Some More News - SMN: Whose Fault Is The "Crisis" At The Border?

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Hi. In today's episode, we look at the U.S.-Mexico border, how our politicians suck at addressing the issues there, and why so many people from Mexico and Central America cross the border into the U.S. in the first place. (Hint: The U.S. did bad things to their countries!) Sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EiYZJQrnNmsY1OpADwjle0FN2YK4aZqcvusKHgEnNSM/edit?usp=sharing Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/somemorenews Check out our MERCH STORE: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/somemorenews SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Some More News and Even More News audio podcasts: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA?si=5keGjCe5SxejFN1XkQlZ3w&dl_branch=1 Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews If you want to take ownership of your health, try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 Free AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/MORENEWS. Factor, America’s #1 Ready-To-Eat Meal Kit, can help you fuel up fast with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. Head to https://factormeals.com/morenews50 and use code morenews50 to get 50% off. It’s always Labor Day for your butt — save 40% off ALL bidets and bundles by visiting https://hellotushy.com/morenews and using promo code MORENEWS. Sale ends September 11th.

Oh, crap, oh, crap, oh, crap, oh, crap. Oh, everyone settle down. All right, it's now September, which means the 2024 elections are soon. We gotta get ahead, okay? We need the freshest takes. I won't move from this spot until I can tell you who the next president will be,

even if I have to lie and make it up. As you know, the first GOP primary debate just happened and it was fine. Lots of stuff happened. We definitely watched it. My favorite part was when the white guy said the thing. No, not him, the other one. You know, he said the thing about the border.

Did they talk about the border? Probably. Candidates the thing about the border. Did they talk about the border? Probably. Candidates love talking about the border. Both the geopiss and the dummorats go turd wild for those sexy map lines and securing those lines and accusing other people of not securing those lines. And so we thought as a fun little treat, we would actually take a look at our border.

What is it? Is it secure? How can we protect this country from the scourge on our great society that is Canadians? What's going on with our border? Okay, so it actually says here that we're not gonna talk about our Northern border after all.

Damn it! No one ever talks about the Canadian border. Do they not remember 1812? You burned down our White House? Well, we're gonna burn down your, whatever they have in Canada. Wherever Michael Cera was born, we'll burn it down. Anyway, so sorry, I'm worked up.

But here is some more news. It turns out that today we're talking about the supposed crisis on our Southern border. It's scary folks. You know it's scary because both politicians and the media tell us it's very scary. And also that it's specifically Joe Biden's fault. We are nauseatingly familiar now with the scenes of chaos

after Biden opened the border to pander to the far left extremists who run his party. We know how it happened. Joe Biden on day one said, we're gonna not build the wall. We're not gonna have any deportations and we're not gonna have the remain in Mexico policy. Narco terrorist organizations who have completely taken over Mexico,

infiltrated the Mexican government, and who are now running operations unimpeded throughout America. Here's a map showing where they are active. And yes, it is basically everywhere in almost every city. This crisis has been building for the last couple of years. Damn you, Joe! The border was never a thing until you became the president! So obviously Fox News in particular

likes to beat off this incredibly dead horse. Super gross jacking off a corpse like that, but why wouldn't they? That's why they're called the Corpse Jackers! Also, it's an easy Biden dunk to claim that there's a sudden and unprecedented border surge under his watch, to the point that the GOP-led House Judiciary Committee

border hearing was titled the Biden border crisis, like it's a freaking Newsmax segment. But while there absolutely is a recent surge at the border, a lot of the right-wing coverage seems to, dare I say, be missing some nuance. For one, these surges exist seasonally. So these sudden upticks being reported on are often part of a yearly pattern that is already expected.

Often they happen in spring and die out when it gets hotter, although that pattern has been changing recently. Secondly, in terms of the larger overall surge, this particular one seemed to start in 2017, right when not Biden took office, and then swelled due to the coronavirus. It matches two other surges of similar numbers in history, both of which coincided with natural or economic disasters.

My point being that yes, there is a surge at the border similar to past surges in the 90s and early 2000s, but that surge doesn't have much to do with American politics so much as events happening in other countries. Although America does have something to do with the overall problem, which we will certainly get to later.

