fear of extortion, mayhem or death.

There are distinctions between the “caravans” in Latin American and those in Europe, but they don’t make much of a difference. The European “caravans” often become seaborne as they transit the Aegean or Mediterranean Sea. Sometimes, but not always, they include people fleeing the fear of Islamist terror and totalitarianism, or the right-wing reaction to them. But the drivers of the migration are precisely the same: violence, chaos, failed states, and little prospect of a peaceful life of honest gain through one’s own labor.

Will this global problem cure itself? No, it’s likely to get worse, possibly much worse. Why? Global warming is the underlying driver. Drought has driven much of the civil war that has devastated Syria. Drought is driving much of the unrest in sub-Saharan Africa. And vastly more destructive hurricanes, tornadoes and other storms are about to join drought as drivers of massive human migration throughout the globe’s tropics and subtropical zones. The massive destruction caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Michael in our own American South are but a tiny sour taste of things to come.

At any moment, melting of the Greenland Ice Shelf or the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica could add precipitous sea-level rise as yet another driver of global migration. Positive global-warming feedback could produce sea-level rise not on the time scale of decades, but on the time scale of weeks or months. Already warming greater than the desired limit of 1.5 ºC is baked into our atmosphere, and further warming is almost inevitable.

So the current “caravan” from Central America is hardly a political ploy of misguided American Democrats. It’s a metaphor and sign of things to come. Climate change is just beginning to cause economic, social and political pain on a vast global scale. Before this century is over, it will cause dislocation and migration at levels never before seen in human history, even at the end of World War II.

How developed nations respond to the dislocation will write the history of this twenty-first century and our Third Millennium after Christ. There are only three options. The developed world can get to work and use its good organization, science, industry and technology to save, welcome, accommodate and assimilate as many migrants as possible. Or it can use its dreadful weaponry and machinery of death to perpetrate the vilest genocide in human history—one that will make the Holocaust, in comparison, seem like a garden party. Or it can dither, fight among its own people and so cause nearly as much unnecessary suffering and death as deliberate genocide.

There are no other alternatives. Right now, dithering and infighting appear to be our species’ “strategy.” But they don’t have to be. How the “North” (and the equivalent temperate zones of the Southern Hemisphere) respond to this challenge will write the future history of our species, if not its epitaph. We had all better start applying our species’ chief evolutionary advantages—our empathy, cooperation and grapefruit-sized brains—while the “caravans” are still only a trickle, before the deluge begins.

Endnote: It is no coincidence that Germany, which once perpetrated the Holocaust and now reflects the sincerest contrition of any brutal conqueror in human history, best sees the stark options now confronting our species. Along with Sweden, Germany has done the most of any nation to accommodate and assimilate desperate migrants. It is also no coincidence that Germany’s current leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, was once a physicist, trained to see and understand reality, unblinking, with the aid of science and mathematics.

Lest we wring our hands too fearfully about the recent Bavarian elections, in which Merkel’s party lost ground, let us recount the numerical results. The far-right party, Alternative für Deutschland, won only 10.3% of the vote—a far cry from Donald Trump’s now-47% approval in this country. The Greens in Bavaria won much more: 17.5%. They are the party that recognizes the ultimate source of the disaster—anthropogenic global warming—and seeks to ameliorate it by replacing fossil fuels.

There are rational responses to the common problems our species faces, and Germany and Scandinavia are quietly leading the way. Other developed societies can follow.

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Diatribes of Jay

26 October 2018

The “Caravan”

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