By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The caravan that broke into the news over the Easter weekend of Central Americans marching through Mexico to invade the United States marked at least one breaking point, and should have marked another.
Responding to reports of more than 1,200 people marching to cross defiantly into the U.S., President Trump was forced to take more solid action than he had so far about actually securing the porous, greatly violated Southwestern border. He signed a proclamation directing that National Guard troops be deployed there.
An unknown number of military boots on the ground were to prevent its being trampled by unauthorized tides in the desert.
Other people who should have reached the limits of their endurance were unfortunate non-U.S. Latinos exploited for decades by oligarchs, cartels, and uninterested others.
Prevailing strongmen laugh off improving their homelands and tell their poorer countrymen just to hit the road to the riches-strewn colossus to the north, no matter the disrespect this means for their neighbors’ welfare at home or for U.S. law.
How much longer will “migrants” meekly choke down their dignity and accept the oligarchs’ orders to sneak into the U.S., “hide in the shadows,” and hope for lucky handouts or the indignities of the welfare state here? Meanwhile, their politically useful presence can generate illegal votes for Democratic Party candidates.
As this was written the night of April 4, news reports said the Central American caravan was dispersing in Mexico rather than continuing north en masse. However, an Arizona conservative political consultant told The Wanderer on April 4 that although the caravan might break up, marchers’ goal remained the same.
Because “a lot of those folks marched to cross. . . . I’d expect lots of them to attempt it in small numbers,” said Constantin Querard.
The march reportedly was organized by the leftist Pueblo Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) group, whose website (pueblosinfronteras.org) says its dream “is to build solidarity bridges . . . and turndown (sic) border walls imposed by greed.”
A Reuters news service story posted April 3 said, “Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are among the most violent and impoverished countries in the Americas, prompting many people to leave in search of a better life.”
Late on April 4 Reuters said, “A number of the children in the caravan were suffering from diarrhea, vomiting, respiratory problems, and dehydration,” according to a doctor.
Various marchers reportedly wanted to seek asylum, but the only country they cared to escape to was the welfare state of the U.S.
Some years ago I covered a rally at the Arizona State Capitol against massive illegal immigration. A black activist who had come over from San Diego to join in made a comment that puzzled me at first. It’s the same dirt on both sides of the fence, he said.
What could that mean? The dirt on the San Diego side of the border is the same as on the Mexican side, he said. It’s not some kind of magically wealthy U.S. dirt that can’t be found in Mexico. What happens to the land depends on what people do with it or make of it.
It may take blood, sweat, and tears to reap the harvest, but your own harvest will never arrive if you keep looking over at the other guy’s fields and regretting that his achievements haven’t rewarded you.
For far too long, many people south of the border either seemed willing to settle for unfulfilling socialist dreams, or have those hollow dreams forced on them as all they’re allowed.
The free market, being a human institution, isn’t perfect and has to be tended carefully, but it has proven far more successful at producing wealth for ordinary individuals than any state-commanded economy. Look at how once-hopeful Venezuela has been smashed down by Marxist theoreticians and iron-fisted rulers.
There are any number of free-market think tanks with a variety of resources that aspiring Latino leaders could turn to. The groups may have different emphases, but a shared broad goal of human freedom and flourishing. Exactly the opposite, that is, of the U.S.’s dominant leftist media that ignore, minimize, or suppress this valuable thinking.
One such admirable group is the Acton Institute (acton.org), based in Grand Rapids, Mich., which says its mission “is to promote a free and virtuous society characterized by individual liberty and sustained by religious principles.”
Another is the Atlanta-based Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org), which says it’s “the leading organization opening the hearts and minds of 14- to 26-year-olds to the values of the free market, individual freedom, and strong personal character.”
In recent months The Wanderer has published two articles about Project Arizona (projectarizona.us), an organization founded by Poland’s Jacek Spendel that brings young Eastern Europeans to the Phoenix area for three months to study American principles and entrepreneurship then return home to spread this knowledge.
(See the February 15 [p. B7] and March 29 [p. A3] hardcopy issues of this year’s Wanderer for the Project Arizona articles.)
