The people in the photo below are headed north. In our direction. It’s what Fox News calls a caravan; or perhaps the beginning of one, or perhaps the end of one. These migrants want what we all want—to be safe and to be free. At the moment, the scent of fear is overpowering to them. But the smell of freedom, also faintly present, is irresistible. They have a path laid out for them, courtesy of a million or more people like them who have passed this same way in recent years. These pilgrims are not traveling to Canterbury as Chaucer might have imagined, though they are in their own way most likely as interesting and colorful as anything that the poet might have encountered. These pilgrims are coming to America. The land of opportunity. The “City on a Hill.” They want to live in that City. They want to lie under spacious skies and wander among amber fields of grain as much as we do. They want to leave their drought-parched, bullet-ridden, pockmarked homes and hovels and bask in a place where God sheds His grace. They want a future for their children, and would face unspeakable horrors to get here. Is that such a crime?
But they face unspeakable horrors getting here.
In this post, I will once again try to come to grips with my conflicting thoughts and feelings on mass migration (illegal immigration if you wish) as it affects America. This is a subject we can no longer avoid putting off. Unless Congress acts responsibly and quickly so, with the support of the Republicans who lost their voice and principles on this urgent topic earlier this year, then in another year from now, we will either see the largest mass round-ups of people by law enforcement since Germany last occupied Poland, else we will be witness to drastic, unplanned growth and far-reaching changes in the character—and temperament–of the U.S.
The Darién Gap
Anyone traveling north on foot from South America must cross the Darién Gap. The Darién Gap has been called the missing link in the Pan American Highway. Part of The Darién Gap is in Panama, and another part is in Columbia. The common notion, one can drive continuously from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the tip of Argentina is just not true. The Darién Gap blocks the way. The cost of highway construction to bridge this tropical wilderness has been just too expensive to ponder at present and for the near future.
According to The Conversation,
The Darién Gap is a stretch of densely forested jungle across northern Colombia and southern Panama. Roughly 60 miles (97 kilometers) across, the terrain is muddy, wet and unstable.”
This is a nightmare with some terror or obstacle for everyone:
“The geography on the Colombian side is dominated by the Atrato River delta, which creates a flatland of marsh and swamp fifty miles wide at its narrowest. The Panamanian side features a mountainous rainforest that rises and falls dramatically, from yawning ravines drawing cavernous swaths across the valley floor, to the soaring peak of six-thousand-foot Cerro Tacarcuna.”
It is the only land-link that joins South America with North America. In Spanish, it’s called Tapón del Darién, but many who pass through it do not understand Spanish. According to data:
In 2023, of the 520,085 people who moved through the region, Venezuelans counted for over half at 328,650. But the total also included 56,422 Haitians, 25,565 Chinese, 4,267 Afghans, 2,252 Nepali, 1,636 Cameroonians and 1,124 Angolans.”
Other data is equally as revealing:
Children under 18 constituted 20% of those crossing, with half of those children under the age of 5. Parents may be carrying children for long stretches of the journey, or children may have to walk even though they are tired. The stress and fatigue add to the likelihood of injury along the way.”
Thirty thousand children have crossed the Darién Gap in the first four months of 2024 (2,000 of them unaccompanied by an adult.)Other data is even more disturbing. The jungle is filled with bandits, drug smugglers, poachers, revolutionaries and assorted cut-throats and thieves ready to pounce without warning. Even as lions and wolves closely study and stalk a herd of peaceful antelope, looking for the weakest member of the herd, or any who has strayed too far from the rest or cannot keep up, these asesinosrape one person every 3 1/2 hours around the clock and rob or kill others with murderous abandon for some reason (or not.)
Vasco Balboa
The first European to take note of the Darién Gap was Vasco Núñez de Balboa in September 1513. Balboa, like other explorers of that time period, was searching for a route to the Pacific. Six years later after finding it, Balboa would be beheaded by his father-in-law, who perhaps felt threatened by Balboa’s influence.
Life–and Death in the Darién Gap
As one pilgrim described the jungle of the Darien Gap:
We plod in the thickening heat through thorny underbrush, across massive root buttresses and over caravans of leaf-cutter ants bearing banners of pale purple membrillo flowers. The raucous bark of howler monkeys and the deafening cry of chicken-like chachalacas are constant, a Niagara of noise that gushes between the cuipo trees that tower into the canopy.”
The thorns tear and slash your ankles and legs. People often break bones falling from heights or into unseen cavities in the forest floor. This is usually a death sentence while on the trail if the fracture is compounded and migrants also dislocate joints from falls as they navigate the treacherous terrain. Infection is an inevitable consequence of injury. Whatever food and water you carried as you entered this death zone rapidly runs out or becomes too heavy to carry. After a few days, people start drinking the putrid water to soothe their parched tongues. This leads to vomiting and diarrhea, which further dehydrates the migrant. While the temperature reaches only 95 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity is perilously close to 100 percent.
And because, the Darién Gap is so close to the equator, the seasons are not clearly defined. Only the amount of precipitation marks one season from another. This climate is a perfect incubator for tropical diseases: Typhoid fever, leptospirosis, listeriosis, and rickettsial infections are all common in the Darién Gap and some travelers die this way. Others contract Yellow Fever. Still others such as small infants and disabled seniors were never healthy enough to even attempt the crossing. A few are bitten by snakes, eaten by predators or drowned by crocodiles. Others are washed away by flash flooding as the Darién Gap gets one of the highest amounts of rainfall on the planet. Travelers pass by remnants of decaying animals, and perhaps human remains, as well, because almost 150 people a year die in the Darién Gap and their bodies are seldom recovered. That means that one may encounter or unwittingly pass by the scattered remnants of human remains every few hundred feet, perhaps buried in mud, or along the trail, in gulleys and so on. Whole corpses, fortunately, decompose rapidly in the tropical heat, even as they linger in the minds of their loved ones who press on.
