Tangle - The Haitian migrants on the border.

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

More than 12,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, are currently congregated underneath and beside International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after they waded across the Rio Grande River from Mexico into the U.S. The town of Del Rio has a population of roughly 35,000 people, and the influx of migrants quickly exceeded the border patrol's capacity to process them.Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at https://www.readtangle.com/--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The faster money and data move, the further your business can go to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward, together. In life, interact. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast,

a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host and the founder of Tangle, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the Haitian migrant crisis that I guess we can call it now that's unfolding on the border of Texas and Mexico. But as always, before we jump into our main story, we're going to give you the quick hits, the news you need to know right now. First up, the Senate parliamentarian has said that undocumented immigrants cannot be solved for in Democrats' reconciliation bill. This is a big blow to a Democratic plan to create a pathway to citizenship for 8 million undocumented immigrants.

Number two, former Representative Beto O'Rourke, the Democrat from Texas who lost the Senate race to Ted Cruz in 2018, is reportedly planning to run for governor of Texas. Number three, a rally in Washington, D.C. to support the January 6th rioters produced more police than protesters and no violence. Number four, Representative Anthony Gonzalez, the Republican from Ohio who voted to impeach Donald Trump, announced his retirement on Thursday after a Trump-backed primary challenger emerged for the 2022 midterms. Number five, U.S. officials confirmed that a drone strike in Kabul last month had not, in fact, killed an ISIS-K threat, but instead killed as many as 10 civilians, including seven children. Number six, and a bonus quick hit today because there's just so much news,

France recalled its ambassadors to the U.S. and Australia after President Biden announced the signing of a nuclear submarine deal with Australia. All right, those are our quick hits today, and we're going to move on to the main topic. Today's story is on Haitian migrants. More than 12,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, are currently congregated underneath and beside International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after they waded across the Rio Grande River from Mexico into the United States.

The town of Del Rio has a population of roughly 35,000 people, and the influx of migrants quickly exceeded the Border Patrol's capacity to process them. Del Rio's mayor estimated on Saturday that there were something like 14,534 immigrants at the camp under the bridge, and U.S. authorities said they have moved about 3,300 migrants to other locations for processing and possible removal since Friday. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced it was closing the Del Rio port of entry in response to the situation at the bridge. More than 320 migrants arrived in

Port-de-Prince, Haiti on Sunday after being placed on three separate flights and expelled from the United States. U.S. officials say another six flights are expected to leave Tuesday, and that they plan to expel many of the migrants camped out at the bridge, which connects Del Rio to Ciudad Acuna and Mexico. Haitians migrating to the U.S. in large numbers from South America is not a new phenomenon. Many left Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake to look for work in South America, but after jobs tied to the 2016 Olympics disappeared, they began to leave Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and head north. In the last several months, though, Haiti has been hit by another devastating earthquake, and its president, Jovenel Moise, was assassinated,

which some Haitians interviewed by the Associated Press reference as their reason for not wanting to return. Violent street gangs are also wreaking havoc in Haiti, with reports of kidnappings, killings, rapes, and torched homes that have caused thousands to flee, according to the Washington Post. The situation in Del Rio comes at a time when illegal crossings along the U.S. southern border are at a decades-high level, despite the heat of the summer, with more than 208,000 migrants detained in August alone. That's according to data released by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. In July, 212,672 migrants were taken into custody, a 21-year high.

Below, we'll take a look at some reactions from the right and left, then my take. First, here's what the left is saying. Overall, the left has been critical of Biden for what they call inhumane policies on the border. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch said the desperate rush to expel Haitian migrants is, quote, inhumane. To many in the mainstream media, the images of hot, hungry and desperate Haitians were just the last crisis of President Biden's long, hot summer. Nothing more, nothing less. President Biden's long, hot summer. Nothing more, nothing less.

