The sudden “Children’s Crusade” of Central American kids across our southern border has outraged Americans, but nobody seems to know who is behind it. Certainly, it’s partly Barack Obama’s fault for enticing the Central Americans with promises not to deport kids, but how could tens of thousands of children suddenly make it all the way across Mexico to show up in such large numbers on our border?

After reading an LA Times article on the invasion in which a woman at the border surrenders herself with her kids in the belief that single mothers will not be deported if they are apprehended [she's probably correct: I recently read a report written by a border patrol officer who reported that people who are not from bordering countries are simply issued summons to court and then released on their own recognizance -- he said they simply turn themselves in, get the summons, then disappear], I figured there must be some kind of organized effort to move these people.

I decided to do a little research, knowing that few people bother to go to the source even here in the US, so the number of Americans paying attention to Central American sources must be tiny. It turns out that the governments and media of Central American countries are very much complicit in the human trafficking, possibly assuming that remittances will be a source of income for their crime and poverty-infested little fiefdoms, and that in any event they can keep the cash flowing to their criminal cronies – and ultimately themselves – by subsidizing the smuggling industry.

It turns out that they are not only publishing advice and encouraging stories for would-be migrants, but also making a pretense of standing up for their countrymen who have illegally immigrated and – get this – they are even adjudicating civil suits between migrants and smugglers to impart an aura of legitimacy to the entire operation. El Salvador is probably the largest source of these Central American migrants and, incidentally, the source of the ruthless Mara Salvatrucha criminal gangsters who have murdered their way to prominence in a number of American cities. Could there be any doubt about a connection between the gangsters on our streets and the gangsters in office back home? These crooks running banana republics have been making a living off organized crime for decades.

After reading a few articles in “La Página,” an online El Salvador news outlet, all of which were highly supportive of illegal immigration to the US, I checked out the comments. It doesn’t seem that Salvadorans are proud of either their politicians or this recent border fiasco. One commenter suggested that it is a national humiliation, and that El Salvador will look “worse than Haiti,” asking “how did our government allow these embarrassments abroad?” Most were more concerned about the right to legally travel — not to emigrate. These are the type of people in El Salvador who actually bother to comment in newspapers; I suspect that the people showing up on the Texas border are from a somewhat less educated demographic. Could it possibly be, as many Americans suspect, that the government of El Salvador is deliberately trying to foist its poor and hapless off on the great big, dumb American milk cow? Something like that, but it’s actually even worse: they’re also shamelessly ripping off their own poor.

What’s going on here is that a number of people are taking smuggling fees from these would-be emigrants (reportedly $4,000 a head from point of origin), moving them through Mexico, then when they make it to the US border, Presto! The US picks up the tab from there. If the DHS prediction of 90,000 children smuggled to the US this year by these gangs is correct, that makes kid-smuggling alone a $360,000,000 per year industry, and probably more. What does it matter if they are eventually deported anyway? Somebody got rich off the scam. The only real losers here are the desperate fools who think they’ll be granted amnesty and the US taxpayers footing the bill for this fiasco.

And why am I so sure they won’t get amnesty? Because we can’t afford to give it to them. Illegals currently prop up the US social security system, having funded roughly ten percent of its reserve and paid in somewhere around $150 billion a year. Give them the right to benefits, and the entire thing would collapse very quickly. Without this illegal subsidy, social security would have started paying out less than it takes in by 2009. Obviously this scheme isn’t going to last forever, but if illegals got amnesty it would be over immediately and the fallout would be painful, to say the least.

However, another part of the scheme involves making sure that those who do sneak in are fit enough to work and pay into the system. If they can swim a river, cross some desert and evade ICE, they probably are. But if they are kids or single moms who just plop themselves down in front of the nearest border patrol officer and wait for air-conditioned accommodations, they’re far more likely to be an expense. So we Americans are really getting a raw deal with this latest wave.

As much as it’s tempting to say that this or that American political party or official is responsible for what’s going on or that it’s part of some deliberate plot, it’s starting to look like the entire thing is just another example of incompetence and poor judgment on the part of our “leaders.” They’ve been caught with their pants down on this one. They actually let themselves get tooled by a gang of Central American hustlers, and now they have no idea what to do about it. I wonder whether our politicians can even admit to themselves how stupid and irresponsible this talk about amnesty for children was. They were simply providing a free advertisement for the coyotes.

Well how about this for an idea: find the head honcho in charge of each of these little countries, and tell him to put an end to it immediately or we’ll sink his yacht and drop a couple 500 pound bombs on his hilltop villa. Sounds rough, but what kind of a scumbag puts kids at the mercy of the criminal gangs who run both human and narcotics smuggling operations in Latin America? One I wouldn’t lose much sleep over if he happened to end up on the business end of an airstrike. This won’t happen in the current administration, of course, but another, better president would have done it.