Sputnik discussed the development with Michael Shannon, a political commentator and Newsmax and Cagle Syndicate columnist, as well as the author of the book "A Conservative Christian's Guidebook for Living in Secular Times".
Sputnik: How efficient is the move to give more medical attention to children at the border? Are you satisfied with the Department of Homeland Security's response to the issue?
My question is: what kind of parent brings an ill child on a 1,500-2,000-mile journey to a country where they don't have any invitation to come, when they could apply for asylum at any consulate, for example, Honduras, Salvador, Mexico or Guatemala, on their way up there.
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Sputnik: Who is actually contributing to this particular situation? It's obviously very unsavoury in terms of these adults bringing their children who've got medical issues. There're issues with regard to the governance within these countries; they should be educating these people. What can you add to that? Do you think there is a lot to blame the governments of Honduras and Guatemala for?
Michael Shannon: Yes, and I think that Mexico is the big offender. I think there should be some sort of sanctions against Mexico for not stopping this. A few years ago, Mexico published a comic book to tell their own people how to apply for asylum in the US and how to get across the border and live as an illegal [alien], and what their rights were.
Sputnik: What's your take regarding the mainstream media coverage of the fact that children are often used as human shields? How much do rights groups and activists focus on this particular problem?
Michael Shannon: Our media is now stenographers for the left. So they use this issue as a way to promote leftist ideas and to attack conservatives and Republicans. I was reading about a gentleman with the child that died and I was struck by the fact that he kept telling the Border Patrol "my son is better, he is feeling fine" because they went back and checked on him a couple of times.
I was wondering why someone would say that I certainly wouldn't. And then it dawned on me, there's no guarantee that kid was his son; it could have been someone he borrowed as a kind of a fashion accessory for his asylum application. He could have been a trafficker; he could have kidnapped a kid. His behaviour doesn't correlate with the way most parents would act if they had an ill child.
And, of course, the media has no interest in investigating that; they want to use the sob-story aspect of it to drive policy.
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Sputnik: It's not just an American issue, it's a global issue. Here, in Europe, we are having the same issues with immigrants coming from Africa and the Middle East; it has caused a lot of pressure within individual countries that have accepted them, such as Germany and Sweden. A lot of indifference from the local population has driven a good degree of the population to vote for Brexit in the UK as well, because of the number of immigrants causing pressure on local services within districts and councils. What is the conclusion to this? What can the countries, which are the better-off countries, do to try to drive down illegal immigration? Is there anything America can do in terms of investing in countries like Guatemala to get infrastructure, jobs, products and services where people will want to remain in their own country? I know it's a very difficult question, but there's so much wealth in the world now, there's something we can do about this.
But there's a lot of overlap; I think there're 18 different job training programs in the Federal Government, all spending money and all trying to do the same thing.
Can you imagine how much of that $10 billion that is sent to Latin America, where a lot of these countries are just kleptocracies, how much good that will actually do and how much of that will actually get down to the peasant who is being crushed economically?
I think the thing to do is to build Trump's wall — which I realize is more of a symbol than anything else — and then require e-verify, that is a system where an employer has to enter the social security number of an employee into a nation-wide database and he is told if a person is a citizen or not, or if a number is a real number.
READ MORE: Migrant Child's Death Requires Separate Probe, Independent of DHS — US Lawyers
So [there should be] a nation-wide e-verify for all hiring, and then [there should be] a 10% tax on remittances sent across the border to help fund deportation activities. Those three things together — and banning anchor babies, birth-right citizenship — would remove a lot of the attraction for illegal aliens.
If they can't get jobs when they come up here and their kids don't automatically become US citizens if they're born here and anchor them to the country, then a lot of that attraction will be removed and they will stay home and try to reform their own country.
Views and opinions, expressed in the article are those of Michael Shannon and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik
