The Wall is crucial, but it’s not everything.

Caravans of human cargo are filing into the United States because … they can. U.S. law allows it, even invites it.

Here’s how: Provided you’re not a white, South African farmer—in other words, a real refugee—you may plonk yourself at an American “port of entry,” say San Ysidro in San Diego, and simply assert your right to petition the U.S. for asylum.

Then and there you claim asylum on the grounds that your race, religion, nationality or politics expose you to persecution in the country you want to leave.

Compared to a multicultural mecca like America, where faction fighting is rising, Latin American arrivals seem rather homogeneous. Dare I say they’re largely Hispanic Catholics? Dare I ask who’s persecuting them in their homelands?

By the law’s logic, Muhammadan terrorists entering the U.S. through its southwestern border should have a far better legal case for asylum than Latin Americans: “I’m from Pakistan. I’m an LGBTQ activist, fleeing Islamic oppression. You’d better believe it.”

If you can’t quite manage to locate the legally designated gate, and a “misguided” U.S. border agent attempts deportation, you may, nevertheless, “defend” yourself against U.S. law by—you’re getting the hang of it!—lodging an asylum claim.

The American lawmakers and jurists who legislate and adjudicate immigration generally have the migrant’s back, and will right away accept the “credible fear” yarn he spins. He will thus be granted face-time with a judge. Their stupidity (and venality) is also his signal to vamoose, never to be seen again.

Children are the charm, a magic amulet. Courtesy of the Flores Settlement Agreement, unaccompanied children or adults with children must be released after a brief timeout in well-appointed detention centers. (“Cages,” as Democrat ingrates call this generous gift from the put-upon American taxpayer.)

All a single male or childless couple needs to do is grab a child. Borrow one if there isn’t an urchin handy, and drag him along for the trip. However hirsute and ink-covered your juvenile is; he cannot be detained for longer than 20 days.

Next, “the child” and his adopted Caravan “family” (or predatory parent) rest up in detention, fill in asylum applications and are subsequently cut loose in the U.S. with a nod and wink. (“Come back for your court hearing, amigos, know what I mean? Grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more,” as the old Monty Python skit goes.)

Ludicrous? American lawmakers—incontestable majorities on the Republican side included—don’t think so. Why else would they have kept these aberrant, catch-and-release, mickey-mouse laws in place?!

U.S. legislators and jurists have crafted laws for Americans which, in another time and era, would have resulted in charges of treason. (Perhaps Special Counsel Robert Mueller can make himself useful: Investigate the special interests colluding in the immigration racket.)

If this is confusing, here’s the magic maxim our immigration scofflaw should follow: Just do it. Cross illegally. All roads lead to Rome—to the creation of an immutable reality on the ground: By and large, illegal migrants get to stay in the U.S., even though fewer than 10 percent of asylum applications are officially approved.

“If there is no Wall, there is no Security,” said President Donald Trump on one of the few reliable news outlets he has remaining: POTUS’ Twitter account.

Too true. Regrettably, The Law is in even worse shape than the invisible Wall, if that’s at all possible.

Despite two years without any serious political opposition, the Republicans did near to nothing to end the legal limbo described.

In the early halcyon days of 2017, Republicans floated the RAISE ACT,  “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment Act.” It was quickly coffined.

Other than Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, nobody defended or haggled for The Act with any vigor, during the Republican dominance on Capitol Hill, from 2017 till 2019.

Back in 2017, Camarota had raised hell for RAISE:

The “Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment,” he argued, would have slashed family reunification immigration by 50 percent—from 11 million people every decade to 5 or 6 million—still a deluge—providing a much-needed respite for economically poor Americans (and for Americans who feel like aliens in their own country).

Seventy percent of legal immigrants enter the U.S. through the family reunification visa. No consideration is given to their skill, education or the needs of the American economy. Roughly half of the legal intake is lacking in any useful skills and without so much as a high-school education. Fifty percent of households headed by legal immigrants access one or more of the major welfare programs.

At current levels, legal immigration suppresses American wages, especially at the bottom rungs of the labor market, and constitutes, inarguably and overall, a fiscal drain.

America’s poor are so very poor, pleaded Camarota on behalf of The Forgotten American. You’d be giving them a raise by lowering levels of legal immigration.

From the missed opportunity of 2017, we fast forward to the border, in 2019. Yes, there is a crisis on the border. Today, that “crisis” is west of Eagle Pass, in Texas. Tomorrow it’s in your neighborhoods.

©2019 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review,
Quarterly Review, Townhall.com
February 7

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Planning for a show-down, a column of 1,500 Central Americans, largely from Honduras, has been beating a path to the Mexican-American border.

