Rape at the Border (and Duct Tape)

[G-Man]

People made fun of Trump when he talked about how human smugglers were raping women as they smuggled them into the United States:

https://www.vox.com/2019/1/27/18198729/ ... uck-border

Now they are admitting it is true:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/us/b ... women.html

Undocumented women making their way into American border towns have been beaten for disobeying smugglers, impregnated by strangers, coerced into prostitution, shackled to beds and trees and — in at least a handful of cases — bound with duct tape, rope or handcuffs.

(Granted, I wish I had a more trustworthy, reliable source than the New York Times).

[Steve]

I thought the issue was Trump claiming the immigrants themselves were the rapists coming to take our wimmin? Because the raping and forced prostitution of immigrant women is something that I don't recall ever being disputed? I mean, human traffickers are barely one step removed from being slavers (and sometimes are), so that kind of behavior isn't shocking, just deplorable and infuriating.

[G-Man]

Steve, read the Vox article. In the past few months, Trump has been talking about how women are being smuggled in due to our lax immigration laws, and his claims were certainly disputed by the press.

Check out this search for "Trump" and "duct tape" on DuckDuckGo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duct+tape++trump&t=h_&ia=news

[Yukaphile]

Even my Mexican right-wing friends agree that this has to do with the cartels, which are about as representative of Latino immigrants as the KKK are of white people.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Even my Mexican right-wing friends agree that this has to do with the cartels, which are about as representative of Latino immigrants as the KKK are of white people.

You do know this thread is about immigration laws, not about the integrity of the Latino community?

[Draco Dracul]

And surely a wall will work better and preventing human traffickers from exploiting the desperate than fixing our broken, deliberately racist immigration system.

[G-Man]

Even my Mexican right-wing friends agree that this has to do with the cartels, which are about as representative of Latino immigrants as the KKK are of white people.

The point went entirely over your head, didn't it?

This isn't about "look how bad Latino immigrants are." The point is that the loopholes in our current immigration system make crossing the border illegally very attractive, because once across you can't simply be sent back, you have to be processed (and if you claim you need asylum, even falsely, the process takes much longer). This encourages people-smuggling, which encourages these abuses. If people knew that they would not be let into the United States, they would not put themselves into a position to be exploited like this.

His point was that rules preventing effective border enforcement are creating the conditions for such abuses.

That is what Trump was referring to, and tons of media outlets claimed that he was lying, making it up, had no information, maybe was putting in some of his own sexual fantasies - and now they are basically admitting that he was actually correct.

[G-Man]

And surely a wall will work better and preventing human traffickers from exploiting the desperate than fixing our broken, deliberately racist immigration system.

A wall, and asylum reforms, and repealing the law that means we cannot turn people back unless they are from Mexico (meaning anyone from other countries who come through Mexico have to be put through a long process).

How do you propose to fix our system? Open borders? Maybe we should send transportation down to Latin America and bring everyone into the United States who wants to come? That way, they won't have to use smugglers?

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Are you positing that you are motivated on this issue by concern for the well-being of victimized immigrants?

[Yukaphile]

That wall is going to kill us financially, and we're already in debt. This is only the kind of reckless spending you embark on when you have a surplus like we did nineteen years ago, AND WE DON'T ANYMORE. And it's not an emergency if the immigration rate is the lowest it's been in decades, but your right-wing sources will lie and claim it IS the highest, of course, because they want to convince people they're just swarming the border, flooding it. The actual rate of Mexicans crossing the border illegally is very low. It's really more refugees and people fleeing bad and war-torn homelands.

I'm asking you. If you agree with Trump this really does constitute "an emergency," desperate and scared refugees fleeing ravaged wastelands, people whose faces in no way represented by that caravan not so long ago, then would you agree, the epidemic of gun violence, which claims hundreds of thousands of lives a year, is not equally a "national emergency?" Or climate change? Which could kill us all if we mess up the environment badly enough? Congress passed a law that banned research into gun violence. Why? I'd love to fund that rather than a useless border wall which they will just tunnel under.