Andrew L. Urban.
The news is broadcast far and wide: California is a safe haven for foreign criminals, complete with instant welfare benefits and voting rights …. come and get it. Thugs Welcome – Bring Guns. If only I were joking.
The recent news about an illegal immigrant, a gangster from Mexico, who shot dead a young police officer during a traffic stop was one of the tens of thousands like him who saw the headlines, heard the news and answered the call.
‘Sanctuary’ is the strangest death wish in America, as strange as Europe’s death wish, so eloquently and informatively outlined by Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe). And it’s the same weapon of suicide: mass migration. In the case of America, it’s a problem of mass illegal migration, the stopping or slowing of which Donald Trump has pursued … is pursuing. Because it is Trump, it must be defied, stopped, discredited and denigrated. When it was Obama’s policy, it was quite OK, and bubbled meaninglessly below the radar of lefty lunacy.
Sanctuary cities, sanctuary states and sanctuary laws not only defy the President, they defy reason. It’s not as if the US didn’t have enough crazies with guns who are legally in the country, these sanctimonious fools drinking from a poisoned cup of compassion, add insult to injury by lecturing middle America and the President about helping the disadvantaged masses who are thronged at the border. And breaching it. Demanding their American welfare and their American rights. This was the playbook written in the 2015 mass migration encouraged by Angela Merkel, that German woman who had the same compassion syndrome that couldn’t distinguish between misplaced compassion and stupidity.
Everyone understands that life is better in the US than in hellholes like Syria and Iran, North Africa and Central America. Life is brutish and short, poverty is bottomless. Many millions aspire to live better – in America, say. In Europe, Britain or Australia. But it is not compassionate to open the borders to all comers, without the kind of controls that everyone accepts at border entry points such as airports, for example. You need a visa, don’t you?
A free for all immigration policy is instant chaos, ultimately destructive of both the host country and the migrants … at least those wishing to contribute, to live productive and healthy lives. Illegal migration turbo charges all the problems associated with national security, personal safety and community order. Many illegal migrants are good people. That’s not the point. The point is that countries have a right to control their borders – as many of them do now. And not only for the benefit of the hosts, also for the benefit of migrants, who, once arrived, wish to be included, accepted and integrated.
On airplanes, when cabin pressure drops, passengers are advised to place their own oxygen masks on before attending to children. There is a good, compassionate reason for that. An unconscious parent is a threat to the child’s safety. The resulting chaos can also threaten the entire plane’s safety.
America admits some 1.3 million migrants annually in its generous legal migration program. The support structures, security agencies and social networks that underpin that program are not designed to support millions more who barge in to the country demanding admittance. That is not how genuine migrants, asylum seekers or refugees behave.
Nancy Pelosi calling the wall that Trump wants to build on the Mexican border – and which was Democrat policy a few years ago – ‘immoral’ is not only hypocritical and transparent but desperate. Or she doesn’t understand morality. Just like California’s Governor.