Mobbing the Streets Americans Won't Mob

Protesters for Amnesty Prove Lack of Assimilation

To the astonishment and delight of the news media, Saturday, March 25, saw an unprecedented protest by an estimated 500,000 illegal aliens and their advocates in Los Angeles. Smaller rallies were held in cities across the country, opposing efforts to secure the border and finally crack down on illegal entry into America by millions of unscreened foreigners. Apparently, the protests prove to many in the media what a "divisive" issue illegal immigration is. To me, they simply prove that criminals dislike the prospect of increased law enforcement.

But that's not all the protests prove. We also see how ridiculously out of control our federal government has allowed illegal immigration to get. Which is worse: that a half-million immigration criminals and their descendants and sympathizers can be found in a single American city, or that the current immigration enforcement system is such a joke that the half-million have nothing to fear from openly entering the public streets and arguing against legislation currently before Congress?

It's as if thieves thought they could form a union to lobby for fewer cops.

Sadly, many in Congress will actually consider their demands. You know, just as Mexico would consider the wishes of any American criminals in their country for profit.

But the throngs showed mostly how poorly we are assimilating the unprecedented numbers of migrants we have received in the generation. The need to limit immigration to numbers that can be properly assimilated has always been one of the main arguments against tolerating illegal immigration, and the weekend's pro-illegal-immigration protests did much, ironically, to support that argument

Symptoms of Failure

Many of the symptoms of failure to assimilate were obvious. The colossal crowd, allegedly gathered to tout their pursuit of the "American Dream," held signs in Spanish, waved mostly Mexican flags, and chanted "Mexico! Mexico!" and "Sí se puede!" (Yes, we can!). Which is, it seems, an answer to the formerly rhetorical question, "Can the whole world sneak into America?" There was also the predictable invocation of race and ethnicity that is supposed to obligate American Hispanics to side with the illegal aliens, at least in the nationalistic eyes of the illegals themselves.

But there was a subtler symptom of how unassimilated the protesters were: the quintessentially foreign form of the protest itself.

Due to its size, the protest shocked the American media. A wave of 500,000 people pouring through L.A. is one of the largest protests in the history of the country. Thus, the protests have been reported as an extraordinary reaction to events in American politics. But they are not extraordinary at all. They are the typical way that governments are influenced in many Latin American nations.

What the protests truly represent is the colonization of America by the Latin style of politics. Rally, demonstration, march and protest are the tools of the politically dispossessed. They carry with them the intrinsic threat that is always associated with the gathering of large crowds in acts of political demonstration. And they are standard fare in the lopsided politics of many foreign nations, including Mexico.

Consider the following recent examples from the BBC World service coverage of Mexico:

* March 19, 1999: "Tens of thousands of demonstrators brought the centre of Mexico City to a standstill on Thursday in a protest against government economic policies."

* Aug. 28, 1999: "Thousands of demonstrators have taken part in a march in Mexico City to protest against government plans to allow private investment in the stateowned electric power industry."

* Sept. 13, 2001: "Union leaders in Mexico say they expect thousands of people to take to the streets on Thursday in protest at plans to impose taxes on some foods and medicines."

* Jan. 31, 2003: "Thousands of farmers gathered in the Mexican capital to demand their government renegotiate a regional trade pact..."

* Nov. 28, 2003: "Tens of thousands of people have marched through Mexico City to protest against energy and tax reforms ..."

* June 28, 2004: "Mexican President Vicente Fox has said his government has failed to defeat violent crime, after a protest in Mexico City by over 250,000 people."

* April 24, 2005: "Hundreds of thousands of people have marched through Mexico City in support of the capital's embattled mayor ..."

* March 17, 2006: "Most of the demonstrations in Mexico City remained peaceful, however, with the violence blamed on a small number of radical youths."

Viewed in this light, one can see that the protests are not unusual at all-for a Latin American nation. And it is an unassimilated colony of Latin America that 20 years of corrupt government inaction on illegal immigration has built in L.A., Phoenix, Chicago, Houston and dozens of other cities across America.

For demographic reasons, the examples I gave were drawn exclusively from Mexico, but similar patterns of political protest as the default means of lobbying government can be found in Venezuela, Peru, Uruguay and other Latin American nations. They are standard fare, and institutionalized in the culture of the region.