Follow the money: it’s an admonition that is doubly true in the illegal alien scramble. Unlike wealthy Mexico (which pretends to be poor to mooch off the US even though it is #14 in national GDP ), the Central American countries really are poor.

As a result, Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras love getting checks from their emigres because double digits of GDP in those dirtbag countries come from remittances. This economic information is more proof that the invasive kids are money seekers (acting on the insistence of their parents of course), not refugees from crime as the administration claims.

Remittances are an evil system because the money comes too easily and rewards bad governments; the worse political elites run a country, the more its people leave to seek more money in the first world, from which they often send mini aid checks to families at home.

If illegal aliens would spend half the energy (and money) they use on breaking into America into working to reform the political/economic systems in their home countries, everyone would be better off. Microlending is one strategy.

For the general good of all concerned, I suggested the dependable behavioral shaper of taxation in a 2002 op-ed: Relieve crisis on border with tax on remittances.

Back to the present: