May Day Mobs and Threats

Yesterday’s "Day Without Illegals" manifestly failed to paralyze the US, failing to bring out the millions of demonstrators the organizers hoped to mobilize. But Americans should draw little comfort from that. Where protestors did turn out, the numbers and the message were telling. Hundreds of thousands marched in Chicago, Los Angeles and Denver. These protestors – illegal aliens, Latino activists and leftists of various stripes – brazenly demanded that their deliberate violation of American law and national sovereignty be officially accomodated by native born Americans and legal immigrants.

It says a lot about contemporary American culture that illegal aliens would feel safe enough to openly threaten the population of their host country. And make not mistake, yesterday’s protests were meant as a threat. That’s what a boycott is: economic retaliation for some perceived grievance. In this case, a million or so illegal aliens were demanding that the nation whose laws they’d broken legitimize their crime and surrender its inherent right to national sovereignty. Yesterday was meant as a show of muscle, both economic and physical, a not-so-subtle display to the American people the size of the alien population growing within the US, with the direct implication that this population must be appeased, or there will be trouble. Pat Buchanan, who has been warning of this scenario for years, puts it best:

May Day was a strike against America. It was a show of force, a demonstration of raw street power to force the government of the United States into granting to 12 million illegal aliens, who have broken our laws and broken into our country, not only the full benefits of U.S. citizenship, but full citizenship.

It was brazen act of extortion to coerce Congress to grant amnesty now, and not to enforce our immigration laws or secure the Mexican border – or to be ready for big trouble in the streets.

Buchanan realizes the increasingly mortal threat to the US from the open border. The protests in the US have advertised to the rest of the world both American physical vulnerability (virtually anyone can run across the border) and American internal weakness. If the US government cannot effectively control its own territory, than what does it control? If the American people allow themselves to be blackmailed by lawbreakers on their own soil, how will other foreigners regard American law or policy? They will properly regard it with contempt.

Buchanan sets forth the response he’d like to see:

Congress cannot capitulate. The response of any Congress that calls itself American to such extortion should be a direct one:

"We are not intimidated. There is going to be no amnesty. The border fence goes up this summer. Those are our non-negotiable answers to your non-negotiable demands. Demonstrate all you want. We're not capitulating."

The message that would go out to the world would be electric: Congress will have said, first, that the United States will not be cowed by strikes or boycotts by law-breakers. Second, America intends to re-establish control of her border. Third, the invasion route from Mexico is going to be closed, forever.

Fourth, those who come to America henceforth will be those we invite in. And, as guests, they will behave as guests – or they will be going back home. As for businesses that cannot get along without illegal foreign labor, if some of their CEOs are prosecuted and put to work in Arizona building that security fence, they will rapidly rediscover how to make a buck without colluding in an invasion of their country for commercial purposes.

It’s precisely the right response. And it will never happen. President Bush has refused to enforce the border – even after September 11th – rendering all his much inflated talk of "homeland security" and a "war on terrorism" as cynical hype. If the president believed even a fraction of his rhetoric on the threat of terrorism (which, unfortunately, is all too real), securing the borders would have been the first thing done. Since he has left the borders open, we can conclude he either doesn’t believe foreign terrorists are trying to enter the US, or is hoping that they succeed. The GOP is fracturing badly over the issue with the pro-business wing driving the open borders policy straight toward party suicide.

Democrats, of course, like the open borders policy, since they know that the millions of Mexicans and Central Americans pouring across the borders will instantly qualify for all sorts of public assistance. Many, coming from poor and leftist-trending countries, will expect such assistance. Once they have been weaned on taxpayer-supported education, welfare and medical care, they can be readily assembled into a new ethnic political bloc, which will almost certainly vote democrat (for more public assistance), assuming they bother to vote at all. Karl Rove’s delusions notwithstanding, they will certainly not vote Republican. The danger of encouraging the emergence of a new and potent ethnic bloc for American cultural cohesion is lost on the Democrats, for whom patriotism, nationalism and American are increasingly dirty words, soaked as they are will notions of imperialism, racism and oppression. This is not Jack Kennedy’s Democrat Party.

In the fourth century, the Roman Empire lost control of its western borders. A paucity of young men to fill its legions, worsened by political infighting and paralysis in Rome, led Roman emperors to permit thousands of barbarians to migrate, unchecked, into Roman land and settle there. The barbarians – Visigoths, by name - who made this journey, driven by even more hostile tribes nipping at their heels, mostly admired the Roman way of life. But they weren’t Romans, and their allegiance remained to their own tribesmen and tribal identity. When the Romans could not assimilate their numbers (and they didn’t much try), the Goths grew hostile, rebelled and ultimately sacked Rome. This is not so unusual a story in history. The characters and details change, but the plot plays itself out again and again.