Who Needs NAFTA Or CAFTA?

By Faith McFarland

Who needs NAFTA or CAFTA and who needs a wall when all it takes is a way for entrepreneurs to make money all along the trail from Central America into the United States of America?

Let’s call that way OpenBorders.biz. It already exists as a franchise operation throughout Central and North America. While it is not always legitimate or an official part of the NFTA or CAFTA agreements, each franchise trades freely in offering a variety of services and products for youth and adults.

Proponents of open borders to the United States are support and encourage this free enterprise. Here is a big picture look at the comprehensive capitalist economy of moving people from a country south of the U.S. border into the United States without legal permission. You can “follow the money” throughout this all-inclusive network of small and large-scale entrepreneurs. OpenBorders.biz is free trade to the max and it operates on the same principal as any business, supply and demand.

To illustrate this network of OpenBorder.biz franchises let’s start in Petén, a town in Guatemala. Here we find a humble family with four children. During the day the father works selling the crops they raise on their small lot plus any odd jobs he can find. The mother is a homemaker who cooks, cleans, and takes care of the children.  The children work on the family lot tending to the crops and also work for meager pay in other fields to earn food or money to help the family. The children go to school for a half-day through grade three.

As hard as they work, they barely make ends meet. One day the oldest teenage son, Mario, hears an ad on the radio about a guide, a.k.a. coyote, who can help him get to the U.S. border. The ad message claims that once across the border it’s easy to get legal status, job, and free education.

Mario and his parents discuss a plan for how he can go north and pursue the American dream. They know that it is risky but they have heard of others in the town that did well once they got to America.

On the day that Mario ran home to avoid a confrontation with a local gang who had threatened him, the family decided it was time to send Mario to take the journey to the Land of Opportunity. They decided it was worth the risk to send him with a guide who would help him reach the U.S. border.

Mario’s father made arrangements with a local loan shark for a loan of about $1,700 U.S., using the family home and lot as collateral. The interest rate for the loan was a high 10%, a perfect example of the profit margin for OpenBorders.biz franchisees.

The plan was that Mario would send money to pay off the loan as soon as he started working in America. Of course, if the loan were not repaid as agreed, the lender would take possession of half of the family property. This seemed worth the risk to eventually get ahead.

Mario and his father then met with the guide who had advertised on the radio. They made arrangements for the trip and paid the guide the $1,500 US leaving $200 to cover Mario’s travel expenses. On his journey north he would pay various vendors for food and other necessities, thus supporting the small franchisees of OpenBroders.biz.

So far, the franchisees in this scenario that have profited from OpenBorders.biz are the local radio station who sold advertising for the guide, the loan shark who loaned the family the money and the guide who was paid to take Mario to the U.S.  border.

The guide, a.k.a. smuggler, in this case was a local man who had taken many on the journey from Guatemala, through Mexico, and to the U.S.  border.  Fortunately for Mario, this man had a reputation to protect so that he could continue to build his business in Petén. Others who have paid coyotes for a similar trip to the U.S. border have been robbed, raped, and abandoned mid trip.

In Mario’s case the trip went well until he and the guide reached the city of Reynosa in the state of Tamaulipas in northern Mexico. At that point he was kidnapped from the guide and taken to a warehouse where he was held for about a month along with about twenty others. The kidnappers were part of a local extortion ring that pressured families of their captives to pay them in order to buy the release of their loved ones.

Once the kidnappers extorted the maximum they could get for their captives, they gave them a free bus ticket to the U.S.  border. The bus ticket was easy because the head of this extortion ring also owned the local bus station. He and his minions are another set of profiteers in the OpenBorders.biz franchise network as we continue to follow the money.

Mario finally made his way to the Progreso, Texas port of entry. He simply walked across the bridge and told the customs agent that he had no visa or other documents that would allow him a legal crossing into the US.   Someone had schooled Mario about his rights as an unaccompanied minor in the U.S.A., thanks to the court decision in the case of Flores vs. Reno in 1997.

I will digress briefly from Mario’s story and OpenBorder.biz to declare the fact that, for these minors, the wall makes no difference because of this lawsuit. It is true that most of the coyotes take these children and teens under age 18 the hard way, crossing rivers and deserts just to turn themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol authorities after wandering through the border area. But those who are savvy know that a youth can simply walk through any official port of entry and turn themselves in and receive special care and status by our Homeland Security Department.

In 1985 Jenny Lisette Flores fled the civil war of El Salvador and came to the U.S. through the port of entry in California. She was detained with adults and strip searched. She lawyered up with other minors in a class action suite against the Immigration and Naturalization office that was under the autority of Attorney General Janet Reno.

