We’re in a mell of a hess! I blame it on the late Senator Ted Kennedy and all those folks who hate American history. By hook and crook, they have created an immigration crisis that must be resolved one way or another. As I try to get my mind around this mess, it helps me to understand better what’s happening when I think of a well-known novel that became a bigger film.

Think of Chief Brody, the reluctant fisherman in the film Jaws who hates boats and the water, out on the ocean in a fishing boat grudgingly spooning smelly and disgusting blood and fish guts over the transom of the fishing vessel Orca. Meanwhile, Captain Quint and Matthew Hooper are busy elsewhere on Quint’s charter boat, hoping to kill a monstrous shark that has been terrorizing the beach community of Amity.

Brody’s distasteful job is called “chumming.” This time-honored tactic of big game fishing spills blood and tasty fish bits into the ocean to attract hungry big fish to the feeding site. Chief Brody’s efforts succeeded when Bruce, the villain shark, broke the surface of the water behind the transom. After regaining his breath from this terrifying sight, Chief Brody famously called out to the others, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat!”

Chumming: “to throw chum overboard to attract fish.” I am not a fisherman, and I don’t even play one on TV, but chumming is a method of attracting a target group, and it works. It works outside of fishing, too. Just as free little morsels of fish are hard to resist for larger fish, other enticements can be offered to other groups to get them to leave where they are and come to a desired location.

Chumming the water by Brocken Inaglory. CC BY 1.0.

You can apply the concept of “chumming” to the crisis of illegal immigration straining our schools, cities, and state and federal economies. Hooper, Captain Quint, and Chief Brody fought a life-and-death battle against the shark in Jaws. Meanwhile, in the real world, three groups are currently battling for the future of our country.

One group, the MAGA or America First group, wants to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants pouring across our southern border. They also want to stop the chumming by governments and non-profit groups that encourage this invasion. The MAGA group likes America as it was in the Reagan days.

The second group is led by people like former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, President Biden, and Senator Schumer. These people like the America they want to create. As former President Obama famously said, they want “to fundamentally transform[] the United States of America.”

If this group has a hero, it would be the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) who unleashed a flood in the 1960s with his legislation to expand immigration. Senator Kennedy viewed himself as an outsider in what he perceived as the predominantly white and Protestant America in which he grew up. It bothered him. He was embittered later when he tried to run for President. He could not shake the Chappaquiddick scandal hanging over his head and this made him hate America. He may have loved some hypothetical America, but not the one that rejected his aspirations for power.

Another group that loves the invasion of illegal immigrants into America is the greedy, cheap, labor-loving employers and their lobbyists. As long as they can operate and manufacture cheaply with illegals, they are happy.

What would make people from other lands want to travel to the United States through Mexico? What is the chum that brings them here? President Biden and his open border minions offer better schools for their children, better healthcare, better wages, and a better quality of living for starters.

Chief Brody had to force the mayor of Amity to pay Captain Quint for the charter that finally eliminated Bruce, the villain shark. Who is paying for all the chum that President Biden and his yes men are offering to the illegal immigrants? We the People, of course. In case you have forgotten, America is broke and nearly 33 trillion dollars in debt. Biden is spending money we don’t have on his grab for power.

Senator Kennedy saw and his contemporary disciples in the Democrat Party see election domination in their chumming. And although it took a while, the MAGA group finally caught on to the Democrats’ scheme for perpetual power. The great irony of this struggle is that it was the Democrats who summoned Donald Trump because of their electoral meddling.

We know who won in the fictional thriller Jaws. The outcome in the immigration battle is undecided. Stay tuned because the champion of open borders, President Biden, and the champion of regulated immigration, former President Trump, are headed for a faceoff election in eight months. Until then the chum keeps flowing over our southern borders.

Ned Cosby, a frequent contributor to American Thinker, is a former pastor, veteran Coast Guard officer, and a retired career public high school teacher. His newest novel OUTCRY is a love story exposing the refusal of Christian leaders to report and discipline clergy who sexually abuse our young people. This work of fiction addresses crimes that are all too real. Cosby has also written RECOLLECTIONS FROM MY FATHER’S HOUSE, tracing his own odyssey from 1954 to the present. For more info, visit Ned Cosby.