Crisis Magazine: How Many Migrants Can a Nation Absorb?

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Migrants -mostly Hondurans- taking part in a caravan heading to the US, hold Honduran and Mexican national flags as they walk along the road on their way to Matias Romero, at La Ventosa, Oaxaca State, Mexico, on November 1, 2018. - President Donald Trump kept up the pressure on Mexico on Wednesday to halt groups of migrants heading to the American border, as the US enters the final stretch of campaigning before key midterm elections. Trump ordered thousands of troops to the southern border and threatened to end automatic citizenship for US-born children of immigrants. (Photo by Guillermo Arias / AFP) (Photo credit should read GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP/Getty Images)

By John Paul Meenan, Crisis Magazine, November 5, 2018

The migrant caravan is like something out of a future, apocalyptic dystopia—or to go back in time, perhaps an image from Exodus—where thousands of men, women, and children trudge a thousand miles under the hot tropical sun across hot tarmac and dirt roads, hoping to just fall down on America’s doorstep, looking for opportunities not to be found in the failed, crumpled, venal, socialist states from which they hail.

What is President Trump to do? Welcome them all in, as one interpretation of Pope Francis’s recent exhortations seem to imply? Turn them back? How? Persuasion? Water cannons? Trump has already sent thousands of soldiers, fully armed; the report yesterday said 15,000 so the would-be immigrants face a fully-armed human wall. Are any to be let in? Should agents sift through every one of the migrants, to determine the worthy from the not, the wheat from the chaff, and by what criteria? And where to house the thousands for the months this would take?…Read entire article here….crisismagazine.com/2018/how-many-migrants-can-a-nation-absorb