This particular fallacy is so old it even has a Latin name, argumentum ad misercordiam, which means an appeal to pity, a ploy designed to get our minds off the real issue by playing to sympathy.

Let’s put that aside for a moment and look at some of the issues we should be talking about.

First, those who play the pity card feel that the culprit in this story is U.S. immigration law. Yet our laws are not as narrow as those of Mexico, a country with some of the most restrictive immigration laws in the world. Nor are illegal immigrants here abused.

Central Americans in Mexico, however, both those that go there to work and those in transit through Mexico to the United States, are routinely exploited by Mexican authorities, a fact well known and lamented by humanitarian groups both here and in Mexico, yet ignored by the special pleaders and the press in this country.

Another question never asked in any depth is why people from Mexico are coming here in such droves.

The simple answer is that the United States offers greater economic opportunities. This of course is true.

The other side of the coin, however, is the question, why a large country like Mexico - rich in resources and with a cheerful, willing, energetic population (if you don’t believe that just look at those who have come here to work); why such a potentially successful country cannot provide that kind of opportunity to its own people?

The answer lies with the Mexican elites who see the emigration, of what they consider their excess population, as a safety-valve that protects their privilege. Mexicans know this. Many talk of the de facto open border immigration policy of the United States as welfare for the rich that preserves their status at the expense of the rest of the Mexican population.

The left once seethed at such inequities and called for internal change. Now they support the privileges of the elite by insisting on mass migration.

Immigration law enforcement of all kinds is anathema to special interests, the exploiters of cheap, tractable labor and those with an ideological agenda.

One of the consequences of such a no-enforcement policy is the entry, under the cover of the migratory stream of vicious criminals, from drug cartels to organized transnational criminal gangs such as the MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang that, according to the FBI have increased the level of violence in crime throughout the United States to unprecedented levels.

Another consequence of not enforcing our border and our immigration laws is that people not only from neighboring Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean are pouring into the country, but increasingly people from all over the world.

At some point we will have to face up to enforcement of some kind, or if an open border policy is what our own elites really want, and we let them get by with it, then we should at least demand that they begin planning for the consequence of such a historically unprecedented policy in this historically unprecedented era of globalization.

Glynn Custred is co-author of Proposition 209 and is a professor at California State University Hayward.

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