Boy, will we, will we? Yes, we will. But in terms of individual declines and surges, it's not really related to who is the current president, especially when the vice president says this. Do not come. Do not come. Now, this isn't to say that presidential policies

don't affect the border, but probably not in the ways that you'd think. It's complicated, don't you know? But of course, that doesn't stop us from heavily politicizing every curve on the graph. The big scary talking point of today is the fentanyl crisis, which is heavily linked to our border.

According to the DEA, Mexican drug cartels are the main driver of fentanyl pouring into the US. So the argument is that since fentanyl is coming through our borders, increasing security will help fix the problem. Makes sense. There is an opioid problem in this country after all,

and a huge amount of the deaths caused by opioids are fentanyl related. The one snag, however, is that border security really doesn't fix that, and not just because the people responsible are sometimes cops themselves, although that's certainly something to consider, but according to experts,

since fentanyl is extremely strong, it can be smuggled in very tiny quantities, meaning that it is very hard to spot. On top of that, Mexico simply doesn't have the infrastructure to take on the cartels internally. So unless we invade Mexico, which I'm just gonna say that we should not, we need to come up with a better solution.

See, like everything else in this very smart and good country, the opioid crisis comes down to supply and demand. It was of course kicked off by pharmaceutical companies by overprescribing drugs like Oxycontin, which led to illicit opioid use. And so the supply side is now, it's out of our hands, but we can't address the demand possibly,

which is obviously much easier said than done. The demand for opioids in this country is incredibly multifaceted. What Jennifer Silva, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Bucknell University, agrees is an everything problem. A combination of aggressive marketing by the pharmaceutical companies,

a lack of government oversight and regulation of said pharmaceutical companies, rising income inequality, and the total lack of healthcare or social safety net have led to a world where, in the words of Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, opioid overdoses, suicides, and alcohol abuse are the results of cumulative distress

or the overall failure of life to turn out as expected. So there you have it. If Biden really wanted to solve the border drug crisis, he could simply overhaul our entire public health sector and improve education, treatment centers, and everything else that makes us depressed. Like smartphones? Yeah, people will love that and vote for him

if he bans smartphones. Okay, perhaps fixing the opioid crisis is a bit complicated. So I guess it makes sense why Republicans have opted to just blame Democrats and or brown people. The GOP has quite effectively used the fentanyl crisis in particular to sow fear over immigrants crossing into the US via the Mexican border. And the question becomes how worried should every American

be that the cartel violence will soon hit their own community? Well, it's already there. There's no doubt about it. Whether you look at the drug deaths that are going on throughout America, what happened to this tragic event in California where they're killing a 10 month old baby. It amazes me that we don't address the criminal cartels, these transnational organizations that hate America that are killing Americans every day. That's Sheriff Mark Danels, director of Oscar-winning hit

"'Everything Everywhere All at Once." Wait, no, he's a sheriff. His last name is Danels, sorry. He's a sheriff and one of the Republicans' favorite maws, rambling about the evil cartels while unrelated footage of people trying to immigrate plays alongside him. Just no effort at all to distinguish cartel violence

from immigrants or asylum seekers. But by blurring this distinction, it makes it far easier for GOP ghouls to suggest grossly inhumane policies in the name of protecting America. If we were going to follow the law, would that not slow down the numbers, funnel in those who can make a legitimate asylum claim

so that they could then be detained for an can make a legitimate asylum claim so that they could then be detained for an adjudication of that claim so they could still claim asylum and Americans would be safer and migrants would be safer. That is Texas representative Chip Roy arguing that we need to detain every asylum seeker until their individual cases are fully resolved. Literally just jail them all for the crime of needing our help and asking for it. Currently, we tend to temporarily let asylum seekers into the country while they await hearings, the system for which is very backed up.

But Chip's bright idea is to, I don't know, I guess build massive detention centers to house the 1.6 million people currently seeking asylum. And I guess because of the backlog, they would have to just keep building more and more facilities until they just start turning people away. And that would prevent fentanyl howl.

