The Children’s Crusade

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I hate to run my mouth about anything medieval even if it’s specific to Portugal, because some of you are experts in the time and the stuff, and I’m not.

So, I won’t.

Instead, I’m going to run my mouth with qualifications. (Yeah, you thought I’d stay quiet, did you? You poor ducklings.)

The way I was taught/understood The Children’s Crusade, it was an effort mounted by Europe in the belief that there was a magical character to children and to faith, and that given the faith of a child, they could easily take over Jerusalem.

It was a mystical thing, with little connection to the world outside, or indeed to anything real, but it was deeply felt and internalized by people in what amounted to a theocracy.

Understand, I’m not putting the faith of the times down, but having achieved wall to wall dominance (save for the Moorish invasion) in Europe, Catholicism dominated every facet of life, to an extent even the most religious of us could not understand or engage with. People used the highly ritualized Catholicism of the time as a prism to see life through, and given that humans are humans and most of us never engage with the transcendent and those who do can’t stay engaged all the time, it was more superstition than anything else. The stories of saints and even of the life of Christ mixed with the local legends of the local divinities to create what’s technically known as a hot mess, which meant that most of the time their superstitions weren’t even about Christianity as such.

But because they were in an echo chamber those superstitions assumed the strength of proven facts. (No human experiences or proves everything by and for himself) and so… the children’s crusade.

Which goes a long way towards explaining what we’re seeing at our Southern Border.

Look, even in its worst aspect, what we’re seeing is not of a number sufficiently large to make a difference. I hear a hundred and two hundred thousand variously mentioned. And I’m not putting it down. It is a huge number.

But unless someone has been pissing down our necks about the number of immigrants already here, it’s a drop in the bucket. (The possibility of someone pissing down our necks is quite real. We’ve entered a state in which it’s easier to trust British newspapers about our numbers, and where even my moderate left friends roll their eyes when the unemployment numbers come out. And let’s face it, exaggerating the number of illegals has always – more or less – been a thing, because it gives more money for social services agencies as well as creating a “crisis” that calls for blanket naturalization. I’m not the only one to think that, because people keep quoting numbers widely apart for the number of illegal immigrants here.) Sane people often say something like “we have between three and eleven million illegal immigrants.” Because we can’t be sure, because our governing classes lie to us. BUT one thing is for sure: even if it’s just three million, even if we added a quarter million before someone puts an end to this insanity, it won’t be the end of the world.

Oh, sure, it will strain our schools and our medical systems. Oh, sure, we will get one or two terrorists in, and maybe a backpack nuke, which could change things dramatically.

But what I mean is, it won’t “fundamentally transform America” unless by transform you mean it will royally p*ss us off.

The kids, (and quite a few adults claiming to be kids) streaming over our border can’t conquer us, any more than children could conquer Jerusalem against experienced warriors.

Then what the heck is going on?

Magical thinking. On both parts, I’m afraid, but mostly on the part of our elites. (People in the third world aren’t isolated enough from every day realities to engage in magical thinking, “magical realism” notwithstanding. Or at least not to engage in it beyond the quotidian “good luck gesture” and such.)

First to understand the part of the people sending their kids across, or the kids coming across. This isn’t very hard, and might be more clear to me than to anyone else.

No, not because I wanted to come here. I wanted to come here because I grew up in books set in America and on translations of Readers’ Digest from the fifties, when granddad had subscribed (in Brazil) and on histories of America. I wanted to come home. I very much doubt that most of these kids have spent years poring over Heinlein and the founding fathers.

On the other hand, I come from a country (and a region) of emmigrants. And I knew that if I didn’t manage to get into the US right away (it’s hard) I’d still have to leave Portugal as soon as possible. It will tell you something that the corruptocracies of Europe were a better destination. I had plans and back up plans for the plans and back up plans for those plans. I’m sure by now I’d have made it here. But I got lucky and fell in love with and married and American.

Which is neither here nor there – I knew both the drive of people my class (college students, mostly) and of people who were dead broke and starving. The downside of Portugal having a deep past, with castles and picturesque views, and quaint customs like the summer solstice “everyone goes to the street and dances all night” thing is that it that deep past is a vast underwater drag. Portugal is like an iceberg. Culturally what you see at the top is maybe 2% of the whole beast. The way the culture really behaves underneath, hidden from outsiders, is the other 98% and that’s mostly how it’s behaved through Roman and Muslim and Christian.

Certain things are very hard to understand from outside, and very hard for them to change from inside. The past will have its due. Which explains why Portuguese politics resembles nothing so much like the Roman system of patronage and why proverbs like “he who has no patron dies in jail” is not even vaguely scandalous.

