A migrant caravan of thousands is moving through Mexico toward the U.S. border. Its leaders are hijacking Christian imagery to hype its cause. These migrants from Honduras claim to be refugees from poverty and urban violence. If that were true, then they’d seek refuge in the “first safe country,” which is Mexico. (Not all of Mexico is a shooting gallery like Juarez or Tijuana.) But it isn’t and they’re not. These migrants aren’t asking for refuge in Mexico, but for escorts to the U.S. And Mexico’s government is helping them get to the U.S. border, no questions asked.

If they arrive, and set foot on U.S. soil, we will be helpless. We will have to house and feed every single one of them, while lawyers from George Soros-funded advocacy groups drag out legal proceedings. The migrants will be free to disappear into our cities. While their claim that the entire country of Honduras is a deadly no-go zone has few legal merits, that won’t matter. They won’t be going home. That’s just how lax our immigration laws now are. No wonder President Trump is talking about using the U.S. military to block them. Watch for activist judges to quickly forbid him from doing that. As Commander-in-Chief, he should simply defy them.

Just Make it to Mexico

If this caravan succeeds, that will send a message through every poor country in the Americas: Make it to Mexico. That’s all you need to do. Then the Mexican government will essentially smuggle you into the U.S., and you will never have to leave. As putative refugees you will qualify for benefits. You will live better than the poor souls you left back home with back-breaking jobs. And someday you or your kids will be that most treasured person on earth: A Democratic party voter. Your life will be transformed.

So will our country, if millions of people pull up stakes and start moving north, en masse. You know, the way Europe has been transformed by just one million or so Muslim migrants-posing-as-refugees. (They ceased to be refugees the moment they entered the “first safe country,” which for most was Turkey.) How many would do so? We don’t know, but the Gallup Poll reports: “Nearly 710 million adults worldwide want to migrate to another country and 147 million of those specifically want to come to the United States.”

This raises a crucial question.

Should the United States of America Continue to Exist in its Present Form?

Or would that be wrong? Do we owe it to the world, the poor, or Pope Francis, to fundamentally transform our homeland? To become something totally different? Maybe our job is to let strangers in who will do that job for us, at our own expense. That’s the deal European settlers imposed on Native Americans. Do we want to take it too?

If so, I wonder why. Is there something intrinsically evil about a country that (mostly):

• Respects property rights, and protects them through detailed legal arrangements.
• Expects people to work for their living.
• Holds up an ideal of civic-mindedness, instead of accepting nepotism and corruption as the norm.
• Sees government as a needful but dangerous force to keep in check. Instead of a trough at which you fight for your gang’s chance to feed.
• Sees middle class existence as the norm, instead of allowing an oligarchy to control almost all resources, and fob off the poor with trinkets?

Because that just described the tolerant, mostly free Anglo-American political culture of the historic United States. It doesn’t describe most of Latin America, for complex historical reasons. Put briefly, power-hungry monarchs in the 1500s and 1600s all across Europe sought to crush local liberties and impose autocratic government. They succeeded in Spain and Portugal (and most of Europe). They failed in Britain. So countries colonized by subjects of tyrants turned out differently than those founded by freemen. That much is simple, and for billions, profoundly sad.

No Borders and No Control

Our liberty-based model worked so much better than rival systems in Europe and Latin America, that millions have flocked and still flock here. But up until recent decades we limited their numbers and expected them to assimilate. Neither of those things is true now. We don’t control our southern border at all. It’s de facto the sovereign territory of drug cartels. The same cultlike gangs of thugs corrupt and control much of the Mexican government. These smugglers move drugs, guns, and people into and out of our country at will. They leave behind “rape trees” of the countless young women they victimize all along our southern border.

The whole of the left, the entire Democratic party, and the leaders of most Christian churches say that the U.S. has no right to stop them. Whatever weasel words they use, all the aforementioned fight every single step America takes to preserve its sovereignty. They demonize it in media. Then tie it up in court. They help foreign arrivals to flout our laws, and sign up for public welfare they never paid into.

I documented last year how 24 U.S. Catholic bishops and a key cardinal, Peter Turkson, called for believers to “disrupt” all attempts at enforcing such laws. One bishop, Daniel Flores, compares deporting illegals to aborting unborn children. (Which of course, equates Mexico with a medical waste dumpster, but never mind.)

So expect the U.S. Catholic Conference and other religious leaders to raise a national outcry over our “duty” to take all these migrants. You know, the kind of stink that few of them made over the legalization of assisted suicide in Hawaii on Holy Thursday. Or when Catholic senators voted to keep on killing “pain-capable” unborn babies.

Will Chief Trump Give Our Land to the Settlers?

And now we face an enormous test of will. If we fail it, the consequences will be — not “could be,” will be — enormous. We stand at the same point in history as the Native Americans did around 1700. And we face the same question: What kind of system will prevail here, ordered liberty on the Anglo-American model? Or a corrupt and lawless oligarchy such as prevails through most of Latin America — and U.S. cities governed by Democrats? Will our “shining city on a hill” become one vast Chicago or Baltimore? Or a high-tech Tijuana?

President Trump, we’re waiting for your answer.

For much more on this, see John Zmirak and Al Perrotta’s upcoming book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration.  This article has been updated.