And Now Come the Threats

The open borders/pro-illegal immigration crowd is finally sensing the real mood of the American people. One suspects that they always knew that the majority of Americans opposed their scheme to radically transform the nation, but they apparently assumed that, so long as the nation's political elite had been bullied into silence or submission or co-opted by bribes, public opinion was irrelevant - that they could go over the heads of the American people and simply shove their agenda down the electorate's throat without any messy inconveniences, like, say, elections or referedums (which they knew they would lose).

In this, the US "open borders" lobby took its cue from the pan-European elites who have consistently attempted to bypass European voters on their way to consolidating the European continent under a single superstate. When European voters threw a monkey wrench into their work by rejecting the propose EU constitution, the pan-European elites decided to simply proceed without any further election in direct defiance to the wishes of their people. This maneuver may still work in Europe, but in the US anti-immigration sentiment has congealed into a powerful electoral force. Anti-illegal immigrant ballot measures are passing in many states and localities and GOP politicans - reacting to the radioactive fallout of conservative fury at the party's backing of Bush's aborted amnesty disaster - are scrambling to back immigration enforcement. Even more positively, restriction of legal immigration is now an acceptable topic for political debate.

All of this has made the open borders lobby just a little desperate, and like the good little leftists they are, they are firing back with - you guessed it - threats of violence.

The rapid escalation of the U.S. anti-immigration hysteria -- fueled by ratings-hungry cable-television hotheads and leading Republican presidential hopefuls -- is a dangerous trend: It may lead to a Hispanic intifada that may rock this nation in the not-so-distant future.

Remember the Palestinian intifada of the early 1990s, when thousands of frustrated young Palestinians took to the streets and threw stones at Israeli troops? Remember the French intifada of the summer of 2005, in which disenfranchised Muslim youths burned cars and stores in the suburbs of Paris?

If we are not careful, we may see something similar coming from the estimated 13 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, most of them Hispanic, who are increasingly vilified in the media, forced further into the underground by spineless politicians and not given any chance to legalize their status by a pusillanimous U.S. Congress.

We are creating an underclass of people who won't leave this country and, realistically, can't be deported. They and their children are living with no prospect of earning a legal status, no matter how hard they work for it. Many of them will become increasingly frustrated, angry, and some of them eventually may turn violent.

Ah, yes. The usual leftist cant: If you don't do what we want, we'll kill you.

And who would be responsible for this violence? Well, surely not the people who'd actually commit it - but then leftists never ever blame the actual perpetrators of violence, using "root causes" as their favored vehicle for blaming the usual suspects (Westerners of European descent).

A study released last week by the Urban Institute and the National Council of La Raza says there are about five million U.S. children with at least one undocumented parent.

''The recent intensification of immigration enforcement activities by the federal government has increasingly put these children at risk of family separation, economic hardship, and psychological trauma,'' the report says.

The study looked at the impact of recent U.S. immigration raids in Colorado, Nebraska and Massachusetts, where about 900 undocumented workers were arrested at their work sites, and their children -- most often infants -- were suddenly deprived of their fathers or mothers.

''The combination of fear, isolation, and economic hardship induced mental health problems such as depression, separation anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide thoughts,'' it said.

In one respect, there is a grain of truth to this. These children were put in a precarious position because the US government refused to heed the expressed wishes of its citizens and enforce its laws. Now that enforcement is beginning again, the illegal immigrants and their progeny are doubtless shocked and dismayed. But, as they say, too bad. Leftist pity only extends to those whom they use to advance their positions. Notice how they express no sympathy at all for Americans who see their communities changing before them. Ask yourself: if large numbers of Americans were settling in Mexico, refusing to obey Mexican laws and dilluting Mexican culture, who would the leftists side with? The American invaders or native Mexicans who resented their intrusion? The answer is obvious.

Of think of it this way, if the threat of violence were arising from millions of Americans feeling stress and alienation due to the unwanted changes in their culture and communities caused by illegal immigration - immigration they did not vote to permit and desperately oppose - would the author of this bit of agit-prop have any sympathy for them? Would he blame such violence or threat thereof on the illegal immigrants? Ha. Not a chance. He'd insist on the law being enforced and call out the military to put such "racists" back in line, with as much bloody force as possible. Why? Because Americans of European descent are evil and thus always wrong and peoples of other non-European backgrounds are always right. Period. End of argument.

Carrying out enforcement-only policies, labeling undocumented workers as ''illegals'' and depriving them of hope for upward mobility -- rather than working toward greater economic cooperation with Latin America to reduce migration pressures -- is not only wrong, but dangerous. The millions of undocumented among us will not leave. They will only get angrier.

Thus, Americans seeking to defend their country and culture are ipso facto the bad guys, source of all the trouble.

While much of this editorial is naked fear-mongering designed to bully and threaten readers into questioning their desire for immigration enforcement, it does point out one of the real dangers of admitting large numbers of aliens into your country - the possibility of rebellion. The Romans learned this when they admitted tens of thousands of Goths into their territory during the waning days of the Empire. The Goths first admired the Romans, but when they decided the Romans were getting to heavy handed with them, they rebelled, decimated a Roman army, killed an emperor and began pillaging the Empire, which fell not long after. Latino immigrants (and others) have come in such large numbers, settled in insulated communities, and harbor enough resentment of the dominant Anglo culture that a serious insurrection in certain areas cannot be declared inconceivable. In Los Angeles, Latino gangs are ethnically cleansing blacks from the traditionally-black neighborhoods that the Latino gangs are taking over. Violence and intimidation are the tools of this trade, which the mainstream press is deliberately downplaying. Latino immigrant communities are so large in Texas, Florida, California, New Mexico and Arizona that supressing any militant movement in those states would be expensive, time consuming and bloody. No such militant movements currently exist, though the seeds for such militancy can be found in organizations like La Raza (a racial organization given respectibility by the Bush administration), gangs like MS-13, and far-left Latino movements like MeCHa and Azatlan.

Thus the safest path for Americans is to deal with this potential threat before it gets any worse. That means dramatically ramping up immigration enforcement, building a border wall and supplying the border patrol with the men, equipment and financing needed to do their jobs, and drastically limiting legal immigration. The true dangerous path for America would be to remain passive against this wave of invaders, hoping for peace while the nation's defenses are overwhelmed. That has never worked for other nations, historically. It won't work for the US now.