That mostly works when you're single and without any hard ties.
Uprooting a well grown tree isn't easy.
Uprooting a well grown tree isn't easy.
If you hitch-hike from California to Vermont while feeding your kids whatever rats and river water you can dredge up and then set up a tent in the forest until you can score a job at Dollar General, then you are an evil neglectful bastard and the state will be on your ass and take your kids away.
You might be better off actually moving countries if you are broke. Because for whatever reason it is better tolerated because you can just say you were broke and your children went through hard times because the last country was evil or something.
According to whom?
The immense hardship endured by migrants isn't a badge of glory, but the direct result of a global economic system designed to extract wealth from the global south to enrich the global north.
The current economic disparity between the United States and the countries to its south is not an accident. The wealth of the United States, like much of the Western Hemisphere, was built on a foundation of 500 years of ongoing theft—specifically through the colonization and theft of indigenous lands, and the mass kidnapping and wage theft of the Atlantic slave trade. The governments and agencies that now police the borders are institutions built on this stolen land.
The US imposition of NAFTA allowed heavily subsidized American agribusiness giants to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, which decimated Mexican agricultural communities, drove small farmers off their land, and triggered massive waves of migration.
In Central America, the CIA sponsored the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrow a government that was attempting land reforms that threatened the profits of the American-owned United Fruit Company. The US government also heavily funded brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala that committed massacres and genocide against their own citizens. The US government effectively bankrolled the destruction of these countries, and then militarized its border to punish the survivors fleeing the devastation.
The migrant walking from Ecuador is not a "glorious immigrant" immune to state violence; they are treated as walking meat by human trafficking cartels and hunted by authorities.
It's not that they haven't suffered risks and dangers and "500 years" of historical grudges. It's that the main risk a broke American parent has of moving their children while broke is that they're going to run afoul of negligence and abuse laws of the US that don't allow you to live in the rough while hopping freight trains or however broke people are crossing the continent. If your kids get ripped away in a river you are going to jail, if you're caught living in tents in the forest or desert then child services is going to be contacted. Immigrants get to bypass this on the way to the US -- if their children dies in a river in the Darien it either gets ignored by greater society or written in a news blurb about how brave and unfortunate they were (maybe alongside your sad story about NAFTA -- your sob story narrative makes my point). This means they can actually move while broke and they might actually be able to get away with it in the eyes of the state.
I still think it's ridiculous that you refer to ICE detention as "kid gloves."
Again, rather than ignoring migrant families, the US government actively targets them; ICE uses Palantir surveillance software to track down and arrest hundreds of parents and relatives simply because they stepped forward to sponsor their unaccompanied migrant children, and now thousands of children are currently in the US foster care system because their parents were deported without them.
You are right, though, that marginalized US citizens face aggressive state intervention and child separation. The US criminal justice and child welfare systems frequently target poor domestic parents, using the threat of child removal to coerce them or punish them.
For example, marginalized women facing minor charges or accused of drug use have faced secret child welfare proceedings, incarceration, and having their newborns placed directly into the foster care system. Domestically, the carceral system routinely tears families apart, leaving hundreds of thousands of parents locked in jail and missing from their children's lives.
You're going to point out that's illegal in random latin american country too. Except the state apparatus is far weaker and more corrupt there, so there's actually a chance to bribe your way around it or just pass through the cracks.
The whole point is to end up with your family in the end, except if nature or criminals take them away, but if in the end the state breaks up the surviving family then you're heading for a dead end regardless. Latin American countries aren't breaking up families to anything near the extent the US does. The USA's bread and butter is breaking up families using the might of the state and they can't do that while you're out of their jurisdiction. If you can stay out of their jurisdiction for most of the move, you can bypass the CPS apparatus in the meanwhile. It actually might be better to go through Mexico to move from say California to Texas while broke, for that reason.
If you want to point out post-move if you are present illegally that might get you tossed out, then sure. But that's the case about everywhere but Argentina, Brazil, and back-bush Africa. A domestic family can also get tossed out for being here illegally (renounced citizenship, or whatever). That's another red herring though. ICE doesn't enforce moving without money, they enforce being present in the USA illegally (or, occasionally, legally, a la Goode / Pretti). If you get the visa to enter the USA, they won't give a single shit about all the kids that got ripped into some river in the Darien, died of some tropical disease while camped without mosquito nets, or all manner of other things they would damn a domestic family for.
No, I'm not. I'm done reading your lazy bullshit.
But of course you aren't reading this as you are "done reading." Unless of course, you are a liar. Only you know, deep inside, but I think I know the answer. And the fact you have to quietly live with that, or else betray your own statement, is quite amusing thought for me to end this conversation on, so I truly appreciate the entertainment you've given from your last response.