Some report that the column has been halted; others dispute that. Interviewed by Reuters in Mexico, a sojourning mother of seven—what are the chances none is an MS13 gangster?—signaled her intention to proceed to the US, if only to teach President Trump a lesson.

Yes, “Make America Great Again” to you, too, Colindres Ortega.

Organizers and participants in this farce aim, very plainly, to publicly demonstrate that the US doesn’t have borders. Led by anti-American agitators, the procession catalyzed the urgency of action to stop an ongoing invasion. 

Whether it arrives or not, the caravan is a positive bit of theatre. For one thing, the actors are quite correct. The US doesn’t have borders. For another, the caravan vividly exposes the antagonists in this ongoing tragedy: our overlords in DC. All of them.

To narrow the indictment a tad, note the extent to which the Democrats and their news media have avoided mentioning or covering the caravan. At a time when Democrats are fielding populists like Conor Lamb (who won in Pennsylvania) and former rodeo champion Billie Sutton (he hopes to govern South Dakota)—the mess on the border damns them like nothing else.

It’s these villains who’ve agreed to laws that permit anyone—other than white South Africans—to arrive at that border, do their Les Misérables act, claim to face a “credible fear” back home, get a court date, and bolt like so many rabbits, to be seen again only at the voting booth, the welfare office, the DMV and at DACA demonstrations. They’re the malcontents holding up signs that read “America is racist.”

What all the veiled allusions to “catch-and-release loopholes in American immigration law” imply is this: Ostensibly, there’s no way to turn interlopers away once they plonk themselves on the US border, demand a translator and spin some yarn.

So far, President Trump has “signed a proclamation ordering the deployment of the National Guard to the border with Mexico.” This changes nothing. It remains illegal to defend the border by turning these particular trespassers away.

Other than stare these brazen people down, what will the National Guard do? Change diapers, as they did during the 2014 rush on the border?

Flash back more recently to January of 2016, when candidate Trump began alluding to “President Obama’s irresponsible use of executive orders” having paved the way for him, Trump, to also use them freely if he won the presidential race.

“Amen,” I said at that time—provided Trump uses executive power to repeal lots of laws, not make them.

After all, we live under an administrative “Secret State.” Very many, maybe most, of the laws under which Americans labor need repealing. The only laws that should be naturally inviolable are those upholding life, liberty and property, for those are natural rights.

Candidate Trump had gone on to promisingly proclaim that, “The one thing good about executive orders the new president, if he comes in – boom, first day, first hour, first minute, you can rescind that.”

All of which speaks to a broader truth: There is nothing sacrosanct about every law imposed by an overweening national government and its unelected agencies. “At the federal level alone,” the number of laws totaled 160,000 pages,” in 2012. By broadcaster John Stossel’s estimation, “Government adds 80,000 pages of rules and regulations every year.” (How long is the Constitution?) According to the Heritage Foundation, “Congress continues to criminalize at an average rate of one new crime for every week of every year.”

America has become a nation of thousands-upon-thousands of arbitrary laws; whose effect is to criminalize naturally licit conduct. Rather than uphold individual rights, most positive law (namely statutory, man-made law) regulates or criminalizes the business of life.

Laws passed in violation of the natural rights of the people, and by altogether skirting the will of the people’s representatives, need to be nullified. Like the laws making it illegal to repel unwanted invaders, who intend to wage welfare on their hosts, and sometimes worse.

Executive orders, President Trump has issued galore. But relatively few pertain to stopping the invasion ongoing. Needed are executive orders that sunder laws dictating that invaders-cum-“refugees” are to be processed rather than expelled.

Let the president suspend the scam that is the United States Refugee Act. Subject to review, yada-yada-yada. Let the president untether the US government from the Trojan Horse and shake-down scheme that is the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. Again, subject to blah-blah-blah.

In working on behalf of refugees worldwide, private American charities dwarf the US government. Private non-profits do what they do unobtrusively, ethically, with minimum overheads and personnel. They don’t rely on confiscatory taxes! Most importantly, charities disburse aid and empower refugees without entering into agreements and entanglements with supranational bureaucracies, a thing that serves to indenture and endanger Americans, stateside.

In this post-constitutional era, nullification of unjust laws through executive orders is what’s necessary. It’s inevitable that correctives to the corrosive, self-sustaining, intractable actions of the state take the shape of action and reaction, force and counterforce in the service of liberty.

In this unfortunate but inescapable scheme of things, nullification is justice’s Jaws of Life, properly considered a political power tool to pry the people free of bad laws.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
Quarterly Review, Townhall.com, The Unz Review,
WND.com, The Ludwig von Mises Centre for Property & Freedom, Constitution.com.
April 5

* Credible fear screen picture credit.

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