The New York Times on Friday published a really strong case against allowing an unlimited flow of people from broken countries in Central America to the U.S.
That wasn’t the intent of the story, but any reader would get to the end of the lengthy piece and think to themselves, “Huh. Maybe we should be more discerning when welcoming in hundreds of thousands of people who just crawled out of a sewer.”
Sonia Nazario wrote in the New York Times that the chief causes driving extreme poverty and unspeakable violence in Honduras are the vast street gangs that terrorize its cities and a pervasive “corruption” within the government.
But let’s not pretend that these are things that could happen anywhere and to anyone. When gangs take over whole cities and government officials embezzle millions of dollars year after year, the problem isn’t the gangs and the “corruption” in and of themselves. That begs the question.
The problem is the culture.
There are stark differences between cultures. Contrary to what Rep. Ilhan Omar believes, not all of those differences are good. That Honduras is suffering from a cultural problem is a theme that keeps coming up in the article, though, again, I’m sure that was unintentional.
Carlos Hernandez, executive director of a nonprofit organization in Honduras that attempts to combat government corruption, told Nazario, “People [in Honduras] say: Well, the state robs, so I can rob, too.”
Nazario’s story said that the the “ultimate goal” of the gangs in Honduras was “to control the police, the courts and Congress.” (In other words, the endgame is dominance of the country’s policies and the people who enforce them.)
Also from the article, this quote from a man who owns a busing system and is routinely held for ransom by gang members, despite his having reported the problem to police: “They know people in the government are with them,” he said. “They know this is uncontrollable.”
That’s the Honduras way. Now that we know Honduran gangs are showing up in America, what should we expect?
(snip)
In February 2019 alone, agents at the Rio Grande Valley border sent out press alerts about capturing MS-13 members and the like.
This is in addition to the child molesters, drug dealers, and human traffickers apprehended around the clock at the border. More importantly, it’s in addition to the ones not caught because agents are tied up acting as caretakers and babysitters for the hundreds of thousands of families turning up to claim asylum. We’ll never know how many violent MS-13 criminals slipped into the U.S.
The Washington Post reported in March 2019 that the police force in El Salvador, where MS-13 is also located, has begun fleeing the country because the gang has taken over. “With salaries of $300 to $400 per month, the low-level police officers who make up the majority of the force often have no choice but to live in neighborhoods vulnerable to gangs,” the report said. “And so, in the vast majority of the cases, police officers are killed when they are home from work or are on leave.”
The decay is no longer confined to Central America. It has spread here. In June 2018, the Post reported on MS-13’s stronghold of an entire Maryland middle school. “Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at Wirt, where a small group of suspected MS-13 members at the overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America,” the report said. “Teachers feel threatened but aren’t backed up. Students feel threatened but aren’t protected,” one of the school’s teachers said. “The school is a ticking time bomb.”
And from a report by the paper in December 2017: “As the gang has grown in strength in recent years, so has its sway over communities across the country. From Boston to Northern Virginia to Houston, a string of grisly MS-13 murders has highlighted its resurgence … ” Innocent people who find themselves in the grips of MS-13-controlled neighborhoods complain of gang violence, frequent robberies, drug dealing, and extortion. One woman who unknowingly moved into an MS-13-ravaged neighborhood of Maryland told the Post that one MS-13 leader threatened her, lest she pay $60 “rent” each week.
This is the culture, and these are the people dumped into the U.S. by way of our current immigration system.
*see full story by The Washington Examiner