Monthly Archives: July 2014

A Boiling Pot

Conversation With A Friend

Note exchange from a friend that goes back to the 1970’s and who traveled with me to Mexico a couple of times. He is an engineer by education and was a corp executive with two very large companies. I detailed the following in Chapter 7 of Mexico-Path To A Failed State? When he walked down the Elamex computer assembly line in Juarez with me, I think it was about 1985, he shook his head and said “that is 20 year old technology that the American side is sending to Mexico for cheap labor and to get a few more years out of the equipment. It will be totally replaced in 5 years and this factory will not have workers trained for the next technology.” The line was making 51/4 floppy-read heads!

Mike:

Dr. Morgan’s latest is attached.  It seems to me that the only argument against his thesis is the miracle energy breakthrough (e.g., hydrogen from sea water via a low energy process, etc.), which is probably not something I need to worry about in my lifetime.

Hope your summer’s going well.

Bill

I replied:

I agree with Morgan’s argument and your perspective. We drove in May to Santa Fe through west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Wind farms are now along much of the 700 mile route. From what I read Texas generates about 6 percent (updated from this 2011 estimate) of its energy consumption from solar (wind and panels). Transmission lines from west to east is part of the challenge and those take plenty of steel and copper. But unlike wells and mines the infrastructure is long lasting.

I am more concerned since I released my book with the growing waves of people coming into Texas from Mexico. Part of the migration comes from the energy challenge as higher fuel costs have increased food and housing costs. Couple that with innovations in manufacturing and the last thing a nation needs is more people and people that lack high levels of education and technical skills. Most of the media and most of the politicians call for more immigration and even those that oppose immigration don’t understand the limits of physics as Morgan bases his writings.

Energy limits and the higher cost of energy pushes daily food costs in many parts of the world to 40 or so percent of daily earnings. Morgan makes very clear that the cost of energy is an independent variable in determining the cost of food. There is probably some trigger point here and the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia that was heralded as an “Arab Awakening or Spring” and a revolution for democracy were misunderstood by politicians such as Obama. Corruption, drought, media focus, etc. are additional variables. The greatest and enduring variable with the discontent yielding revolution and immigration is energy and will increase as energy prices increase.

Mike

A Boiling Pot

Some Comments To Austin Public Safety Commissioners

Thanks, Commissioners for noting the Statesman Editorial on Homeland Security by Michael McCaul. It is an important and growing public safety threat for Austin.
This just grows more extreme. Fortunately the Statesman has picked up on the Homeland Security Committee’s initial findings.
Parts of Mexico are a failed state and prominently Tamaulipas that is south of the Laredo to Brownsville section of the border between Mexico and Texas. Tamaulipas runs along the Gulf Coast to the next Mexican state to the south, Veracruz. Veracruz is  a potentially hugely wealthy state from the prospects of oil but but a corrupt union and the national company, PEMEX, prevents much exploration and production. Below is a map. As you look at the map, it is clear that the ready route for people from Central America is through the southernmost state of Mexico, Chiapas, along the Gulf Coast through Veracruz, then Tamaulipas and then entering Texas. Key entering points are in the Valley at McAllen and Brownsville with reduced numbers as you move west to Laredo. San Antonio, Houston and Austin are the first stopping points north of the overwhelmed Texas towns along the border.
In the 80’s when I was in Mexico monthly, the Mexican government maintained tight controls on its southern border and controlled illegal immigration into Mexico. Communicable diseases were one concern as well as the potential cost of education, job training and health care of millions of rural immigrants into Mexico. In the last few years that control appears to have collapsed. I don’t know what the reasons are but that is why we have seen 52,000 children (upped I see to 57,000) in Texas since October 2013 and an anticipated 150,000 in the coming 12 months from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador per Chair McCaul’s hearings this last week. The children if they are not returned will have to head away from Mexico and our Federal government is actively busing and flying those women and children to points north in Texas like Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, west to Arizona and California and onto other states. The flow of children has displaced the Border Patrol from a Federal police force with the responsibility to control the border to one holding and moving women and children. Make no mistake though, there are adult males in this flow and that includes members of gangs from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. That policing responsibility that belongs in the Federal domain now falls much more heavily on local and state police. Representative McCaul is doing much to bring attention to this enormous challenge and the threats. I find the Federal response halting and naïve. Representative Cuellar implied as much from Laredo this week with the failure of the President to even come to the border as well as many other Texas state officials and candidates from both parties urging Federal response to controlling the immigrant flow.
Years ago there should have been efforts to address poverty and corruption in Central America and Mexico. The lands are rich in natural resources and the people hard-working. But people should not have to abandon homes, family and culture to flee poverty, violence and gangs. Yet they are coming by car, by freight train and on foot. This is not Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Egypt with displaced populations and refugee campus but 1200 miles south of McAllen, less than the distance to Chicago and only 200 miles more than west from Austin to El Paso and back to Austin! We are now inheriting the lack of leadership and thinking for the last many years. Efforts such as those suggested by Mike Sheffield to us, Randy, on Monday to enhance the dialogue with representatives of these countries with consulate offices in Austin and Houston are urgently needed. Many of those children are arriving in Austin. More will come. Some alone. Some with adults. Some with other siblings. The public schools, the hospitals, the police, EMS, the parks, the streets will see the impact. Major Texas cities and the state have no choice but to act with or without Federal due diligence. If the Federal Administration either through ignorance or fecklessness continues to fail to control the border, and that is a constitutional burden and responsibility of the Federal government, then we will see hundred of thousands coming into Texas.
Our colleague, Mike Levy, messaged many of us yesterday on important and costly decisions Austin must make about urban rail, water and sidewalks. I appreciated his note and sent it to many others. He ended the note with a cartoon I have grabbed and put at the end of this note. Fits here as well!
political-map-of-Mexico
A Boiling Pot

