An emergency is defined as “a serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action.”

By Julie Slama –

After agreeing to sign bipartisan legislation passed by both houses of Congress to keep the government open and provide $1.375 billion for border fencing, not the wall Trump wanted and far less than the $5.7 billion he has been demanding since shutting down the government for 35 days in December and January, the president held a press conference on Friday and declared a national emergency claiming illegal immigration on the U.S.- Mexico border constituted a national crisis.

The national emergency declaration was attacked from all sides immediately and even Trump admitted it will inevitably end up in court.

Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh issued a statement Friday afternoon calling the move “a sham.”

“President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on our southern border is illegal, unnecessary and dangerous,” Frosh said in a statement issued by email Friday afternoon late. “The asserted purpose of the order — national security — is a sham. The president’s order diverts funds from legitimate emergencies and puts at risk the health and safety of Americans as a result. It is also an abuse of executive authority. Our office is reviewing the declaration’s impact on Maryland and all options for redressing this unconstitutional usurpation of power.”

California’s Adam Schiff, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Twitter that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency is designed to bypass Congress, “to build a wall we don’t need, to address a crisis that doesn’t exist, by claiming an authority he doesn’t have.”

If that sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is,” he said. “It’s also plainly unconstitutional.”

Trump is declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, to build a wall we don’t need, to address a crisis that doesn’t exist, by claiming an authority he doesn’t have.

If that sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is. It’s also plainly unconstitutional.

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) February 14, 2019

What are the facts about national emergencies and illegal immigration readers need to know about to evaluate this story?

According to the Federal Register, 58 national emergencies have been declared since the National Emergency Act of 1976 was signed into law by President Gerald Ford, and 31 have been annually renewed and are still in effect, according to ABC News.

According to our original reporting, there are about 10 million unauthorized immigrants living in the Unites States. What people need to know is whether this constitutes an emergency, and if so, why?

If it is not an emergency, should it be characterized as a danger to the economy when our unemployment rates are at historic lows? Most undocumented immigrants are low skilled workers with little formal education working in service jobs, construction labor and agriculture. Many have been here for decades, raising families and scraping by financially.

Historically, almost half are Mexican, although the Mexican influx has slowed and the rate of immigration from Central America has increased. The largest percentage of new unauthorized arrivals are from El Salvador, followed by Honduras and Guatemala.

They are here as a result of U.S. immigration policies, in which Mexico has always enjoyed a special relationship with this country. Fully one half of all unauthorized immigrants in the country today are Mexicans, a significant number of whom have lived here for over a decade.

One can hardly define this problem as unexpected, since our conflicting and confusing immigration laws and policies got their start with the Alien Contract Labor Law of 1885, which became part of the Immigration Act of 1917. These laws were early attempts to keep “undesirables” from taking up permanent residence, while allowing necessary labor into the country. The solution they adopted was to restrict large scale legal immigration, while allowing farming, mining and industry to recruit workers from Mexico and Canada with temporary waivers — on the basis that they would return home when the jobs were finished.

This policy is still in play today, with the H-2A and H-2B visas for seasonal farm workers and temporary laborers. A large percentage of unauthorized immigrants are people who have overstayed those visas, which are expensive for the workers to obtain and renew. The workers, most of whom didn’t finish high school, are often exploited by the recruiters in their home countries who, in exchange for filling out forms and providing transport to the work site, etc., demand extra fees averaging about $600, in addition to the fees required to pay for the visa. Much of this is expected to be reimbursed by their future employer, but workers who don’t have the cash may be offered a loan by the recruiter, sometimes at interest rates as high as 79 percent.

Securing seasonal workers is a laborious process for busy farmers with three crucial filing deadlines, often handled by their attorneys. The entire process must begin at least 3 months in advance of the anticipated harvest, which is always subject to the vagaries of the weather. The visas are renewable each year for three years, after which the worker must return to their home country for a period of not less than three months. Workers can then reapply at the local U.S. Consulate, which starts the whole process over again.

While it may be true that “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too,” as the saying goes, you can’t say we haven’t tried. Our policy on Mexican immigration has historically been aimed at having the cake of cheap, imported labor and eating most of the generated profit.

The Social Security Administration estimates it has collected about $12 billion from undocumented workers using fake cards, who will never be allowed to draw a penny for their own benefit unless at some point in the future they become legal permanent residents. There is an entire black market industry devoted to producing these fake ID’s, sometimes with disastrous consequences for American citizens.

