Immigrants from Central America aren’t stealing jobs. They’re running for their lives | Opinion

Scapegoating immigrants is easy.

Looking in the mirror? Not so much.

But now’s the time for introspection.

Inflamed by a Mein Kampf-quoting former (and possibly future) president, immigration ranks as the top issue on voters’ minds, surpassing the economy, deficit and crime in Gallup’s February survey. Immigration has never ranked this high in Gallup polls stretching back to 1981.

Whether rising fears of immigrants are rational, the surge at the southern border is unprecedented. The number of immigrants apprehended there in December exceeded any other month in more than two decades, per a February Pew Research study. No state’s frontier has seen more strain than California’s. More migrants were arrested crossing San Diego’s border than anywhere in the country in April.

Opinion

Relative to prior decades, what separates this wave of immigrants isn’t just their quantities. It is where they are coming from, and why.

While immigration from almost every region in the world has risen in recent years, the fastest growth has come from Central America, per a November Pew report.

Between 2017 and 2021, more immigrants came from what is known as the Northern Triangle — that is, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — than anywhere, including Mexico, per Pew. In 2022, nearly one in four “encounters” with Border Patrol agents involved migrants from these countries.

What do Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans have in common?

The immigrants, whom Americans fear most, have fled failed states torn apart by gangs armed with American guns fighting to supply Americans drugs.

Nearly 50 million Americans have a substance abuse disorder, and we’re dying from overdoses 500% more often than two decades ago, per federal data.

Our spiraling addictions to shooting heroin, smoking fentanyl, dabbing marijuana, snorting cocaine and selling guns have turned the whole hemisphere into de facto narco-states. Per the UN, all but three of mainland Latin America’s 21 countries are significant producers of, or corridors for, cocaine.

Few areas have suffered more than Central America.

“Violence has long plagued the Northern Triangle, but homicide rates rose rapidly in the 2000s as the region became the primary transit corridor for South American narcotics bound for the U.S.,” per a November Congressional Research Service report, noting “transnational organizations have sought to secure trafficking routes through Central America by battling one another and by intimidating and infiltrating government institutions.”

When Central Americans are raped, kidnapped and shot dead by drug cartels, they’re looking down barrels of American guns.

More than half the firearms used in crimes in Central America and later recovered by authorities originated here, per a 2023 ATF report.

Immigrants from Central America aren’t here to steal jobs. They’re running for their lives.

President Joe Biden has tried treating the disease — our supply of weapons and demand for drugs. The same can’t be said for Republicans.

Trying to expand access to drug treatment, Biden proposed raising the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s budget by $3.3 billion, or 44 percent, last year. House Republicans didn’t like that, so they proposed cutting drug treatment access, deleting funding by $234 million.

As president, Donald Trump put more weapons in drug traffickers’ hands when he eased export rules for gun makers in 2020.

Biden has used federal power differently, leveraging the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to aggressively reduce firearms trafficking south of the border. In October, his Commerce Department imposed a pause on exports of most civilian guns and ammo. Predictably, Senate Republicans objected. In November, nearly their entire caucus signed a letter bemoaning the rule’s impact on firearm industry revenues.

As Americans’ fears of immigrants keep swelling, they must know that beneath the surface of this external crisis lies its root causes — addiction and profit, gluttony and greed.

Max Taves is a concerned Californian, a former columnist at The Wall Street Journal and CBS’ CNET and an award-winning former reporter at LA Weekly and Law.com.