And once asylum seekers stop coming as much and the facilities aren't needed as much, I assume they'll be used for some helpful purposes and not just be cages where we like find reasons to put people in them because that's what we like to do with cages. Or perhaps it doesn't really solve the problem so much as it punishes people for seeking asylum. But the GOP doesn't really need to offer

any good solutions for the issue. And that's in part because they've successfully painted the other side as being bad at handling the border. Even claiming that Democrats want open borders, a phrase that the right has been using since at least Obama, to frame the left as radical anarchist maniacs who hate America and want to let all the terrorists in

to do all kinds of terrorisms. So hey, here's a question. What exactly is Biden doing at the border? Is he fucking the dog as badly as the GOP claims? How many miles of wall has he bulldozed? What chaos has he unleashed upon us God-fearing Americans? Or on the flip side, has Biden abolished ICE? Has he reunited all those kids with their families?

Has he mended the wounds caused by the cruel policies of President Trump? Facing a record surge of migrants at the southwest border, President Biden is resorting to policies his critics call Trump-lite. Jeremy Robbins of the American Immigration Council sounded the alarm about a leaked proposal to resume detentions of migrant families who crossed the border illegally. Oh, neat. Turns out he's just mostly doing Trump stuff. Despite making a lot of promises, Joe Biden has more or less stayed the course. And don't get me wrong, he has enacted some limitations to ICE. He ended worksite raids and got rid of long-term

family detentions. Deportations and arrest numbers have gone significantly down since he took office, but there's a lot of shit he didn't do when it comes to ICE. Of the 40 new ICE detention centers that were opened under Trump, Biden has closed only one, maybe two of those. And in fact, the number of people detained has gone up by over 50% since 2021. There are currently still 30,000 migrants

in these detention centers, over 60% of whom have no criminal record, which isn't to say the other 40% are even serious offenders or deserve to be there. So the idea that Joe Biden wants open borders or is soft on immigrants is just not true to the point that he kind of totally sucks at it. In fact, the administration has announced its intentions

to step up expedited removal as well as further limit asylum eligibility, two moves that have angered immigration advocates. Of course, one of the most frustrating examples of this involves Title 42, a small part of the Public Health Service Act of 1944 that gives the president the power to exclude people from certain countries during public health emergencies.

Trump used the measure under the guise of responding to COVID, which wasn't a big deal also, to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants. And while the Biden administration did later fight to lift Title 42 in court, they also simultaneously used it to continue expelling individuals and families from this country.

And on top of that, the policies Biden has replaced Title 42 with are actually worse somehow, with measures that could disqualify the vast majority of migrants from being able to seek asylum at the southern border, such as barring immigrants from seeking asylum if they already did so in another country.

He's also considering protocols that detain migrant families who cross the border illegally rather than releasing them into the US temporarily. Detain people seeking asylum, you say? Why, that sure sounds like what Chip Roy wanted us to do. Oh, and will you look at that? It is exactly what Chip Roy wanted us to do. Oh, and will you look at that? It is exactly what Chip Roy wanted us to do. Well, then surely Chip owes Biden a big meaty pat on the back

or at least a tongue kiss. Can we see a clip of Chip Roy and Joe Biden tongue kissing? Maybe some hand stuff. We're here today because of the abject failure of the administration to do its fundamental duty to protect the United States. We have a wide open border empowering cartels, empowering China to the detriment of the American citizens

and to the migrants that seek to come here, supposedly in the name of compassion. Dang, did he say empowering China? I guess you gotta cram the anti-China stuff in there while you can. Chip, like the rest of the GOP, gets to have his cake and eat it racially too, depicting Joe Biden as a soft on the border hippie

while quietly getting the exact policies they want. Although to his credit, Biden has implemented a few policies that attempt to streamline the asylum process, shortening the amount of time a migrant might be held in limbo, which is to say the cage, the prison, the camp sort of thing, limbo. At the end of the day though, the number of migrant encounters has actually dropped

significantly since December. And that's likely because the Biden administration's overall harsher asylum policies are deterring people from even trying. As one advocacy group puts it, it should be unsurprising that if asylum is all but impossible to obtain, then some people seeking protection will stop coming.

