Much has been written recently about the nearly 850% increase in illegal border crossing apprehensions along the New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire border with Canada (Maine, too, I expect). Not so much about who.
Nearly two-thirds of the 1,513 apprehensions since October of 2022 are Mexican. Does that seem odd? The US has a border with Mexico. It is long, porous, and far from Canada or the American North East. It is also not nearly as unpleasant this time of year as its longer Canadian counterpart.
January in Nogales (Mexico or Arizona) is 65F during the day and 39F degrees at night (average). I expect any deserts you cross along the way are worse, and we know many folks never make it that far but it’s temperate in Nogales. In Laredo, the temps run 65F /45F, and again, depending on the method of entry, you might not make the walk or die in the back of a truck trailer, but you’re Mexican and in Mexico.
In contrast, on the northern border, Swanton, Vermont doesn’t get much warmer than 25F on average when the sun is up and hovers near zero at night (without windchill). A trek through Canada to the US border is chilly, especially if you are not used to the cold. It is also nowhere near Mexico.
The Burlington Free Press recently published a piece with some weather cautions and comments from Border Patrol about illegals choosing this path. A number, as noted above, that has risen 850% during the Biden tenure. They’ve even got this awesome graph showing us where the illegals come from based on their self-declared nationality.
Sixty-two percent are Mexicans. We’ve also got Haitians, Guatemalans, Venezuelans, Columbians, Ecuadoans, Cubans, Peruvians, and Brazilians (the people, not the wax job). There are plenty of off-continent nationalities and even a handful of Canadians, all of whom might consider illegal entry along the northeastern US border a sensible entry point for lawbreakers.
Anyone south of Mexico might do better on a boat ride to Canada, to which you might add stops in Cuba or Haiti. But just Mexicans? Crossing in Canada? Who is moving them up the coastline and down the St. Lawrence Seaway before they hop on land and make a cold-snowy break for America?
Cartels? Who else can afford it with the southern border saturated with invaders, which includes a few asylees, a lot of opportunists, and an army of gangs with drugs? Maybe VT, NY, and NH look like more accessible points of entry. Instead of moving drugs up to Lawrence, MA, and then into New Hampshire, they can move them down and in from Canada. And why not if they don’t get caught in Canada?
Vermont is a Sanctuary state. Burlington has effectively legalized human trafficking (you cannot prosecute prostitution there). Its door is already open, except for the Border Patrol, working at skeleton crew levels. And they’ve caught 1,513.
The rest are here among us.
But it’s not couch cushion money to take a boat from the Gulf up the coast and then down toward Montreal. Is someone paying that freight, or is there another explanation for why Mexicans are marched at great risk to their lives across the wintery Canadian border into the US?
The racist, sexist, bigoted, xenophobic, colonialist, white supremacist United States, or so I’ve heard). A place colder than the water in January.
