Read it and weep. A headline from a Fox News article: “Guatemalan migrants vow to keep trying to reach US border after Mexico ramps up pressure.” Even as our neighbor to the South capitulates to the administration’s demands to help U.S. deal with its massive border crisis, the majority of those deported immediately turn around and head back toward the “promised land” for another try.
The article quotes a migrant named Noe Santos, who confesses, “I did it three times already, and three times I got caught.” Yet, here Santos is, back in the U.S., working for $12 an hour at a restaurant in Atlanta.
So what makes these migrants so determined to keep coming back to a country that can’t handle this number of asylum seekers? The answer “The Conveyor Belt.” That, according to The Washington Post, is the nickname U.S. border officials have appended to “a lucrative new smuggling operation that uses express buses to deliver Guatemalan migrant families to the U.S. border in a matter of days, making the journey faster, easier and safer.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
… [T]he conveyor pattern has continued for months, part of a record-breaking surge in crossings by families. … Last month, 40,325 arrived in family groups, up 67 percent from January.
Those apprehended and deported after sneaking across the border don’t return merely because it is easier. They do it because they have made an “investment” in reaching the U.S. Users of The Conveyor Belt pay as much as $7,000 per adult with child.
… [F]amilies are transported to staging areas at ranches and hotels in southern Mexico, where they are organized into bus groups and rushed north along Mexican highways, ‘stopping only for food, fuel and bathroom breaks,’ according to the U.S. law enforcement documents.