So like that, you know how like Trump was like, was to deter the people from coming and everyone's like, well, that's bad that you're doing that. And it won't work. Well, it does kind of sometimes. And then is it not, is it good now? Again, it just can't be said enough.

These are people specifically seeking asylum, which means they believe it would be unsafe for them to return to where they came from. Literally huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And yet now our laws are so fucking bad that they're just choosing not to come in the first place. Seems bad, man, because later in this video, we will explain exactly where these harsh policies take us.

And just as a hint, it's not good for immigrants or the United States. So that's a fun little tease for later. Be sure to gather the kids for the terrible news. So yeah, Biden isn't great on the border, nor is the GOP, nor is anybody. No one is great on the border is. So yeah, Biden isn't great on the border, nor is the GOP, nor is anybody. No one is great on the border is my point here, which won't stop politicians from using it to campaign.

But here's a question. Why is the border such a big problem? Why do people geographically below the United States feel such a great need to seek asylum here? Seems like it's a lot of complicated factors, and perhaps one big and uncomplicated factor as well. I don't know, I'll give you another tease. It's us, it's us.

Us as in the United States, U.S., us, United States. And so after the break, we will look at all of that, all while maintaining a humorous and entertaining demeanor throughout. It sounds zany and not at all angering. Good day my little bitty kittens. It is I, fancy Cody Jonathan Stone. As part of the upper crust of society, I expect only the finest that life has to offer. Take vitamins for an example. I could eat my vitamins in pill form like some kind of dirt commoner, or I can take AG1,

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you know, depending on if you're you or if you're me or if you're Katie who also delivers ads, but it's only those three options, do not think of a fourth one. As we sneakily hinted at before by saying out loud in this video, a great deal of the US-Mexico border contention has to do with how the United States

has influenced the politics in our neighbors to the south. You know, just a bit of hoopsie imperialism, only a smidgen, a mere splooge streak of neocolonialism, just a little bit of a lot of it. And to be fair and balanced, that's not the only reason for destabilization in these other countries. But it's pretty bold of us to take such a defensive stance

on the border when the people seeking asylum perhaps wouldn't be doing that if it weren't for us crossing the border with our military and capital, and perhaps our super tiny need to enslave and dehumanize other people for the sake of capitalism. Heck, just the border alone is stained with a long history of US shenanigans. And so it's time for some history.

Please put on your history caps for this, which I'm sorry to say is one of those denim newsboy caps, but those are the rules, and I don't make the rules. I just enforce them with extreme violence. Hey, speaking of violence, like a lot of countries in the 1800s, America had all this labor that needed to be done, but gosh darn it, we didn't want to pay for that labor.

So we just sorta kinda did a slavery. Just until we got our shit together, we swear it. And a lot of our early border disputes were specifically around that whole slavery jizz. Mexico had actually abolished slavery almost 30 years before the United States, which meant that people began crossing the border into Mexico to seek freedom.

This is also around when Texas seceded from Mexico and joined the US. I guess because they wanted to be independent outlaws who still had slaves and formed the Texas Rangers to maintain border security and battle Native Americans who were rudely born on the land we wanted to have. Point here is that the first version of US border security is actually slave catchers working to keep enslaved people

in Texas rather than to keep Mexican people out. It's ironic, like blowing Dave Coulier in your Chardonnay or like when you have 10,000 spoons, but all you need is to suck off Dave Coulier. Anyway, 40 years later, the US would pass the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which suspended Chinese immigration for 10 years and made it impossible for Chinese immigrants to naturalize.

This would cause a labor shortage, and so America would turn to Mexican immigrants instead, because someone had to build our railroads. Remember, we wanted labor, but didn't want to pay much for it. That was really important to us. It's really important we don't pay that much, all right? So what other choice did we have?

