How can House Speaker Nancy Pelosi look at the victims of illegal immigrants with a straight face and declare that building a border wall is “immoral”? Some might say “years of skin-stiffening plastic surgery” — but that’s not my answer. After all, her claim is far more than skin deep. It’s so cynical, so designed to paint proponents of border security as heartless, amoral people, so deadly, that it needs a serious answer.

“Immoral Not to Build the Wall”

Sadine Durden counters Speaker Pelosi. She says it is “immoral not to build the wall.” Sadine doesn’t hold the Speaker’s gavel. She doesn’t live in an ivory tower compound with tax-payer funded security. But she does live with the fact her son Dominic was killed in 2012 by an illegal immigrant twice deported for DUI.

Of course she is but one American grieving as a result of our joke of a border. The stats are astounding. You can find them throughout our book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. But Pelosi’s doubling down on the immorality of a wall comes as America mourns the vicious slaughter of California police officer Cpl. Ronil Singh at the hands of an illegal immigrant. Cpl. Singh was himself a legal immigrant. Noting the fact may get this story banned from Facebook, but doesn’t make it any less telling.

Also countering Pelosi are the souls of the 10,000 people known to have died the past 25 years while rejecting the legal path to America and instead opting for the dangerous journey toward our porous borders. That’s 10,000 known dead. Countless unknown have been murdered or died and abandoned by heartless criminal coyotes.

What about the women and girls? Trump alluded to this during his press conference Friday. But let’s be specific. According to the Huffington Post, 80% of the women and girls who make the trek from Central America to illegally enter the country are raped along the way.

Yet Pelosi is telling you that perpetuating a system that nearly guarantees the brutalization of women is “moral.”

Tragically, raped and impregnated Latino women sneaking into the country serves Pelosi’s purposes. If they have the children, the kids are American citizens and anchors for other future family members (who, statistically, have about a 70 percent chance of voting Democratic.) If they have abortions, business improves for Pelosi’s patrons at Planned Parenthood. Win-win for Nancy.

Not incidentally, one of the Pelosi’s first moves as Speaker was moving to do away with the so-called “Mexico City Policy” which prohibits taxpayer money from going to international groups that perform or support abortion. To paraphrase the Rolling Stones, “Rape. Death. Murder. It’s just a vote away … ”

But spending money to secure the border, discouraging the cycle of sexual violence? That’s “immoral.”

Let’s Suppose Pelosi is Sincere

Let’s grant Pelosi something she does not grant supporters of real and strong border security. Okay? Let’s say she is sincere in believing building a wall is “immoral.” What does she mean by that?

First: “It’s not who we are as a people,” she says. What she means is a wall sends a signal we are not a welcoming nation for immigrants. Nearly 250 years of history and countless ports of entry and legal pathways notwithstanding.

She’ll point to the Statue of Liberty and the poem declaring “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” Exactly. And in the shadow of that great Lady is Ellis Island, where millions upon millions of people were processed legally into our great land … but only after undergoing health exams and vowing not to be on the public charge.

We have doors and we have welcome mats. And we cherish what legal immigration has brought this nation. We savor the flavor of what Alexander Hamilton called “the harmony of ingredients.”

Using Scripture as a Bludgeon

Pelosi would find backbone to her claim in a common scripture tossed around a lot these days by those fighting against the Administration’s immigration moves. (Usually by people who normally wouldn’t let a Bible get anywhere near the public discourse.) It’s Exodus 22:21, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (NIV)

Yes, yes. A thousand times yes.

Except the Hebrew word used there for “foreigner” is “ger.” It is a more specific term than “nekar,” which also means foreigner. Nekar implies a stranger in the land, one who does not follow the law. Nekar has no implication of legal standing in the nation. However, ger is a “sojourner,” a “guest.” One, who though not a Jew, accepts the law of Israel. Ger means someone who has been given legal standing. Not someone who sneaks into or invades the land.

