We appear to have a problem on our southern border.
Huge numbers of children are showing up unescorted, and rather than seeking to evade Las Migras (Border Patrol) they are seeking them out and surrendering. They are then taken to holding facilities where though crowded, they’re at least getting three hots and a cot.
Among those “children” are an unknown though certainly significant number of teens who appear to have gang tattoos.
It’s hard to tell how many because the press has been denied access to the detention centers. This is the kind of thing the press likes to rise up in righteous wrath against but so far the silence has been deafening.
In a town called Murrietta, California, attempts to relocate some of these detainees in Border Patrol facilities were met by demonstrators who have forced buses to turn back. For now.
The actions of the citizens of Murrietta have been decried by all generous and right–thinking people who live near the border.
The Canadian border that is.
What seems to have happened is that word has reached the southern parts of our hemisphere that the U.S. is no longer enforcing border controls.
Furthermore the hordes of hopefuls seem to have gotten the impression from somewhere that the U.S. has a very generous social welfare system they are perfectly welcome to partake of.
I wonder where they got that idea?
The results are about what you’d expect when your rich uncle invites all his poor relatives to move in, stay as long as they like and help themselves to whatever is in the fridge.
It’s not like they’re entirely unwanted. Democrats like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks they’re so adorable she wants to take them all home. Where they can work in her Napa Valley vineyard and look forward to becoming citizens and registered Democrats.
But there are plenty of Republicans ready with offers of low-wage labor and a piece of the American dream.
What to do? What to do?
I have a question. I have lost count of how many times I have asked this question.
Does anybody else see how seriously weird it is we’re even having this debate?
Every country in the world, with us as the only exception, regards their right to control their border as a given. Not even up for discussion!
It’s pretty much what defines a country. A line, your laws on your side, our laws on our side.
And yet there is serious opposition to the idea that we have a right to control our territory, to admit or exclude who we chose.
In the past the criteria we declared and enforced were often mean-spirited and racist. But the general idea was, were you willing to become an American, to assimilate, learn the national language, the history, the laws?
I have friends from Europe and Asia who are of the first American-born generation of their families, who quite unself-consciously speak of “our Revolution” and “our Civil War.”
And of course they are quite right. Being American, almost unique among the nations of the world, is not a matter of birth but a relationship with a philosophy of liberty and self-government.
I have helped defecting Chinese find their way to a new life in America. I’ve helped Iranian refugees get legalized. I worked with Mexican kids who came out of the shadows during the Reagan amnesty.
I’ve also lived in a country, former Yugoslavia, which tore itself apart over ethnic and linguistic divisions I couldn’t even see. I lived in the Baltic States where the citizens were terrified by the presence of large Russian minorities settled there when they were under the Soviet occupation.
My children’s mother is an immigrant.
So you could say I’ve seen the best and the worst of immigration. Will you then take my word that everything I’ve seen of this crisis looks bad, and in the long run possibly fatal for our country and all we’ve achieved?