WTF Friday: Who Are You?

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Now that the brave men and women of the Texas Military Forces are on their way to the border (or will be in 30 to 45 days, time, weather and logistics permitting) we can start to address the core causes of the problem. Why are migrants coming here? Who are they? Don’t they know that this is a broken, bankrupt nation sweltering under the unrestrained tyranny of a Kenyan potentate?

1) On this, we find ourselves of two minds. One faction argues that the border crisis occurred because it was planned—the dark handiwork of Barack “Hussein” Obama and the machinations of some combination of the browner nations. There’s Mexico, for example, and… the other ones. It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy at work, you see, the culmination of years of cultural Marxism.

But this group is comprised of the fringiest of the fringe, the crankiest of the cranks—it would be unfair to tag mainstream conservatives with the belief that Obama has been personally orchestrating the arrival of child migrants. We’re talking about groups like … the Texas Public Policy Foundation? Huh.

2) Others have a novel theory, based in science. In this accounting, the United States is a giant magnet, and Central American teenagers, high in iron and other ferrous metals, are pulled here by freedom’s inexorable call. So dissuading them should, in theory, be simple: Stop the Magnet. Eliminate the things that make the United States an appealing and hospitable place to oppressed peoples. In Texas, that means making education more expensive and life more dangerous for undocumented migrants by eliminating in-state tuition and “sanctuary cities.” Stop the Magnet has a new champion: His name is state Rep. Steve Toth, and he’s running for a Texas Senate seat in The Woodlands.

Steve Toth has garnered the respect from the activists focused on the immigration issue. He has demonstrated by his deeds in investigating the locations and conditions of the sites where the Office of Refugee and Resettlement […] are bringing in poverty-stricken and in some cases, diseased or criminal alien minors.

This is a very American sentiment, as memorialized in the often-forgotten second stanza to Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” inscribed for posterity at the foot of the unfortunately Gallic Statue of Liberty:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Now stop the magnet, stop it now.
Send them back, and send no more
All these folk should go back, wow.
They’re sick and smell, and hell, they’re poor.

If he wins next week, Toth will become Stop the Magnet’s man in what’s sure to be a pretty anti-immigrant state senate. But is Stop the Magnet going far enough? Perhaps the only way to ensure migrants stop coming to Texas is to make the state uninhabitable for everyone. Our bounty of breathable air and drinkable water is a magnet: So is our transportation network and public school system. I have little doubt that the 84th Legislature will tackle these problems head-on.

3) So now we know why they’re coming: But who are they? Yes, they’re OTM UACs, but who are they inside? A raging debate is taking place on this question up and down the state. State Rep. David Simpson, a steadfast conservative who’s nonetheless a very earnest and heartfelt Christian, went down to the border and thought seriously on this question. He came back to Longview and spoke honestly to his constituents.

Yes, we should tighten the border, he said. But these are also kids, some of whom have experienced horrors that we cannot possibly imagine. And we should be kind, and open to them and their needs. Some have been grievously abused. Many feared for their lives, and many do still. Basically, he bet that he could talk to his constituents like adults that could hold two competing thoughts in their heads at once.

“I believe your constituents should come first when you talk about people who are impacted,” Terri Hill of Longview said during a town hall session that followed a slide show of Simpson’s recent tour of the southern border. “You are to represent us, and we have children. These (immigrants) are people that are coming in with leprosy, tuberculosis, polio.”

[…]

“I’ve got four kids and a fifth one on the way,” Ben Denson of Gilmer told Simpson from a forum microphone. “These (Central American) kids have scabies and influenza, viral pneumonia, leprosy. These kids are going to be part of the school system. They are bleeding Texas (Democrat) blue.”

Another fellow had a more direct diagnosis of the illness at hand:

“These people are not coming in with a good, Christian heart.”

WWJDTAAPEOMWAPHAAPIB? (What would Jesus do to alleviate a prolonged exodus of minors, who are probable heathens, along a porous international border?)

4) Are they Christians? Well, I suppose it depends on what kind of Christians. Many of them, worshippers of the Pope in Rome, are not the good kind of Christian. Mary and Dale Huls, two Houston-area tea party activists with the First Baptist Church of Seabrook, have been going down to the Rio Grande Valley lately to lend a hand. Their exploits are lovingly chronicled by Breitbart Texas’ Bob Price, author of such lovely stories as “ANIMALS FEAST ON BODY OF DEAD MIGRANT.”

There is a long and storied tradition of white conservatives from around Texas going to the Valley for the first time and losing their shit, so in a way it’s a small positive step that the Huls have complimentary things to say, even if they’re Baptists doing missionary work in a Catholic community that they don’t seem to quite understand. (They’re also part of a border militia, so, cool.)

In her work with the FBC mission, Huls observed the part of Falfurrias that doesn’t make the news. “There is a face of Falfurrias that is seldom seen,” she said. “It’s the face of a people who are committed Americans, complete with USA and Texas flags in their yards, who are being over-looked.”

Hispanic people living near the border who are committed Americans? Hold on, let me put my monocle back into place, which I dropped when my face went wide with shock. I hope more information, coming shortly, won’t make me spit out this water in my mouth in a comically exaggerated fashion.

“These folks have totally bought into the American dream,” Huls continued. “They name their kids Taylor, Gilbert, Joslyn and Kaitlyn rather than Juan, Manuel or Maria. They keep up their homes in the projects with a quiet dignity and encourage their children to attend our mission clubs.”

Ew.

5) This weekend, as we drink heavily, let us take time to salve the wounds that arise from our own misconception of each other. Namaste, y’all.