To develop any true cultural understanding one needs to spend, in my estimation, a minimum of six months fully saturated in the society and people, and that is just scratching the surface. Sometimes we encountered “Western World” visitors who felt during their vacations they “picked up the language” and really got to know the culture. This is absurd, but no harm done. What was frustrating were the moneyed tourists, which by definition were almost always leftist progressives who, after their ecological or culture-immersion resort vacations, returned home and presented themselves as experts and oracles; sometimes they referred to themselves as “global citizens.” This is like someone who has a nice little organic garden and therefore feels eminently qualified to address farm and agricultural issues.

Like any area, Central American culture is not monolithic, but there are distinct differences between there and what we are accustomed to in the US, along with similarities. In the US, the pretend real world forces, be they left or right, tend to control the narratives that are disseminated to the masses, and they are often in contrast to the real real world knowledge. Before getting into that, a little recounting of something my wife and I experienced early on with our Honduras project. We had a great idea, an American kind of idea, in which we made it known anyone from the village could use are land for gardens. We would supply the seed, tools, water, etc, and all they had to provide was their labor. There were 0 takers, and we asked our main person there (who remains our main person in Honduras) why this was. Her answer was simple: that no matter how much work they put into it, no matter how successful, it would all be stolen when ready to harvest, so why bother? Several years later, a very impoverished guy in his 80s did use our land, and toiled greatly to bring in a crop. Our deal was we would buy whatever he grew to use in our lunch program. Nothing came to pass, so I asked him what happened, and, Yes, he told me everything had been stolen.

Experiences like the one noted above were common and numerous- the constant thieving, the throwing of trash everywhere, alcoholism and drug use, very few intact families, the gunfire at night (during much of our time in Honduras the country had the distinction of having the highest murder rate in the world). There were, however, many happy and meaningful experiences, and some of the positive effects of our presence continue to this day. The narrative of the left is one of friendly and hard-working peasants, but hapless victims of something or another- poverty, crime, oppression- and, as is typical of the left, they are incapable of directing the course of their own lives. Their remedy is for everyone to come to America, with our Netflix and Amazon, diverse dining experiences, and really big screen TVs. The narrative of the right tends to be they are lazy, uneducated and unskilled, and often criminals. The establishment Republicans, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, talk about bringing to America doctors and engineers and professional types in general, never wondering about the impact of the poor country losing their most skilled and educated people.

The question is, “Who is correct?” And the answer is, “Both.” A significant number of people from our village ended up as illegals in the US, many of them, especially the young males, ladrones (the Spanish word which specifically means thieves but also criminals in general). Once word got out that showing up at the border with a child guaranteed entry to the US, fathers who were nothing more than sperm donors snatched up there biologic kids and used them like admission tickets. Likewise, children were used for entry by people who had vague, if any, relation. These were not people looking for liberty to “breathe free,” or even economic opportunity, but rather promises of free and easy money and cool stuff difficult to buy in Honduras. On the other hand, there are plenty of Hondurans, now illegals in the US, who are law-abiding and are looking for better opportunities than available in their native country. It should be noted that their vision of America, largely perpetuated by TV and movies, is that life is always easy, filled with material goods, and even glamorous.

The phraseology surrounding who enters the US without valid visas (or remain after their visas expire) is all over the place. The right holds on to the traditional “illegal immigrant” or “illegal alien.” The left came to consider these terms pejorative, and now use more saccharin words such as “unauthorized immigrants,” “undocumented immigrants,” “migrants” and, perniciously, “asylum seekers,” and they often employ the pseudo-compassionate slogan, “No One Is Illegal!” The numbers of these people, no matter what they are called, varies from 10 million to 20+ million; no one really knows because many enter the US illegally and don’t check in first. I should add that “vetting” people at the border is kind of farcical: government documentation and records from the country of origin are un chiste (Spanish for a joke).

At the US border, pretty much anyone showing up with a minor in tow would be waved through. If they had fake ID or no ID, no big deal. Since 2020 there has been a smart phone app called CBP One (get it a Google Play!) that makes entering the US more convenient for all parties. In all, of the millions of “migrant encounters” as many as 85% are “paroled” into the US (a reluctant admission from a year ago by the guy in charge of such things named Mayorkas, the secretary of DHS) with a promise of showing up at some kind of a hearing sometime in the future.

