Our picksTime to give Trump his wall?; where will ISIS go next? Going on the cyber offensive, and more
• If we want to end the border crisis, it’s time to give Trump his wall
• Who’s really crossing the U.S. border, and why they’re coming
• Detention of migrant families as “deterrence”: Ethical flaws and empirical doubts
• Hungary just passed a “Stop Soros” law that makes it illegal to help undocumented migrants
• New fears over Chinese espionage grip Washington
• China-based Thrip hacking group targets U.S. telecoms
• Adm. Mike Mullen: Cyber Command should be empowered to go on offensive
• Where will the Islamic State go next?
If we want to end the border crisis, it’s time to give Trump his wall (Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine)
You could think of the last week as a solid victory for the Democrats and for basic human decency. An utterly indefensible and morally foul policy of separating children from their parents is over for now. Trump backed down amid a torrent of his usual lies and refusal to take responsibility for anything. But it is emphatically not the end of this story, not simply because there are more than 2,000 children still apart from their families, with very little hope of ever finding their parents again, but because none of the underlying reasons for this atrocity in the first place have been addressed.
The reason for that is simple: The United States has not allocated the resources, political and financial, to stem the wave of illegal immigrants into this country that is now rising again, or to enable genuine asylum cases to be adjudicated fairly and expeditiously. Our political system — incapacitated by tribalism — has been incapable of addressing the intensifying problem since the Bush administration. Obama was trapped by the same impasse as Trump now is, and detained families in camps. And the problem is acute. There are almost a third of a million asylum cases pending in the system; and, as David Frum has noted, it now takes up to nine months to process a single one. We also know that the Flores settlement that bars any detention of children with their parents past 20 days has not been invalidated or legislatively fixed.
As in everything, Trump makes things worse. His rhetoric, his callousness, his wanton lies all make a compromise harder. It’s completely understandable that Democrats do not wish to let him off the hook in any way before November. But there’s a big conflict here if you actually want to end the suffering, or get at the real problem. There’s something deeply wrong, it seems to me, with expressing the view that what the government is doing is barbaric and yet allowing the underlying cause of it to continue for political reasons. If that’s the case, then Trump is not the only one using kids as pawns. Chuck Schumer is too. (Cont.)