Indeed, the initial rush to blame our first year 46th president for anything that goes awry on planet Earth can be more than a tad silly. But now you can and should blame Biden for a rapid fire response that aims to get these Haitians on the airplanes and out of Del Rio, and more importantly, off your TV screen, to rush them back to the unsafety of the unstable, violence-wracked, and earthquake-ravaged Caribbean island of their birth. Incredibly, Biden is following in the footsteps of America's Ted Cruz's and Greg Abbott's in failing to see these 14,000 Haitian souls for the only thing that

should really matter in this fraught moment, their humanity. Bunch goes on to basically argue that the race to airlift these mostly Haitian migrants back into harm's way would look inhumane and un-American under normal circumstances, but they seem especially bizarre in the present moment when we're trying to airlift Afghan refugees into the United States. In our land of illogic, Bunch said, perhaps some of the same planes that helped folks crammed into a Kabul tarmac escape the Taliban will now ferry the people crammed under that Texas bridge back to the bullet-ridden streets of Port-de- Prince. In Vox, Nicole Nerea struck a similar tone saying that the Texas GOP sees this as a political opportunity but it's actually a humanitarian disaster

exacerbated by Biden. She said that the situation in Del Rio where more than 12,000 migrants are camping in increasingly squalid conditions without adequate access to water, food, and sanitation, is growing dire from a humanitarian perspective. Most of these migrants are from Haiti and plan to seek asylum in the United States, as is their right under federal and international law, she wrote. But Texas Governor Greg Abbott has sought to twist that humanitarian crisis into a security crisis designed to appeal to Republican voters in the state. Despite promises to institute a more humane immigration policy, though, the Biden administration is clung to pandemic-related border restrictions known as Title 42 policy implemented by the Trump administration last year. Since March of 2020, that policy has been used to rapidly expel more than a million migrants without hearings before an immigration judge.

Biden is also restarting Trump's Remain in Mexico policy, under which tens of thousands of migrants are forced to wait in Mexico for their court hearings in the U.S., and he has resumed rapidly deporting families at the U.S.-Mexico border. All the while, Nerea said, his message to migrants has been don't come. Even though many of them are fleeing unlivable conditions not unlike those Afghan refugees are running from, problems ranging from gang violence to climate-related devastation. In the Arizona Republic, Elvia Diaz said the crisis is once again proof we can't turn a blind eye to disasters in other countries. Make no mistake, Diaz said, when people are hungry, homeless, are tortured by gangsters, raped, seeing their family members killed, they'll come, whether we want them to or not.

What needs to happen now is for authorities, churches, nonprofits, and ordinary folks to extend a hand to those poor souls camping under the Del Rio Bridge. They aren't necessarily trying to cross illegally. They're crying for help. These poor souls aren't going back to Haiti or wherever they came from. These poor souls aren't going back to Haiti or wherever they came from. Either we help them in an orderly way, feeding, vetting, and vaccinating them against COVID-19, or they'll try to get to American soil no matter what. All right, so that's the left's argument, and here is what the right is saying. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu,

a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Your Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The right says Biden's border policies and rhetoric are causing this crisis. In the National Review, Michael Dougherty called it Biden's growing border catastrophe. The scene is so embarrassing and distressing that the FAA has restricted flights of drone cameras to prevent Fox News from showing the pictures of what the developing migrant encampment looks like, he said. These Haitian migrants are a part of a larger movement of tens of thousands of Haitians who are trying to migrate to the United States

from a number of South American countries where they fled after the 2010 earthquake. They've apparently received the message loud and clear that if you present yourself at the border or get caught, you might be distributed to the assassination of Haiti's president, which includes extending temporary protected status to Haitians, allowing them to live in the United States without legal status. Legal gray zones, and or looking the other way, end in disorder and even needless death, he went on to write. other way, end in disorder, and even needless death, he went on to write. This form of invited but unofficial immigration expands the opportunity for human smugglers to prey on the desperation of the poor, exploiting them for extortionate fees for sex or to help them smuggle drugs. There is a real humanitarian impulse that informs progressives in their desire to just let migrants

in and to allow them to make their own way. But in the real world, American citizenship is a repository of promises, rights, and duties that makes living in America not just possible, but safer and tolerable. Progressives who ignore this fact in the hope that it would relieve them of the moral burden of enforcing the law at our borders are exposing thousands of people to danger, exploitation, and squalor. It's not benign neglect, just neglect. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said if Biden wanted to undermine his chances for immigration reform, he couldn't have done a better job than his first eight months in office. The scenes from the area couldn't have been scripted better by immigration restriction, as the board wrote. Thousands of migrants crossing

the Rio Grande en masse in expectation that they'll be able to claim asylum in the U.S. Thousands of Haitians fleeing desperate poverty somehow made it to Mexico, then traveled to the border, probably with the help of the cartels that control the human traffic. U.S. border agents have closed the legal Del Rio port of entry, so normal cross-border traffic essential for commerce is shut down. Some 15,000 Haitians and others are trapped in awful conditions around the Del Rio International Bridge without basic necessities. The migrants may be carrying COVID-19 and border agents are overwhelmed. The problem, the board said, is the incentives of American policy. U.S. law, at least as interpreted