I mean, pay people livable wages, get real. Railroad companies went into El Paso and set up recruitment efforts. By the early 1900s, there were more than 16,000 Mexican immigrants working on the railroads. This is fine for a minute until the Mexican Revolution starts in 1910. Suddenly, Mexican people aren't just coming across the border

to do miserable physical labor for us, they're coming to escape the conflict in their own country and seek a better life in America. Gross! We want your labor, not your baggage! In response, US armed forces and a series of independent militias, including the Texas Rangers,

begin to organize along the border to keep them out. Then in 1924, we established the border patrol and they basically exist to serve whatever perceived threat we had at the time. Originally, they were focused on bootleggers, for example. Later, Nixon would launch Operation Intercept, which was focused on drugs, of course. Different presidents would have different policies

and so on and so such. In 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, went into effect. That is an agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico that creates a free trade zone between the three countries and creates a trilateral trade block between them. Essentially, it eliminates tariffs on products moving between the three North American countries.

At least that's what it was supposed to only do in theory. The deal led to outsourcing of jobs, lower wages due to threats of outsourcing, American companies buying up land, putting Mexican farmers out of business, and indeed also lots of Mexican workers who would turn to America and offer cheap labor and take our jerbs and a whole bunch of other stuff

that was good for corporations, but bad for workers. Point is, more like NAFTA. All right. Initially though, Mexico sees a boost to their economy, but it doesn't last, and the collapse of the peso causes a lot of economic instability. Meanwhile, the US passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,

which restricted due process opportunities for immigrants, empowers local law enforcement agencies, and expands the definition of aggravated felony for immigrants to include things like prostitution, shoplifting, and failure to appear in court. A keen eye might notice that none of those things are acts of aggravation, but hey, I guess if you're brown, all bets are off.

That goes double when we hit the year of 2001. Good evening. Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. Jeez, pretty dramatic way to talk about Jurassic Park 3, but I get it. Okay, so we get our precious 9-11,

and suddenly people are in a frenzy over terrorism from the Middle East, and that fear grows into general xenophobic anxiety about people who look or sound different. Bush then created the Department of Homeland Security, which famously sucks wads, along with ICE. That's important to note. ICE can't even rent a car.

If Vivek got his way, they wouldn't be able to vote unless they take a civics test, which they would probably fail. Anyway, two years later, the US authorized 10,000 new border patrol agents via the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The border patrol immediately uses all of these agents

to enforce a bunch of new, harsh, no tolerance policies along the border. So along with Mexico, a huge portion of the immigration that comes into the United States is from three countries, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Those three alone accounted for nearly a quarter of the immigration coming across the US-Mexico border in 2022.

And weird coincidence, those are also countries that the United States sure loves doing messed up stuff to. In the 1980s, the US government funded and trained the Salvadoran military to fight a brutal war against the country's leftist insurgency groups. Many of these US-backed military groups carried out a scorched earth campaign, killing thousands of citizens

and wiping out entire villages overnight. 20 years later, and these groups were especially prominent during the Salvadoran Civil War, targeting the left-wing party, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front to quash resistance against the US-backed El Salvadoran government. While these death squads technically operated independently,

they were nearly entirely composed of soldiers from the armed forces of El Salvador, which the United States was actively funding with one million gosh darn dollars a day. Thanks, Reagan. The war understandably made people want to leave the country because wars. So thousands of El Salvadorans made their way to the states

where they were granted temporary protection status by Bush Sr. That status would be pulled by Bill Clinton in 1994, who claimed the Salvadorans could still apply for political asylum and the only people deported would be criminals. However, not everyone would be granted that asylum. And so a cycle was created where gang members and young people were pumped back into El Salvador,

further fueling the violence happening there. Weird aside, they would be given more protections later from Bush Jr. So I guess the heroes here are the Bushes? Thanks. Bushes? Admission accomplished. Meanwhile, over in Guatemala,

things haven't been much better. Dare I say, things got a bit genocide-y. It all started in the mid-1900s, when Guatemala's dictatorial government served at the pleasure of a small group of rich landowners. One such landowner was the United Fruit Company, an American corporation that dabbled in treating their workers like disposable crap. But alas, in 1944, a group of pesky middle-class workers inspired by FDR decided to force the leaders out and democratically elect Juan Jose Arevalo, who rejected both communism and capitalism to form what he called a spiritual socialism.

