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

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.

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.

By Nick Miroff and Joshua Partlow June 12 at 10:22 AM

MCALLEN, Tex. — Behind the beige brick facade and the barbed wire of the Border Patrol station here, crowds of Central American women and children are sleeping on concrete floors in 90 degree heat.

The sick are separated by flimsy strands of yellow police tape from the crying babies and expectant mothers. They subsist on bologna sandwiches and tacos, with portable toilets and no showers, and their wait can last for days.

These are examples of the detention conditions, captured on a surreptitious video obtained by The Washington Post, that prompted President Obama to declare a “humanitarian crisis” this week, as illegal migrants, including thousands of women and children, stream into south Texas. Every day, hundreds of Central American migrants, in groups as large as 250 people, are wading across the muddy Rio Grande and turning themselves in to the Border Patrol as helicopters and machine gun-mounted speed boats patrol the river.

Fleeing gang violence and poverty, and driven in part by the belief that Central American women and children will not be deported, many of the migrants are not trying to sneak into the country but crossing in plain sight.

The sharp spike over the past three months, particularly of children traveling without their parents, has overwhelmed the Border Patrol’s detention centers in South Texas, prompting authorities to ship young children to converted warehouses and military bases as far away as California. Obama has pledged $2 billion to construct temporary housing and has ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to take charge.

In the past eight months, Customs and Border Protection has detained 47,000 unaccompanied minors, most of them in the Rio Grande Valley area of south Texas, up 92 percent from last year.

“We’re fighting a losing battle right now,” said Chris Cabrera, the Border Patrol’s union representative here. “We don’t have anywhere to hold them.”

Across the river in the drug cartel-run Mexican border town of Reynosa, migrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala sleep on bunk-beds in church-run shelters, as they prepare for the culmination of dangerous journeys by bus and train that have often taken them weeks to finish.

Fany Yaneth, a 25-year-old single mother of four, hitchhiked for three weeks. On Tuesday, she waited under a sliver of shade in a shelter courtyard with dozens of others. In her violent home town of Choluteca, Honduras, where she milled flour and shared her mother’s apartment with three families, “you can’t walk in the streets,” she said. “They’ll kill anyone.”

The next morning, she said, she would be taking her 7-year-old daughter and her 17-year-old brother and presenting herself to the Border Patrol.

“What we’re hearing is that the Americans are helping Hondurans right now. And even more for women and children. I don’t know if it’s true,” she said. “This is what I want to do. I’m going to arrive at the bridge, to walk up to American immigration and hold out my hand.”

Unlike illegal migrants from Mexico, who can be quickly processed and returned by bus to Mexican border cities, Central Americans cannot be easily shipped home. Airplanes must be chartered. Consular arrangements must be made. And if migrants request asylum in the United States, the U.S. government has the additional responsibility to determine whether their appeal is based on a legitimate need for protection and a “credible fear” of persecution in their home countries.

More than 36,000 migrants, the majority from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, requested asylum along the southwest border during the government’s 2013 fiscal year, nearly triple the 2012 number. Ultimately, most of the applications were denied, but critics of the process say migrants are gaming the system to extend their stays in the United States. Others may simply go underground and ignore deportation orders if their petitions are rejected.

“I guess when you advertise $2 billion of assistance to help out the cause, it’s an open invitation for anybody to come across,” said Lazaro “Larry” Gallardo Jr., a constable in Hidalgo County, as he stood along the Rio Grande riverbank.

His deputies said they were picking up children as young as 4 without their parents and other kids with Hello Kitty backpacks, cellphones and the numbers of U.S. relatives on notecards.

The cellphone video obtained by The Washington Post shows dozens of women and children sprawled out on concrete floors. According to a person with first-hand knowledge of the facility, who provided the video, the migrants wait for days, sometimes more than a week. A makeshift quarantine for detainees with scabies is cordoned off with strands of yellow tape. Another separates those with chicken pox.

Asked about the living conditions for migrants in the Border Patrol stations, Customs and Border Protection spokesman Michael Friel said his agency is “ensuring nutritional and hygienic needs are met.” The children receive “meals regularly and have access to drinks and snacks throughout the day,” he said, adding that there is medical care and that “facilities include toilets.”

In a statement, Friel said the Border Patrol does “everything within its power” to process the children within 72 hours and transfer them to the Department of Health and Human Services, as required by law.

The video, whose contents were confirmed by Border Patrol agents, offers an up-close look at the daunting challenges facing FEMA, which has been tasked with coordinating a response to the crisis.

