I don’t think many Americans realize how difficult it is to come to America legally.
Among my own friends, I know an academic who has spent the past year in legal limbo, not allowed to work between teaching positions and constantly waiting on whether he can stay in America or not.
In Georgia, I know a couple — the husband is American, the wife British — who can still not legalize as a couple, despite years of marriage and years of being together, who want to get themselves to America.
The only reason I mention the plight of the law-abiding is because it stands in such stark contrast to the situation of the law-breaking.
Our pro-immigration politicians in America are loudly on the side of anyone who comes to America illegally.
But it is rare to find representatives who are on the side of people who are trying to do everything by the book.
While lots of representatives speak up for the law-breaking, few speak up for or help the law-abiding.
That is because it is perfectly clear that the immigration situation in this country has run away from its representatives.
Human cost
The human scale of this is devastating.
Not just in the fractured and destroyed communities, but in the people who come here looking for a better life having given most of their wealth to the cartels.
America gets only poorer from allowing this constant tide of human misery.
The only people who really benefit from it are the cartels. What an incentive structure to create.
Just this week, a Texas sheriff found an 18-year-old illegal immigrant at the southern border.
The young man had been wandering in the desert for two days, having been abandoned by the cartel he had given all his money to — $3,000, with another $3,000 to follow.
The gang had first tried to recruit him and then abandoned him.
“I want to go home to my mother” he said as he wept.
What country would do this? Incentivize law-breaking while discouraging law-abiders?
Well, actually there are examples.
In the past decade, Sweden — yes lovely, allegedly perfect Sweden — did exactly that.
There was a time until very recently when Scandinavia was meant to be the answer for everything.
Whether it was trust, safety, health care or hot drinks — everything was meant to be better over there.
But then a decade ago its left-wing government decided to reward anyone who just walked into the country.
They allowed in a similar percentage of the population as the US is now allowing in.
And that decision had consequences.
All the stories that Americans have been told not to talk about in recent years, the Swedes were likewise not meant to notice.
Sometimes it was the big bearded men who came into the country and insisted that they were child refugees and promptly got enrolled in a classroom full of kids.
After all, what could go wrong with allowing adults from often dangerous countries to sit all day with a group of teenagers?
Bigot!
Sometimes it was the huge rise in rapes and sexual assaults.
One of the few surveys allowed in recent years discovered that 99 out of 112 gang rapists in Sweden had a foreign background.
But again, you weren’t meant to mention that. “So you’re saying all immigrants are rapists, are you” was the sort of shout-down that went on.
And while nobody was supposed to talk about that, of course, plenty of people couldn’t help noticing that the rise in sexual assaults seemed to correlate very closely with the sudden arrival of tens of thousands of unaccompanied men.
Men who often said they were fleeing war zones, but seemed to have left their families back home.
Ticking bomb
And then there was the rise in the most serious violent crime.
When grenade and other bomb attacks started going off in Sweden, the locals also weren’t meant to notice them.
“Is that another grenade going off?”
“No — it’s just part of the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree. Just all year round. With more noise.”
At first the rise in bombings was suppressed by the Swedish media.
But now even the Swedish media has to cover it.
The point is that within just a few years, Sweden has moved from a peaceful paradise to the country with the second-most bombings in any country in the world not at war.
The only country with more bombings is our own neighbor, Mexico.
How did it happen?
In large part — as here in the United States — because our politicians couldn’t be bothered to enforce the law at the border and preferred to put off reality while they posed as compassionate and kind.
After all, anything is better than looking mean and nasty, isn’t it?
One person who would now say otherwise is Louise Meijer.
She was one of the Swedish lawmakers who in 2015 decided to allow her country’s borders to be wide open.
Or as she put it, she “took a stand for openness.”
But in an interview this week Meijer said, “I have changed my mind on the matter,” and she now supports “an even stricter migration policy than the one I opposed at the time.”
“The change that Sweden has undergone and is undergoing is fundamentally changing the country,” she said.
“Mass immigration has been followed by several major problems.”
These include “serious, organized crime,” the fact that new arrivals are “not self-sufficient” and that their “culture of honor, separatism and Islamism is limiting and dangerous.”
I remember Meijer in 2015.
She was just like those US politicians and media types today who don’t like to speak up for the law here.
People who continue to make life hard for the law-abiding while making it as easy as possible for the law-breaking.
They, too, just want to “take a stand for openness.”
Well perhaps these people who like to think of them as such people-of-the-world could actually look to the rest of the world.
Look to lovely, once-peaceful Sweden and realize that your poses have real-life consequences.
For everyone else first.
Only you next.