I assume that's when ghosts control the means of production. Arevalo would push education programs and labor rights, and in 1951, his successor, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, would go a step further by taking all the large uncultivated lands and redistributing them to the poorest citizens. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to work for the United Fruit Company,

who were sitting on a lot of uncultivated land. After a failed negotiation, the US State Department and CIA convinced Eisenhower to launch Operation Success, otherwise known as an armed overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman's government. The ensuing civil war would result in the genocide of 200,000 native Guatemalans. So if that was the success they wanted,

then I guess they did it. All because a fucking American fruit company got upset and Guatemala is still dealing with the aftershocks of this coup. Things are not great over there, politically speaking. In their most recent election, the two front runner candidates were disqualified due to corruption, leaving the third place candidate

to win with only 14% of the vote in the first round. These are direct consequences of US interference in the 1950s, where we rat fucked a government for trying to take care of their own citizens. How dare they be inspired by FDR? That's our thing, barelyly, sometimes, kind of. As for Honduras, we've made that place our own factory floor since the early 20th century.

Started by banana companies, we built infrastructure and even our own banking system there. We planted so much military that the country has been nicknamed the USS Honduras because we like being cheeky about our imperialism. Impish, if you will. By 1914, US companies owned 1 million acres of their land, to the point that the people who actually lived there

couldn't access their own fucking soil. Seems like maybe America actually has a reverse border problem? Like we need to stay the fuck in our own country a little bit more? Anyway, once we got to the 80s, Honduras was basically occupied territory. Ronald Reagan used the country as a military outpost

to spend tens of millions of dollars training and equipping Nicaraguan Contra rebels. He also deregulated the coffee trade and restructured their economy to focus on exporting goods because we wanted their stuff you see, not their people, their stuff or their baggage if you will. So we suck them dry like a parasite and then bounced. And for decades afterward,

the country desperately tried to get their shit together. In 2006, Honduras elected Manuel Zelaya, who tried to do a bunch of extreme stuff like, like raise the minimum wage. Cool, we're still struggling to do that too. So brothers in arms and trying to raise the fucking minimum wage barely a little bit. Zelaya's efforts ultimately failed

when he was voted out by the more conservative party. Wait, no, I'm sorry, hold on. More notes to address. He was overthrown by the military in 2009 while the Obama administration watched it happen. Not our problem, you see. It's not like we totally fucked up their entire country at some previous point in time.

Sorry, we're busy with other destabilizing wars. Try us again tomorrow. Anywho, all of this leads to violence and economic instability, which inevitably pushes thousands of Hondurans to the United States border. No doubt to a warm welcome. And then of course there's

Mexico. Mexico, okay. Our patient downstairs, Mexico, our downstairs neighbor, Mexico, remember what I said earlier about us shutting our borders down after the Mexican Revolution? Well, that's not all we did. In the early 1900s, we had a good thing going

with Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, who was real buddy-buddy with wealthy American industrialists and had no quibbles about stripping the country of its resources for the highest bidder. Again, a good situation for America, to the point that when Diaz's power began to wane, William Taft became the first president to meet with a Mexican leader

in order to show his support for the dictator. Afterward, Taft wrote to his wife about how worried he was about a Mexican revolution, not because of violence or politics, but because America had $2 million invested in the country. And sure enough, there was a revolution. And as a result, Diaz fucked off in 1911. This would lead to the election of Francisco Madero,

a liberal reformist who pushed for a democratic Mexico. So yeah, he had to go. It didn't help that his own administration became corrupt as well. So the US endorsed a coup that led to Madero being assassinated in 1913. You know, because of all the stuff I just said. The United States then supported General Victoriano Huerta

to replace Madero, but eventually flip-flopped when Woodrow Wilson took office. Wilson would go on to send troops into Mexico, not once, but twice, after being pressured to do so by quote, American business interests. Yes, Wilson also spoke up about the guy being a dictator, but we didn't really have an issue with that in the past. Huerta's biggest sin was being unable

to protect US interests in the country. And so looking to capture the ports of Veracruz, American warships fired on the city, leading to civilian casualties. Eventually we helped remove Huerta by arming the revolutionary forces. And we also did a bunch of other stuff there as well, basically swapping leaders

