Well, the left has another photograph at their disposal, and they’re doing everything they can to make the most of it, like they always do.
What is this, the third photo of this type they’ve used to try and sway public opinion on illegal immigration? There was the one with the abandoned kid crying – you may recall the Time magazine cover that superimposed Trump onto that one to wring the full emotional content out of it. Then there was the mother and child running away from the tear gas at the border. And now we have this one.
You’ve undoubtedly seen it by now, and we don’t really feel the need to publish it again. You can find it in a click or two of Google if it somehow escaped your attention. It is a truly tragic picture of a man and his daughter lying facedown, dead, in the waters of the Rio Grande. No two ways about it, you would have to be a robot not to feel something at the power of the image. It is heartbreaking.
But the media and Democrats are, of course, using this image not for the simple cause of pathos or humanity but to make a political weapon out of it. The Republican Party is the cause of these deaths. Donald “Hitler” Trump killed these migrants. American racism is responsible for putting this father and this daughter in the afterlife. (Vote Joe Biden!)
This isn’t just a cynical and foul use of propaganda, it’s also completely wrong. If anyone is to blame for these migrants’ deaths, it is the Democratic Party.
The victims featured in the photo are Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria. “They left El Salvador on April 3 and spent two months in a migrant camp in southern Mexico, awaiting news of their asylum request to the US, before they decided to take a bus to the border on Sunday to try to speed up their case,” reports the Daily Mail. “When they arrived, the consulate was closed but they also learned they were far down a list of hundreds of migrants in line for interviews. They decided to make the crossing illegally rather than wait – a decision that led to their deaths.”
How is Trump responsible for this? The wheels of bureaucracy moved too slowly for these asylum-seekers, so they decided to push their luck. It turned out to be a tragic mistake. No evil forces were at play here, other than ordinary human unconsciousness. Indeed, it appears as though Oscar and his family would not have qualified for asylum in the first place:
Oscar worked at a Papa Johns pizza restaurant, where he was earning $350 a month.
They lived off his wage, limiting themselves to $10-a-day, because Tania had already quit her job as a cashier in a Chinese restaurant to care for Valeria, their only child.
They were not fleeing violence, Tania’s mother has since said, but were in desperate search of a life where they could earn more.
Their plan was to spend a few years in America to save up enough money to eventually return to El Salvador and buy or build their own house.
Right. “Not making enough at the local pizza joint” does not a valid asylum claim make.
At the end of the day, though, a big, beautiful border wall might have prevented this tragedy. Oscar would have known that even if he could get safely across the Rio Grande, there would have been nothing waiting for him other than a giant, impenetrable barrier on the other side. Maybe he would have thought twice about waiting patiently for his turn in line.
Better yet, maybe he wouldn’t have bothered making this disastrous trip in the first place.
Democrats want us to believe that enforcing the law and protecting our border is inhumane and racist. But in this case, firm, inflexible enforcement might very well have saved lives.
