Debunking the myths about immigration: Ronald Reagan, Central America and everything Ted Cruz doesn't understand

If we want to understand the immigration crisis, we need to revisit Reagan and the violence we brought the region 

There seems to be a general consensus that we should be addressing not only the symptoms, but also the "root causes" of rising emigration from Central America. But what are they? On the right, the influx of children from the region is said to be the predictable result of our allegedly lenient immigration policy; mass deportation, therefore, is supposedly the obvious solution. "[I]mmediately deport these families, these children," demands Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, in "plane loads," specifies Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Closer to the center, the causes of immigration from the region are typically said to be rising gang violence, the drug trade and the drug war and - to a lesser extent - poverty.
With the exception of our immigration policy, it's obvious these factors are playing a major role in encouraging emigration from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. But if we are to speak of true "root causes," we have to look deeper still: first, to the gross inequality from which these social maladies arise, and second, to the political forces that have maintained and enforced this economic status quo, decade after decade. The implications of Thomas Piketty's "Capital" for the developed world have been much discussed, but the meaning of inequality for poor countries is no less: The crisis of Central American immigration, I would argue, is a crisis of inequality, tragically manifested.
Clearly, inequality in Central America has been, to some degree, the brutal legacy of colonialism. Yet even today, the countries of Central America are among the most unequal not only in the hemisphere, but also on the globe: Honduras is the eighth most unequal country worldwide, and Guatemala isn't far behind. Income distribution aside, Central American nations are also the most impoverished in Latin America. Using a multidimensional index, the U.N. estimates that 79.9% of children in Guatemala, 78.9% in El Salvador and 63.1% in Honduras live in poverty (compared to 31.8% in Venezuela and 15.7% in Chile). In Honduras, rates of malnutrition reach 48.5% in rural areas, while almost half of Guatemalan children are moderately or severely stunted in growth. Superimposed on this poverty has been a devastating wave of gang violence. El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have some of the highest homicide rates in the world.
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But why is the region so underdeveloped, why is poverty so entrenched, and why has the colonial legacy of inequality proven so resistant to social and political change? Though the situation is admittedly complex, the dismal state of affairs in Central America is in no small part the result of the failure of social democratic and left-of-center governments to maintain power and enact socioeconomic change; this failure, in turn, is sadly (in part) the consequence of the ironic "success" of U.S. foreign policy.

Ted Cruz is an idiot