Conquest Changes Everything: Build the Wall
At my very first class session on my first day of college, I encountered a world-weary psychology professor in the twilight of his career. He was unyielding on class deadlines, with one exception.
“If you can tell me an excuse I’ve never heard before,” he told his wide-eyed freshmen, “I’ll give you an A.” Many of us gave it a shot during that semester, but I never heard of anybody getting the A.
His offer was strategic. Much of our success over the ensuing 40+ years would, in fact, depend on the quality of our excuses. “A lie is an abomination unto the Lord,” Mark Twain quipped, “and an ever-present help in time of trouble.”
But lying to authority figures is one thing. Lying to your children is something else. And so it’s not very hard to forgive illegal aliens who lie about their status in order to put food on the family table, but not so easy to forgive Baby Boomers who lie to their grandchildren that America’s going to be just fine with open borders.
Our American grandchildren need a barrier at our southern border, and soon. Without it, the United States will cease to exist, perhaps within your grandchild’s lifetime.
What would that ending look like? Chicano activist and professor Charles Trujillo has predicted a merger of the U.S. and Mexico, after which fertile immigrants would overtake the native-born voting population, without a shot fired. But he has also called secession of the Southwest from America inevitable, due to recent immigration.
His colleague Armando Navarro, who says he takes inspiration from Saul Alinsky, Vladimir Lenin and Che Guevara, advocates a forcible occupation of the Southwest. “A secessionist movement isn’t something you can put away and say it’s never going to happen in the United States,” Prof. Navarro writes. “Time and history change.”
He has a point.
What if a hypothetical resurgent Mexico not only occupied the Southwest but drove north and east to conquer America from sea to shining sea? Would Mexico’s title to Indianapolis be valid under American property law? Yes, and it’s not even a close question.
The Supreme Court settled that issue in 1823, when it decided Johnson v. McIntosh, a case about Native Americans’ attempt to sell their land to whites. That decision established once and for all that conquest confers title. It even trumps good-faith bilateral contracts for purchase.
If we’re under the impression that we can cut a side deal with invaders, that we can deal away our grandchildren’s sovereignty but keep our property and privileges, we’re playing a very dangerous game. The truth is that conquest trumps not only property rights, it effectively trumps all rights. Match wits with a burnt-out academic if you insist, but let’s not lie to our grandchildren.
Conquest changes everything. Don’t put your grandchildren through it. Build the wall.
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