By Rod Dreher
This is going to be interesting when — and if — they arrive at the US border:
For five days now hundreds of Central Americans — children, women, and men, most of them from Honduras — have boldly crossed immigration checkpoints, military bases, and police in a desperate, sometimes chaotic march toward the United States. Despite their being in Mexico without authorization, no one has made any effort to stop them.
Organized by a group of volunteers called Pueblos Sin Fronteras, or People Without Borders, the caravan is intended to help migrants safely reach the United States, bypassing not only authorities who would seek to deport them, but gangs and cartels who are known to assault vulnerable migrants.
Organizers like Rodrigo Abeja hope that the sheer size of the crowd will give immigration authorities and criminals pause before trying to stop them.
“If we all protect each other we’ll get through this together,” Abeja yelled through a loudspeaker on the morning they left Tapachula, on Mexico’s border with Guatemala, for the nearly monthlong trek.
When they get to the US, they hope American authorities will grant them asylum or, for some, be absent when they attempt to cross the border illegally. More likely is that it will 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.
The number of people who showed up to travel with the caravan caught organizers by surprise, and has overwhelmed the various towns they’ve stopped in to spend the night. Pueblos Sin Fronteras counted about 1,200 people on the first day.
This is close to the plot of the notorious 1973 dystopian French novel The Camp of the Saints. In that novel, a mass exodus of migrants from India land their ragtag flotilla in the south of France, and all but dare the French to resist letting them in. The novel — which is undeniably racist in parts — is mostly a pitch-black satire on French elites — in government, the academy, media, the church, etc. — falling all over themselves to prove their humanitarianism by welcoming the invasion. I read the book in 2015, and wrote a post about it titled “Good Lessons From A Bad Book.” I caught some flak on Twitter earlier today simply by noting the similarity between this real-life story and the plot of the novel. Apparently even noticing things like this is considered by some on the left as prima facie evidence of bigotry.
Still, there it is, even though the thousand-strong migrant throng headed north from Central America is scarcely like the hundreds of thousands sailing from India to France in the novel. The comparison is useful in providing an imaginative framework for the kind of reactions we might see on this side of the border (though it should be understood that the scenario in Camp Of The Saints is an apocalyptic one, with all the attendant end-of-the-world hysteria that makes for vivid fiction.) …read more
Via:: American Conservative
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