by the courts, allows migrants to claim asylum even if they are coming solely for economic reasons. They can then be released into the U.S. to work until their asylum claims are heard by overwhelmed immigration judges. This is politically unsustainable as it creates hardship for migrants and border communities. It will also make the public less likely to trust politicians on sensible immigration reform that would allow more legal immigration in exchange for tighter border security. In the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll said the Haitian migrants don't qualify for asylum, but Biden is letting them in anyway. It is very brave of these migrants to walk thousands of miles north for a better life, Carroll said. But if you live safely in a country where you have a job, can provide for your family and save money, then you have no grounds for asylum in the United

States. Our country has laws that identify specific grounds for asylum. They require migrants to face deportation or persecution in a home country based on one of five specific criteria. Race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. If these migrants have been safely living and working in South American countries for a decade, none of them will meet this standard. All right, that's it for the right and left's take, and here are my thoughts on this. There's a funny thing you might notice here. The left is saying that Biden's policies are becoming an extension of Trump's. They're cruel, they're inhumane, deportation heavy,

they ignore international law that creates asylum opportunities on our border. Meanwhile, the right is claiming that Biden's policies and rhetoric are far too inviting to migrants, thus the surge we're seeing on the border and the overwhelmed U.S. officials. It's not that these two things can't coexist. They can. Biden could be projecting a more humane policy to appease progressives while actually executing a similar immigration policy to Trump's, which is kind of a political lose-lose. As we see above, you end up getting hammered from both sides. But I think the reality is actually a little bit different. To me, this just proves that whether you're building walls using public health policy to expel migrants en masse, setting welcoming or divisive tones, it doesn't really matter. There will always be waves of migrants at the border.

Certainly what Biden is facing now is worse than anything Trump faced, and I don't doubt his more immigrant-friendly rhetoric is part of it. That, plus the temporary status afforded to Haitian migrants, I'm absolutely certain served as an incentive for some more migrants to come here. But the policies so far really aren't all that different from what Trump did. What has changed is the circumstances elsewhere after a devastating pandemic that destroyed even the strongest economies and wreaked havoc in many of the countries where these migrants are coming from now.

The stories from Haitians on the border vary widely, but many fit a similar theme. Fleeing danger, seeking economic opportunity, or both. Just reading some of the news reports, I've seen one migrant saying that they were eating trash out of the news reports, I've seen one migrant saying that they were eating trash out of the garbage in Chile to feed their families, and another saying they had $15,000 saved up, which is more than many Americans have. And instead of using that money to try and build a business in a dangerous, unstable country, they used it to get to America. I've done a lot of reporting from the border and on immigration more broadly, and my view has been pretty consistent since before the Trump administration. Instead of more border patrol encampments, drones, or stricter policies or whatever else,

what we really need is more immigration judges. We need a system that's capable of processing and handling the migrants who are coming here, either by granting them asylum under the law, a separate temporary immigration status, or deporting them if they don't have a legitimate claim. In short, we need to expand the legal immigration and have a more robust system for processing migrants across the border illegally. That this reality has not yet dawned on Congress, or at least has not sunk in to the point of producing legislation, is baffling.

If we can't process tens of thousands of asylum seekers, we are left with only two choices, each of which is inhumane and illegal in its own right. Either A, we refuse and deport them, or B, we release them into the U.S. with a far-off court date and little recourse to track them down if they don't show up. Now, that's not something that used to happen that often, but it's happening more frequently these days. However you want to cut it, Biden's policies are clearly failing, but it's happening more frequently these days. However you want to cut it, Biden's policies are clearly failing, but it's not as if his predecessors did any better. Trump, too, saw border apprehensions hit a 12-year high under his watch, and that was with his notoriously

draconian measures in place to try and dissuade migrants from coming. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then maybe we should consider some ideas other than the ones that have repeatedly failed to solve our immigration woes. Okay, we're going to move on to the reader question for the day now. This one comes from Terry in Palmdale, California. Terry said, I would love to see a definitive answer to the efficacy of mask wearing. I cannot understand how a paper mask with holes the size of the Grand Canyon can stop a submicroscopic virus from being expelled through the mask and out into the world, such as it may be. Can anyone definitively show the value of mask?