Border Collapse

Hearings on July 3, 2014 of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee in McAllen that there have been 52,000 unaccompanied children entering in recent weeks from Central America and held in a variety of often make-shift accommodations run by ICE once arriving in the United States. Some reports estimate that 1,000 daily are being apprehended and if so, there is a large number that are not apprehended. Since they are coming from Central America they are not deported back to Mexico. The most direct and least mountainous and remote route is along the east coast of Mexico through the Mexican state of Tamaulipas and into Texas cities such as Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo. I would suspect that thousands have arrived or soon to be in Austin and unless matters are resolved thousands of more will come.

Years ago Mexico had active policies that controlled the entry of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and other countries south of Mexico into Mexico’s southern states like Chiapas and Campeche. I conducted a research project in the 1980’s with the Mexican government and was in Mexico City monthly, had an office there and provided statistical and computer technology to help Mexico track and project population changes and health, education and welfare needs. Mexico kept a wary eye on its southern border as Central American wars were still active and health and welfare systems there were primitive and Mexico viewed large scale refugee influx as a serious threat to the stability of Mexico. Military units were stationed in Chiapas with the expressed responsibility of keeping people from entering from Central America.

With several powerful drug cartels in Mexico today, the nation’s territorial integrity is less than it was 30 years ago and in some cases as Randy’s article sent to us yesterday from the El Paso Times coverage of of Texas state committee hearing, cartels are known to bring people from Central America through Mexico to Texas. They require a payment of several thousand dollars but also likely know that the creation of a refugee crisis in Texas will deflect the efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement to control their crimes of drug and human trafficking.

The cartels’ interests are considerable as agencies like the DPS and the DEA estimate that somewhere between 18 and 50 billion dollars annually of illegal drugs are brought into the United States. Some very large percentage of that contraband flows through Austin on IH 35, the best and most direct land route to major cities of the heartland from Oklahoma City to Chicago. Three years ago DEA agent Greg Thrash told us that Austin now serves as a “command and control center” for cartel activities. In the last three years Federal prosecutions led by U.S. Asst. AG Robert Pitman have convicted members of several Mexican cartels including la Familia de Michoacan, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel in Federal court in Austin. In these cases and other cases the Austin Police played important roles in developing the criminal prosecutions.

The Federal government has been caught completely unaware of this exploding number of children refugees from Central America this year and the Federal service is not trained or staffed to care for minors. Care of minor children without their parents are a state responsibility and in most states including Texas are in state and county agencies of child and family services and are handled in foster care. Unaccompanied minors, for example in Texas, are turned over by the police to child welfare services and intake workers place children in foster care. Most foster care is through contracts with families paid to care for the children and who continue to do so until they reach the age of 18 or are adopted. Texas has just under 33,000 foster care placements and cannot expand those placements to deal with 50,000 or more minors coming into towns like McAllen and made more complex with the need to find foster families and if possible where someone speaks Spanish. Beyond simply finding families that can serve as foster care parents, dependent children require clothing, health care, vaccinations and education. If they are not deported, they will need additional education through high school and at a level that will permit them as young adults to successfully enter the job market. Education and job development are challenges this year and in the future and if the numbers continue to grow they will run to the hundreds of thousands. Those costs will be paid through local taxes for public welfare workers, contracts with foster care families, some form of health care and schools and teachers paid by local and state funds.

