I watched PBS’s Frontline “The Gang Crackdown” on MS-13 till I couldn’t take it anymore, roughly ¾ of it. The program was a goulash of logic that raised more questions than it answered. And when it tried to answer some, the explanations resembled Alice going down the rabbit hole. The thing was an affront to common sense.
The broadcast tried, in the tradition of the world’s best sleight-of-hand magicians, to associate the presence of MS-13 to reactionary American public officials. As they did so, anyone watching it would be blinded by one basic question. Where do we find these MS-13 miscreants? They reside within the suddenly blossoming enclaves of immigrants, many of them “undocumented”. Suddenly blossoming! We wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t lost control of our borders. Dahhh!
Such logic apparently never dawned on the script writers – or at least there’s no evidence of it. Instead, they steered the viewer into a sojourn of the crime and poverty of third world countries, the reactions of law enforcement, and the unchallenged opinions of open-borders activists. Clearly, the program could have benefited from more of the kind of pushback that was only reserved for Trump and federal and local law enforcement.
The lambasting of American authorities was partnered with an unstated inference. Call it innuendo with a light touch. Bad conditions everywhere in the world obliges the US to accept nearly anyone needy. Why else the hackneyed reference to the plight of El Salvadorans, et al? Everyone living in a dirt floor hut is now to be recast as a “soon-to-be-American”. Emma Lazarus’s poem is sentiment, but it is also suicide as public policy in the era of a gargantuan welfare state.
Frontline added nothing to the immigration debate but the tired Democratic Party talking points on the issue du jour. A little more honesty would help, as well as a little more rationality.
RogerG