Sandbox trees are everywhere. They can grow as high as a twenty-story building, and they have leaves as wide as two feet. But they can be deadly. Their sap will cause blindness in the unsuspecting child who comes into contact with it, and it is this same substance that natives used as poison for their darts. Perhaps for this reason, their trunks are surrounded with a layer of painful thorns, which warn both man and beast to stay away. The seed pods of this tree literally explode when ripe, scattering seeds at 160 miles per hour over the length of a football field. That unnerving sound adds to the cacophony of screeches and screams.
Jean Horima
Another first-hand account. Jean Horima, 25 and his pregnant wife Rosa crossed the Darién Gap recently. They originally hailed from Haiti. Horima recalls:
The jungle is brutal; it’s really, really tough. The hardest thing for me was to climb the mountains and cross the water. . .There are also people in the forest who will rob or kill you. I know some who got killed. Yes, people who left before me and when I arrived, I found them dead in the woods.”
To make it worse, they were abandoned by their group of fifty people, and found themselves in the Gap when Rose went into labor.
‘I was with my wife, and she told me what to do to help and save her,’ says Jean. She gave birth and told her husband to cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. ‘”‘I also had a black string, so I told him to use it to tie the baby’s umbilical cord. Then, we used a t-shirt to make a bag to put the baby in,’ says Rose.”
Freedom Isn’t Free
Because of guerrillas, bandits, and the sheer dangers of the Gap, most people pay to be part of a transit group. This is an expensive proposition:
The journey through the Darién Gap usually starts in the Colombian ports of Necoclí or Turbo, where local communities offer maritime transportation to the towns of Acandí or Capurganá. Migrants are charged high amounts of money for every section of the trip. After crossing by boat, they must pay again to be allowed to continue through the jungle to the Panamanian side. There are three main paths leading to the government-run reception centres of Lajas Blancas and San Vicente, through the communities of Bajo Chiquito or Canaán Membrillo. The crossing lasts from 5 to 15 days and total costs range from $435 to more than $1,000 per person.”
Once the beaten and bruised survivors emerge from the Darién Gap, they must then travel 2,500 more miles through Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico before reaching the U.S.
Why do Immigrants Come to the U.S.?
As I mentioned earlier here and in other posts, migrants today seek refuge in the U.S. for some of the same reasons as immigrants did over the past few centuries. The most common reasons given when asked why they want to live in the U.S. include a poor standard of living in their country of origin, lack of opportunities for advancement or improvement, political instability, violence and persecution and conflict. In some sense, they are innocent, perhaps naïve sheep. But there are wolves who mix among them. Even Bradshaw who came to the U.S. on the Mayflower had a murderer mixed among the peaceful Puritan people of Plymouth Colony.People who study this phenomenon say that some people are pushed here while others are pulled. Here is the difference:
Push factors are reasons that people leave their country of residence. These are often negative or dangerous situations that result in people trying to escape.
Pull factors are the opposite, and often attract people to a specific area. Pull factors are usually positive opportunities or conditions that are desirable.
Immigration decisions are often the product of push and pull factors working in combination. The effects of these factors will differ based on each individual. Age, health, wealth, gender, and ethnicity can all alter how somebody responds to certain influences. Still, these motivations can help us start to better understand immigration patterns.
But these push-pull factors are nothing new. They accounted for migration patterns during the last ice age and they are just as relevant now.
The First Americans
Human migration is as natural and ancient as other activities that people become involved in. Some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago during Pleistocene times, the Lithic peoples moved east from Asia across the land bridge which the Bering Strait covers today. The record of their migration to the New World can be found not only in the DNA of indigenous peoples but also in their dogs, which were prized and domesticated very early in history.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, Caucasians were driven westward, in the opposite direction. They landed in Americas and seized whatever they wished just as their Asian cousins did thousands of years earlier. Now, we have another mass migration in this hemisphere from south to north. The Lithic (aka Paleo-Indian) peoples came to the New World in search for game. Europeans came to the New World to escape persecution and to start a new life. They wanted to be free. Today, peoples of color from Central and South America come to the U.S. and Canada for the same reasons as European came. The dangers they face enroute are considerable, and their reception to our borders is much less welcome than the reception the Native Americans afforded the Whites.
All of this paints the issue in broad strokes. But there is much more. Around the world and since civilization began, people have drifted from rural areas to urban areas looking for work and a better life. In the U.S. during the early twentieth century, Black families moved north to escape segregation and racial violence, while during the same century, White families moved to the South seeking a warmer climate (an estimated thirty million in the first three decades following the end of World War II.) Then, too, there was the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and Route 66. When the Joad family left Oklahoma for California, they were not welcomed with open arms, but painted as poor white trash, dangerous, deranged, politically radical if not outright communist.[1] Where, when and from whom have we heard this recently?
The ultimate approach and solution to the “immigration problem” will not be easy and I, personally, don’t know enough on the subject to find where the knotted rope begins. But the solution must fairly and justly balance the fundamental, spiritual goodness of God with those temporal and meritorious considerations of men. It must be decided in our legislature, enforced by our executive and adjudicated in our courts, else our Presidents assume dictatorial powers and rule in an arbitrary and capricious manner. As far as our own hearts go, we Christians might ask ourselves “What would Jesus do?”
[1] (See The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.)