We’ve written frequently about the infamous Darien Gap, that 60-mile stretch of no-man’s land in Panama that the Pan-American Highway simply gives up on. Filled with jungle beasts and unfriendly natives, dotted with imposing mountains and swift-moving rivers, the Gap has, until recently, served as something of a barrier for migrants in South America wishing to reach the United States.
According to Todd Bensman of CIS.org, historically only about 10,000 migrants, most of them young men, completed the 7-to-10-day trip through the dangerous Gap each year. But that was before Joe Biden opened America’s southern gate. In just the first year of the Biden administration, no fewer than 130,000 men, women, and children from countries all over the world came through.
Anxious to improve the lot of the migrants and optimize their chances of getting to the U.S. border, the Biden government soon began negotiations with Panama, which resulted this past April in the signing of the Bilateral Arrangement on Migration and Protection agreement, whose stated purpose was to “improve migration management.” A couple of months prior to the signing, Panama announced a migrants’ game changer: a new sea route permitting Colombian smugglers to land much further northwest up Panama’s Caribbean coast than previously. At the same time, Panama opened another route opened the Pacific side.
The new routes turned an arduous ten-day trek into a much easier trip of 2-3 days, over friendlier territory. Bensman writes:
The significance of Panama establishing the new shorter bypasses is that, while fewer immigrants will probably die getting to Biden’s open door, it formalized the opening of a true superhighway where easier, quicker passage will only invite ever more massive volumes of people to pour through from South America and keep going, said the American conflict journalist Chuck Holton, who lives in Panama not far from Darien Province.
“It could easily get to the point where we have as many extra-continentals coming through as we do from the northern triangle countries of Central America,” he said. “They’ll double and double again the number of people coming. They’re talking about facilitation. They’re not talking about deterrence.”
Anyone paying attention at this point knows that the word “deterrence” is not in the Biden vocabulary. Anything and everything that can bring more and more of the world’s refuse to and across our southern border is what he and his regime want. And they’re getting it.
For more on the migrant superhighway, see CIS.org.