(Hi everyone. Thanks for welcoming me to the BMG community. For my first post I wanted to share a few takeaways from my trip to Central America earlier this month. Would love to hear your thoughts and look forward to joining this conversation. – Joe)
Gunfire at work. Death threats at home. Vicious gangs demanding you pay them a ‘war tax’ or your 7-year-old son’s life is on the line.
For Margarita and her son Darling, this was their daily reality in Lempira, Honduras. And last November it finally forced Margarita – terrified and desperate – to leave her home, pack up what few belongings she could, and flee the country with Darling by her side, moving north to a country whose golden door has long been a refuge for the oppressed and afraid.
They were not alone. Since last October, nearly 60,000 children and families have arrived at our border asking to be let in. Many were fleeing similar danger as Margarita and Darling. Some were seeking economic opportunity. Others were trying to reunite with family. But all cascaded on our border asking for help. For several months – even as the numbers pouring in have steadied — our country has struggled to respond.
With this in mind, I traveled to Central America over Labor Day Weekend with a bipartisan group of my colleagues, trying to understand what fueled the surge in migration. We talked to religious leaders in El Salvador about how they protect their communities from violence in the absence of a reliable police force. We visited an outreach center for Honduran youth where the first thing you see when you walk in is a wall filled with pictures of local children who have lost their lives to gang violence. We toured a shelter for victims of sex trafficking in Guatemala City, speaking to girls no more than 14 and 15 years old.
That life, raw and real, opened our eyes to the circumstances so many of these families are desperate to leave behind. This is not a problem for the United States to solve on its own. But there is no question there are areas where we can help. We need to work with the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to crack down on the human smugglers (known locally as coyotes), address poverty, assist local development and restore faith in civic institutions. We have to clean up our own system, pass comprehensive immigration reform and make a strong, clear statement about what US policy is – and isn’t. And we need additional judges, lawyers and legal resources in our system to speed up the process for assessing whether people arriving in this country have a legitimate claim to asylum or not.
But there was a lesson that resonated through our experience above all else. Fueling the instability and violence wreaking havoc on Central American communities is one thing: the United States’ deep, painful and persistent addiction to narcotics.
This is a plight we here in Massachusetts know far too well. From Taunton to Springfield, families across our Commonwealth have been coping with this heartbreaking epidemic. But the human cost of our country’s addiction extends beyond our borders. At the heart of the poverty, crime and lack of opportunity driving desperate children and adults to American soil are drug cartels that have systemically undermined civil society, rule of law and economic justice. The impunity of these cartels is protected by the US drug trade. By the billions of dollars that flow into their pockets from the rock bottom of the American drug culture.
Which is why this country needs to confront its addiction crisis head-on, as the public health emergency that it is, rather than the law enforcement problem it has become. The DEA estimates that the heroin trade with Mexico alone is well over $40 billion per year; the gross domestic product of Honduras is only $18 billion. There is no chance we can arrest our way out of this problem. We need to invest more resources into education, treatment and prevention. Combatting drug abuse will require a comprehensive approach, ensuring we have enough providers, making sure dosing guidelines reflect the realities of addiction, holding insurance companies accountable for their role in helping to improve access to care, and guaranteeing that those with addiction get the long-term health care they deserve for what is a chronic condition.
There is no easy answer to the crisis of drugs, violence and economic opportunity that continues to drive thousands to our doorstep. At every repatriation center we visited on the trip, I asked the individuals there why they’d left; why they’d risked everything on a dangerous journey with no guarantee of success. The answer was simple: promise of a life free of fear and violence. Promise of a country that doesn’t turn its back on the hungry, the persecuted or the abused.
As the United States works to address this issue and reform our broken, backwards immigration system, it is that promise that must light our way. Because few American families would be here today were it not for that golden door. Mine certainly wouldn’t.
johntmay says
The unintended consequences of our prohibition on drugs along with NAFTA are here. Al Capone was a product of prohibition, history repeats. NAFTA was going to create a Mexican middle class and a trade partner for high tech American goods. Well, maybe not. NAFTA hurt the small Mexican farmers. NAFTA hires cheap labor in Mexico and from what I’ve been able to learn, has not been the start of a middle class.
Amusing we do legalize drugs in the USA (make heroin available by prescription, a policy that actually works) and remove the profit incentive from Mexican and Central American drug syndicates, what do these people do for work? How do they compete with the American super agriculture? How do they compete with cheap Chinese labor? (How do we?!).
No easy answers.
