The Angry Summer

Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth
my hands to war, and my fingers to fight . . .
—Psalm 144:1

According to the Washington Post, McAllen, Texas is an “all-American city,” albeit one “that speaks Spanish.”  So it’s small wonder that “immigration isn’t a problem for this Texas town—it’s a way of life.”  The Post’s Kevin Sullivan knows.  He visited McAllen and stopped in at Maria’s, a local restaurant offering pollo en mole for a reasonable $8.25 and, for a quarter, “patriotic red, white and blue peanut M&Ms” in a gumball machine at the front door.  One can almost envision Norman Rockwell portraying this “all-American” city on canvas.  Sullivan goes on to reveal that McAllen, located on the U.S.-Mexico border, is a suitably “diverse” environment for a Washington Post reporter: Maria’s, he tells us, “is a reflection of the blended community it has served for 41 years,” raising the question of how “blended” the “all-American city” can be if it speaks Spanish and was, as Sullivan informs us, “built on immigration.”

That’s not quite the case, and if Kevin Sullivan had done a quick Internet search, he could have brushed up on McAllen’s history.  McAllen is, indeed, just across the Rio Grande from Reynosa, Mexico.  Today, its population exceeds 142,000 souls.  The city was founded in 1904 by John McAllen and his son James on land allotted from the family’s ranch, and the city’s charter was adopted in 1916.  As of 1970, McAllen’s population was less than 38,000.  As a border town, cross-border traffic has always been part of the city’s life.  A suspension bridge linking the “City of Palms” with Reynosa was built in 1940.  Oil, agriculture (cotton, alfalfa, citrus fruits, grapes, figs), and cross-border trade were the basis of the city’s economy.  Mexican laborers crossed the bridge to work in McAllen.  What we might call “temporary guest workers” were often housed in camps established by state and federal authorities.  Carolina Garza, whose family runs Maria’s, assured Sullivan (who noted that immigration had become “the nation’s nastiest political battle in the angry summer of 2018”) that McAllen had a “border culture” and that “these people”—immigrants or “migrants” in the Post’s parlance—“are not monsters to us.”  Indeed.  They speak Spanish, so in the “all-American city” they should feel right at home.

No matter what Kevin Sullivan may believe, however, life has not always been tranquil along the border.  As late as 1920, according to an article posted on the Texas State Historical Association’s (TSHA) website, 20,000 National Guard troops had to be deployed near McAllen to “help with border disturbances,” a delicate way of describing cross-border raids and cattle theft that had been going on for years.  The TSHA notes that raids in 1912-15, for example, had “converted the area into a combat zone.”  The Rio Grande Valley has an historical reputation for machine politics, graft, corruption, and political bosses manipulating what is politely called the “Hispanic vote” nowadays.  Following a rigged election in 1928, largely Anglo-American farmers fought back in the so-called Hidalgo County Rebellion, resulting in the ouster of regional political bosses.  Relations between “Hispanics” and Anglos were wary, to say the least.

Kevin Sullivan, however, needn’t worry.  The “Hispanics” are winning the battle along the border in McAllen, Texas.  As blogger Steve Sailer has noted, our globalist elites and their minions such as Sullivan are often exhorting us to cheer on “the Latin American influx” as “an exciting social experiment,” one that might lead to “who knows what spicy, perhaps magical, outcomes.”  Yet, as Sailer pointed out, “vibrantly multicultural” McAllen (at the time of the 2000 Census, over 80 percent Hispanic, with 76 percent of residents over five years of age speaking a language other than English at home) is today part of the least educated urban area in America (the McAllen-Edinburg-Mission tri-city area, according to a WalletHub.com survey), one of the unhealthiest (at number three out of the 100 most obese cities in America), and the worst city in America for residents feeling unsafe outside their homes.  (Less than half of respondents to a Gallup survey felt comfortable outside their homes after dark.)  Moreover, as of 2012, 34.5 percent of McAllen’s residents lived below the poverty line (more than double the national rate of 15.9 percent), and only 50.6 percent of McAllen residents over the age of 25 had a job.

We do, in fact, know something about what a mass influx of Mexicans and Central Americans will mean for our country.  McAllen, Texas, the “all-American city,” provides a preview of what is in store for us if the southern border isn’t secured.  Meanwhile, as Sailer wrote, the Washington Post is running stories about why nobody in the Mexo-American city of McAllen, Texas, can understand “why anybody in the rest of the country is worried about immigration’s effects.”

As Sailer often states the case, the reason we are worried is because we have noticed some things, and noticing is something that the Washington Post and other globalist mouthpieces don’t want you to do.  I noticed long ago that the working-class neighborhood where I grew up in Houston had been transformed into a barrio.  As it happens, my maternal grandmother was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley, in Edinburg, Texas.  Like so many families from rural areas and small towns in Texas and the Southwest, her family came to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression.  My grandfathers and one of my great-grandfathers worked at the Houston shipyards.  With World War II on the horizon, shipbuilding was a booming business, and people whose families had farmed, ranched, worked for railroads, and the like made what for them was a good living.

We had a good life.  My father, a carpenter, built a house for us in the 1950’s, but the old neighborhood was showing signs of deterioration by the mid-1980’s.  The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 finished off my old neighborhood and transformed the entire Houston metropolitan area.  (We should remember both that the 1986 law promised the enforcement of immigration laws in exchange for what was supposed to be a one-time-only amnesty, and that the enforcement part was quickly forgotten.)  It all happened very swiftly: The dam had burst.  By the early 1990’s, “gang activity” led to a murder just blocks from my parents’ home.  The house was burglarized on two occasions.  My father began keeping his pistol handy.  Coming home (my immediate family and I were living in Virginia at the time) was a shock.  Taco wagons, “low rider” cars, drunk driving, loud and obnoxious Spanish-language music, litter, housing filled as tight as sardine cans, petty crime—these were signs of “the new normal” in my old neighborhood.

The final straw came in 2013 when a car likely driven by an illegal alien—it had shot out of the parking lot of an auto shop where only Spanish was spoken—slammed into my parents’ Ford sedan.  Fortunately, my parents were not seriously injured.  My father, 81 at the time, was driving; their car was hit on the driver’s side passenger door.  The car was a total loss.  And the man who hit them sped away.  None of the Spanish-speaking witnesses would cooperate with the police.  My parents, who had been living behind barred doors and windows for decades by this time, had had enough.  They sold the old house and moved.  Again, we do have a very good idea of what a mass influx of Latinos means for our country.  Meanwhile, our history is derided, our ancestors denigrated, our holidays replaced or neglected (San Jacinto Day and Texas Independence Day pass with very little fanfare each year; Cinco de Mayo, you might have noticed, has largely superseded them), social trust is evaporating, and Latino-style corruption and crime are cropping up on American soil.

Will that be America’s future?  Is our destiny to become just another “shithole country”?  It will be if our enemies have their way, and they are relentless in pursuit of that dystopian goal.

The “angry summer” was preceded by a provocation staged by open-borders advocates, which was aimed at forcing a confrontation their mass-media allies could use in an incessant campaign to attack and undermine the Trump administration.  I’m referring to the “caravan” of Central Americans that made its way through Mexico last spring.  Pueblo Sin Fronteras (“People Without Borders”—the anti-American left isn’t especially subtle), the organizer of the caravan of about 1,000 Central Americans, most of them from Honduras, was clearly acting with the aid of the Mexican government.  Mexico herself has tough immigration laws, and has been known to employ harsh measures against Central Americans who illegally enter that country.  In the particular case of the “caravan,” however, Mexican officials reportedly gave members of that merry band passes of 20 to 30 days to proceed through Mexican territory, and even directed them to immigration centers along the U.S. border to claim asylum.  President Trump announced that he had been assured by Mexico City that the caravan would be “broken up,” and dispersed it was, eventually, with smaller groups continuing to the U.S. border.  Our Mexican “friends,” however, never had any intention of halting the caravan, actually breaking it up, or turning it back.  Whatever duplicitous Mexican officials told Trump was a ruse.

By June, many caravaners, some of whom had been boasting of defying Trump and U.S. law (“See you soon, Mr. President,” declared Salvadoran Marvin Geovanni Alvarez, as reported by Britain’s Daily Mail; for good measure, Mr. Alvarez added that Trump was “crazy” and a “racist” for attempting to enforce the U.S. border), had reached the border and been apprehended by the Border Patrol.

Act II of the summer immivasion spectacle followed—the tearjerking tale of “families” that were being “separated” by the heartless Trump.  That drama had also been set up last spring, with a wave of “asylum seekers,” allegedly fleeing crime and violence in their homelands, filling border detention centers.  To be sure, their homelands (mostly Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras) are violent and crime-ridden.  But, as pointed out by VDare.com’s Allan Wall, massive numbers of people from Central America crashing the gates at the U.S.-Mexico border wouldn’t decrease crime; it would “just move it” to American territory.  Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had declared a “zero tolerance” policy, a policy meant to deter those making “defensive asylum” claims, which are used by illegal aliens as a means of avoiding deportation.  “Zero tolerance” meant that whether or not an asylum claim was filed, illegal border crossers would be prosecuted.  Sessions’ Justice Department aimed to expedite criminal proceedings and deportations.  While the parents were undergoing criminal proceedings, the children with them were held separately, the source of much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the usual suspects, who were feigning concern about “family separation.”  Families are, of course, routinely separated during criminal trials and by incarceration, and “family separation” had actually been going on at the border for years before Trump took office.  Media outlets sometimes made use of “children in cages” pictures that were actually file photos taken during the Obama administration.

Would-be invaders had caught wind of the story that having a child with them would ease their entry into the U.S.  The 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement and subsequent court decisions had prohibited holding children for long periods, generally no more than 20 days.  Since it usually takes much longer than 20 days to initiate asylum hearings and court proceedings—there’s a substantial backlog of cases—the frequent result of detaining illegal aliens is “catch and release,” with illegals simply vanishing after being released from custody, never to return for a court hearing.  As it turned out, “migrants” were sometimes crossing the border with children who were not their own: DNA swabs had clarified what was going on.  As related by the Daily Mail, the administration had also found that a significant number of the adults accompanying the children were wanted criminals—child abusers, kidnappers, murderers, drug runners, and “human smugglers.”  In July, Trump told the plain truth: Illegals and human traffickers were “using children” to manipulate the American immigration system and stay in the U.S.  Later that month, the President signed an executive order ending the “family separation” policy, but that order left the issue unresolved: Would “families” be held together, or would “catch and release” be restored? 

When Trump signed the executive order ending “family separation,” the Justice Department quickly filed a request in federal court asking that the rules on detaining children be changed.  When a deadline to reunite children under five years of age with the adults they had come with passed, news media were quick to press Trump on what would happen next.  The President, again displaying a common sense that is not so common among reporters, said, “Well, I have a solution.  Tell people not to come to our country illegally. . . . We have laws, we have borders.  Don’t come to our country illegally.”  Right, Mr. President.  They should stay in their own countries, forego a dangerous trip, and prevent their families from being “separated.”  Return home with them, and the families won’t be separated, either.  Nobody is preventing that.  There is one problem, however: Some of the “migrants” don’t really care about being separated from their families.

The dishonesty of our “fake news” media is breathtaking.  While the screeching about “separated families” was at a full howl, Time’s photoshopped cover of a bullying Trump glaring at a crying “migrant” child was exposed as a fraud: The two-year-old girl had not been separated from her mother, as the picture implied.  And the mother?  She had paid a human smuggler (a “coyote”) $6,000 to get her into the United States—abandoning her other children and her husband, who did not know about her plan to go to the U.S., in Honduras.  “Family separation”?  The Washington Post subsequently reported that some “migrant” parents who were being deported might want to leave their kids behind.  They believe, chirped the Post (assuming we are, in fact, talking about their actual children), “Their children’s best option is staying in the U.S.”  Do tell.  Are these the “Hispanic family values” of “natural conservatives”?  What about our own children and their future “options”?  Are our resources limitless?  How many people seeking other “options” should be allowed in before we have to start thinking in terms of “lifeboat ethics”? And whose children should come first?  Our own, I should hope, though that simple and fundamental sentiment seems beyond the deep thinkers of the Washington Post.

Perhaps even a Post editor could grasp what I’m getting at if he took the time to ponder a 2012 Gallup survey: Gallup polled more than 452,000 respondents in 151 countries and arrived at the conclusion that 13 percent of the world’s adult population, more than 640 million people, would like to leave their home country permanently, with 150 million preferring the U. S. of A. as their ultimate destination.  That’s not counting accompanying relatives, of course.  Meanwhile, the U.N. estimates that Africa’s population will reach four billion by 2100 (as reflected in what Steve Sailer has dubbed “the most important graph in the world”).  We live in an era of instant communications and, in historical terms, relatively quick and easy travel.  Mass migration—in the present case, mass migration from the global South to the global North—is being facilitated by technological advancements.  Hence the mass-migration crisis in Europe and the crisis at our own southern border.  Need it be said that such mass movements of populations have brought on the collapse of vast empires and civilizations in the past?

If stories of Americans falling victim to crime committed by aliens, including murders and rapes committed by MS-13 across the country; of Mexican drug cartels taking over American parklands for marijuana cultivation and drug trafficking; and of “human trafficking,” much less our importation of hostile Muslims, are not enough, let us ponder what seems likely in the future.  Our country is being inundated by “migrants,” who are coming in such numbers and at such a pace that their bringing the crime, violence, and dysfunction of their home countries with them is inevitable.  What is happening in those home countries?  Consider the violence in Mexico: During this year’s election campaign, over 120 candidates were assassinated.  Over 200,000 (and that’s the official figure—the actual body count is probably higher) have been killed in Mexico since 2006, and Mexico’s official murder count last year was over 25,000.  “Socialized” or “mass” crimes are becoming frequent in Mexico—mobs loot department stores and supermarkets, derail and rob trains, and are tapping into oil pipelines, often with the help of the drug cartels, which have numerous other business interests these days.  As far as Central America, El Salvador and Honduras are frequently listed among the most murderous countries in the world.

The enemies of Donald Trump and historic America obviously aim to erase borders altogether and overwhelm America’s “deplorables” in what is clearly a plan of population replacement.  They no longer hesitate to tell us what they are up to: Slogans like “No countries, no borders!” and “Abolish ICE!” as well as their frequent and passionate calls for white people to hurry up and die off should tell us everything we need to know.  In their Post-America of the future, a thin overclass will rule a growing underclass and a hard-pressed and declining middle class.  The vast tentacles of the managerial state, buoyed by its dependents, will envelop what’s left of historic America, by then chiefly a “geographic expression.”

We, fellow deplorables, will be homeless.

Mass immigration is being used as a weapon in the war globalists are waging against sovereign nations and their peoples.  It is proving to be a far more dangerous weapon of mass destruction than the stockpiles of bombs and missiles the great powers accumulated during the Cold War.  If our enemies win this war, we may forget about the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and indeed, about the Constitution itself.  We can forget about property rights, overturning Roe v. Wade, freedom to practice our religion, all of the conservative slogans, all of the achievements of a great country and the people, religion, and culture that produced it.  Globalism is a totalitarian faith, essentially antihuman, at its root, a manifestation of the great rebellion against God Himself.  They will not leave us alone.

My novel, Field of Blood, is partly a fictional vehicle for highlighting the very high stakes in the immigration war, and what globalist ideology means for ourselves and our posterity.  The novel’s characters suffer from a sense of loss as they face moral dilemmas that could have been prevented.  Near the end of the story, one character, a former military chaplain, reflects on what has come to pass, in ruminations meant for a younger generation:

So, it is finished.  I’ve lived through the worst of it.  When I was over there and saw what was happening, I knew what the endgame was.  The world I knew is gone.  Most of the things I’ve loved are gone.  We’ve left a mess behind us.  You’ll have to make something new.  I don’t have all the answers.  You’ll have to find them yourselves.

The immigration war isn’t over just yet, but time is not on our side.

As of this writing, Donald Trump is threatening to shut down the government if Congress does not fund a border wall and enact patriotic immigration reforms.  He faces an uphill battle, with members of his own party undermining his administration’s every move.  On July 11, Attorney General Sessions tightened asylum rules, but on July 25, Breitbart reported that the GOP-run House Appropriations Committee had voted to “bar government officials from spending any time or money” on implementing Sessions’ reform.  Trump retains “the bully pulpit,” and he will have to use it to mobilize his supporters to counter his—and our—enemies.