Sadly, the term “asylum” has become front and center in the word games of the left: people who just a few years ago were illegal aliens are now “asylum seekers,” and it severely diminishes the significance of the concept of asylum (very similar to when they call everyone “racists!”). Asylum deals with, and only with, persecution. Persecution is the dictator sending out paramilitaries to secretly round up and silence political opponents. Persecution is where the madman in power murders entire groups of people based on ethnic identity (eg the 1994 Hutu genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda). Persecution is exiling “enemies of the state” to Siberia in Soviet Russia. The requirement of asylum is in fact specified on the Homeland Security I-589 form application for asylum- “...persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Persecution is NOT a lot of things, including difficulty finding a job, really hot weather, having few or no modern conveniences or material goods, and even living in an impoverished and violent society. Certainly historically Latin America had plenty of despots with “death squads,” both left and right (How to tell the difference? The petty dictators on the left wore fatigues, like Castro of Cuba, and those on the right wore snazzy uniforms weighted down by meaningless medals, like Pinochet of Chile). For the most part, Latin American countries evolved into persecution-free pseudo-Democracies, meaning still lots of corruption, but at least the President had a limited amount of time to steal as much money as possible before the next corrupt person was elected.

The great immigration issue of this moment involves the claim that our incoming President is going to order “mass deportations.” I don’t know what this means, and I hope it won’t entail sweeps arresting and deporting people who were “paroled” into the US but are minding their own business, not committing crimes, and aren’t recipients of government largess. I really don’t think it will. Being from the real real world with significant first hand experience in the countries from which the illegal immigrants come, I can offer some pretty reasonable solutions, some I’ve never heard mentioned:

1) Stop this “sanctuary city/state” absurdity, which is designed exclusively for elite, mostly white, insulated leftists to feel good about themselves. They couldn’t care less about the consequences of their policies, though the recent election suggests maybe they should.

2) Curiously, considering the huge influx of illegals during the term of our soon-to-be ex-President, it’s actually quite easy to turn the flood into a trickle. We need to simply send the message, “If you show up at the border, you are not going to be allowed in, no matter how many people under 18 you have in tow, so don’t bother.” The motivation to come isn’t the melodramatic pretend compassion of the left, the yearning to breathe free nonsense. It’s “I want to be where life is easier, more comfortable, and maybe get some free stuff and, what the heck, they’re not stopping me.” Building “The Wall” would probably be helpful to some extent, and the irony is the left is all about building physical barriers for their own security, but against “The Wall.” That is at least until it seemed to poll well for Trump, so the recent, failed Democrat candidate suddenly jumped on board.

3) We need to have a very low threshold for deporting illegals who do commit crimes. One of the more disturbing utterances by our soon-to-be ex-President was, “You only arrest for the purpose of dealing with a felony that's committed, and I don't count drunk driving as a felony (Biden 1/23/2020, discussing deportation).” Have things changed since I obtained my driver’s license in 1974, when drunk driving was considered one of the worst things you could do? In 2022 there were over 13,000 drunk driving related deaths, apparently not a big deal to Biden. If an American commits a serious crime in the countries I’ve lived (Honduras, Guatemala, Kenya), it’s serious business, no “released on own recognizance” or given an appearance ticket. There is an amusing slogan that has been floating around recently- “Let’s make crime illegal again.” This idea seen in liberal bastions and “sanctuary cities” that criminals, here legally or not, must be coddled, is just another manifestation of insulated and privileged white progressives, who never experience the consequences of their policies, and the ultimate victims are usually the demographics they pretend they are defending.

4) Illegal immigration is very big business, beginning in the $1,000s paid to the facilitators (aka coyotes) to bring the aspiring illegal to the border, then $10’s of billions to provide services, including housing, health care, education, nutrition. A reasonable estimate is $182 billion a year between federal, state and local governments. Much of this money is disbursed to innumerable “non-profits (a very slippery term), that pay for everything from transportation to smart phones. One example is the vociferously progressive organization called Global Refuge which received government grants of $182,000,000 in 2022, and happens to pay its CEO a cool $650,000. It’s surprisingly difficult to find amounts and accountability for these $billions, but when talking about such massive amounts, a few million here and there is apparently insignificant.

So, how about this: the US is bursting at the seems with rich people whose hearts are filled with love and compassion for illegals, as long as someone else pays. The current governor of Illinois is a corpulent guy named JB Pritzker, a truly extreme leftist with a personal net worth of $3.5 billion. He acquired it the old fashioned way, by being an heir to the Hyatt Hotel corporation fortune. The Pritzker family has a net worth of about $41 billion, and at least some of them are radical “social justice” activists. In 2019 the Hyatt chain had 140,000 rooms in the US, which would allow them to easily house 700,00 “migrants.” So why don’t they?

Those middle-class to wealthy people whose tears run incessantly over social injustice (and have the No One Is Illegal! signs on their suburban yards) truly need to be shamed and brow-beaten to accept financial responsibility for those they claim to love and cherish. When we arranged to sponsor a Kenyan under a legal student visa, we had to absolutely promise he would at NO point receive any government benefits, and we had to provide documents supporting this. There are 10s of millions of middle-class to wealthy progressives in the US, and there are no reasons other than greed and selfishness (and, to be honest, fear of these strange people) for them to NOT open their homes and bank accounts to every one of their beloved “asylum seekers.”