As for the current Central American caravan toward the U.S., conservative Catholic Rob Haney, a retired chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, based in Phoenix, told The Wanderer on April 4:
“I cannot fault ignorant aliens from Third World countries for wanting to improve their lives by any means they are permitted to get away with. I can fault our own rulers for allowing the success of a six-decade-old Democrat Party strategy of converting our republic into a one-party socialist dictatorship through the illegal importation of socialist voters.
“California was a Republican Party stronghold. It is now a failed socialist state. We can acknowledge that Republican Party leaders were complicit through their support of the illegal alien invasion,” Haney said.
“I can imagine a future socialist historian heaping praise upon Arizona Republican Senators (John) McCain, (Jon) Kyl and (Jeff) Flake, as well as Republican Cong. (John) Shadegg, for their actions in support of the invasion which brought about the demise of their own party,” he said.
(Kyl’s surprise retirement as an Arizona U.S. senator opened the way for Flake to win that seat in 2012.)
“In much the same manner,” Haney continued, “the socialist writer will describe how the support of Democrat Party secular issues by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops led to the demise of the Catholic faith.”
Constantin Querard, the conservative Arizona political consultant, told The Wanderer that while the number of Central American marchers in the caravan was being noticed, it wasn’t unusual.
“While this particular group of 1,500 is getting a great deal of media attention, it is worth pointing out that there is nothing at all unusual about 1,500 people a day coming across our border illegally,” Querard said. “The fact that this group is trying to do it in a very public fashion is helping to protect it from coyotes (smugglers) and the criminal elements who prey on those trying to cross illegally, but it also certainly dooms them to fail.”
Before the dispersal of the large group was announced, Querard said, “There is simply no way that U.S. officials are going to let them cross and/or remain, or the next group will be 15,000 instead of 1,500. Tactically, I wouldn’t be surprised if they travel to near the border in a large group for safety, then scatter and try to make it across in a more traditional small group.”
The Washington Examiner posted on April 4 that, in line with Trump’s toughened position, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen “confirmed…that military officials are looking into building their own barriers along the Southwest border. . . .
“ ‘We’re looking into options for the military to build wall or military installations on the border,’ she added,” the Examiner reported.
Playing Games
Phoenix talk-radio host James T. Harris of KFYI (550 AM) had southeastern Arizona border rancher Ed Ashurst as a guest on April 4. Ashurst flatly listed what he sees as deficiencies: Border Patrol agents aren’t right on the border, there are large expanses of land with no federal presence, and because the Border Patrol is unionized, it’s corrupt and can’t be counted on.
Ashurst said he wants a military presence on the border. In fact, he said, “I do not want a wall….The outlaws will bypass it,” but he wants military “boots on the ground.”
There aren’t many “worker types” crossing illegally now, Ashurst said, but drug-related invaders. “That is a lie,” that the border issue is immigration. “It’s smuggling. . . . It’s smuggling-driven.” Smuggling contraband is the largest business, he said.
Talk host Harris said some of what Ashurst said is controversial, because Harris thinks there are some good border agents.
Harris had lived in Tucson for six years, hosting a radio program there, before moving to Phoenix radio early this year. Tucson is more than an hour’s drive closer to the Mexican border than Phoenix is.
Tucson-area “moderate” Republican Cong. Martha McSally was on Lou Dobbs’ Fox program the previous day, April 3, Harris said, adding that McSally got herself in trouble on the air because she tried to play both sides of the border issue.
“Martha McSally was not honest” with Dobbs, Harris said, adding later, “This is what happens when you play politics.”
The radio host played clips of McSally and Dobbs strongly talking over each other, with Dobbs saying the congresswoman was playing games with him and also warning her, “You can’t just talk over me.”
“Lou Dobbs put Martha McSally in a very difficult place,” Harris told his listeners. “…It was ugly. It was ugly. The politics came through.”
McSally portrays herself as tough on border security. But one of her major supporters in Arizona media, the leftist Arizona Republic, has openly said McSally is just using the same kind of border pretense that the Republic’s political friends John McCain and Jeff Flake have used to fool voters and beat conservatives.
A March 25 Republic editorial that occupied the top half of its editorial page excused McSally’s pose as “simply a political calculation” that she needs to use now. The Wanderer reported this on its hardcopy front page in last week’s issue, dated for April 5, and elsewhere in this issue in a story about former White House official Sebastian Gorka endorsing McSally’s GOP-primary opponent Kelli Ward.
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