So I've covered this topic a lot in Tangle, I think sufficiently at this point, but I'm just going to throw this out there as my general take. Masks work when they're the right kind of mask and they're worn properly. There's no doubt in my mind that face coverings reduce some viral transmission, but it's clear that a roomful of people wearing N95 masks, for instance, COVID-19, will be far less transmissible than it is in a roomful of people not wearing masks. will be far less transmissible than it is in a room full of people not wearing masks. Now, when you get outside the N95 mask and the cloth mask and the cutoff t-shirts around the face, it's a lot less scientific. It's a lot different. But many of the popular common cloth masks obviously are less effective, and the surgical masks worn by doctors and nurses seem to fall somewhere in between those two, you know, the N95 and just your standard face covering. One of the challenges of studying masks and COVID-19 is that there are very

few real-world ways to track the impacts of masking without some serious ethical issues, without, you know, with a proper control. It's hard. Simply put, it's just a hard thing to study. But the study that has probably made the most waves was actually released recently, just the beginning of this month, and involved tracking 340,000 adults across 600 villages in rural Bangladesh. It was by far the largest randomized study on masking and COVID-19 transmission to date. The Washington Post said in one group where adults were encouraged to wear masks, mask wearing increased by 28.8%. mass wearing increased by 28.8%. That same group then saw a 9.3% reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 seroprevalence, which means the virus was actually confirmed by blood work. There was also an 11.9% reduction in COVID-19 symptoms. Now these people were mostly wearing surgical masks and it's also

important to note that this is not saying masks are 9% effective. It's saying that when mask wearing went up 28% in this group, the symptomatic COVID-19 cases went down 9%. So we could infer from that that, you know, if mask wearing was universal 100%, then COVID-19 spread would have gone down way more than 9%. Obviously, there have been a lot of studies on this. There's anecdotal evidence. I know there's a lot of competing evidence out there.

But yes, if you ask me, I think we know pretty certainly that masks, at the very least, reduce transmission a little bit. If they're worn properly and if they're the right kind of mask, they can probably reduce transmission a lot. Okay, today's A Story That Matters is actually a very political one. Sometimes, you know, we get into addiction, education, healthcare, stuff that a lot of, like, Americans talk about at the kitchen table. This one I thought was just really interesting, though. With Democrats attempting to pass historic levels of spending in Congress, Republicans are trying to rekindle the Tea Party's anti-spending energy. But increasingly, they're finding it a tough sell. the Tea Party's anti-spending energy, but increasingly they're finding it a tough sell.

A new report from the Wall Street Journal details how conservative politicians are struggling to rally voters around an anti-spending message and instead are finding that school board meetings, the state's coronavirus rules, and mask mandates are the dominant conversations happening around the country. Part of the issue is that 70% of Americans, including 4 in 10 Republicans, supported President Biden's $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package, even after two pandemic-focused spending plans passed under Trump. You can go to The Wall Street Journal to read more about this story, but it's pretty fascinating to hear about how Republicans are trying to focus the conversation and where voters actually want to go. actually want to go. All right, your numbers for today, 396,579. That's the number of apprehensions on the southern border in 2018. 851,508 is the number of apprehensions on the southern border in 2019. 132,856 is the number of migrant encounters at the southwestern border in May of 2019. That's the highest at any point under the Trump administration.

199,777 is the number of migrant encounters at the southern border in July of 2021. 220,063 is the number of migrant encounters at the southwestern border in March of 2000, the highest prior to this year. 150,000 is the estimated number of Haitians living in the U.S. who were given temporary protected status in May. And your have a nice day story to send you off. Some researchers believe they have a simple and unique solution to reducing some of our energy consumption. White paint. Yes, you heard that right. Purdue University researchers say they have developed the whitest paint on Earth.

So white that it literally reflects sunlight. The paint reflects 98.1% of solar radiation while also emitting infrared heat. It's so effective it could reduce the need for and use of air conditioning. Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power, the university said. It added that typical commercial white paint gets warmer, not cooler. You can get the fascinating details from USA Today.

All right, guys, that's it for today's podcast. As always, if you enjoyed this, please go give us a five-star rating. And if you want more, go to retangle.com, where you can subscribe to our newsletter, show us some support that way, and we'll be back here tomorrow. Today's podcast was written by me, Isaac Saul, the Tangle News founder, and it was edited and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. The music for the podcast was done by Diet75. Our newsletter is edited by Sean Brady, Bailey Saul, and Ari Weitzman. It is also produced by my social media manager and right hand Magdalena Bokoa. Thank you so much for tuning in. And as always, if you want more, go to readtangle.com. Thanks for watching! a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history,

and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+.