Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled “Why African migrants will flood the world over the next half-century“. As if to highlight the sheer desperation for something – anything! – better that most migrants exhibit, the BBC has published a remarkable in-depth article about a young Ghanaian man who decided to try to document the risk, abuses and crimes faced by literally millions of would-be migrants as they journey through Africa on their way to the Mediterranean Sea and, hopefully, Europe. It’s chillingly blunt about the dangers they face.
Here’s a brief excerpt from a very long article.
It was night when the trucks came to an abrupt stop, jolting Azeteng from a half-sleep. Voices called out from the dark, ordering the migrants to get out, and they were surrounded by men in military fatigues carrying AK-47s. They had hit the first Tuareg rebel checkpoint.
The rebels fired shots into the air and ordered the migrants to line up to pay. Those who didn’t have enough money were told to form a separate line and had their pockets searched and possessions taken. Then they were beaten. Azeteng was hit hard in the side of the head, knocking his glasses off his face. A migrant in front of him was hit with a metal pole and bled from the mouth. A Gambian man, whom Azeteng had befriended on the journey, held up his Koran and begged in vain for them to stop.
Azeteng put his glasses back on and, overcoming a swell of fear, pressed the tiny button under the arm. The grainy footage captured the migrants shuffling past a militant holding out a large plastic bowl, depositing cash. When the bowl was full, another militant tipped it into a larger bowl. Those who had paid were ordered to sit on the sand and wait. The wind whipped up and the cold started to bite.
It was then that Azeteng saw the two Nigerian women again, the women who had sat up front with the driver. Women from Nigeria, more than any other African nation, have fallen prey to the sex-trafficking trade to Europe. A well-established criminal network entraps them with promises of well-paid jobs as hairdressers or houseworkers or similar, then sells them into sex work. “As soon as they leave their family and community network they become extremely vulnerable,” Michele Bombassei, a UN expert on West African migration, told me. “And this is the moment the sexual exploitation begins.”
Azeteng had spoken to the Nigerian women briefly, back in Bamako. They were confident and outgoing. They had joked and laughed. Now their heads were bowed, and Azeteng watched as they walked silently into the desert escorted by seven armed men from the checkpoint. The seven men gang-raped the two women on the desert floor, close enough for the migrants to see.
When it was finished, the women were brought back and put in the front of the truck and the migrants were put in the back of the truck, and a heavy silence settled on them. The jubilation of earlier that day had given way to fear.
. . .
Azeteng helped Sekou to a hospital. Four days later, Sekou was dead. Some smugglers collected the body, and Azeteng followed them to a migrants’ graveyard near the edge of town. He watched as they took Sekou’s body from the bed of a pick-up. The dead man had been wrapped in a white sheet, one arm bound straight along his side and the other folded across his chest. They lowered the body into a shallow grave and covered it with sand and gravel and bricks. Adjacent to the migrants’ graveyard was a graveyard for Algerian citizens, with orderly plots and headstones. The migrants were buried haphazardly and close together, with nothing to mark their passing but the disturbance of the earth. Azeteng began to count, first one by one, then in rough batches, and by the time he gave up he’d counted 700 graves.
. . .
Ibrahim started out from Ghana with almost no money, and he was subjected to levels of hardship and brutality that Azeteng had paid to avoid. Locked into debt bondage, he worked for five months in Mali and Algeria with little or no pay. “It is so hard, so hard,” he said. “Work, work, work, work, work.” He pinched a fold of his skin. “My body was not good, it changed because of no food.” Ibrahim walked for five days in the desert after he and others were dumped by the smugglers, he said. He saw hands and feet sticking out of the sand, and helped bury a man who sat down on a dune one day, closed his eyes, and died.
There’s much more at the link.
The illegal aliens who are flooding across our southern border are in many ways similar to those flooding out of Africa into Europe (and, increasingly, into the USA as well). They have nothing at all to live for at home. Their only hope of a better life is to get to a country with a better economy, offering them the chance to earn more and improve themselves (and, particularly, their descendants in due course). That’s why they keep coming, even in the face of such dangers (which are as real in South America as they are in Africa). That’s why we need a border wall, and vastly increased border security, and everything else necessary to prevent our economy – and our own future – being submerged, and swamped, and drowned in the sea of despair that wants to invade us.
There is no simple, easy answer. There’s certainly, in my opinion, an ethical and/or moral obligation on us to help those less fortunate than ourselves; but that should not mean we have to sacrifice our own national future, and that of our children, to be swamped by those who would drag this country down to the depths from which they’ve managed to escape. That’s no answer at all! Nevertheless, we need to understand the desperation that drives so many illegal aliens. They’re not refugees from oppression, or seeking asylum due to persecution. They’re economic migrants, pure and simple. We have to understand their motivation in order to deal with them, and with the countries from which they’re fleeing; because unless we help those countries improve their own economies, more and more of their inhabitants are going to flee in our direction.
The irresistible force meets the immovable object. Who will win? Right now, in the absence of meaningful border security, it’s the invaders.
Peter
Recruit border guards from the migrants themselves. They will work for a tiny fraction of what our own border agents make and, I am certain, have no qualms about the methods used to prevent others from crossing the border. Establish bases along the border which house them and have our people oversee these. Because they work cheap we can hire thousands of them, surely enough to effectively cover the entire border.
Of course there will be bribery and corruption and some invaders will buy their way through. But most will not get through. We can stem a great deal of the invasion doing this. There will be violence and bloodshed as the cartels and coyotes fight to keep their businesses up and running. But their efforts will be diminished and, if we allow our new guards to use small arms, their numbers will diminish also.
Put our own people in as a second line of defense to block those who buy or fight their way through.
None of this would work perfectly but it would likely reduce the numbers significantly. Of course a whole new set of problems will arise sooner or later. They always do.
I agree 100%.
The problem, as I see it, is that these people do come here, "somehow" get regularized, then citizens, and because of the cultures they come from vote for the party that gives them the most goodies. I.e., "D". Irrespective of the gradients driving them here, once here they become part of the Great Replacement.
I would say the answer is simple, but NOT easy; these people are fleeing failed States. Nation building has proven futile, so long as it is taken as an exercise in long distance altruism. But there was a time when many of these States ran tolerably well…with Western Colonial administrators.
No, Colonialism was far from a democratic ideal. But it CLEARLY worked better than the concatenation of People's Kleptocracies we have now.
And, yes, the Left will scream bloody murder. So what else is new?
Schofield beat me to it: the rock on which any plan to improve African or South American countries will flounder is the kleptocratic nature of them. While the two continents arrive there from different paths, arrive there they do.
I suspect the solution to the problem will be provided by nature. If it isn't Ebola, it will be some other disease. The disease doesn't matter. It may even be waves of different diseases. What matters will be the scale of death. The Black Death will look like a Girl Scout picnic compared to what awaits. And when the second and third order effects kick in, the countries will be effectively depopulated.
Once it's over, there will be nations who that made the hard decisions and who didn't suffer the worst of the deaths. They will use another term for it, but those depopulated countries will become colonies again.
I have a three part solution for the global illegal immigration problem:
1) STOP giving foreign aid to shithole countries. It only props up the corrupt tyrants in them and perpetuates the global welfare state. It doesn't benefit the actual people of those countries.
2) STOP giving illegal immigrants free shit. No welfare, no food stamps, no housing, nothing. Make them go through the immigration process like so many of us have done.
3) FINE the crap out of companies that hire illegals (law's already on the books, how about enforcing it?). And enforce all the other immigration laws as well.
There, easy peasy. (#2 alone would probably eliminate 90% of the problem)
Oh and stop feeling sorry for these turd world savages. We had them tamed once, but the Marxists got them all riled up in the 50's to get their "freedom" and "independence", even though most of them didn't know it or what that meant. Africa was more advanced culturally 200 years ago than it is today.
We don't need low IQ workers to augment the workforce. We have millions already here on the dole, and they used to be quite good at picking crops. It's somehow beneath them now. Give them 6 months of unemployment and then kick them off the tit. There has always been work in this country. I moved here 35 years ago, and have never wonted for employment. It wasn't always the nicest work, but it put food on the table and a roof over my head.
If we continue in the current vein, the movie "Idiocracy" will become a documentary, studied at length by whoever discovers the ruins of Western Civilisation.
Desert Rat: Do as you propose without changing their culture and they become the new bribe takers. Will they be armed? Will they be trained in the use of those arms? Yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
Edward Abby, in one of his opening essays of his book "Down the River" proposed, give them a rifle, ammunition, send them back to solve the problems they are leaving, then welcome them on their return. This is a very rough quote from a recollection of something I read some time back, but, damn, it seems to make sense.
1. Build the wall.
2. Shoot anybody who touches it.
3. Declare victory.
We cannot fix their problems for them. Their culture is the problem. The only way to replace the culture from outside is to kill everyone over the age of 8, and start over. Do we really want to do that?
Post WW II "aid" has been to entrench a corrupt elite kleptocracy, especially in Africa.
They have ex-colonies, not "nation states".
Switzerland, not the US nor any other Euro-state, should be the model with ethnic nation states and ethnic/tribal cantons in state confederations.
Their human problems need to be solved by their local, human communities — and in their families, their clans, their tribes; with their tribal canton customs having the force of law and taking care of most internal community legal issues.
The ex-colony should be a confederation of functioning tribal cantons, primarily for local & regional free trade, plus defense from aggression by violent neighbor tribes.
Investment yes, "aid" no.
The food-exporting Rhodesia transformation into a failed Zimbabwe should be more studied, more publicized, and better lessons learned.