House Democrats on Wednesday will hold a hearing titled "Kids in Cages: Inhumane Treatment at the Border." It will once again be an attempt to divert attention from the real reason why migrants kids are dying at the southern border.

The root of each and every death at the border is traced to a belief, on the part of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans, that they can and should show up after a dangerous 2,000-mile journey and throw themselves into the care of a stretched-thin U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

It's not the "cages" that infected these exhausted, worn down people with the flu. It's not the overcrowded ICE detention facilities that have compromised their health. It's not a lack of medical attention that has turned southern Texas into an infirmary for all of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.

It's Congress, and Democrats in particular. It's the absolute refusal to do anything that would stop these people from risking their lives in the first place.

Anyone who has been listening to the desperate warnings from the Departments of Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Defense for the past year already knows that our immigration system is collapsing. It's being crushed under the weight of countless migrants showing up at the border, all of them aware that we can't cope with the sheer number of them and thus will have to eventually be turned loose in to the country.

But the national news media play stupid. The Washington Post described the hearing scheduled for Wednesday as an opportunity for Democrats "to question the impact of Trump's immigration policies."

No, "Trump's immigration policies" aren't having an impact. They were to build a wall, move to a merit-based immigration system, and halt illegal border crossings. He has accomplished precisely none of those things. The administration has instead been thrown into chaos trying to manage — not reduce or stop, but manage — the new gush of migrants pushing their way into Texas.

The only "impact" we should be asking about is the impact on the American taxpayer, tasked with providing endless food, clothing, medicine, and legal services to all of these migrants, while Congress does nothing to solve the problem.