This lawsuit and subsequent laws and policies require the Department of Homeland Security to provide special treatment for all unaccompained youth who enter the United States and that they be be placed in a shelter or other center which is the least restrictive setting. Youth in these settings must receive medical, educational, recreational, and mental health servcies – all courtesy of funds received from the United States taxpayers via the Office of Refugee Resettlement.

If you saw the Super Bowl ad for 84 Lumber you saw a video of a women and her daughter who left her home in Mexico or Central America and made her way to the U.S.A., presumably to pursue the “American Dream”.  At the border there was a huge wall that had a huge door that opened to welcome them. In other words, an open border. The ad doesn’t show what happens to them after they pass through the door but I can tell you that, if the mother had sent her daughter across the border without her, she would receive the special treatment of all unaccompanied minors.

At this juncture OpenBorders.biz evolves.  In all future evolutions of OpenBorders the money flows, not from .biz profiteers but from all U.S. taxpayers through various governmental entities.

Now let’s get back to Mario. For six days Mario was held in an immigration-processing center run by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). This is commonly known as the “icebox.” Here through OpenBorders.gov ICE and border patrol employees are paid to detain and care for the minors, often providing general childcare for the younger minors. Here Mario was given his alien or “A” number.  He is now an UAC or Unaccompanied Alien Child in the official custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security.

A recent draft of a memo from DHS Secretary, John F. Kelly, states that the parents of UACs who live in the U.S. can be prosecuted if they have paid a smuggler to bring a UAC across the border.  However, it is not clear at this point whether or not this would apply to Mario.  First, his sponsor is his uncle, not his parents and he did not pay the smuggler who brought Mario to the U.S. border.  Also, in Mario’s case, the smuggler did not bring him across the border, only to the edge.

Once cleared, Mario was then sent to a special shelter for unaccompanied minors. This place was a huge shelter in Texas that holds about 500 children and teens. This takes us to the next evolution of OpenBorders – OpenBorders.net. Here various nonprofit corporations receive millions from the ORR to care for the UACs as they await reunification with family or friends somewhere in the U.S., or to be deported back to the country of origin.  Because of their nonprofit status, these shelters pay few taxes and end up hiring vast numbers of people while also paying huge salaries to their CEOs. These “fat cats” are likely the biggest winners in the OpenBorders.net enterprise.

In Mario’s case, he will stay at the shelter for about five or six weeks as he awaits approval of his uncle in Kansas to be his sponsor. Once this process is complete, the uncle will pay the airfare for Mario to fly to Kansas.

Once Mario arrives he will go to the local school.  School districts across the country have been burdened with the added expense of providing teachers with special training in English as a Second Language instruction, all paid for now by OpenBorders.edu, another evolution of OpenBorders.biz. Mario will have special needs in addition to learning English.  He doesn’t speak much Spanish because his first language is a Mayan dialect.  Since he has not had much schooling he needs help with general literacy skills as well.

Eventually Mario will receive a letter stating that he must go to an immigration hearing to determine whether or not he is eligible for refugee status. The website for the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Office states that a refugee is someone who meets these criteria:

  • “Is located outside of the United States
  • Is of special humanitarian concern to the United States
  • Demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group
  • Is not firmly resettled in another country
  • Is admissible to the United States”

While Mario may not meet these standards, he is still one of millions of consumers in the OpenBorders.gov arena where thousands of government and court employees are paid with U.S. taxpayer funds.

This scenario of Mario’s life and journey to the U.S.A. is merely an illustration of the various ways that entrepreneurs are profiting from the movement of people, especially minors, from their hometowns to the U.S. in the OpenBorders.biz network. After that it is up to us (U.S.) to pay to help them live here. All that being said, if I were Mario’s mother and I saw the journey to the U.S. as a viable opportunity for advancement for him and our family, I would send him just as many mothers do.

For that reason I advocate for using the millions or billions of dollars spent on UACs and adults coming here for a better life for the purpose of nation building and strengthening these countries in Central America where poverty and crime drive so many to be smuggled north for a better life.

I wonder why it is that Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador are so riddled with crime, when their Central American neighbors, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Belize, are not. Nicaragua is one of the poorest countries but crime is not rampant there. Could this country be a model for the three other countries? For the sake of the “Marios” of the region, I hope that a viable solution is found that goes beyond OpenBorders.biz.gov.edu.org.

About Letter to the Editor 171 Articles
Under the leadership of Editor in Chief Huey Freeman, the Editorial Board of the Arizona Daily Independent offers readers an opportunity to comment on current events and the pressing issues of the day. Occasionally, the Board weighs-in on issues of concern for the residents of Arizona and the US.