On sheer volume, open-borders advocates are in the catbird seat, getting exactly the open borders they have effectively been calling for.

Here is the latest from NPR:

The number of migrants apprehended at the Southern border surpassed 100,000 for the second consecutive month, according to new figures released by the Trump administration.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection apprehended 109,144 migrants in April. That is more than 5,400 over the total in the month of March, and it is the highest monthly total since 2007.

The chief of the Border Patrol, Carla Provost, told a Senate Judiciary panel that "our apprehension numbers are off the charts."

"We cannot address this crisis by shifting more resources. It's like holding a bucket under a faucet. It doesn't matter how many buckets you give me if we can't turn off the flow," she said.

For the rest of us, we are about to learn just what open borders looks like.  One hundred nine thousand is quite a few people, not just in a big country such as the United States, but in the countries these migrants are coming from — 1% of the population of Guatemala, 1% of the population of Honduras, taken over the course of the first seven months of the fiscal year.

Economist Hernando de Soto told me several years ago that history shows there is no stopping the movement of peoples, and while I felt disagreement with him then, it's clear that in this mass migration incident, he was in a certain way right.  It's not that people are unstoppable like deer in nature, however.  It's that the incentivizing laws from the U.S. — from the failure of the asylum system to keep junk claims out, to the huge banquet of 'free' benefits on offer from states, which judges have ruled no popular vote can stop, pretty well inevitably leads to the now seen open border that lawmen can no longer stop, all based on sheer volume.  The law has little ballast or enforcement in the face of a migrant flood, with migrants now rolling in not just from Central America, but from all over the world.

What is it going to take to re-establish rule of law, to stop so many service-desperate, uneducated, hard-to-assimilate, unskilled migrants looking for a handout without following the law?  It helps, of course, when someone puts pressure on the governments that make life so miserable for their citizens that they want to leave, as a Nigerian cardinal did recently, blasting his country's government for driving so many people out based on its rotten governance.  In this hemisphere, no such leadership is evident on the ground in remittance-hungry countries such as Honduras, so the migrants are coming.

Sadly, Victor Davis Hanson has offered the grim answer where the limit lies from these current open-border dynamics, too, writing: 

Under such conditions, the logical limits of immigration can be calibrated not so much by whether countries south of the border reach parity with American standards of living, freedom, security, and quality of life. But rather the current issue is whether regions of America, especially the American Southwest become roughly indistinguishable from Latin America and Mexico, and therefore in terms of economic opportunity, safety, and quality of life do not offer that much of an improvement — or at least not such a radical margin of enhancement to justify abandoning one's homeland.

In such an equation, the more that illegal aliens arrive, swamp social services and tax law enforcement, the more that they create ethnic enclaves that resist rapid assimilation and the more that they sense that their hosts see them most useful as an identity politics constituency, then the more parts of the southwestern United States will seem more like Mexico, and perhaps to the point of eventually diminishing illegal immigration.

No one knows what the saturation point might be of illegal and unassimilated immigration, but influxes are now approximating each month a mid-sized American city. 

So the U.S. will have to become as corrupt, hellish, and impoverished as the places these foreigners leave behind to nullify the enticements of migrating illegally. 

Which is a pretty sad picture.  The only possibility of reversing it, though, is still out there, given that nations such as Canada and Australia have mastered it: they crafted far better immigration laws, which required fewer lawmen to stop those who would break those laws.  If the U.S. does this, the nation can renew its commitment to rule of law, and serious efforts can be made to halt illegal entrants at the border.

No chance for that with the Democrats, who see the migrants as politically useful in a lot of ways, the needier and more easily manipulated, the better.

So for now, the migrants are rolling in, and the Border Patrol, with no tools for stopping anyone (just deporting one of them require the use of a detention bed they don't have) is effectively just waving them though, if not serving as free babysitters for people who should be paying for their own freight the way normal people do.

It's sad because the other thing Hernando de Soto said was critical for any prosperity and stability in a country is the invisible architecture of rule of law. Without it, the U.S. can just morph into Honduras North. It appears the Democrats would have that because they are blocking any meaningful efforts to control the border, the borders are wide open now and rule of law is going fast.

Image credit: ABC News via shareable YouTube screen shot.