Plan B Forum

Econoline wrote:I agree with you 100% on this, Jim. To those who want Obama to "go to the border" my question is simply "...and once he GOES there, what should he DO there?"

BTW, I have a similar question for Rick Perry (and anyone who agrees with him) about stationing National Guard troops on the Tex-Mex border: "...and once they GO there, what should they DO there?"

Wickham: Send border children to Gitmo
DeWayne Wickham, 6:36 p.m. EDT July 7, 2014
Don't scatter refugees to unprepared facilities when we can do something better.


Send them to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That's what President Obama should do with the children surging across our country's borders in search of a better life.

With congressional Republicans absurdly accusing him of causing this flood of child migrants from Central America, there's little chance the GOP will work with Obama to fix this problem before draining it of all opportunity for partisan pandering.

Rather than let the children be treated as political pawns, the president should send them to the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. While this U.S. military installation is known as a prison for enemy combatants, that penal colony occupies just a small portion of the 45-square-mile base.

Obtained from Cuba in a 1903 treaty, the base was used in the 1990s as a detention camp for Haitians escaping bloodshed. Though many of them were treated only slightly better than the prisoners from the U.S. global war on terrorism, who started showing up there after 9/11, Guantanamo is capable of being a far more hospitable place for kids fleeing the horrors of life in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

At the Navy base, which boasts movie theaters, American fast-food restaurants and excellent recreational facilities, care of the child migrants should be put in the hands of officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Department of Homeland Security.

Scattering them across the U.S. to immigration centers that lack the space and staff to deal with large numbers of children will turn the problem into a ticking time bomb. Relocating them to Guantanamo would ratchet up the pressure on their home countries to repatriate them. No nation can long ignore the global attention that will follow their lost children to that naval base.

The U.S. has a long history of offering haven to dispossessed children, from World War II's Operation Pied Piper that evacuated children from Britain, to Operation Pedro Pan that moved more than 14,000 children out of Cuba, to Operation Babylift's rescue of youngsters from Vietnam.

But today's child migrants present a special problem. They are neither refugees of a war the U.S. was involved in, nor the product of a lingering ideological tug of war. Instead, they are part of what, for many Americans, is a crisis of little concern. The domestic unrest in Central America that has sent these children scurrying for U.S. borders is one that ultimately must be resolved by the affected nations. But until good sense, or international pressure, forces them to deal with it, the U.S. must provide a haven.

The best way to do that is to house all the children, temporarily, at Guantanamo Bay.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University's School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

make the conditions of life better in the countries people are willing to die to get away from.

Why can't we extend the same opportunities we had, to others.

rubato wrote:The only long-term solution here is the same as it is everywhere else in the world: make the conditions of life better in the countries people are willing to die to get away from.



We can pass laws against gravity and the tides all we want and then complain that "they're not enforcing the law!" ... Forever.

tighten up work restrictions and sanctions against employers who profit from this "trade"?

How do we repatriate them?

The other alternative (and I honestly would not be surprised if it gets to this point within the next ten years--especially if we get another Republican POTUS) is to start shooting and killing everyone--men, women, and children--who tries to cross into the U.S. from Mexico.