One strand that unites Biden’s chastisement of Putin and Harris’s blunt command is their historical amnesia. They chastise Russia and Central America from an assumed stance of moral purity. Nonetheless, their version of American exceptionalism won’t survive even a casual examination of recent US dealings with Russia or the triangle states of Central America.

Vice President Harris has received some praise for acknowledging that surges in migration are a reflection of underlying causes. Poverty, violence, and corruption are most often cited. Correct as this observation is it fails to acknowledge US responsibility for those causes. Violence poverty, and corruption are treated as free- floating maladies that just happened and around which US policy must navigate. If things go badly that is because violence and corruption were too great.

Dana Frank, emerita professor University of California/Santa Cruz points out: “people are very much fleeing poverty. But that poverty, again, is not a natural disaster. It’s the direct result of the post-{US-backed ]coup policies.” Neoliberal faith in markets destroyed the state, which is the only barrier to the excesses of the market.. In addition “ state services have been destroyed because the elites that run the government are just robbing it blind. For example, the president and his party stole as many as $90 million from the national health service in 2013 to pay for their campaigns, and so then there’s no national health service that functions.

Frank observed that while then Vice President, Joe Biden wanted to give a billion dollars to the governments of the so-called northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador in order to stop migration and address root causes, “If you look at that, it’s pouring precisely into the same security forces and sectors of the economy that are causing the very repression, the very destruction of the economy that people are fleeing.”

That sort of amnesia seems well distributed in DC., as was demonstrated in the press conference following the summit. Here is President Biden’s remarkable revisionist history:: “get this straight: How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries, and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he is engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country that is desperately trying to make sure it maintains its standing as a world power.” In response to this absurdity the DC press corps lent its tacit ascent by remaining silent.

What is involved here is more than an academic controversy over recent Central American history. As the editors of NACLA point out: “memory can be leveraged as a tool of education, political action, and alternative building, while its antithesis, forgetting, can serve as a weapon to impose silence and erasure.

Joe Biden is notoriously muddleheaded. Perhaps the most charitable way to regard these words is as another incoherent rant. If policy choices are guided by a conviction of US innocence and even international faith in that innocence, more self-defeating atrocities marked all over with the USA brand will likely emerge.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Al Jazeera English: “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government”

It was not clear from the excerpt who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres” — drug cartels, immigrants, or both.

President Donald Trump threatened his Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto with sending U.S. military to his country to deal with “bad hombres” because the Mexican Army seems to be “scared” of them, the Associated Press reported Wednesday night, according to an excerpt of the transcript of the conversation it obtained.

“You have a bunch of bad hombres down there,” Trump told Peña Nieto in a Friday phone call according to the excerpt seen by the AP. “You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.”

It was not clear from the excerpt who exactly Trump considered “bad hombres” — drug cartels, immigrants, or both.

Just hours before the AP report, Dolia Estevez, a journalist based in Washington, D.C., told the Mexican news outlet Aristegui Noticias that Trump indeed did threaten to send a military force to deal with the drug trade, citing sources from both sides of the call.

“It was a very offensive conversation where Trump humiliated Peña Nieto,” Estevez told the outlet. He also said that Trump seemed to be aggressive when talking about the wall he authorized along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I don’t need the Mexicans. I don’t need Mexico,” Trump reportedly told the Mexican president. “We are going to build the wall and you all are going to pay for it, like it or not.”

However, Mexico’s foreign relations department downplayed the reports and flatly denied that Trump made such comments. “The assertions that you make about said conversation do not correspond to the reality of it,” the statement said.

“The tone was constructive and it was agreed by the presidents to continue working and that the teams will continue to meet frequently to construct an agreement that is positive for Mexico and for the United States.”

The reports come almost a week after Trump signed an executive order to follow through on his campaign promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican, which prompted the Mexican president to cancel an official trip to Washington to meet the U.S. president that had been scheduled to take place this week.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

KGUN9: “President Trump threatened to send troops to Mexico if they didn’t take care of ‘bad hombres'”

Donald Trump tweeted on Jan. 6 that “any money spent on building the Great Wall (for the sake of speed), will be paid back by Mexico later.”

The Economist reports that 40 countries have built fences since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thirty of these were built since 9/11; 15 were built in 2015.

The United States already has about 650 miles of wall along the border with Mexico. Hungary built a wall on the Serbian border in 2015, and is erecting barriers on its borders with Romania and Croatia to hinder the entrance of refugees. Spain – an important link in Europe’s southern border – built fences in its enclaves of Ceuta and in Melilla (northern Morocco) to thwart African immigration and smuggling.

My research focuses on why countries build legal and physical walls, especially in the Americas. The logic of walls – creating a spatial separation between people – predates the current craze. It’s part of a broader logic of nation-building that humans have used for over three centuries.

This strategy is politically appealing for its simplicity, but it misunderstands the problems of globalization and migration it aims to address. Building walls has rarely has achieved its intended effect, and may result in wasted resources and lost opportunities for the United States.

Logic behind walls

People in countries like the United States and Britain are uneasy about what they perceive as falling economic fortunes, and outsiders who threaten a way of life. Erecting paper or concrete walls to protect the national economy, jobs and culture is a strategy that has strong appeal. British Prime Minister Theresa May recently referred to the Brexit plan as a way to regain control of Britain’s borders from Europe, and to “build a stronger Britain.”

In U.S. history, building paper and concrete walls resulted in episodes that today are widely viewed by historians as inconsistent with our better democratic angels.

