Buzzfeed recently reported on a caravan of roughly 1,200 Hondurans, and other Central Americans, that is making their way across Mexico, toward the American border. Styling themselves as “international workers,” they have been organized by an organization known as Pueblos Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders) “into security, food, and logistics committees.”
Who exactly is Pueblos Sin Fronteras? For a public-issue group, its website is remarkably skimpy on meaningful information. However, it describes its goal as building “solidarity bridges among peoples and [turning down]border walls imposed by greed.” That would tend to indicate that it is a radical anti-capitalist, open-borders organization. As would the fact that the group advertises “refugee caravans” as if they were a form of political theater.
Its leadership seems to consist mainly of kooky extremists. A few examples: Alex Mensing, whose main claim to fame appears to be prior employment with a San Francisco company that makes novelty neckties out of wood. And Gina Garibo, a self-described scholar of “necropolitics,” a pseudo-intellectual field that purports to study how societies dictate who may live and who must die.
Those assisting the current caravan have characterized their efforts as, helping “the migrants empower themselves.” And they have stated their hope that, “the sheer size of the crowd will give immigration authorities and criminals pause before trying to stop them.”
If the approach sounds eerily familiar, that’s because it is. The tactics being employed by Pueblos Sin Fronteras are exactly those preferred by devotees of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The overall goal appears to be to, “set up an enormous challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and its ability to deal with an organized group of migrants numbering in the hundreds.” In other words, create a media circus like the one that accompanied the massing of unaccompanied alien minors (UAM) along the southern border, which reached its peak in 2014.
That seems a stretch. While the Border Patrol was challenged in certain locations by the UAM crisis, it didn’t bring a halt to all border enforcement. Criminals who prey on illegal aliens may think twice about attacking a column of 1,200 people. However, dealing with several thousand border jumpers represents a relatively quiet morning in many Border Patrol sectors.
Regardless of how effective its efforts turn out to be the Pueblos Sin Fronteras caravans demonstrate the extent to which the immigration debate has gone off the rails. A group of American and Mexican citizens, masquerading as an aid organization, has deliberately set out to violate scads of both Mexican and American laws. And, to date, the United States doesn’t appear to have lodged a single diplomatic protest with the Mexican government over its utter failure to stop the mini-invasion.
This is how American sovereignty dies, not with a bang but a whimper.