Illegal Aliens Are Destroying Our Environment, Darién Gap Indians Warn

We hear much about the crime, costs, and culture clashes resulting from illegal migration. But one consequence is generally overlooked: the environmental destruction wrought by the millions of illegal aliens encouraged to travel to the U.S. by the Harris-Biden open border policy. This destruction is severe, too. Just ask the Indians living in the remote jungle area known as the Darién Gap.

What’s more, these hapless people aren’t the only victims. Illegals also leave trash in the Arizona desert and start destructive border fires.

Paradise Lost?

As for the situation in the Darién Gap, which connects Colombia with Panama, the left-wing Guardian reports that the area’s

isolation and formidable reputation has shielded the Indigenous communities who live there from the outside world for centuries.

… Now, however, with half a million people slogging through the rainforest on their way to the US each year, Darién’s Indigenous groups say their ecosystem and way of life are under threat.

“It’s something that we did not expect, as the migration took off from one day to the next and suddenly we found ourselves flooded with trash,” says Yenairo Aji, a community leader, or “noco”, in Nueva Vigía, a village close to the Darién’s northern frontier where about 1,400 Emberá people live. “It’s worrying because we depend on our local ecosystem for everything. It’s our source of life.”

And, now, tragically, it’s a source of anguish — thanks to the immoral Harris-Biden border policy. The Guardian continues:

When it rains, the once pristine stony banks of the Turquesa River in Nueva Vigía are now lined with discarded [drink] cans, T-shirts and plastic food containers, local people report.

Gasoline leaking from the influx of boats and the human waste of the hundreds of thousands who make the journey have poisoned the rivers on which several communities depend, says Tania Chanapi, a community leader in Nuevo Vigía.

The bodies of those who did not survive are often found decaying in the waterways.

“Before, we used the river for everything: drinking, washing our things and bathing. Now we can’t really do any of that because it causes a lot of sickness, like diarrhoea and vomiting,” Chanapi says.

The video below features on-scene reporting on the Gap devastation by RAV-TV host Ben Bergquam.

More of Bergquam’s reporting is featured in the footage below. In it you’ll see a corpse, another victim of the Harris-Biden border failures.

(Hat tip for above videos: American Thinker.)

Under the first video, Anthony Hughes, a political commentator and, as he describes himself, “indigenous American,” expressed incredulity. What’s “incredible,” he wrote, “is that you’ve been reporting on this for YEARS and the MSM is still pretending it’s not happening.”

See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

But pretense is the mainstream media’s business. Something else it largely won’t report is how illegals have also made the Arizona desert a garbage dump. Just watch the 13-year-old ABC 15 report below and then ask: Is the problem likely better or worse now?

Then there’s this: “People entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico are believed responsible for more than one-third of human-ignited wildfires in Arizona over a five-year period, according to a government report,” wrote the Los Angeles Times in 2011. Related to this, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection took action against this problem, too.

In 2009, it participated in “a public awareness campaign giving fire tips to illegal border crossers” (video below). Of course, we’ve long been providing water for illegals in the Arizona desert, so why not?

Lest anyone complain about the above news clips’ age, realize that it tells the tale. The mainstream media should be issuing such reports regularly. Instead, intent on being a certain major party’s PR team, they avoid talking about our borders and focus on Ukraine’s.

Moving on, there’s also the matter of how Greentopians claim to be concerned about overpopulation in the U.S. Americans’ fertility rate, however, has long been below replacement level (2.1 children per female) and currently stands at 1.786. Oh, our population is increasing — but only because of (im)migration. Yet the environmentalists, always quick to tell Americans not to have babies, utter not a peep about it.

Likewise, too, it’s crickets with the Darién Gap situation. In fact, the “ones pandering to the progressive ‘climate change’ [lobby] are oddly silent about the environmental carnage brought by the migrants,” notes American Thinker. Apparently, “using immaculate forest and rivers as landfills, killing the wildlife with ‘fossil fuels,’ and tossing rotting corpses into the water supply is perfectly acceptable. Who knew?”

“Imagine”

So just imagine the media did its job and reported on all the problems caused by illegal migration. Imagine we regularly saw news segments about the crime, costs, strain on institutions and resources, and environmental degradation. It would so catalyze public support for a solution that the “border crisis” would be solved yesterday.

Of course, though, that we even have to debate the “effects of illegal migration” illustrates the problem. The main reason to eliminate illegal migration is always this: it’s illegal — and wrong. A simple rule of life is that doing what’s wrong ever and always leads to problems, though details may vary. Moreover, securing the borders is a basic state function. A government that can’t or won’t perform it has no reason to exist.

But as another tweeter under the Bergquam video above noted, “Joe Biden could care less as his open border policy cements ten million new democrat voters for the next two generations.” Power is the point — spoiled environments are just some of the broken eggs needed to make that omelet.