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!