Part of the reason, the motivation, for the costly and dangerous passage of minors through Mexico is the disaster that is enveloping countries like Honduras. That country has the world’s highest homicide rate and the economy of nearly 9 million provides only about 2,000 dollars per family per year. Drug cartels use Central American countries as staging grounds to move drugs there and then through Mexico to the U.S. The violence and the poverty and now the popular notion in those countries that if you can make it across the United States’ borders you can stay is the driving motivation. The 15 million people in Guatemala are not significantly better off than Honduras, nor the 6 million in El Salvador or the total of 40 million in those countries south of Mexico and several of those countries being far more failed states than Mexico. So the likelihood of hundreds of thousands coming to the U.S. via Texas this year and in the coming years is not an improbable situation.

Americans cannot ignore this situation. It will directly impact EMS and the Police. Medical care will be at hospital emergency rooms and the public schools will face huge challenges. Housing will be problematic and homelessness a significant factor.

A Boiling Pot

Costs Of Immigrants From Central America

Our worst fears are being manifest on the Mexican border and this will lead to direct impact on the streets, in the hospitals and schools of Austin. There are two ways this will occur and make very critical the numbers, selection and training of the Austin Police and to some extent EMS.

One is that the 52,000 children that have crossed the border into Texas since October 2013 cannot stay in towns like McAllen. Their resources are overwhelmed. I believe under current law as those apprehended are minors and not from Mexico, they must be processed through a court hearing. Apparently Federal agencies are flying or busing these persons, mainly children and some women, to other areas of the United States including nearby San Antonio and to other states including Arizona and California to hold until a court hearing and determination is made. As an example 1300 were transferred to Ft. Sill next to Lawton, Oklahoma where HHS has custody and refused to permit a U.S. Member of the House of Representative from Oklahoma to enter the facility. To the degree that these are unaccompanied minors they should be turned over to Protective Services in each state for placement in Foster Care. States not the Federal government have the trained personnel to arrange and supervise Foster Care. It is not a perfect system, Texas has fewer than 33,000 foster care placements and the death of two foster care children in Williamson County over the 4th weekend is an illustration of problems in selecting and supervising those who provide foster care. How then can Texas expand foster care to handle some significant fraction of the 52,000 much less the fraction of 150,000 more children coming in the next 12 months that Homeland Security Chair Representative Michael McCaul advised at a hearing in McAllen on Thursday, July 7 in McAllen, Texas?

These children will require some place to live, education, clothing, medical care and transportation. How will Texas be able to secure these resources and how will Texas pay for these resources? Foster care payments per child per day are about 23 dollars to the caregiver and there are probably 10 more dollars per child per day to pay for other associated costs. If 52,000 children remain in Texas and have comparable costs to Texas children, the annual budget ($626,000,000) will be half as an example of what the state spends on the Texas Department of Public Safety. If these children or some portion are simply on the streets in cities like ours, how will public safety agencies like the Austin Police cope?

The second is that the presence of thousands of children and the fact the children have been told and are seeking out Border Patrol officers is removing those Federal officers from the critical function of thwarting drug and human trafficking mainly led by Cartels. Friends in law enforcement in McAllen and Laredo have told me as late as this weekend that the immigrant children will climb fences to enter Border Patrol offices to surrender to those officers. This means that state and municipal law enforcement will face a larger burden not just in border towns like McAllen or Laredo but in cities like ours. Human trafficking and illegal drug activity will increase on the streets of Austin as a result of this refugee disaster overwhelming Border Patrol officers and offices from their role in interdicting this criminal activity. To a significant extent the debate of the last three years of whether we can have fewer officers that 2 per thousand citizens is a bit out of touch with what is developing on the ground. We are as we have brought to the attention of the City Council behind in that hiring and facing far greater potential demands.

The Federal government in my opinion has been asleep at the wheel in terms of forethought and preparation. Some have compared this to FEMA’s failures when Hurricane Katrina struck. The difference is that this situation is a quantum level greater than Katrina. Honduras, Guatemala and to a lesser extent, El Salvador and Mexico are failed states. Honduras is the most dangerous nation in the world in terms of violent deaths. Guatemala is slightly better. There are 160 million people in those countries. They do not provide for the essentials of life and have the potential to send tens of thousands to refugee camps in the United States and unlike Katrina with little prospect to return home.