The Caravan from Central America, apparently 1,000 miles from the U.S. border, is providing a great source for staged midterm theatrics. Furthermore, the Caravan illustrates the abject ironies and paradoxes of the entire illegal alien project, notes Victor Davis Hanson in American Greatness.

Immigrants, the ancestors of most of us, enriched our food, music, fashion, art, and literature by importing ideas, customs and practices from their mother countries, but they do not tamper with our core that has guaranteed our success: religious and political tolerance, adherence to the U.S. Constitution, English as the official language, free-market capitalism, and individual liberty.

Refugees, True and False

Quirks in American law make it more difficult to deport resident “refugees” (especially those with small children) than ordinary illegal aliens seeking improved economic conditions inside the United States.

• Well inside Mexico, the migrants have been offered succor by the Mexican government “No one is threatening their lives. Mexico has even offered temporary residence for those who seem to have good grounds to be admitted as true political refugees.”
• Fury and fear over endemic lawlessness now prompts thousands to wish to break the law to enter the United States, and continue to ignore statutes by illegally residing here.
• Why would a host country welcome in aliens who break the law to enter it because their own former home is lawless?
• It is Orwellian to leave a nation because of its lawlessness and then, first, to enter another nation illegally, and, second, to continue to reside in contravention of the law.

VDH continues, “The caravan is a paradox, a contradiction and an irony of many thousands who are quite eager to violate U.S. law, to make claims upon their would-be host without serious reflection about why they are leaving one nation and demanding entrance into another—with the full expectation that their new home has no right to demand that all would-be guests fleeing lawlessness should first abide by laws.”

Read more from VDH here.