We hear a lot about the crime, costs, and cultural clashes that illegal immigration brings. But one impact that is generally overlooked is the environmental damage caused by the millions of illegal immigrants encouraged to travel to the United States by the open border policies of the Harris-Biden administration. This damage is also severe. Just ask the Indians who live in the remote jungle area known as the Darien Gap.
And these unfortunate souls aren't the only victims: illegal immigrants also litter the Arizona desert and start destructive border fires.
Paradise Lost?
Regarding the situation in the Darien Valley, which connects Colombia and Panama, the left-leaning Guardian newspaper wrote
Isolation and a fearsome reputation have protected the indigenous communities living there from the outside world for centuries.
…But now, with as many as 500,000 people passing through the rainforest to reach the United States each year, Darien's indigenous groups say their ecosystem and way of life are under threat.
“This was unexpected because all of a sudden, the migration started and we suddenly noticed the garbage overflowing,” said Yenailo Aji, known as “Noko,” a community leader in Nueva Vigia, a village in the northern Darien region near the border that is home to about 1,400 Embera people. “We're worried because we depend on the local ecosystem for everything. It's our source of life.”
And now, tragically, it has become a source of suffering because of Harris-Biden's immoral border policies. The Guardian continues:
Locals report that after the rains, the once-clear stony banks of Nueva Vigia's Turquesa River become lined with discarded cans, T-shirts and plastic food containers.
Tania Chanapi, a community leader in Nuevo Vigia, said gasoline leaking from incoming boats and human waste from the hundreds of thousands of people who make the voyage were polluting the river that several communities depend on.
The bodies of those who did not survive were often found decomposing in waterways.
“Earlier, we used the river for everything – drinking water, washing clothes, bathing – but now we can't do any of that because it causes a lot of diseases, including diarrhoea and vomiting,” Chanapi said.
The video below features RAV-TV host Ben Bergquam's on-the-scene report of the Gap disaster.
Bergquam's reporting is further illustrated by the video below, which shows another casualty of the Harris-Biden team's border missteps: a dead body.
(Hint: American Thinker in the video above.)
In the first video, political commentator and self-described “born-in-the-life American” Anthony Hughes expressed disbelief: “What's unbelievable is that you've been reporting on this for years and the mainstream media is still pretending this isn't happening,” Hughes wrote.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil
But pretense is the work of the mainstream media. Another thing they rarely report is how illegal immigrants have turned the Arizona desert into a garbage dump. Check out the ABC 15 report below from 13 years ago and see if the problem is better or worse now.
Furthermore, in 2011, the Los Angeles Times reported that “more than one-third of the man-made wildfires in Arizona over the past five years are believed to have been started by people who crossed into the U.S. illegally from Mexico, according to a government report.” In connection with this, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection also took measures against this problem.
In 2009, they participated in an “awareness campaign to teach illegal border crossers how to use fire” (video below). Of course, they've been providing water to illegal immigrants in the Arizona desert for years, so why wouldn't they?
Some may complain that the news clip above is outdated, but please understand that it speaks facts. Mainstream media should publish such reports regularly. Instead, they try to become the PR team of one major political party, avoiding talking about our country's borders and focusing on Ukraine's borders.
On another note, there is also the issue that Greentopians claim to be concerned about overpopulation in the US. But the US birth rate has been below replacement level (2.1 children per woman) for a long time, and is currently at 1.786. Oh, and the US population is growing, but only because of (im)immigration. But the environmentalists who always tell Americans not to have children never say a word about it.
Similarly, the Darien Gap situation has gone unanswered. In fact, American Thinker points out that “those who pander to the progressive 'climate change' (lobby) are curiously silent about the environmental damage caused by immigrants.” Apparently, “it's perfectly acceptable to use pristine forests and rivers as landfill, kill wildlife for 'fossil fuels,' and dump their rotting carcasses into our water supplies. Who would have known?”
“Imagine”
So imagine if the media did their job and reported on all the problems caused by illegal immigration — imagine if news about crime, the costs, the strain on institutions and resources, and environmental degradation was reported regularly — public support for a solution would have grown, and the “border crisis” would have been solved yesterday.
Of course, the very fact that we have to discuss the “impact of illegal immigration” speaks to a problem. The primary reason illegal immigration should be removed has always been this: because it is illegal and wrong. A simple rule of life is that doing the wrong thing always causes problems, although the details may differ. Moreover, border security is a fundamental state function; a government that cannot or will not perform it has no reason to exist.
But as another Twitter user points out below Bergquam's video above, “Joe Biden thinks that doesn't matter because his open borders policy will bring in 10 million new Democrat voters over the next two generations.” What matters is power. Scarcity is just one of the cracked eggs needed to make an omelette.
