It is madness for the United States not to control its borders and who lives here.

In The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman notes that misgovernment is of four kinds: (1) tyranny or oppression, (2) excessive ambition, (3) incompetence or decadence, and (4) folly or perversity.  Folly is the pursuit of a policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

To qualify for folly, the policy must meet three criteria: it must be perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not just in hindsight; a feasible alternative course of action must have been available; and the policy in question must be that of a group and persist beyond any one political lifetime.  The four major examples of folly described in the book are bringing the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy despite urgent warnings not to do so; the Protestant secession from the Catholic Church, caused by the folly and perversity of six popes between 1470 and 1530; the loss of America by the British, primarily over taxation, when the retention of America would have been worth far more for the mother country economically and politically than any sum ever raised by taxation; and America's folly in following the defeated French into Vietnam and ignoring abundant evidence that the Vietnamese did not want us there and that our mission was doomed unless we were willing to engage in full-scale unrestricted war — which we were not.

The American policy of permitting millions of unvetted aliens into the country satisfies all three criteria to be deemed folly.

Everyone knows why it is happening.  Democrats want to do to the rest of the country what they did to California.  By flooding California with millions of poor people from third-world countries, Democrats were able to transform California from a vibrant two-party center-right state to single-party far-left Democrat rule of all three branches of government.  To state the obvious, poor people need more government services and are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans.  As the great Rush Limbaugh used to say, "it's difficult to compete with Santa Claus."

The number of illegals currently storming our southern border and the numbers already living here are Deep State secrets.  The Democrats and their allies in the media don't want the American people to know the magnitude, lest the voters become aroused and demand that the invasion be stopped.  The Dems have no intention of stopping the invasion until the Californication of the country has been completed.

But there are warning signs of how large the numbers are.  Three years ago, a Yale study estimated that there may be more than 22 million "undocumented" living in the country.  Customs and Border Enforcement show an explosion of enforcement actions.  For all of fiscal year 2020, there were 646,000.  For fiscal year 2021, just through the end of July, there have been 1,510,000.  Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just reported that there were 212,672 migrant encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border in July 2021.  For July 2020, the number was 40,929.

What are the demographics of the invaders?  We don't know.  The Biden administration is doing everything it can to shield this information from the public.  It is safe to assume that the majority of those flooding across the Rio Grande are not their home countries' "best and brightest."  It is also safe to assume that the vast majority are desperately poor, speak little or no English, and have low education levels.  We know that tens of thousands are diseased.  Many have criminal histories.  There have been reports that ICE has been ordered to release even those with confirmed criminal histories or outstanding warrants.  Are there terrorists among them?  Undoubtedly.

Applying the Tuchman three-prong test for folly, all three criteria have been met.  The policy of permitting hundreds of thousands of unscreened aliens into the United States is clearly counterproductive and against our national interests.  A viable alternative is readily available: you simply stop the invaders at the border and send them back to Mexico.  As to the third test, the requirement that the policy persist beyond one political lifetime, Democrats have wanted to change the fundamental demographics of the country since the massive overhaul of our immigration laws in the 1960s under the direction of Ted Kennedy.

If Congress had the cojones to do so, it could solve the illegal immigration problem in about five minutes.  It would require passing three pieces of legislation.  The first would require that every worker in the U.S. be E-Verified.  The second would declare that American-born offspring of illegal alien mothers are not entitled to birthright citizenship.  Currently, the United States and Canada are the only first-world nations that give birthright citizenship to the children of illegal alien mothers.  Finally, Congress would pass a law overruling the Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court decision that mandates free public-school education for illegal alien children.

Image: BBC World Service via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.

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