like we were trying on dresses at the mall. So TLDR of all of this is that over the last 200 or so years America has put its sticky little fingers all up in Mexico and Central America, persistently contributing to its destabilization and then scoffing when their citizens dare to migrate here while simultaneously exploiting them for cheap labor. And I don't know, it seems weird

that this isn't how we frame the border conversation, right? Even today, we see echoes of our imperialistic roots in the way we regard our neighbors. In what you could call a Dave Coulier blowing twist, recently we've seen Americans moving into Mexico in search of a lower cost of living. And sure enough, that will inevitably raise the cost of living for everyone

who was already living there. You know, Mexican people living in Mexico. All in all, the so-called border problem is like many of the things we talk about on this show, an infinitely more complicated problem than any mainstream politicians seem to give it credit for, and one that America ultimately has played a pretty large part in creating in the first place.

But because solving it means having to reconcile centuries of wrongdoing, we simply boil it down to two honkies arguing over which party is tougher on immigrants, when the reality is that both parties are pretty fucking shitty. Congratulations, everyone blows, Dave Coulier. And after the break, we're gonna talk about just how uniquely bad our policies are.

Maybe we should cut them out. Specifically though, that it continues to destabilize these nations. So get excited for that. policies are. Maybe we should cut them out. Specifically though, that it continues to destabilize these nations. So get excited for that. So excited you are. Dave Goulier. Hey there, butt fans. It's me, Katie, telling you about the Hello Tushy Bidet. Pooping is a lot of work. You gotta, you gotta push it out, light candles, play your pooping song on your phone, and then put an entry in your poop journal. But you can take some of the work out of your poop with 40% off all HelloTushyBidets and bundles. Air bidets clean your human hole with a fresh stream of water that makes it far better than wiping. You know, keep that poo off of your hands and off of your fingers so you don't smoo it, smear it all over your poo journal. It also attaches to your existing toilet with no additional plumbing or electricity.

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We were talking about how the United States has a long history of overtly fucking over Mexico and Central American countries, while simultaneously acting indignant over the resulting migration from said fucked over countries, and also creating terrible policies to further worsen the situation. And when I say the situation, I don't mean that Jersey Shore guy. I mean everything, not just these other countries, but America too. So I guess I do also mean that Jersey Shore guy. We spoke earlier about policies like Title 42. There's also the Migrant Protection Protocol started under Trump, otherwise known as the

Remain in Mexico policy. The selling point for Republicans was that by shuttering our borders, we are saving America from the icy grips of Mexican cartels. These cartels are making billions of dollars every month. Every single illegal immigrant who comes across must pay the cartels anywhere between $3,000 and $12,000. When they come across, they're wearing colored wristbands. We saw the wristbands by the hundreds laying by the shore of the river. Each color corresponds to how many thousands of dollars they owe the cartels.

So these teenagers arrive in America, the Biden administration ships them to every city in America. And they are in debt to violent drug cartels, thousands of dollars. So you have teenage boys working for the cartels in your city. That's right. Remember folks, if you see a brown teenager in your city, be sure to consider them working for cartels and act accordingly. So here's what's funny about Ted's little argument there.

He's not wrong that people pay smugglers to cross the border and will end up owing those smugglers money. First of all, the more dangerous we make the border, the more they'll be charged, so they'll owe even more money. But also, according to actual interviews with these smugglers, that debt will often never get paid if the person successfully immigrates into the United States.

After all, what are they gonna do? Mail them a check? It's such an obviously stupid idea when you think about it for a second. Not to mention that a lot of the smugglers have no connection to organized crime and are pretty low level. But even if they aren't,

there's still no way for them to collect, unless perhaps the people crossing the border are sent back into Mexico, which of course is what policies like Title 42 did. And so this is a long way of explaining that the cartel violence the GOP loves to cite as a reason to send migrants back is actually fueled by those exact policies they push for.