Among the first paper, or legal, walls erected in the U.S. were the Chinese Exclusion Acts, which limited the entry of Asian immigrants, as well as their eligibility for citizenship, beginning in 1882. What the late political scientist Aristide Zolberg called “The Great Wall against China” did not come down until 1943, and did only then because the U.S. needed China’s support in the war against fascism.

For 220 years, the U.S. discriminated against prospective immigrants and citizens on the basis of race. Although the United States was among the first countries to implement this strategy of excluding by race, all other countries in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa had similar laws and policies. In the U.S., this approach led to policies such as Chinese exclusions, the Nationality Quotas Act (which selected immigrants by ethno-racial origins), Japanese internment and closing doors to Jewish refugees fleeing murderous Nazi persecution.

Most countries used discrimination by origin to build their nation. It allowed political elites to choose which immigrants were suitable as workers, or as citizens. For example, in the U.S., Chinese immigrants were seen as suitable as workers who did dirty, demeaning and dangerous jobs, but not as full members of the nation.

Rise and fall of walls

My work with David FitzGerald describes how blatant discrimination by race in immigration and nationality law eventually came to an end in the Americas, including in the United States. This marked a decline in wall-building policy, though not of the underlying racism which surfaced in other policy areas.

The United States and other powerful, primarily white countries needed the support of countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa to wage wars against fascism, and later communism. The U.S. and its allies could not easily ask for support from the countries whose citizens they excluded on racial grounds.

Reluctantly, the U.S. and Canada ended their overtly discriminatory immigration and nationality laws in the 1960s – much later than other countries in the Americas. The fall of paper walls against particular groups resulted in a dramatic demographic transformation. In the 1950s, immigrants to the United States were 90 percent European and 3 percent Asian. By 2011, 48 percent were Asian and 13 percent were European.

The face of the nation was transformed, and “Americans” confronted questions about who was a full member. Was it those who belonged to a particular ethnoracial group? Or, was it those who subscribed to civic ideals of democracy?

The demographic changes that have happened since the demise of the Nationality Quotas Act in 1965 have again raised these questions among whites in the political mainstream. Immigrants are settling in “new destinations” – areas primarily in the South and Midwest that had experienced little migration until the 1990s. Calls to revive the logic of walls have become louder in those areas.

No easy fix

Building a wall does not address the complexities of unauthorized migration, or the economic woes of America’s middle class.

For instance, as many as half of unauthorized immigrants in the United States are people who overstay their visas, not border crossers. Barriers also result in more deaths because people try to cross the border at the most inhospitable and unwalled places. The barriers in place now have generated billions of dollars of federal expenditures for border security and investment.

Working- and middle-class Americans are also feeling a vague unease about their place in the economy. Rhetoric that identifies specific culprits – immigrants and international trade – is very appealing. So are simple, concrete solutions.

But walls to limit mobility or trade are too simple a solution to a complex problem. Today’s economies are more linked by exchanges of data, goods and services between countries than at any time in the past. Workers have also moved between countries, even if with greater regulation than in the past.

The effects of global income inequality have been felt differently among groups. Economist Branko Milanovic’s research shows that during the most intense period of globalization, from 1988 to 2008, people in Asia and in the top 1 percent of global earners experienced the highest real income growth. Meanwhile, people in the lower- and middle-income strata in Western Europe, North America and Oceania experienced no growth.

The demographic shifts described, the perceived loss of political advantages among whites and stagnant incomes among working- and middle-class people in the United States are hard realities. No wall can change these facts.

Most importantly, walling the world distracts citizens and policymakers from complex problems. Extreme economic inequality, global conflict and environmental decline surpass the borders and capacities of any single country.

David Cook Martín, Professor of Sociology and Assistant Vice President of Global Education, Grinnell College

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

University of Michigan: “Hoyt Bleakley: What Import Tariffs Would Do to U.S. Economy”

Sen. Ted Cruz criticized Jeb Bush for appearing to downplay the rule of law in arguing that undocumented immigration to the US is a crime of passion, resorted to out of an abundance of love for families in straitened circumstances. Cruz said that such an argument injures the sovereignty of the US and ignores the exploitation that undocumented workers are subjected to by coyotes or unscrupulous people-smugglers. Cruz implied that “Washington elites” feel Bush and some other candidates “won’t rock the boat.”

CNN: Sen. Cruz responds to Jeb Bush immigration comments

What is really going on here? The fact is that Latinos are now such a big part of the American electorate (10%) that no one can be president who does not get at least 44% of their votes. Remember that the two parties are typically relatively close in the popular vote, so it is 51% to 49% to win. A majority of Latinos can put the candidate over the top. Likewise, Latinos swung Nevada, Colorado and Florida to Barack Obama in 2012.

But the Republican Party has become the party of angry white men and white evangelicals, who do not want immigration reform and fear their jobs will be taken by immigrants or that the latter will menace their neighborhoods with crime, or that their “values” are threatened by alien immigrants (i.e. in the latter case, they are racists). Only 42% of conservatives support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers in the US, and only 51% of whites support that idea. The Republican Party is largely “white” in its base of support.

In short, a candidate who can win the GOP presidential primaries will find it very difficult to win the general election. Jeb Bush and his advisers are counting on his dynastic appeal to get him through the primaries if he runs, and he is hoping he can attract the kind of Latino vote his brother George W. did (44%, the magic number) in the general election. Jeb Bush’s wife is of Mexican heritage.

Cruz may hope that his Cuban heritage will give him appeal to Latinos even if he opposes immigration reform, so he is free to try to appeal to the angry white men inside the party. I doubt, however, that most Mexican-Americans or other Latino groups will vote for a Cuban-American who has a hard line against immigration reform. That is, class may well trump simple ethnicity within the Latino bloc.