About half of undocumented workers pay taxes using the ITIN, a tax ID number that doesn’t require a Social Security card. About 75 percent of those who pay are eligible for the child tax credit, which results in a net loss for the IRS, but the child must have a Social Security number to be eligible, meaning the child is probably a U.S. citizen. They also pay in order to establish work history and residency, as many are hoping to use these to gain legal status later. As all residents do, they pay a fair amount of state sales and excise taxes perforce, contributing an estimated $11 billion to state and local coffers each year.

Unauthorized immigrants do generally cost more in benefits than they produce in taxable income, resulting in a net loss of approximately $56 billion for the government every year. The profit they produce for their employers, which almost certainly leads to increased revenue for the IRS at tax time, is harder to quantify; they often work off the books and employers are subject to penalties if they are discovered. However, those figures change for the U.S. born children who get college educations and full time employment. Those people produce a net gain for the economy in tax revenue.

The immigrants have made a rather good show of having and eating as well; “remittances” of migrant workers back to their home countries topped $69 billion in 2016, making arguments to restrict “chain migration” rather weak. After all, if their families were here, the money would stay here, as well. As long as they are required to go home every three years though, they must maintain a base in their country of origin as well as surviving in the U.S. We would need to spend more than that on social services for their children and elderly to make it tenable as a justification, and illegals don’t qualify for much in the way of social services.

Their children can attend school, and they may qualify for WIC, but they are not eligible for SNAP or TANF unless they have a child who is a citizen. Remittances currently account for 2 percent of Mexico’s GDP, and 25 percent of Haiti’s. Honduras and El Salvador rely on these payments for 20 percent of their GDP, as well. It’s a profitable foreign aid policy, in a way – that contributes to stability in our region.

Many immigrants fully intend to retire to their former homelands, which explains why the 1986 Reagan Amnesty fell short of its projected legalization of about 4 million workers. Almost 3 million people took advantage of the offer, but at that time Mexico did not offer dual citizenship, so many chose to remain undocumented.

The other mammoth “remittance” we make is to the drug traffickers. Roughly the same amount of U.S. dollars, about $68 billion, flows into the hands of foreign drug cartels every year. The cartels have destabilized large swaths of Mexico and Honduras, leading to the caravans of asylum seekers we have today. Gangs such as MS-13 in El Salvador were exported there from Los Angeles, where they re-formed after being deported from the US. Now they are controlling entire counties, extorting payments from up to 70 percent of the small businesses there, and creating a crime wave of epic proportions. El Salvador is currently one of the murder capitals of the world.

The cartels launder huge amounts of cash here, buying wholesale shipments of various goods for resale, purchasing real estate, doing a brisk trade in light aircraft in Florida and Delaware, as well as doing business with certain banks. Several U.S. banks were rescued from insolvency during the crash with cartel money, not government payments. Worldwide, the drug trade accounts for about 2 percent of the global economy. Government agencies have tried and failed to get a solid estimate on the amount of laundering here. The U.S. Treasury intercepted approximately $600 million in cash and goods in 2001, but this serves only as a yardstick for educated guesses based on using that as a percentage of the total.

We must ask ourselves where our priorities should lie – deportation of immigrants, or stemming the tide of illegal drugs and weapons that is currently creating much of the asylum backlog? Poverty creates many willing black marketeers – the money is a ticket out of ghettos worldwide. Illegality and living in limbo create more hands willing to participate in shadow economies.

The budget for ICE is currently larger than the combined budgets of the DEA, FBI and ATF. We are spending more on border security than we do on the U.S. Marines, while our Seventh Fleet does without critical upgrades and repairs in the world’s hot spots.

We are proposing to spend many billions more in a quest to wall off and militarize the border without much hope of stemming the tide of either drugs or immigrants. Using National Guard troops to assist Border Patrol will run over $1 billion per year, alone. Five billion dollars for more barriers will not end the project, as the cost of the current proposal will be at least four times that amount by most estimates, and those don’t include the billions more we will spend buying up land from unwilling ranchers, and fighting them in court for many years to come.

“Requiring immediate action” would be better phrased as “long term project spanning four administrations,” seeing how the first 13 mile section of border wall was constructed between San Diego and Tijuana in 1993 under Bill Clinton. Once NAFTA passed, devastating Mexican farmers unable to compete with American Big Ag, migration swelled to unprecedented levels. The administration in turn increased patrols, called for stricter enforcement, harsher penalties for illegal entry, and of course more fencing — which immigrants continued to walk around, cut through, ramp over or tunnel under.

After September 11, the Bush administration redoubled previous efforts to control the flow of people through the border, resulting in the Secure Fence Act of 2006. This promised 700 miles of border barriers at a projected cost of approximately $6 billion, which was mostly completed by 2010 during the first year of Obama’s administration. Both the Clinton and Obama administrations investigated “virtual wall” technology, investing over a billion dollars into R&D on various systems by L-3 Communications and later Boeing (which got the lion’s share of the money), with little to show for it. The final project covered only about 58 miles of territory at a ruinous cost, and was eventually scrapped.

