Why do wave after wave of South Americans come to the USA ...

would they have still taken the dangerous road to the borders of the USA, plus all the abuse and hate from Americans if their own countries were prosperous?  And, why are their own countries not doing well?  Could it be because the USA has looted their countries' wealth in cahoots with the corrupt governments of those countries placed in power by the United States of America?

Deena Stryker  at Journal-NEO
Russiagate has been almost completely obscured by the media’s crocodile tears over Latino toddlers being torn from their mothers’ arms at the Mexican border.  Neither Gaza nor Yemen — not to mention Syria — have favored the press with comparable tear-jerking moments.  

The Attorney general, Jeff Sessions, known for his racism as Alabama’s Senator, and who was Trump’s earliest congressional backer, confessed to having ordered this inhumane policy in order to deter Latino families from illegally entering the United States — or even legally seeking asylum.  As the President for several days refused to back down until his wife intervened, together with the wives of previous Republican presidents, MSNBC and CNN inundated the airwaves with the sounds of little children crying for their mothers in Spanish.

None so far have asked the obvious question: What has made the people in the US’s back-yard so miserable that they are willing to risk temporarily — or even permanently — losing their children as they try to get into a country where they are not wanted? A recent book titled Crusade and Jihadby William Polk an Arabist and former diplomat, documents all the ways in which the North committed crimes against the South since Great Britain used gains from piracy to take over India two centuries ago.  Alas, little attention is paid by academics or journalists to America’s historic treatment of its Hispanic neighbors.

For two centuries, the tiny countries of Central America extending from Mexico to the southern American hemisphere have lurched from one US-backed government to another and from what sociologists call one development path to another, until politically motivated revolts and revolutions were succeeded by gang violence.

Benign neglect is the best one can say about these fiefdoms which United Fruit ruled for over a century. By the 1930s, the vast conglomerate was the single largest land owner in Guatemala. With a total of 3.5 million acres in Central America and the Caribbean, it had absolute power over the governments of these small, under-developed countries. (The phrase Banana Republic says it all.)

In 1944, a popular uprising in Guatemalaled to the country’s first democratic election, introducing near-universal suffrage, and a minimum wage. What happened later made it the poster child for Caribbean turmoil until the Cuban Revolution of 1959. The revolution’s second government, led by Jacobo Árbenz, broke up large estates, distributing property to landless peasants, and legalized the Communist Party. These actions threw up red flags in Washington, and when 40% of United Fruit Company’s land was expropriated, the powerful conglomerate persuaded the Truman and Eisenhower administrations that Arbenz planned to align Guatemala with the Soviet Bloc....