Even if order is restored soon (which I don’t think likely), it will be a long time before we know the full extent of the damage done to the country by the breakdown of border security in South Texas. But there has been one real benefit from the fiasco: We see the immigration expansionists for who they really are.
Unlike some of the more excitable immigration hawks, I don’t believe that the Obama people planned the border surge as part of some Cloward-Piven plan to overwhelm the immigration system. They’re not that clever. But once Obama’s long string of actions gutting immigration enforcement finally came home to roost, it became clear that many on the mainstream left didn’t want to stop it. Harry Reid said this week that thinks the border is already plenty secure, thank you very much. John Lewis tweeted in response to the crisis that “Our doors are open.” During a visit to Texas, Nancy Pelosi dismissed the very idea of borders: “We’re all Americans in this hemisphere, North and South America.”
“Open borders” isn’t an epithet — it’s an actual world view, one all but universal among the leaders of one of our two political parties (and not rare in the other). This is why we haven’t been able to have a normal political debate over immigration: we don’t agree on the basic parameters. When so much of our political class doesn’t believe we have the right to say “no” to foreigners who want to move here, any discussions over limits, categories, enforcement, etc. is irrelevant.