Newer ideas may be more promising; fiber optic cable which can act as a buried, 30 mile long sensor is one project being tested, and Israeli-style tunnel detection units that use sonic sensing might prove useful to inhibit the drug trade. One problem inherent to technology-based interception is that, like a wall or a fence, it requires great increases in the number of patrols to be effective. It is useless to observe a breech if the closest agent is an hour away. Border patrols are often literally tracking footprints through deserts at night, a “technology” introduced to the white man by Native Americans hundreds of years ago.

Native American trackers are still employed by ICE. Since 1972 the Shadow Wolves of the Tohono O’odham Nation patrol the 76 mile Mexican-American border that bisects their land of 2.8 million acres. The Nation pre-dates the United States, with the border imposed as a result of the Gadsden Purchase. Existing vehicle barriers require gates that allow passage within their territory, and did help to reduce the influx of illegal drug traffickers and “coyotes” who try to take advantage of the lack of federal oversight on reservation land. Two extra law enforcement installations are now positioned near trouble spots along that border, with security enforcement costing the tribe about $3 million a year.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the drugs continue to enter the country by sea, air and land – primarily through legal ports of entry. Last year Border Patrol seized 135,000 pounds of cocaine, over 2,000 pounds of heroin, over 6,000 pounds of meth, and over 4 million pounds of marijuana, in addition to fentanyl and ecstasy. Compare and contrast with just one major Coast Guard seizure in international waters this past November: 16.7 tons of cocaine off the coast of Central America.

The U.S. doesn’t have unlimited money to spend, and what we do spend should be targeted, cost effective and prudent. We must look at our priorities as a nation, and where the money can best be spent to prevent harm to citizens, the landscape, public lands and environment and the economy. The Governors of the five most-affected states should be convened, along with representatives from law enforcement in their most troubled border areas, in order to reach a sensible solution. While there isn’t a silver bullet, the goal should be to reduce problems to a trickle rather than a flood, and live with small leaks.

Damming flood plains in towns near the wall, cutting ranchers and endangered wildlife off from crucial water supplies, and chilling many small tourist attractions and businesses along the Rio Grande might not be the best way to go about it.

Illegal immigrants are not killing Americans at any extraordinary rate, but illegal drugs are — the latest report from the DEA shows that deaths from opioid abuse have now outstripped homicides, car wrecks, suicides and guns. It is the number one killer at the moment — not Mexican construction workers. Dope dealers don’t pay taxes, or build schools and roads. Their influence worldwide results in instability, corruption at the highest levels of government, and astronomical increases in homicide rates, crime and kidnappings wherever they take over. Take away the drug money without ridding yourself of these gangs, and they will simply up the rates of extortion, kidnapping and robbery to sustain themselves.

If you think such a thing could never happen here, I invite you to review the situation we had in Chicago, Detroit and New York during Prohibition. The result of the billions flowing into cartel hands results in gangs and dealers who are often better armed and equipped than their own national armies.

There will be no end to poverty or immigration. Our immigration courts are currently backed up by 800,000 cases here, and wait times for an asylum determination are hovering between 18 months and two years. The most quoted solution is to enormously expand the number of courts and judges, creating yet another mammoth increase within the current system. For-profit private prisons are cashing in on large government contracts, with ICE renting beds in the tens of thousands at about $175/day per resident. Courts, judges, cops, barriers – we are spending ourselves into a police state. For what? To save on a few food stamps and ER visits?

Now that U.S. factories are established in Mexico, bringing jobs there, we suddenly have fewer people immigrating here. Stabilizing El Salvador and Honduras might have a similar result. This would be neither easy nor inexpensive, but if our end goal is peace, stability and safety here and in our neighboring countries, we might consider whether some of this money might be better spent helping these small countries defeat the gangs and cartels. Establishing a safe haven for small businesses and re-asserting the rule of law there will not happen overnight, but neither will our asylum problems go away as long as the current situation exists.

We have already created an enormous bureaucracy tasked with arresting and deporting unauthorized immigrants, and these efforts don’t come cheaply. This is why a wall is such an attractive idea — because it is a simple thing with a beginning and an end.

Unfortunately, the world is a complex web of interwoven dependencies that, like a spider’s web, is both fragile and resilient. The lightest touch can provoke a trembling reaction, but the threads are indestructible. Attempt to simply swipe it aside, and you will find yourself covered in sticky, silken strands — and perhaps walk away with a spider on your collar.