The McAllen Border Patrol station, where the video was recorded, has received as many as 1,300 migrants per day recently, far exceeding its capacity of fewer than 500. The crowding has forced Border Patrol officials to use the secure garage area, or sally port, where passenger buses are typically unloaded, as a detention area.

In holding cells with one toilet, there are sometimes as many as 100 people, “covering every inch of floor-space,” said one agent. Border Patrol officials here declined to make the facility available to Post reporters.

The flood of new arrivals has so overwhelmed border facilities that U.S. immigration officials have been flying families to cities in Arizona, where the illegal migrants are released and instructed to return for a court appearance. Hundreds of children are being held at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, as well as Naval Base Ventura County in California and Fort Sill in Oklahoma. They are also being sheltered in a converted warehouse in Nogales, Ariz. FEMA plans to repurpose another warehouse in McAllen to house the children, according to local agents.

On Monday, Roger Omar Garcia Chavez, a 29-year-old Honduran at a shelter in Reynosa, said he had sent his wife and 2-year-old daughter across the river four days earlier and planned to sneak across himself and meet up with them in Houston.

“Women with children are going north,” he said. “What I’m sure of is that pregnant women and children are being allowed in.”

At the shelter the next day, he was gone.

The failure of the economies and societies to our south and the population overburden continue to drive high levels of desperate immigration numbers into the United States with the area from Laredo to Brownsville experiencing the heaviest burden along the nearly 2,000 mile Mexico-U.S. border. Among the many implications are things like moving the immigrants is a new profit center for the Mexican Cartels.

What neither Austin nor Washington perceive are the huge forces that drive the immigration and the hollow hope that “immigration reform” promises. Tens of thousands of these numbers are in Texas city after city including Austin and the rate is increasing. Municipal police and public schools face the growing burden most directly of all institutions. The Austin Police are our front line in this public safety challenge. The numbers from my book are estimates from official sources about 2010 to 2012. Real total numbers today are in the area of 170 million persons with job income and benefits of employment comparable to the United States of perhaps 20 percent in those countries. The hope of any job here, the availability of medical care, food, housing and importantly freedom from crime and violence resonates through the lands and fuels the desperate and dangerous trip north.

This is a pot simply boiling over. Nature has been kind to Austin the last two weeks with generous rainfall and made the risk of wildfires a lesser public safety issue for Austin. Implications from this immigration is the number one public safety challenge facing Austin. Flying people from the Valley to Tucson, per the article below, is symptomatic of the lack of preparation and understanding of our Federal government—simply an exercise of arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Here is a recent comment from a newspaper in McAllen that illustrates.

http://www.themonitor.com/news/local/immigrant-surge-in-mcallen-crowds-bus-station-in-tucson/article_821a8718-e6de-11e3-b616-0017a43b2370.html

TUCSON, Ariz. — The Department of Homeland Security dropped off some 140 immigrants — mostly women and children — at the Tucson Greyhound station this weekend, leaving them to find their own way to their destination cities across the country to report to immigration offices there.

While such releases are not new, the number left here at the same time has put a strain on local border advocates and has customs and bus line officials working on a plan to accommodate the unexpected influx of travelers.

ICE in Arizona is processing 400 people, mostly families coming from Central America and Mexico who were apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley and flown here over the weekend, officials said.

To meet the demand coming from Texas, the Border Patrol is turning to all available resources at its disposal, said Daniel Tirado, Border Patrol spokesman for the Rio Grande Valley sector……..

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

More detail on child immigrants is contained in this article early in May from the New York Times that stated:

The flow of child migrants has been building since 2011, when 4,059 unaccompanied youths were apprehended by border agents. Last year more than 21,000 minors were caught, and Border Patrol officials had said they were expecting more than 60,000 this year. But that projection has already been exceeded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/us/us-sets-up-crisis-shelter-as-children-flow-across-border-alone.html

I noted these broad demographic features of Mexico and Central America and the coming impacts on the border near the end of Mexico-Pat To A Failed State:

A. Collapse in progress

World recession deepens. Oil plays out in Mexico’s top producing fields, Mexico cedes control to private actors over the south and north of the country with 10 million refugees in Mexico from the countries to its south, and 20 million refugees from within Mexico head to the northern cities of Mexico and the United States. Millions will come to Texas alone. Mexico is beset with guerilla bands controlling much of the countryside and several of the larger low-income neighborhoods in Mexico City. Staged attacks on American border cities occur with regular frequency and local police in Mexico are overwhelmed facing cartels that are better organized, funded and equipped and abandon their posts. American border cities are overwhelmed with refugees and violent gangs. American military units are required to defend against armed intrusions from Mexico.