At her bicentennial, most Americans believed America to be a beacon of light to the world, with legal immigrants drawn by hopes of opportunity, building something and becoming an American success story. America and everything she stood for were things of value and unique, and those who came counted themselves as fortunate. As we approach her semi-quincentennial, things are different.

Today, large swaths of Democrats disparage America as illegitimate in one breath while, in the next, saying that we should allow in every person who wants to walk across the border and suckle at the public teat.  After all, “Columbus was an immigrant.”

America is indeed a land of immigrants, as we’re constantly told. Actually, every place is a land of immigrants, for immigration is a hallmark of human history.

Wherever humanity originated, at some point, members of the species immigrated everywhere else. It’s almost never a simple process. Sometimes, it’s because people were chased from their homelands, like the Vandals who were chased by the Huns from eastern Europe into the Roman Empire, eventually settling in Gaul, then Iberia and, finally, North Africa. Other times, it’s because of people who seek to expand their territory through conquest, as happened with the various Muslim caliphates that emerged from Mecca and Medina, whose desire to encircle the Mediterranean was only stopped by Charles Martel in Tours in 732 and by John III Sobieski in Vienna in 1683.

Image: YouTube screen grab.

History is full of examples of people immigrating from one place to another. We often think of the earliest people moving into an area that was previously uninhabited. That may possibly be true of North and South America, but for the most part, it’s not true. When the earliest humans immigrated out of Africa and into Europe, Asia, and Oceania, they encountered our cousins, the Neanderthals, and after 100 centuries of war, eventually eradicated them.

All of this is to say that immigration is nothing new in human history. And it’s not in American history either. Pre-Columbian people in what’s now North America came across the Bering Straits at the end of the Ice Age and then, even in that large land, jostled with each other over territory.

The modern United States was built by immigrants from Europe from a land that was extraordinarily sparsely populated when they arrived. It’s estimated that there were 4.5 million inhabitants north of the Rio Grande in 1492, or about one-half a person per square mile. That compares to approximately 32 in Mexico at the time, 33 in Spain, 60 in France and 103 in India, the world’s densest nation at the time. Today America stands at approximately 100 people per square mile.

From its beginning, the land that became America experienced a series of waves of immigration, which included approximately 86 million people through 2019, a number that has increased to approximately 100 million over the last 5 years. Although Donald Trump stemmed the tide somewhat, Joe Biden has opened up the floodgates with more than 10 million illegal immigrants pouring over our now-nonexistent border since his installation. That’s fully 3% of the US population. As significant numbers of those people are heading to New York, California, and other blue states, which roll out the red carpet and give them free money, the Democrats are grateful because this swelling population helps their congressional numbers.

This is simply not sustainable. Particularly when the overwhelming majority of the people coming across the border are from countries that don’t share our values and have little experience with the freedoms that helped create history’s greatest nation and economy.

Across the country, we’re seeing sanctuary states and cities being overwhelmed by the events they supported in the first place. Citizens, veterans, children, and more are being displaced to make room for illegals, with taxpayers picking up the tab. Virtually every aspect of public services is being overwhelmed, from shelters to schools to hospitals to police.

The good thing is, Donald Trump has promised that on Day One, he will start the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. That, combined with a wall the likes of which we’ve never seen, is a great start.

But there’s a problem, and Jesse Kelly hit it right on the head…

70% of Americans SAY they care about the border.

Run one video of little Pedro sobbing as he and mother Lupe get loaded into an ICE vehicle a they get deported back to Guatemala and that 70% number will drop to around 5%.

Country is too soft for mass deportation. No chance. 0. https://t.co/HhU7bmY5OY

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) April 4, 2024

Kelly is right. America is simply too soft to do what’s necessary to deal with this disaster.

Americans are largely a compassionate people. The LBGTQXYZ travesty we’re experiencing today is, at its core, the result of Americans reacting to gay partners not being able to visit dying lovers in hospitals during the AIDS epidemic because they didn’t have rights and families of the dying kept them out of the hospital rooms.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of babies are aborted annually because Americans are angered at hearing that a victim of rape or the mother of a severely handicapped fetus was forced to give birth rather than get an abortion.

In wide swaths of the country, policing and justice have been eviscerated because too many Americans believe that blacks are incapable of overcoming slavery that ended a century and a half ago or discrimination that was outlawed back in the 1960s.

Americans are indeed a compassionate people, but sometimes compassion can get you killed. Compassion has a role to play in a moral civilization, but when it becomes the driving force to the exclusion of rational thought, it ceases to be a virtue. (See Europe, which, since 2015, at Angela Merkel’s direction during the war in Syria, imported tens of millions of military-aged men from Africa and the Middle East who are bringing war to the streets, along with the problem that many of them despise Western culture and want Sharia law in Europe.) You cannot run a country based on teary anecdotes. They make for great media and heartfelt stories, but they make for terrible policy.

If Donald Trump is going to fix this situation, he must be willing to endure the unprecedented level of vitriol that will be thrown at him. AOC crying at the side of cages will be child’s play compared to what the media will do with images of little Pedro and his pregnant mommy being pulled from the taxpayer-provided hotel room and loaded up into a DHS van. Trump must be willing to endure stories about the heartbreaking lives that face deportees back in Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and the rest of the countries from whence they came with him playing the role of Hitler.

At the end of the day, if Donald Trump is going to lead the nation out of the morass that Democrats and the swamp have led us into, he must be willing to be vilified, cursed, defamed, libeled, reviled and basically all of the other things he has been exposed to over the last eight years, on steroids.

Trump wasn’t willing to endure that abuse last time and allowed random judges to throw roadblocks all along the way. As a result, his wall was never finished, and now there are 10 million new illegals in America. As the country approaches her 250th birthday, if Donald Trump is going to be the leader Americans need right now, he’s going to have to be a lot more George Patton and a lot less Mark Milley.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.