This means that the system almost doesn’t work. Material wealth in the world at large is so great right now that even in Portugal people aren’t like the old immigrants to Germany I talked to on a train, unable to eat meat but twice a month.

But there’s stuff other than the material which drives people from a country. Portugal has gotten much worse, crime and insecurity wise, than it was when I left. But even at the level it was then, it created a bad background to life. And knowing that if what you wanted to do was not something you had contacts in, you couldn’t do it pushed a lot more people out. And then there was material need, and the stories that the streets of France (yes, France) were paved with gold. We knew they were true, too, because those lowest class people who went to France came back in a few years and looked… glossy. It’s the only way I can describe it. They went and they came back, and their kids looked healthy and sassy.

So, that’s what we’re seeing from the other side. Our government having invited them (I don’t know whether to trust that there were pamphlets distributed at American consulates, but after the IRS and the EPA and everything else, would anyone really be surprised?) and promised them citizenship which then means they can chain-bring their whole families, they’re coming to the place where the streets are paved with gold, and where there’s hope they can do something better than what their ancestors did.

No, it’s not because of “instability and war” because unless our press is more blind than usual, there ain’t no such thing going on in South and Central America right now. Or at least there ain’t more of it than there’s been since forever. If these children were primarily streaming in from Syria or Lybia, I’d understand it, but they’re not. Yes, South and Central America is a hot mess, but it has been since… well, since before the conquistadors came through. And that’s a d*mn long time.

In fact, the stories I’ve read of individual kids coming through, they came through not because they were starving or at war, but because their parents are in the US and the grandparents or uncles or whatever who’d been looking after them takes them to a bus and entrusts them to the coyotes.

But Sarah, you say, why would anyone do that with an unprotected child unless they’re truly and absolutely desperate?

Because the concept of children is different in the US. Sorry, guys, it is.

We “lived so well so long” that we’ve forgotten the normal behavior of humanity and what children mean or don’t mean even right now abroad. Look, our laws make it almost impossible for raising children to be anything but a net financial drain, a source of time loss, a labor of love. As our birth rate plummets, each child becomes “the all precious one child” or the “all precious two children” (I know. I suffer from that.)

I come from a different time and place. My family was relatively well off, definitely educated, and ran to small numbers of children. (Mom was one of five, dad one of four. For their time and place these were small families.) Of their siblings only my aunt had more than two – she had four because she wanted a son – and half had only one. That’s a precipitous birth rate drop in a generation – but the attitude was still there.

What do I mean? If you heard of a child dying at say, eight, it wasn’t “oh, the poor thing, so young and innocent.” No, the adults would shake their heads and say “almost raised.” Their pity was for the parents who having got the child through the most intensive-care years, now lost all their labor.

Families of poorer people seemed to view the death of a child as sad, of course, but something like between the death of a pet and an adult. It wasn’t as serious. A child might be mourned because he or she was the only one of its kind (our neighbor never got over losing her daughter in the measles/small pox/whatever the hell it was when we were three (Robert says from presentation and mortality sounds like small pox). She had three sons.) Or because he/she was the only one. Or for some other reason. But normal children as children didn’t have the value they have to us.

I was reading about the poor woman arrested for letting her nine year old go to a park alone with a cell phone, and I told Robert “Likely they’d arrest me now for the way I raised you and your brother.” Because see, we lived in a small mountain town with a large complement of nosy grandmothers so that the kids COULD be free range. At five, Robert would walk downtown (two blocks. It’s a 5k people town) to the arcade, to buy himself a corn dog and play the games. At seven, he’d take his three year old brother with him. I’m not going to lie: the first few times I followed from a block away, making sure they were being good about crossing the street and such. But I wanted them to be free-range and self-sufficient and not dependent on mom to drive them everywhere, and not hemmed in by structured play dates.

This of course sounds like borderline abuse now.

But in other countries it’s not like that. They still have larger families. Children are still a means to an end.

When I was growing up there was a family of hereditary beggers who blinded their children (the family was known for being blind) if they were born with sight, so they could continue in the family tradition. And they blinded them at birth because blind children bring in the most money.

You are now probably thinking I’m maligning people from third world countries. I’m not. They’re the norm. We’re the anomaly.

So if you had a chance to send your young kid on this perilous journey to secure for the entire family the blessings of the United States wherethestreetsarepavedwithgold, why WOULDN’T you do it? He/she is a kid. He/she is supposed to benefit the family. It’s not like you’re blinding him/her.

And then… And then there is the people who invited them – who promised these children and by extension these families the ability to become Americans and to bring their whole tribe to greater opportunity and prosperity.

What were they thinking?

And here we are in the children’s crusade. You see, these children are magical.

