The footage of a marching column of thousands of Honduran refugees advancing resolutely on the United States border is making outstanding television. This group of desperate people, including women, children and babes in arms, has already barged its way across Guatemala. Though blocked on a border river bridge into Mexico, many of the refugees managed to cross on rafts. Then on Sunday they faced down a line of armed Mexican policemen who were finally ordered to retreat. Unless the Mexican government manages to stem this human tide, it is going to wash up against the US border fence along its frontier with Mexico, where President Donald Trump has vowed to stop them.
Honduras, from which the majority of these refugees come, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, comprise a three-country security disaster area. Armed gangs, financed by drug production and smuggling, are every bit as vicious than their Mexican counterparts. But unlike Mexico, these three Central American countries are rarely in the media spotlight. In El Salvador, at least one person in every thousand can expect to meet a violent death. The ratio for Hondurans is only marginally better. In such circumstances, who could blame these people for wanting to get out? Whatever the dangers and challenges of their long march to the US border and their likely unfriendly official reception there, they apparently represent less risk than staying in the countries where they were born.
Unfortunately, however laudable the motives behind this extraordinary migration, those involved and moreover those in the West’s liberal establishment who are egging them on are just plain wrong. No country can allow an uncontrolled mass of migrants to flood across its borders without any proven right to asylum. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel imposed order on her humanitarian decision to admit more than a million largely Syrian refugees. And until the Assad regime attacked its own people, Europe’s main refugee challenge was from largely economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
Even if Trump is at fault in accusing his Democrat rivals of encouraging this confrontation with US border officials, there can be little doubt that the US political establishment is rubbing its hands with glee at the expected bad headlines the administration is going to draw as it seeks to block this column of desperate people. Democrats clearly hope to reap a harvest of outraged voters in next month’s mid-term elections. This clash could not have been better timed for them.
But Trump is not about to be moved. Even if, as usual, his language, such as calling these people “aliens”, is maladroit, he rightly sees this planned migrant invasion as a challenge to everything he stands for, to his key migration policies that won him the White House. It seems almost certain that this is not going to end well for the thousands of marchers. Barack Obama might have wavered and found some way to admit them. Trump will not. And however much his political opponents dislike it he has the law on his side. And no less importantly, polls show he has other allies. Many relatively recent migrants to the US appear to support him, on the basis that if they had to go through the often tortuous regular channels to get their residence or citizenship, why should not the marchers do the same?