Medical care is one of the most expensive government provided services for illegals, and the epitome of the elitist aristocracy are physicians and the health care/pharmaceutical establishments overall. How about they stop billing Medicaid or whatever and do the right thing: volunteer to freely provide medical care to illegals i.e. renounce their hypocrisy and false compassion and actually be compassionate. Free clinics, free hospitalizations if needed, free medicines- the leftist dream- but paid for not by the taxpayers but from their own massive coffers and those massively wealthy corporations and people whose hearts also bleed somehow but never cough up the money. Medical practitioners, believe it not, don’t have to charge for every patient they see, let alone bill the government for seeing them.

5) Very closely related to the above, eliminate government support after a period of time, perhaps one year. At that point using, the endless resources of the elite left, the safety net is entirely privately funded, and this DOES NOT include “non-profits” funded by government grant money. The government will NOT provide housing, for example, but Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LeBron James, Stephen King, Robert De Niro, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and all the other multitudes of progressive multi-millionaire and billionaire loudmouths, along with the lesser rich liberals living in gentrified urban areas or suburbia can say either, “Come live with me” or “I will provide your housing.”

6) Time-limited education in the native language of children of illegals. This is not harsh, but necessary for any chance of assimilation and success. I personally have taught English to Hondurans with a fair amount of success, and there should be 10s of thousands of American willing to assist teaching English as volunteers. Countless children of immigrants historically have learned English without educational coddling, and to not expect proficiency in English is to expect failure.

7) It’s a common belief among conservatives that the left encourages open borders so as to increase the number of potential Democrat voters, and I think there is some truth to this. Otherwise, the presence of so many people so rapidly entering the US has seriously taxed local, state, and Federal resources, often at the expense of American citizens, and it’s not unreasonable to wonder if there is a deeper- and darker- strategic goal involved. The elite leftist policies truly seem to foster chaos, disorder, societal stratification and disunity, and crime, all which historically can create power vacuums. It’s not conspiratorial to ask, “Are there people within or without the US who are hoping to create then fill a vacuum, and fundamentally change the traditional and historic values and political structure of America?”

The Democrats categorically deny the idea of enhancing their voter rolls through illegal immigration, and stick to the “Yearning to breathe free” narrative, but if they are to be taken at face value, here is a not so radical approach: anyone and everyone who entered the US illegally will have NO “path to citizenship,” None- they will NEVER be granted citizenship and the right to vote. That is not to say the illegals, proving themselves to be law-abiding, productive, and not beneficiaries of government provided resources, cannot receive legal residency and pursue educational, economic, employment opportunities, etc, and enjoy basic legal protections, just that they will never be eligible for citizenship and voting rights. Problem solved, reasonably and compassionately.

Conclusion

We had a young volunteer at our Honduras project in maybe 2009 who was of Mexican descent- I believe her parents were legal immigrants to the US- and she said something both simple and profound: “My father always told me, ‘We may be from Mexico, but we are Americans now.’” This sentiment is, of course, the belief and that fueled immigration to America throughout history; there is nothing wrong with remembering the traditions where you came from, but your identity must transition from what it was to become an American. In other words, assimilation.

There is an odious organization called UnidosUS (formerly La Raza- The Race), one of those deceitful groups that claim to be “non-partisan” and “non-profit” but, not surprisingly, embraces every left wing dogma that exists (it “serves as the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization,” which is progressive-speak for far-left activism). They even use the hideous term Latinx, created by guilt-ridden privileged white people and rejected by the real real world Hispanic people; BTW, the CEO of this “non-profit” makes about $700,000 a year. They were often in the news several years ago during a former incarnation of the immigration debates, demanding “rights” for illegals per usual. One aspect of their activism struck me: the deep love and devotion they had for their native countries (and animosity for the US) as long as they never had to go back, let alone do anything to improve their cherished homelands.

One thing that is almost never mentioned by the obscenely wealthy open-borders elite and their mindless minions is the radical idea of actually trying to improve living standards in the native countries. Why is this? Perhaps another time, though in my experience the usual US methods of providing foreign aid to countries like Honduras is misguided, ineffective, and ultimately fuels corruption.

I don’t know what will happen with illegal immigrants during the upcoming Trump administration, but I’m pretty sure it will not entail some apocalyptic mass sweeps and arrests, as much as this would please the left. There’s plenty to do without hassling illegals who are productive, not criminals, and not essentially wards of the state. One suggestion to the pretend real world progressives: it may feel good to call those who oppose open border policies xenophobic hate-filled Nazis, but it’s not accurate and in the long run counterproductive.