The footage of a marching column of thousands of Honduran refugees advancing resolutely on the United States border is making outstanding television. This group of desperate people, including women, children and babes in arms, has already barged its way across Guatemala. Though blocked on a border river bridge into Mexico, many of the refugees managed to cross on rafts. Then on Sunday they faced down a line of armed Mexican policemen who were finally ordered to retreat. Unless the Mexican government manages to stem this human tide, it is going to wash up against the US border fence along its frontier with Mexico, where President Donald Trump has vowed to stop them.
Honduras, from which the majority of these refugees come, along with El Salvador and Guatemala, comprise a three-country security disaster area. Armed gangs, financed by drug production and smuggling, are every bit as vicious than their Mexican counterparts. But unlike Mexico, these three Central American countries are rarely in the media spotlight. In El Salvador, at least one person in every thousand can expect to meet a violent death. The ratio for Hondurans is only marginally better. In such circumstances, who could blame these people for wanting to get out? Whatever the dangers and challenges of their long march to the US border and their likely unfriendly official reception there, they apparently represent less risk than staying in the countries where they were born.
Unfortunately, however laudable the motives behind this extraordinary migration, those involved and moreover those in the West’s liberal establishment who are egging them on are just plain wrong. No country can allow an uncontrolled mass of migrants to flood across its borders without any proven right to asylum. Even Germany’s Angela Merkel imposed order on her humanitarian decision to admit more than a million largely Syrian refugees. And until the Assad regime attacked its own people, Europe’s main refugee challenge was from largely economic migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
