Three takes on Apache plume

 

I’m always happy when I get far enough west of Austin that I can photograph Apache plume, Fallugia paradoxa. The xeriscape garden in front of the Western Heritage Museum in Hobbs, New Mexico, gave me my latest chance to do so on May 13th.

 

 

Different backgrounds, compositions, and processing produced different results.

 

 

Coincidentally, the last time I’d photographed Apache plume was outside a different
New Mexico museum when we spent time in that state a year and a half earlier.

 

 

 

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

 

This past Tuesday saw the issuance of an “executive action” that purports to largely suspend entry of noncitizens into the United States once there has been an average of at least 2,500 encounters with illegal border crossers for seven consecutive days. The new measures will be suspended as soon as the average number of encounters with illegal border crossers drops to “only” 1,500 a day.

My inclination was to write a commentary about that as part of Wednesday’s post. I planned to look at what would have kept the new measures from being imposed in the first place, namely an average of 2,499 encounters with illegal border crossers every day. Because a year consists on average of approximately 365.2422 days, I’d have multiplied that number by 2,499. I’d have asked why the result, about 912,740, is somehow an acceptable number of illegal border crossers, a great many of whom are allowed to stay in the country despite having entered the country illegally. I’d have asked why the “acceptable” number of illegal border crossings shouldn’t instead have been 1,499 or 499 or any number other than 0. If the number of current yearly legal immigrants isn’t high enough, why not ask Congress to raise that number? But Tuesday’s announcement didn’t answer any of those questions. It didn’t even describe the specific measures that the government was going to begin applying the very next day, Wednesday, when, because the 2,500 number has been far exceeded every day for months on end, the new order would be going into effect immediately.

With so many questions unanswered, I decided to wait a few days to see what actually happened. The best I can tell, nothing has changed. As of yesterday, a television reporter in Jacumba, California, on the border with Mexico, reported as many people crossing illegally as before, many of whom were being mass-released into the United States with notices to appear in immigration court on dates years in the future—the same farce as before the “change” in policy.

So you’ll have to forgive an old cynic for concluding that the executive “action” five months before the presidential election was merely a ploy to try to fool voters into thinking that now, after three-and-a-half years of lawless chaos, the border is finally under control. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I’d be happy to sell you at a bargain price.

 

UPDATE: After this post went out, I came upon a June 7th article by Anna Giaritelli in the Washington Examiner that begins:

 

U.S. Border Patrol agents in Southern California have been instructed to admit migrants from far-off countries rather than place them in removal proceedings, a move that goes against the White House’s Tuesday ban on asylum-seekers.

A government document given to federal law enforcement in San Diego, California, following President Joe Biden’s executive order to keep migrants from seeking asylum in the United States advises that migrants from all but six of the more than 100 countries in the Eastern Hemisphere be released into the United States rather than deported.

The instruction contradicts what senior Biden administration officials told reporters in a call on Tuesday would be the case for migrants from Eastern Hemisphere countries who traveled through multiple countries without seeking asylum in order to reach the U.S., referred to as extra-hemispheric migrants.

 

Looks like cynical old me got it right: there’ll be no significant change from before. You can read the full article.

 

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman