By John Klar

Democrats who encourage illegal entry of refugees on our southern border — whether for supposed humanitarian compassion, or to enlist future Democrats on their voting lists — invite a potentially irreversible disaster for our nation. If Democrats make it any more enticing for would-be immigrants, the system may suddenly implode. And because such seismic population shifts can occur almost overnight, America may not have to wait twelve years for the end of its world.

The race issue is abused by the left to attack the right‘s effort to stem illegal immigration, and wrongly employed by some on the right to attack even legal immigration. Both perspectives obfuscate the underlying reality and contribute to culture-war gridlock. The numbers speak for themselves – even if all Central Americans were Caucasian.

Populations and violence

The current population of Central America is nearly 181.5 million; Mexico exceeds 132 million. Gang violence in other countries is pushing migrants into Mexico; from there, the promise of America is the greatest, if not only, hope. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that “El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras rank among the most violent countries in the world,” and “MS-13 and M-18, the region’s largest gangs, are estimated to have as many as eighty-five thousand members in total.”

Ironically, both of these extremely violent gangs (in which murder is allegedly a required qualification for admission) originated in Los Angeles: “Their presence in Central America grew in the mid-1990s following large-scale deportations from the United States of undocumented immigrants with criminal records. The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates there are ten thousand MS-13 members in the United States.”

In El Salvador, these gangs are active in 94% of municipalities, hundreds of thousands of additional people depend on them for their livelihood, and the police wear gorro navarone (ski masks) for fear of gang reprisals against their families. They are even housed in unique prisons, where gangs are separated and are self-ruled.

Some dismiss claims of criminality by illegals within the United States, but the crimes these gangs commit here are brutal and rampant. There are cases of beatings, murder, and barbaric malice abound across the country. It is estimated that about 2,000 murders (13% of total) annually in the United States were committed by the roughly 30,700 gangs here in 2012, and that 80% of U.S. gun homicides are gang-related.

Desperation

The causes of the spike in poverty and violence in Central America are complex, but the result is simple: Millions of people are becoming increasingly desperate to escape. The economic promise of the U.S., coupled with growing gang violence and instability across Central America, has led to nearly 100,000 border apprehensions in March, straining resources to near breaking point.

And yet many Americans agitate to open our nation’s borders completely. World populations are restive and shifting. Climate degradation from pollution, erosion, and drought, political unrest, financial collapse – these promise to increase, not diminish, as our race to consume the entire planet’s resources continues. We must help people where they are: The solution is not to invite them all here in the hopes of thereby solving problems of overpopulation and cultural division. We will merely import those problems en masse.

There are three million homeless in Yemen and 22 million require humanitarian aid. The Rohingya refugees now exceed 900,000. Uganda is estimated to have more than 2.5 million orphaned children. Venezuela and Zimbabwe are in chaos. Need I mention Ethiopia, Somalia, Syria, or the Congo (where Ebola is spreading amidst anarchy)?

As Democrats craft immigration into a moral issue, shedding crocodile tears for DACA children, separated families, and border fatalities, they hamper our nation from effectively addressing a growing global crisis. Straining the definition of ‘asylum’ to embrace domestic violence or homosexuality, liberals wish to absorb the entire world’s domestic social problems onto our soil. Soon, unpaid parking tickets in Tijuana will be grounds for asylum north of the Rio Grande.

Encouraging destitute Central American families to enter our nation by any means invites the rapid disintegration both of physical boundaries and our economic and social stability. Texas and other border areas are presently inundated beyond capacity with this sudden influx; churches are being strained even as donations have declined. Customs & Border Protection are like the drenched sandbags holding back this rising tide, while Democrats keep dragging away bags and raising water levels. The problem cannot be solved technologically. The El Paso area regards 6,000 detainees as a “crisis”: it held an “unprecedented” 13,400 as of March 27: “a breaking point,” according to Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan.

No sanctuary

Democrats oppose ICE and the reporting of illegal immigrants to federal authorities. Across the country, liberal cities and states have proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for people who have entered the country illegally, or who seek to obtain the rights to vote or obtain a driver’s license without citizenship. In some states, such as Vermont, U.S. citizens can lose their driver’s or vocational licenses for nonpayment of child support: There is no verification of whether an illegal immigrant is current on their child support back home in order to grant their “privilege card!” Under such laws, a U.S. citizen in arrears for child support can lose his driver’s license and right to work (e.g., contractor’s, plumber’s, or other license), while a person here illegally who has been delinquent in child support for years in El Salvador could drive freely to his illegal job.

Wall-hating Democrats expended great energy this week to prevent a citizenship question from being added to the U.S. Census, exposing where their loyalties lie by arguing that it might hurt their prospects in the electoral college, “diluting the political influence of millions of people for years to come.” But what is the point of any census at all, if we lack border integrity? What area is it that we would be taking a census of?

Every effort to improve border security is stalled by Democrats’ attempts to make that border more porous – efforts which are signaled abroad, as further invitation to newcomers. Appallingly, Democrats demonstrated a willingness to squander more money in lost economic growth than the cost of a border wall during the government shutdown, actually wasting more than two dollars for every one President Trump requested to construct a wall.

America’s legal systems, and its social and economic stability, are threatened: A wall along our border with Mexico must be built immediately. It will not be built overnight, and as the wall goes up, desperate citizens to its south — kind, good, family people perhaps, or maybe nothing-to-lose rapists, gang members, or drug dealers — will be drawn to make a dash over that magic line to American utopia before there is no path remaining to their north. In other words, the longer our country waits to do this necessary thing, the more difficult it shall become.

Perhaps that is precisely what America’s Democratic Party wishes to achieve, so it can govern the chaos it sows.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield, and pastor of the First Congregational Church of Westfield.