Under the twist Marxism took in the seventies (I think. Might have been earlier. I suck with dates) the proletariat that failed to rise were discarded in favor of the “international proletariat.” I.e. the people in the Western countries who refused to take to Marxism were discarded by the dreamers in favor of the idea of internationalism and the idea of the poor of oppressed countries.

People like our president – generational, fervent Marxists – have been raised with the idea that there’s a magic to people of exotic races (yes, he thinks so, trust me) particularly people of oppressed races from poor countries. So, you know, your South American campesino trumps the inner city Chicago youth from the projects.

It’s a magical category and a magical thought. They think that people have more “power” in proportion to their class (oppressed) and color (brown.)

In current Marxist eschatology the poor from third world countries will inherit the world, because of their magic victimhood that gives them the power to defeat everyone else.

It’s entirely possible that they think if they bring in a few thousand of the “oppressed” it will be enough to change us completely, because, oppressed power or something.

But it’s more likely that they have in mind something more physical. Apparently a lot of these “kiddies” have criminal records and have belonged to gangs. Which means… I don’t know. At any other time I’d think this was insane, but it’s entirely possible the elites view these “children” as their defense against us should we turn on them. Look, disarming us didn’t work and they tried so hard, by flooding Mexico with guns which action should make us give ours up in disgust, and by screaming when a nut shot up some school children. They need some protection.

That’s an hypothesis.

The other one is that they think that they can use these young adults, carefully distributed, to tip the polls in selected places. While this is more plausible, it still doesn’t make much in the way of sense because, well, guys, we had places with more than 100% vote for the president. They can’t get much more dirty than that, and they don’t need physical people to game the polls.

Perhaps they think they can overwhelm the system enough it will collapse. This is possible. It’s the idea that what rises afterwards is communism that is insane. I mean even in Russia or for that matter France, that’s how it was sold, but it’s not what happened. If things collapse we’re more likely to get a strong man, and I doubt he’ll be from the left, the current generation being what it is.

None of it makes much sense, in fact, given the numbers involved, unless it is predicted in magical thinking.

You know, Children- Purity of oppression- something happens – fall of capitalism.

This is the level of intellectual understanding we’re dealing with now.

The children’s crusade is in full swing, and theocrats singing L’International will not listen to reason. In all this, I pity the poor people caught in the middle and decided with false promises, and the people who will die because of the terrorists and weapons that inevitably will cross over.

As for our elites, I think they might be past help.  Like the desperate theocrats of medieval Europe, they sacrifice the children of others, and are unaware of the suffering they cause.

It is up to us — our duty and our sacred obligation — to bring them into contact with reality as speedily as may be.

 

139 thoughts on “The Children’s Crusade”

  1. I had to think about what you said about the libprog program being a religion to them. I think you touched on something…..

    One of the things that makes these people so dangerous, is they still think they’re revolutionists and anything they do to is justified for the ends they seek.

    The older leaders of this movement, the Elizabeth Warren’s and the Clintons, rebelled against the “establishment” of the sixties with the backdrop of the Vietnam war. It hasn’t really dawned on them yet, that they’re now the “establishment”, and what they’re doing with the IRS attacking the Right, with tendrils to the White House and the Federal Election Commission {with the Justice Department being unwilling to press charges} is seen by a lot of the rest of us as corruption.

    They haven’t stopped trying to limit the second ammendment. They’ll continue as long as they’re in power…….

    We have an interesting election cycle coming around. A lot of the problems that seemed solved {by their standards}, immigration being one of them, are exploding in their faces. So far, the firearm squabble has been quiet, but before the election you can bet something will happen to bring that into sharp focus again…..

    I wish I had more time right now {but I have a lot of work to do today}, but in my view the second ammendment guarantees the constitution. All the other issues are important, but protecting our second ammendment rights is probably the most important thing of all. Everything else can be fixed later, but give up your rights and responsibilities over this ammendment, and it can all be lost…

    My view

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    1. Obviously it hasn’t dawned on them yet that they are now the Establishment, they are still talking about, “Speaking Truth to Power”. But you’re right, they still see themselves as revolutionists, which makes for some really strange logical convolutions.

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      1. Like the cell phone commercial where the gent in the corner office and three piece suit is crowing about how this new cell phone service lets him “stick it to the man.”
        Boy from the mailroom: “Um, sir, you are the man.”
        Boss: “That doesn’t matter.”

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    2. anything they do to is justified for the ends they seek

      This, I think, is the important bit.

      Because their desired result is good, anything they do– or want– is also good. Even if it’s directly opposed to the good they claim to be pursuing.
      (“Sexual freedom” or “sex equality” groups that demand all women be sluts. Not whores, because they are offered nothing in return for sexual favors– they’re supposed to be sluts and be pleased to have the chance.)

