Senior Obama administration officials told Congress on Wednesday that they were struggling to keep up with the growing influx of young migrants from Central America who are illegally crossing the Southwestern border.

The number of unaccompanied children picked up at the border since Oct. 1 is now 57,000, according to R. Gil Kerlikowske, head of Customs and Border Protection…

The “children continue to come across the border,” Craig Fugate, FEMA administrator, told the committee. “It’s a very fluid situation.”

“Look, for $8 million, we can put them all on a first-class seat back to their homes. That’s $8 million. That’s a first-class seat, one way, to each of their homes,” Coburn told CNN’s “Crossfire” on Tuesday.

“That’s $60,000 per child that we’re going to spend, in emergency money. Can we — first of all, that shows just how incompetent we — we can’t do that for $3(000) or $4,000 per child? That’s No. 1.

“No. 2 is, if we can’t do that, the Border Patrol is as bad as the V.A. And by the way, the vast majority of Border Patrol are not patrolling the border right now. They’re involved in the humanitarian crisis.”

Border state Republicans slammed President Barack Obama Wednesday for practicing “selective morality” in his policies towards migrant children coming to the United States, blaming the administration for failing to send the clear message that unaccompanied minors cannot remain illegally in the country…

“What about people in other parts of the world? Don’t they need this kind of relief? Aren’t they persecuted? What about the Middle East? What about Africa? This is selective morality that’s being practiced here,” McCain said on the Senate floor. “We want people to come to this country legally, we want them to come if they are persecuted. But we want [it in] an orderly fashion.”

President Obama’s request for $3.7 billion in supplemental funding amounts to an “admission” that he plans for the influx of immigrant children to “continue indefinitely,” according to Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas).

Cruz said that only five percent of the funding would provide for “boots on the ground” along the southern border. ”This is an HHS and social services bill that is entitled border security to make it appear as if it’s responding to the problem,” Cruz told National Review Online.

“But this supplemental bill is an admission by the president that he has no intention of solving this problem, and, indeed, that he anticipates it continuing indefinitely, because he is simply asking for money to deal with those kids who are coming after they’ve been brutalized, rather than taking the necessary steps to prevent them from coming here in the first place, to prevent them from being victimized,” he also said.

A number of conservatives on Capitol Hill are pushing back hard against President Obama’s request for almost $4 billion to manage the spike of immigrants — thousands of them unaccompanied minors — that’s hit the Texas-Mexico border in recent months.

But Graham, a long-time supporter of an immigration system overhaul, said a failure to provide the funds will exacerbate the crisis while handing Obama and the Democrats a political victory ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“If we do that, then we’re going to get blamed for perpetuating the problem,” Graham told reporters on Wednesday.

The White House needs to mollify progressive allies who are demanding payback from an administration that has long disappointed them on immigration. Some in the Democratic coalition are even contemplating a stay-at-home-in-November strategy if Obama does little beyond what they see as symbolic measures.

There are also worries among advocates that Obama will pull back if the influx of Central American children on the southwestern border erodes public support for the broader reforms. The White House on Tuesday asked Congress for $3.7 billion to address the growing crisis…

The program for so-called Dreamers, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, has covered about 600,000 undocumented immigrants. The scope of the changes now under consideration would be much broader. There are more than 6.4 million employed adults who are undocumented, 8.7 million people who had been in the country for at least five years as of March 2010, and 4.7 million parents or guardians of minor U.S. and foreign-born children, according to the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a coalition of reform advocacy groups.

It is not clear, however, if Obama believes open borders will be the same hit with the American people that amnesty activists think it will be. Up till now Americans have voiced support for granting amnesty to those already in the country, but keeping out further waves if illegal immigrants.

But the current migrant crisis has exploded the amnesty lie. Americans are seeing first hand that amnesties only beget more amnesties. The only way for Obama to end the crisis is to start treating all migrants the way Mexican migrants are treated: by turning them away from the border.

But Obama’s base won’t let him do that.

So the crisis on the border will continue, more migrants will come to the United States, and Obama will continue to facilitate their entry into the country. Until there is a strong signal that Americans will not tolerate this politically, the status quo will not change.

1. Start deporting people. Far from being cold-hearted or “draconian,” deportations will save lives and restore much-needed credibility to the U.S. immigration system. The thousands of illegals who risk their lives and those of their minor children to cross our southwest border are doing so in large part because they believe once here, they will not be sent back. Here is where Obama’s actions speak louder than his words. Contrary to the Administration’s claim of toughness on deportation, interior removals have dropped by 40 percent over the past three years. In 2013, for instance, Obama’s Administration deported less than 0.2 percent of illegal aliens who had not committed a major crime. As John Sandweg, Obama’s former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told the Los Angeles Times in April: “If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero.” No surprise that a plurality of Americans in the latest Rasmussen poll believe President Obama helped create the current crisis.

2. Halt foreign aid, work, and tourist visas for any country that refuses to assist in the repatriation of its citizens who have entered our country illegally. Ditto for countries that facilitate the transport of illegals to the U.S., as Mexico is currently doing. In egregious cases, we should consider suspending trade agreements and freezing the bank accounts of the political leaders of offending nations. If you abuse your relationship with America by effectively dumping your low-skilled workers here, you should suffer the economic consequences.

3. Order U.S. financial institutions to stop remittances illegal immigrants wire back to their home countries. For decades, other nations have enjoyed the economic benefit of money made illegally here but sent there. Last year, remittances topped a whopping $51 billion, and almost half of that went to Mexico. The best way for people to fix their own countries is to work in their home countries and fight for political reforms there. The incentive to come here illegally will be greatly reduced if they can’t transfer money out of the country.

Director of the federal agency responsible for aiding the unaccompanied alien children illegally coming to the United States from Central America told a conference Tuesday that staffers should be reminded of Jesus Christ when working with refugees.

“Jesus was a refugee, and that’s a very good reminder to all of us,” Eskinder Negash, director of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), said at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ 2014 Migration Conference in Washington, CNS News reported.

“I happen to believe in [the] refugee program, not just because Jesus was a refugee — because I was also myself a refugee,” Mr. Negash said, adding that people working with refugees “can only be successful and have a long impact on people when we actually start seeing ourselves [as] the people we want to serve.”

Via the Corner.