The migration root cause that officials don’t want to talk about

The migration root cause that officials don’t want to talk about

By: Rachel Marsden

PARIS — Relying solely on border control to curtail migration is like counting on spankings to fix a spoiled brat. The underpinnings of the problem are elsewhere.

Population displacement has taken center stage this month from America to Europe. The situation is so bad in New York City, with 60,000 newcomers spilling out of requisitioned hotels at a cost of tens of millions for the city’s taxpayers, that a congressional delegation visited last week to put on a public relations show. Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Governor Kathy Hochul, and NYC Mayor Eric Adams want Washington to also toss some cash in the pot. That’s what Democrats do best: constantly drill in search of new cash geysers. Where’s the typical leftist “root cause” talk on this issue? Guess they don’t care much about actually solving a problem when money flowing to the leftist-activist complex risks being hindered by a spigot.

Why are all these people fleeing their countries in the first place? Even a cursory glance at the list — the New York Times cites Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua — paints a clear picture. These nations are all synonymous with US-backed meddling, from coups to crippling economic sanctions, which contribute to ongoing poverty, instability, or both. Blowback in the form of mass emigration suggests that while interventionist strategies serve the interests of the Washington establishment and their special interest pals, they nonetheless have knock-on effects at home. And it’s the average American who has to pay the price.

The same can be said for Europe. The tsunami of migrants coming from Sub-Saharan Africa via Tunisia — an estimated 10,000 of them within mere days last week — has continued unabated to the little Italian Island of Lampedusa, sandwiched between Sicily and Tunisia, while the European Union dithered. And there’s one particular image that says it all. The European Commissioner for Migration was doing a little knitting in Parliament this week at the exact time that this migratory crisis was unfolding and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was busy talking about … China and Ukraine.

Right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni ran for election on the promise to stem migration, but then refusal to let migrant boats dock in Italy led to drownings earlier this year. So Brussels said that they’d handle it. They made a deal with Tunisia earlier this year to pay the North African country €100 million for the EU to outsource its border defense to them and have Tunis deal with the traffickers and the influx of migrants toward Europe. So with this week’s tsunami of migrants now being larger than the population of Lampedusa island itself (which is only about 6,000 residents) clearly these efforts to toss the hot potato into someone else’s lap have turned out to be yet another resounding success for the big brained bureaucrats in Brussels.

There used to be an African leader who was very effective in keeping migrants from reaching Europe and had a deal with the EU to do so: Libyan leader Muommar Gaddafi. But France and Britain led the way for NATO to take him out in 2011. Whoops. There’s that foreign meddling again.

So EU countries are now supposed to take migrants to reduce the burden on Italy — in the interest of solidarity, of course. But instead, France closed its border with Italy last week, and Germany said that it’s full up, particularly after previously being overwhelmed with migrants coming across the Turkish border and into Europe amid the war in Syria — yet another conflict fueled by Western military involvement. (The EU also paid Turkey to hold back migrants in that case.) Other EU countries aren’t interested in playing the unity game on this issue, either. Poland, for example, has prided itself on not accepting migrants from regions that it considers to be culturally incompatible with its own.

Most recently, unrest was stirred up in Africa as a result of failed Western counterterrorism missions in the Sahel and had led to coups, which has also served to straightened migrants’ cases for refugee status in Europe in the same way that Washington has ended up recognizing citizens of various countries where it has meddled as legitimate refugees. Every instance of Western-backed destabilization is a clarion call for citizens of those countries to roll the dice on attempting to score a golden ticket to the West.

Our leaders have been quick to blame climate change or poverty for why their borders are fraying at the seams. Sure, blame the weather. And poverty. Which exists everywhere these days. And yet the migrants are coming from very specific countries that just happen to align with documented incidents of heavy meddling. Instead of our fearless leaders evoking causes that they can conveniently claim to be out of their control, the situation can never really hope to be resolved unless they can bring themselves to acknowledge their own responsibility.