One thing we’ve learned about mass immigration over the past couple of years is that all good people support it. Immigration is the ultimate moral litmus test: when a caravan of poor migrants from the third world shows up uninvited on your doorstep, the decent among us step forward to welcome them in, as commanded by the moral code of cable news, and more importantly by the poem on the Statue of Liberty.
Only bigots and haters slam the door. -- That’s what they’ve been telling us in the media for years now. CNN’s Jim Acosta has made the point repeatedly.
Well, it finally happened. The caravan has arrived. But here’s the funny part. It didn’t arrive in our country, but in Mexico, in the border city of Tijuana, just across the fence from San Diego.
The people of Tijuana are Mexican citizens, so by definition, they are good people, much better than you are. They’re more welcoming and compassionate, less selfish and less American. They must be thrilled by the new arrivals. As immigrants, their new Honduran neighbors will grow the local economy and add rich new diversity to the culture. That’s what low-skilled immigrants always do, again a point that Jim Acosta frequently makes.
So are the people of Tijuana grateful for this caravan from Honduras? Fox’s William Lajeunesse went there to find out first hand. Here’s what he discovered:
LAJEUNESSE: Should this caravan have been stopped at the Guatemala border?
TIJUANA MAN: Of course. I agree with that a hundred percent. They should have.
A DIFFERENT TIJUANA MAN: Your country has to beware of these people because there are bad people...
ANOTHER TIJUANA MAN: They don’t belong here. They’re migrants. It’s the same case as when Mexican migrants go to the U.S. and they’re undocumented
TIJUANA PROTESTER: We do know of incidences of Tijuana and other cities that these people in the caravans are committing crimes … This is not about racism. We don’t dislike a certain group of people because they’re from one country or another. We’re here because our government has not taken control of these invasions.
Wait a second. That’s not at all the script we expected. The migrants are disruptive? They don’t belong here? Some of them are criminals?
It sounds like what they’re saying is, when Honduras sends its people, it’s they’re not sending their best. That’s a racist statement obviously.
We know that because Donald Trump said it about Mexico once, and the geniuses on cable news never forgot it. They’re still talking about that line years later, as evidence of Trump’s white supremacy. And yet here you have non-white people in Mexico saying pretty much exactly the same thing.
How can that be? Let’s check back with Tijuana to make sure we heard that right:
PROTESTER: Donald Trump was right. This is an invasion. What Donald Trump said was true. This is an invasion.
Donald Trump was right? Wait?! How can someone in Mexico say that? Everyone in Mexico hates Trump. He believes in borders. Nobody in Mexico believes in borders. They’re better than that.
Maybe that was just a lone extremist talking, some crazy person who found a microphone and a TV camera.
We’d better check with the elected mayor of Tijuana. If anyone can speak for the people of the city, he can. Here’s what the mayor had to say about the migrant caravan:
“No city in the world is prepared to receive this, if I may, it's an avalanche. It's a tsunami”
An avalanche? A tsunami? Note the dehumanizing terms he uses. If this were a liberal arts college America, the mayor might be suspended for saying that. He’d definitely be in some sort of diversity re-education class by now.
If he worked at Google, he’d be fired instantly. But he’s not a student or a tech drone. He’s the mayor of Tijuana, where people can still say what they think without fear of being denounced by Don Lemon on CNN as a white supremacist. So they do say what they think. And in Tijuana what they think is that massive and abrupt demographic change is destabilizing to a society, no matter what the color of the people involved might be. It’s particularly destabilizing if you’re not rich, and most people in Tijuana aren’t rich.
Even in Mexico, they’re wary of ignoring the law and treating borders like they don’t exist. They know that doesn’t end well.
Most people know that. The difference is, in Mexico, they can say it out loud. We could learn from that.
Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on November 19, 2018.
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