By CHRISTOPHER MANION
This week’s election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador as president of Mexico formalizes the state of war that Mexico has waged on the United States for decades. Donald Trump is the first president to recognize this state of war, however inchoately. López Obrador, known universally by his initials, AMLO, has finally won the presidential campaign he’s been running most of his adult life. He intends to put Trump’s mettle to the test.
Mexico’s elite Corruptos hate the United States, even though their opulent prosperity depends on us. Every level of Mexican government, business, law, and daily life is rife with cartels and corruption, and the poor suffer the most, always paying, never paid.
These habits required for survival in a soft tyranny are not left behind when Mexicans cross the border, legally or illegally. When I interpret for law enforcement here in the Shenandoah Valley, the sheriff growls — “get their hands out of their pockets!” But they aren’t reaching for a gun, they’re reaching for a wallet. They’ve had to bribe every person in a uniform they’ve ever met in their lives.
The illegal children and adults reaching our southern border are often but not always related. All of them have paid countless bribes to get here. Not only do their Coyote smugglers demand thousands, but they have to pay off local “authorities” every step of the way. And yet, because of the ideological indoctrination that the Corruptos have forced down their throats for generations, their greatest resentment is not for their own oppressors, but for the United States.
As world-renowned economist Lord Peter Bauer put it, Mexicans have learned that their poverty is “our” fault, not the fault of the Corruptos. Poor Mexicans are told that America has exploited them for years. So when AMLO announces that all Mexicans who want to go to the United States have a right to do so, he is telling them: “Go get from the guilty Gringo what he has stolen from you here.”
For AMLO, open borders means “it’s payback time” — for over a hundred years of Yankee oppression, and his massive victory indicates that Mexico’s voters agree. The fact that he has declared war implies that, once a Mexican reaches the U.S., he is entitled to the spoils of that war. Consider: the average Hispanic receiving the generous array of free health, welfare, and educational benefits available in the U.S. for the asking immediately graduates to the standard of living of the upper middle class he left back home.
And AMLO says that every living Mexican has a right to that.
Trump’s Next Move
This week, America’s Catholic bishops are meeting on the border between Mexico and Texas. Their mission is to resonate AMLO’s declaration of Mexican rights and to offer moral cachet to the argument for open borders. After all, children can’t be separated from the criminal adults who brought them nor can they be jailed with them. Thus, they must be released into the country.
Trump has another solution — the promise that got him elected two years ago: the wall.
Confronting the immigration crisis is Trump’s first priority, while the bipartisan Establishment’s first priority is to defeat him. To put it another way, his unprecedented popularity flows directly from his unflinching demand that U.S. immigration law be not only enforced, but strengthened. He resolutely argues that a wall protecting the southern border of the United States is indispensable to that goal.
For the Establishment, the logic is simple: to oppose Trump, oppose the wall.
While elites on both sides of the border have resorted to mockery regarding Trump’s proposal, the average Mexican would hardly find it unusual. After all, virtually every family in Mexico builds a wall around their home as soon as they can afford one. Those walls, often topped with glass, barbed wire, or both, is as necessary to their daily lives as indoor plumbing.
Even liberals understand the necessity of walls. Six years ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat and second-generation Mexican-American, demanded an exception to zoning laws to allow him to build a six-foot-high wall around his official residence. Hillary Clinton’s family home in Chappaqua, N.Y., is surrounded by a high security fence complete with a guardhouse. The new Washington headquarters for Obama’s civil disobedience brigades is surrounded by a wall.
American liberals understand walls. Mexicans understand walls. Even Europeans are coming around. At this writing, four-term German Chancellor Angela Merkel is facing the worst crisis of her career as her coalition partners demand a reversal of her liberal immigration policies.
Like its counterpart in the U.S., Mexico’s powerful ruling establishment has condemned Mr. Trump’s proposal. Mexico’s ruling party might change, but the elites will not. AMLO will have to cut the same deals that the “Institutional Revolutionary Party” (PRI) made during the years it was in power. Regardless of who’s elected, the alliance of Corruptos, the cartels, the military, and the lavish insider network of politicians, businessmen, and financiers has made generations of Mexican politicians and their favored allies some of the richest men in the world.
Meanwhile, the Mexican people have remained impoverished, surrounded daily by a culture of violence, gangs, and bribes.
Bishops To
The Rescue — Not!
In recent years, Catholic prelates in both Mexico and the United States have reinforced the message of Mexico’s corrupt elites. Mexico City’s archdiocesan newspaper, Desde La Fe, lambastes “the arrogant, xenophobic, and racist attitude of the United States,” but Mexican bishops have to be careful: according to Aid to the Church in Need, Mexico is the most dangerous country in the world to be a Catholic priest. If a priest or bishop contradicts the Corrupto party line, he’s putting a bull’s-eye on his back. No one will protect him.
But American bishops don’t face such threats. Yet their voices are among the loudest in the leftist anti-Trump echo chamber. When Bishop Weisenburger threatened to deny Communion to Catholic Border Patrol agents, he was merely riding an episcopal wave of acrimony and vilification of the faithful by his brother bishops towards opponents of amnesty.
Meanwhile, there are nine pro-abortion Catholic senators running for reelection this fall: Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), Joe Donnelly (D., Ind.), Tim Kaine (D., Va.), Heidi Heitkamp (D., N.D.), Bob Menendez (D., N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.), Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.), Joe Manchin (D., W. Va.), and Bob Casey (D., Pa.).
All of them have received a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card from their bishops. Wanderer readers are familiar with a tenth candidate, Cong. Beto O’Rourke (D., El Paso), who has challenged pro-life Sen. Ted Cruz in Texas. O’Rourke tells us that his bishop, Mark Seitz, has never criticized his support of abortion publicly. Bishop Seitz confirms that sad report, but is proud to appear with him at pro-amnesty rallies and calls pro-life officials who oppose open borders “hypocrites” and “Pharisees.”
Perhaps Mexican bishops have an excuse: They fear for their lives. But what are U.S. bishops afraid of? Do they fear losing their hundreds of millions in federal funding if they criticize their pro-abortion Catholic paymasters — including those nine senators and over eighty Members of the House of Representatives?
Canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law is clear: “Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty, and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion.” Our bishops are equally clear: Forget about it.
Every single one of those pro-abortion Catholic senators and representatives has a bishop. Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., has publicly instructed Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) not to receive Communion. Bishop Paprocki, who is both a civil and a canon lawyer, has not yet been struck by lightning or mobbed by screaming shrews in pink hats.
What are our beloved bishops afraid of? Perhaps we should ask them.
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