In a bid to save public support for Joe Biden’s massive immigration bill, set to be announced shortly after inauguration, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos has taken the extraordinary step of advising the caravans coming from Central America that the U.S. border is not open- at least not yet.
Watch as Ramos makes this announcement on Univision’s evening newscast:
JORGE RAMOS: We all know that one of the first things Joe Biden is going to do as president will be to send (Congress) a bill in order to legalize 11 million undocumented immigrants, to protect the DREAMers, and to protect hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan exiles. Very well. This might be sending Central America the message that the U.S. border is open. And that's not true. And this could cause new Central American caravans to come North. We have the most specific case, precisely, from a caravan of Hondurans that is currently stuck in Guatemala, attempting to cross Mexico in order to make it to the United States.
English-language media have largely ignored the caravan, as our colleague Nick Fondacaro pointed out. However, immigration is the lifeblood of our nation’s Spanish-language media- an opportunity to refresh and renew their viewer bases and guard against attrition due to assimilation and acculturation into the United States. And it bears noting that these networks have a role in fueling these caravans by pumping viewers overseas full of hope that a President Biden would immediately fling the borders open. As you see below, it this hope and hype that enabled the caravans in the first place:
MIGRANT 1: I hope that as soon as the new President Biden takes office, I'll be able to maybe save up some money and soon make the trip.
REPORTER: Migrants from countries in Central America's Northern Triangle have the perception that the Biden Era will be favorable to them. (People) are already talking about a caravan of Hondurans which would depart their country this January 15th.
VICE-PRESIDENT ELECT KAMALA HARRIS: We have an immigration bill, for example, that we are going to be proposing as our first order of business. And it will be about creating a pathway for people to earn citizenship. We’re going to reduce the time from what is now- has been currently 13 years to 8 years. We are going to expand protections for DREAMers and DACA recipients. We’re going to be tightening up the process for green cards, and making sure that we give people a very defined period of time from the time that they actually apply for a green card through the time of obtaining citizenship. We are going to put more judges and deal with what we need to do in terms of people arriving at the border to make sure that the process runs smoothly and get rid of the backlog. So there are a number of things we are gonna do, but in particular about the immigration process, it’s gonna be about shortening the time by creating more and greater efficiency, allowing people who have Temporary Protected Status- and in particular, DREAMers and TPS holders to automatically get green cards.
JORGE RAMOS: The immigration promises of the incoming Biden Administration revive the hopes of many Hondurans to come to the United States in search of a better life.
REPORTER: A group of about 200 Hondurans initially departed in the first announced Honduran caravan of 2021. They all departed, determined to build new lives.
JORGE RAMOS: Hundreds of Hondurans formed a second caravan in as many weeks, expecting to arrive here. In the United States.
REPORTER: These are some six thousand migrants who, according to official records, departed from Honduras. Although the total group of persons in the caravan could be as many as nine thousand.
TELEMUNDO REPORTER: These were the riots that occurred on Saturday and on Sunday, when members of the Honduran caravan attempted to overwhelm the police cordon
That false hope, when unmet, can have devastating consequences:
CARAVAN MIGRANT: But if everything is the same tomorrow, I believe we'll have to resort to violence. Because we're not going to let them (the Guatemalan military) beat us up if all we're demanding is (safe) passage.
And so it is, faced with the realization that nothing could be more optically devastating to Biden’s fast-track amnesty than to have a riotous caravan making its way to the U.S. southern border without Trump’s controls and third-nation agreements being fully unwound, that America’s most prominent Spanish-language journalist comes out and says that the border is not open.
Lest we forget, the next 100 days will bring a stark reminder that Spanish-language media operates from the belief that open borders are what’s best for business.
JORGE RAMOS: I think the future of Spanish-language media is assured for decades, simply, for a very simple reason: Despite of the fact that the majority of the growth within the Hispanic community is coming from people being born here, we still have one to two million immigrants, legally and illegally coming in every single year. Most of them speak Spanish. So, therefore, we have a market that is growing and growing.
And I think we can assure you that in the next few decades, you'll see Spanish-language media. That's another topic completely, but the Latino community is keeping so many elements from their country of origin, including Spanish- 9 out of 10 Latinos speak Spanish...speak Spanish at home- that- and we're doing things that Italians didn't do, or Russians, or Eastern Europeans didn't do- and the closeness to our countries of origin and the communications that we have are keeping Spanish-language media alive. And thanks to that, it's a new power that other immigrant communities didn't have in the past.