And if we actually wanted to break the cycle, we would stop enacting those policies. Because the moment you take a bus full of desperate, poor and vulnerable people and dump them back into the environment they were trying to escape, they will be immediately met by predators. Since Biden took office, the nonprofit Human Rights First

has documented 10,318 instances of violent attacks against migrants being expelled back to Mexico under Title 42. That includes kidnapping, torture, murder, rape, and many other types of attacks. We're just tossing them right into a meat grinder that they managed to get out of. And so the people lucky to avoid that

will become more and more desperate and turn to more and more dangerous forms of human trafficking, which is of course the exact thing that the GOP claims to be concerned about a lot of the time. They'll also point to border towns being overrun and out of control because of immigrants, which citation needed. But also when you think about it,

isn't having this perpetual police state more of a destructive force? Would you rather have immigrants in your town or a bunch of terrifying detention centers? Isn't it worse to continue this symbiotic relationship between cartels, border agents, and smugglers paying off those border agents to continue this cycle of immigrants being tossed back and forth over the border, often to the extreme danger of the people being

used like game pieces? Just into CNN, disturbing new video showing detainees locked behind gates at a migrant center in Mexico as a deadly fire broke out. Just this March, 40 people died at a Mexico-run border facility due to a fire. Because along with exacerbating the overall problem, our border policies have put that much more pressure on Mexican institutions and infrastructure

to handle those people, which in turn depletes their resources and continues the cycle once more. And it kind of seems like maybe that's actually the point. Like the border issue is complicated, but the things making it worse aren't very. We can stop doing those things, but choose not to. So it stands to reason that perhaps we like it this way.

Not you and me, but the politicians getting to run on border policy, for example, or the media who gets to blast out scary headlines. Or the border agents who get paid by our government and smugglers. Or if you're CoreCivic, a private prisons corporation that gets paid to keep detainees, then perhaps this situation is working great for you

and you're going to lobby hard for it to continue. There's an entire ecosystem around keeping things exactly the way they are, while simultaneously complaining about them and promising reforms. And while I'm not saying the solutions are easy, they certainly aren't as binary as open or closed borders. That said, we know that immigration doesn't really hurt native wages, with the exception of one small percentage of workers that could totally be accounted for via comprehensive policy. We know that immigration is in fact an

overall positive for the economy, and we know that the diversity caused by accepting immigrants is good for the country and just like your neighborhoods. So maybe we need to take a less punitive approach, you know, since what we're currently doing clearly isn't working. And maybe we need to depoliticize this subject and instead approach the issue the way it needs to be approached, as a humanitarian crisis that we played a role in creating in the first place.

Because all things considered, America actually has it pretty easy borders-wise. We only neighbor two countries, and for the most part, both of those countries have been pretty easy borders wise. We only neighbor two countries and for the most part, both of those countries have been pretty friendly with us. I don't know if you've heard, but some countries do wars at their border countries. Though to be fair, a current anti-war candidate for the Republican Party seems to be in favor

of possibly invading Mexico, so maybe we'll get there someday. It's just kind of wild that we managed to fuck it up this badly. You know, other countries don't have this problem. I mean, some do, but other countries have fun shit like zip lines across their borders. We could have zip lines, but instead we have this shit.

And while this is going to sound extremely reductive, can't we just like be nicer about this? Maybe instead of pumping money into border patrol and amping up violence at the border, use that money to build up Mexico's infrastructure and create a working immigration system. Not invade them, but actually help. Is that really so hard?

Because as it stands right now, we are the bad neighbors more than them. We are the ones who spent decades seeding our business interests into their countries and systematically destabilizing them for our own profit. They didn't do that to us. It seems that in this broken relationship, we are the toxic part. We love when capital and corporate interests cross borders over there, but we hate it when the icky, icky people from there cross the borders over to here. And of course, climate change is going to make it worse,

and that's a whole other episode, but we should probably figure out how to share the globe as it heats up and starts mashing people together even more. Anyway, that's our election coverage. The winner of the presidency is Doug Burgum. Whoa, what a twist. Not even sure who that guy is. Good for him though, I guess.

And his running mate, possible vice president, Donald Trump. All right. Burgum Trump. Make America Burgum Trump. Make America Bergham Trump. Ah, it's not Bergham, it's Bergman, Ingrid Bergman, and Trump are running for president. That makes more sense. Hi, what's up?

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