In other words, in our language and parlance, a resident alien or someone here on a visa. If someone mugs you in the park, we’ll try to bring the bad guy to justice, period. We’ll welcome and treat you as a guest, not as a slave.

You will not be mistreated. Other translations say “exploit.” That apples to our current system, which encourages the exploitation of illegal immigrants, particularly in the workplace. So we can’t call the status quo moral. And it sure ain’t biblical.

Of course, we, as individuals, are to treat anyone who crosses our path with love and dignity. And finding solutions should be our sacred business, as a government of the people, a nation under God. (See Rev. James Robison and Pastor Sammy Rodriguez’s “Solutions to the Immigration Problem.”)

Wall is Immoral, But a Fence is Not?

Still, Pelosi’s argument that walls are immoral gets confusing. In her view a wall on the border is “immoral” but a fence is not. But if you keep building up her fence, at what point does it become immoral? When it works?

Suppose it is not a wall, but a non-lethal electrified fence? Or if it’s not a structure at all. Suppose we protect the border with some high-tech laser mesh, or a force field. No structure in sight. Moral or immoral?

Morally, what’s the difference between a wall and “using technology” that makes the border impenetrable? None.

Remember, we’d still have big doors, big welcome mats, and in many cases a big “Help Wanted” sign. So where’s the problem?

Rich Lowry finds Pelosi and the Democrats argument bewildering as well, writing:

A wall or fencing is relatively mild as far as immigration enforcement goes. It doesn’t involve deporting anyone. It doesn’t separate families. It doesn’t prosecute and detain anyone. It doesn’t deny any illegal immigrant currently working in the United States a job. All it does is seek to avoid getting in a situation where any of these things is necessary in the first place.

So what is Nancy Pelosi really driving at? Is her real issue a barrier blocking access into our country?

This gets to our second possibility: Nancy Pelosi is saying the American border itself is immoral.

Open Borders

A decade or two ago that would have sounded insane. Nancy Pelosi herself would have smacked with her gavel anyone who suggested such a thing. But this is 2019, when Democratic benefactor George Soros runs a powerful organization called “Open Borders,” selling this very notion: Borders are bad.

Read libertarian Alex Tabbarok in The Atlantic. Listen to Pope Francis. The American border, American sovereignty, by definition is immoral.

Absorb the catcalls from liberal politicians coast-to-coast calling for the abolition of ICE, the celebration of sanctuary cities, the condemnation of border guards defending our nation from rock and bottle throwing thugs attempting to storm into the country.

Not one cent for a border wall, Pelosi vows. But she seems to have no problem with the U.S. funding of international agencies that undermine American sovereignty.

The Left’s mantra for a couple generations now? America itself is the problem. Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States is treated as a more sacred text than the Bible … Exodus quotes notwithstanding.

The wall, you see, is not immoral. It’s just a chunk of concrete or steel in the middle of the desert. The world’s longest handball court.

We know what the Left now consider immoral: America herself. The policies and practices, common beliefs and cherished traditions that took rugged settlers and ragtag arrivals, the bold and industrious sons and daughters of slaves and shoemakers and built the most prosperous and generous and welcoming nation in human history. See, we stole from the suffering masses around the globe, so we have no right to limit anyone access to American wealth. That’s a tune Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez will dance to all night. And the one that sways Pelosi’s position.

Which gets us to Pelosi’s great irony.

The Great Irony

If we take Nancy Pelosi seriously she is simultaneously arguing that a border wall is not who we are as a country, while promoting policies that change who we are as a country.

When you flood our nation with millions of people who do not share the nation’s values, millions no longer encouraged to assimilate, millions who are instead taught at taxpayer expense and by the media that America is not a great and unique land, you are, by definition, changing “who we are as a country.”

She is changing who we are under the guise of protecting who we have been.

The moral thing for her to do would be to … admit it.

 

Al Perrotta is co-author, with John Zmirak, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.