Let’s get something straight — I am not a racist, nor am I a bigot. There’s a difference, and neither have traits I tolerate.
I’m not going to follow the path of so many folks and try to prove my negative assertion. It’s not really any of your business who my friends are; they are a rather heterogeneous, some would even say motley, crew. Sure, there are more Caucasian Americans in that crowd than there are minorities. That’s human nature. I’m not going to be shamed into some false apology.
I once had a fellow whose politics are far to the left of mine accuse me of being a racist, since I take pride in being a native Southerner. He later apologized, profusely, and said he had never seen me so angry. It was purely by the grace of God that he didn’t see the anger that was contained.
First, I am a child of the risen Lord. Second, I am an American. There are a lot of things that come after that, but we can worry about those some other time.
Like all of you (with the exceptions of my Native American friends) I am a child of immigrants. My people came here from England, Wales, Breton France, Scotland, Spain, Ireland, and possibly Northern Europe. Some came here by choice, some more or less by accident. Some were poor, some had a good stake with which to start a life in the New World. One was a craftsman, one was a teacher turned soldier, others were farmers, one was a horse thief, and one was a pirate.
They were not the same. They chose different sides in the American Revolution, the War Between the States, and even the Whiskey Rebellion. But they were all Americans. Even today, with a couple centuries of stewing in the crockpot, my kin and I are often radically different. But we are Americans.
No country can grow without immigrants. Every country needs new blood, new ideas, new energy.
But without the rule of law, there is no country.
On the Mexican border of the United States, there is something beyond an invasion going on. It is no longer a “humanitarian crisis,” or an “issue to be resolved.” It is a full-on invasion, engineered, albeit passively, by members of our own government, to increase their own pool of voters and to thumb their collective nose at the previous administration.
I firmly believe that the president and his crew—be they handlers or followers, you can make you own decision — are like the dog that suddenly caught a car. After months and years of screaming about closed borders being racist, they got what they wanted, and are now in charge. They rolled in like Mad Hatters after the inauguration, intent on undoing everything done by the Mean Old Orange Man. Opening the borders was an easy way to slap President Trump and his supporters in the face, a great big “nanny-nanny-boo-boo” on the electoral playground to those who supported legal immigration. It was politics.
But the folks who so desperately wanted to come here, folks who in some cases deserve the right to chase the American dream, they didn’t see the invitation as politics. They took it seriously, and like folks always have, they began coming to America, seeing a new, easier path than following the legal process.
Along the way, the evil scavengers and predators that follow every movement of mankind saw a way to make money. It’s significant that in some areas of the Mexican border, state and federal authorities have reported a slight drop in drug smuggling. People are apparently much more profitable.
On different news shows the other day, one of the president’s talking heads used the same numbers as one of his critics. Both said there’s an average of 100 people per hour crossing the border every day that are known. That’s twice the number of people in New Hanover, Bladen, Pender, Columbus and Bladen counties, every year.
Some come here in desperation, others with a plan to better themselves and their families. Some come for more nefarious purposes.
I think the most evil part of the whole immigration issue is the “family rule”. All an illegal alien has to do is claim a child is theirs, and in some cases they are released into the U.S. on a promise to turn up for a court hearing someday. “Parents” of unaccompanied children can come into the country to fetch their kids — and of course, they are never seen again.
There’s a documented business in renting children. The kids are often abandoned when they’re no longer needed to provide an excuse to be near the border.
There are thousands of children being packed into warehouses designed to house a quarter of their numbers. Those are the lucky ones. There are children being raped, killed, sold, and left in the desert when there’s no longer a need to use them as cover.
Until Inauguration Day, there was a system in place that was showing promise. The long-vilified wall was making a difference. The deal with Mexico to allow immigrants to wait their turn to cross the border, rather than become illegal aliens, was working.
But the sheer, rabid hatred of Donald Trump, and the determination to undo anything he ever did, has led to children being placed in conditions we wouldn’t allow for unwanted pets.
This is not how we do things as Americans.
Nor do we break the law en masse.
Nor do we expect our elected leaders to encourage people to break the law, then reward them for doing so, and anxiously change laws to make it so they can vote.
I would not care if there were thousands of conservative European Caucasians coming across the Canadian border illegally. I wouldn’t care if the aliens were from Africa, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, or central Russia.
Our country should welcome immigrants — but if those immigrants start off by breaking the law, and avoiding any consequences for doing so, what kind of Americans are they willing to be?
I don’t know how to solve all the problems at the border; I do know the wall, and the policy of wait-your-turn, worked. My heart breaks at the horrors many of those kids have gone through, and what many will still go through when the sex traffickers and drug dealers and slave labor types claim them as their own “lost children.”
What I do know is that the dog has caught the car, and not only does he not know what to do with it, he’s in serious danger of being run over.
