This is part 1 of a two-part Port Rail on the history of the Americas, North, Central, and South, and the current immigration crisis or challenge or whatever you want to call the open border policy the Biden administration has put into place with respect to the border and immigration. If it hasn’t become perfectly clear to all of us, the “United” States is turning into the “Divided” States. The last time this happened on the scale it is happening today, it led to the dissolution of the Republic and the American Civil War of 1861-1865.
Lance Morrow had an interesting piece in the WSJ’s April 5 edition, “Joe Biden’s American Grandstand” in which he examined the idea that “the country reinvents itself from time to time.” Read it. He is an old journalist, with a close eye for the historical context of the various transitions of our Republic over the past two centuries. I wouldn’t have used that title, but it kind of fits.
And, below, two Laplander children from early 1900s, immigrants at Ellis Island. Lest you think the immigrants at the border on the Rio Grande today aren’t representative of a long stream of people from all over the world seeking freedom and liberty in the United States.
Biden, without a mandate from the vote or the people is trying to be like an aging Dick Clark who continued to try to act young on the old American Bandstand with teenagers dancing and playing in the background. Biden is no longer young. He is afraid his legacy is in danger (what legacy?) if he doesn’t join the pack of Leftists and Wokes screaming for attention and determined—even with only a very small percentage of the American population with them—to transform the country. Anyhow, since Morrow focused on other “reinventions” of the American way, leaving true, violent, killing revolutions to Karl Marx’s followers, I thought to piggyback my thoughts on to his.
I had to chuckle quietly, lest I offend anyone, with an announcement by President Biden late in March that he is sending Vice President Kamala Harris to Central America to tell Central Americans they “should not come to the border now…that we will enforce the law and that we also…because we can chew gum and walk at the same time…must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek.”[1] I wish the Vice President well in reversing about five hundred years of history, correcting the “root causes” of poverty and political corruption, and turning the “northern triangle” of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras into a prosperous and contented state like, like…California of course, her home state.
I will not address California in any detail other than to mention that they are about to recall their Governor for incompetence and Californians are leaving the state by the thousands bound for Texas and other states not quite so liberated by the woke, the BLM, Antifa, and other modern progressive movements that support and endorse our Vice President.
Poor Texans, being overrun by immigrants from two directions: the old “banana” republics, now renamed the “northern triangle” and Californians escaping the new socialism bankrupting their state and their own future. Some native Texans may look back on the old Lone Star Republic under Sam Houston with longing during its ten-year independence between 1836 and 1846. Then came the Confederacy, a lost cause, followed by about a hundred years of peace and prosperity. And now, here come the immigrants. What to do?
The idea that Vice President Harris can somehow alter or improve Central America is laughable at best, and at worst, a sign of the times based on an equally incredible political and historical naivete. To suggest economic and political models that have driven, or are driving, Kamala’s home state, and add New York, into an economic abyss whose bottom no one knows or can predict is on the other side of ignorance, nearing plain stupid. Kamala’s signature snort and nervous laugh when she can’t find words will be greeted with astonishment by Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran politicians. Who have they sent us?
But as President Biden reassured us, we can chew gum and walk at the same time. Perhaps he will give his Veep a big box of Wrigley’s for her long work ahead. Chicle, the basic source for Wrigley’s famous gum, BTW came from Guatemala until 1952 when a socialist revolution persuaded Wrigley’s to leave and change its formula and suppliers.
And the wordsmiths are at it again. “The Northern Triangle” for the old “Banana Republics?” It sounds, somehow, more diplomatic, and less imperialistic. But, before the immigrants came the bananas, a revolutionary commercial and economic explosion if there ever was one. The economic boom brought bananas into the ports and shops and kitchens of Americans and catapulted Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras into the fantastically successful and profitable American markets of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peel a banana from the “Northern Triangle” and join us next week for the rest of the story.
If you want to read more about it, try A New History of Modern Latin America. There is lots of Central America in there for Kamala. Perhaps she should walk from Laredo down to Guatemala to get a feel for the what the immigrants go through on their way north. Lend her one of the President’s limos in case she gets tired.
Published as “Biden’s open door policy filled with pitfalls,” in Sunday, April 11, 2021 The Tuscaloosa News.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/24/politics/kamala-harris-immigration-central-america/index.html
Posted on April 12, 2021
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