Christopher says
Should the first word of your second paragraph be “assuming” by any chance?
johntmay says
yeah
jconway says
For posting about your experiences, which seem quite raw and visceral, and an issue underreported by the media. Glad you were able to get Republican colleagues to join you as well. It was a fitting first post, but I would also like welcome you to come back here in the near future and answer questions like Seth Moulton did yesterday. Some of us have a few questions about votes you have taken on privacy and security questions, and look forward to hearing your answers.
Sticking on this subject, since it seems like comprehensive immigration reform with a capital ‘R’ is dead this persidency, what small steps can the President and other lawmakers take that could address this particular humanitarian crisis? Can you shed some light on what your Republican colleagues thought and how they might respond to this? Helping this group of vulnerable people is a basic question of justice and humanity, it shouldn’t have to be political.
JoeKennedyIII says
Tackling this issue is about basic decency and the kind of country we pride ourselves on being. There are definitely some things I think the US can do, regardless of the state of Comprehensive Immigration Reform. We can work with those countries to drive economic development, crack down on coyotes and strengthen basic civic institutions like the police force. In Honduras, for example, 90 percent of murders go unprosecuted. 90 percent. In terms of the very immediate crisis, it’s critical we get more legal resources to the border – judges, lawyers, etc. – to speed up the process of going through asylum claims. But really – and I can’t stress this enough –the most effective way we could begin to tackle migration is by tackling drug addiction. Unless those cartels lose their US market, they will continue to recklessly undermine these communities and cause families to flee.
I will say that one of the best parts of the trip was the group of Members I went with. It was a small, serious, bipartisan group. We ended up on the same page about a lot of the takeaways, and I’m really hopeful that shared perspective can have an impact in Washington.
I’d love to come back for more of an extended conversation some time. Great idea.
jconway says
I look forward to it, and appreciate your answer and initial post on this subject. I know Cambridge had a lot of immigrants come from these communities over here, and I would hope there is a decent amount of pressure for tackling the problem. Start with the easy fixes, build bipartisan trust, than tackle the heavy stuff. Seems like a good process to me.
johntmay says
Currently, we arrest, convict, and imprison this market leaving the sellers of illegals drugs consistently looking to replace lost market share which apparently is easy to do in large part because of the ills of our society. The market stretches from the poor resident in the slums on up to Academy Award winning actors living in penthouses.
Treating drug addicts as criminals and not as people with health problems is not working. There is a spectrum of reasons why people self medicate with various drugs and we need to address those reasons. For one, a UN study (2007) has learned that cocaine and heroin use is more common in unequal societies. Mental illness and behavioral problems left untreated because of a lack of medical insurance or or understaffed facilities lead to drug abuse. Drug abuse is a symptom. We need to address the causes.
Arresting them just keeps the dealer network looking to expand their market, pushing it where they can. Even in Franklin Massachusetts, my home town and noted nationally as one of the safest towns in the USA, there was an entire family arrested on charges of heroin distribution this summer.
If a heroin or anyone addicted to any illegal narcotics knew that they could simply walk into a free local health clinic for help, even if that meant the local clinic would give them free narcotics (monitored and controlled by a physician), the “market” would be virtually gone. This would require a huge public relations campaign and education push because the usual suspects will denounce this as “giving free drugs to criminals” and not teaching them a lesson – even though going the route of imprisonment and no treatment is ineffective and fiscally irresponsible.
As a seller of illegal drugs, my first goal is to establish a customer base, then exploit it. Establishing the base is an investment. If I discover that after I have hooked twenty people in a given neighborhood that they are now getting free treatment at a local clinic, there goes my market and there I go, out of business.
Christopher says
…I’m happy to prioritize treatment, but for the cartels and their agents, anybody who distributes, especially to children, I say throw the book at them.
johntmay says
spent a few years in jail because he “sold” cocaine to an undercover NY State Trooper twice, second time “on camera”. Poor Ron had a sister who was involved in a bad crowd and she was unaware that her new boyfriend was an undercover trooper trying to get to the head of coke distribution in our city. He had no luck with her, but did manage to get Ron whose only defense was that he was buying it and selling it to his sister’s boyfriend at no profit. The judge said that poor profit margins did not excuse the crime, and under the Rockefeller drug laws, off Ron went to a minimum security prison.
JimC says
Thank you Congressman.
jconway says
And something too many of my fellow Irish and Italian Americans forget. There was a time when we were ‘without papers’ and a ‘horde that will threaten the American character of the Republic’. The cynic in me says, you know someone’s assimilated when they start wanting to close the door or pull the ladder up behind them-but I want that door wide open for every future American who wants to join our noble experiment. I wouldn’t be here were it not for my ancestors coming over through Ellis Island, and my future children wouldn’t be here if my fiancees parents didn’t make the same decision to come to the US.