Donald Trump has taken to a daily update, in place of his former use of Twitter, which I appreciate since I want nothing to do with Big Tech or social media.  In his update for July 21, he wrote:

“If Amnesty is included in the infrastructure package, there will be a run on our Southern Border the likes of which we have never seen before. It will be a signal that says "come to America now, because you will soon be a citizen." Providing Amnesty to illegal aliens, in the history of what already is considered the greatest Border catastrophe, will result in disaster beyond our gravest nightmares. No country can pay this price. Will lead to ruination!”

There may be some, or even many, who write off that statement as typical Trump hyperbole, but those of us who live in the desert areas of Southern California can testify that they are not.  And in fact, even before amnesty, current border policy has already led to ruination.

In our little town of Lucerne Valley, east of Victorville, California, we have been inundated with hundreds of illegal marijuana grows.  Communities all around us are similarly swamped.  So what is the disaster? 

First, all of a sudden (within a period of 18 months, roughly equivalent to the duration of the China virus panic-demic), our supermarket/hardware store has more Spanish-speaking customers than English-speaking customers.  They are mostly very well behaved, so as not to draw undue attention to themselves, but communication is a challenge, buying patterns are radically different, and staffing to deal with it is inadequate.  Daily operations are now extremely stressful, whereas before, they were just stressful.

Yes, it is true that paying people with lavish unemployment and virus benefits creates a labor shortage and as one writer pointed out, has become the Left’s back door to a minimum wage hike.  We have given substantial raises to our existing staffers to thank them for their hard work under stress and to retain them since they are irreplaceable.  It’s almost as if the Left has created a reward to grow their dependent supporter class and to form a new class of overworked near-slaves to serve them (composed of the hated white supremacist oppressors).

Second, the treasured desert-rat culture of the High Desert that drew people to live here by choice, not to escape from urban disaster, has been severely damaged, if not destroyed.  As residents leave California, we lose our deeply rooted neighbors, only to see them replaced by people who don’t speak English and don’t particularly care to become truly American. 

Perhaps the third and most disastrous result is that the illegals are illegal, so they don’t respect the laws and have little to lose should they be caught.  They are stealing our water to the point of wells running dry at a time of serious drought.  They drive like maniacs, resulting in a significant uptick of fatal head-on crashes on the two-lane highways.  A few weeks ago, three young teenage girls out for a walk on a summer evening were killed when a driver mowed them down and then ran off into the desert.  A fourth was critically injured.  The CHP is close-mouthed about it, but indicators are that they were Mexican illegals.

At first, the customers coming into the store were mostly young men, whom we knew to be workers at the marijuana grows.  Now we are seeing new waves that include wives and children and who speak virtually no English.  Our guess is that the border situation is allowing so many to come in that they are migrating as far north as the San Bernardino County desert, living in who-knows-what conditions.

The situation has become so serious that our town meeting next week will include our elected county supervisor, state assemblyman, state senator, and U.S. congressman.  We are asking that the governor declare a state of emergency so that corrective legislation can be passed that restores the illegal cultivation of marijuana to the status of a felony.  We expect a large turnout of very frustrated folks.

So Trump’s release is no overstatement.  He addresses only the immigration part of the disaster, but then adds to that the insanity of those ruining this state from Sacramento, and you have the recipe for the destruction of American culture.  We who have lived and cherished the desert for as much as a half-century know this first hand and know we are on the verge of losing our community totally.

Image:Jessie Eastland

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.