Maybe it’s not American greatness that brings immigrants here

  My mother left a small village in western Ireland when she was 17.

  She had good reason. Her public education ended at age 14. At the time, public high schools did not exist in Ireland. The fifth child of a Irish farmer’s 10 children could only get a secondary education with a scholarship to a private school. And she did not get that. Many people in her village in County Mayo were migrant workers, traveling to Scotland to pick potatoes.

  She didn’t want that life. So she left. So did most of her sisters.

  And decades later, she’s still angry.

U.S. officials are responsible for more immigrant deaths

  According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, after federal immigration-control officials charged five Mexican citizens with the deaths of four illegal immigrants from drowning, including two children, Shawn Gibson, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in San Diego, stated, “Smugglers often treat people as disposable commodities. Yesterday’s heartbreaking events are a stark reminder of the urgent need to dismantle these criminal networks driven by greed.”

  Gibson has it partly right and partly wrong.

Vice President Kamala Harris and migration in the Americas: Setting the record straight

  Vice President Kamala Harris has shown a long-standing commitment to the rule of law and supports a bipartisan border security bill. On the other hand, anti-immigration MAGA extremists in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), have played politics with the issue of immigration—even making up a nonexistent immigration role—but shown little interest in actually fixing the broken immigration system.

  Contrary to what her detractors have long alleged, Vice President Harris was never placed in charge of the U.S.-Mexico border; rather, she has taken on a challenging task similar to the effort then-Vice President Joe Biden undertook during the later stages of the Obama-Biden administration: overseeing U.S. efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America.