This week, House Speaker John Boehner said it’ll be difficult to monetarily address the flow of undocumented kids across the U.S./Mexico border, until the 2008 law that allowed their travels to the aforementioned place is changed. Boehner said the anti-trafficking regulations that were put in place during the waning year of the Bush administration are being abused, and that he doesn’t foresee much progress on the immigration issue until that specific law is addressed.
All the while, protests have continued in the city of Murrieta, in Riverside County, where busloads of migrant kids without parents were turned away a few weeks ago.
Joe Mathews writes the weekly “Connecting California” column and is the California editor at Zócalo Public Square and John Hunneman is a columnist for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and is a resident of Murrieta. Both joined us for a discussion about immigration and Murrieta’s place in the debate.
The city of slightly more than 100,000 seems to be the flashpoint these days, with protests — albeit small ones — taking place regularly for the past several weeks. Murrieta has had an active border patrol post there for the last eight years. For more than 80 years before that, that station was located in Temecula.
Hunneman wrote in his column this week that the city’s being unfairly maligned in the national media, with the thought that residents protesting those kids were more in number and higher in anger than in reality. He says the number of protestors on the day the bus was turned around was about the same as the fans at a little league game.
Mathews, however, pointed out the paradox of a city that’s grown rapidly in the last 20 years, with the help of international companies that officials had reached out to. He lamented the angry protests of poor Central American kids as opposed to the warm welcome of wealthy global investors.