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    3. Your second amendment is the one thing which, in my opinion, makes your situation much better, or at least promising, than the situation is in Europe. Otherwise what is in each country and each of your states can be rather mixed, some things may be better here, some other things over there, but overall all of our freedoms are threatened.

      But you have the second amendment. We don’t. That, and attitudes – Europeans are more indoctrinated to thinking as subjects – makes me think that you have a lot more hope than we do.

      Europeans… well, I can’t quite believe that something like Kratman’s Caliphate might happen here for real, people may be rather docile appearing on the surface right now but underneath the surface not so much (under the surface we are still tribal enough), and if the push becomes too real to too many people too fast the end result could easily turn into some sort of modern Reconquista and the Moors will once again be kicked out (the foreign elements start to initiate changes which impact the accustomed lifestyles of the natives… yes, they maybe able to do that on some parts of some cities where it’s mostly them now, but if that starts to happen in large enough scale that most locals can no longer deal with the situation by just easily avoiding them – there will probably be backlash and it may not be pretty. And whether those foreign elements are likely to push too hard too fast, and before they have the numbers needed to do it by force? They seem to have a tendency towards doing exactly that. They have gotten used to the idea that we are mostly very soft here. Maybe we are, because we think we can afford it now. Show us that we no longer can afford it… maybe we will remember what we used to be).

      But then that would probably also result in even tighter rule by the governments – it will just be governments run by very different people than the current world healing peaceniks.

      But you still have more hope of keeping and retaking your freedoms. Because you have the guns you are much less easy to run over. We’d need a much bigger portion of our populace willing to act before we could change the direction – and because of that things are also more likely to continue towards worse because our rulers fear our reactions much less.

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      1. “ecause you have the guns you are much less easy to run over.”

        Because we have the guns we are much less accustomed to backing down from our government.

        BTW, I am currently reading Michael Barone’s Our First Revolution, a history of the abdication of England’s James II in 1689, a revolution which was capped by the declaration of the English Bill of Rights, 1689, a document anticipating our own American Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Notably it included a version of the 2nd Amendment (although only for Protestants) and leveled a list of charges against James II which is echoed by the list of censorious acts by the Crown against its Colonial subjects in America’s Declaration of Independence.

        One cannot help but notice how the events of this first revolution would have been fresh in the minds of the Founding Fathers … and how much they are reflected in our current complaints against the present imperious president.

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        1. Yes. We may vote in different groups and change governments when we become unhappy enough, but after that we think that governments should do the rest of whatever is needed. More of you dare to think you should do things yourselves and not wait to be told what to do, or wait for some official people to do it if you think something needs doing.

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      2. Europeans… well, I can’t quite believe that something like Kratman’s Caliphate might happen here for real,

        Kratman wasn’t *predicting*, he was extrapolating from established datapoints. It IS happening.

        Did you hear about what happened in Paris over the weekend?

        people may be rather docile appearing on the surface right now but underneath the surface not so much (under the surface we are still tribal enough), and if the push becomes too real to too many people too fast the end result could easily turn into some sort of modern Reconquista and the Moors will once again be kicked out (the foreign elements start to initiate changes which impact the accustomed lifestyles of the natives…

        Then what? Who’s going to work the cafe’s and hospitals in August?

        Who’s going to pay a significant portion of their wages in taxes as transfer taxes to the pensioners who certain have EARNED their 20+ years of retirement?

        And finally when push comes to shove, who’s going to pick up the guns? You’ve spent almost 70 years pissing on the concept of an offensive military. Heck you won’t even send volunteers to places like Afghanistan unless there’s promises they won’t be in fighting. Your militaries are filled with people who have little or no experience with fighting, no experience with war, and damn little experience with discomfort.

        You might be able to outsource the killing to folks from the Balkans but to do that…where you going to get the money?

        It’s not any one thing that is destroying Europe, it’s a lot of things, and you won’t be able to fix any one of them without the rest stopping you.

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        1. Yes, I know about Paris. And Stockholm etc.

          Yep, if there was an attack from the outside we’d fold, without your help, fast enough. From the inside, that depends. Right now it could go either way, but what makes me think Caliphate will probably not happen is that it seems likely that these strangers who have been moving here may very likely go too far too fast. They are strangers, and it’s one thing when you are being told what to do by your own, something else when some group of strangers tries to do that, and they are trying to do it already. But we are still tribal, and right now it seems likely they will push us into reacting before they have the numbers to subdue us by force. One part is that their group has a lots of angry young men who are likely to fly off the handle regularly. And if the perception of them changes from the people who work the cafes and the hospitals into the people who may burn your car, not only if you make the mistake of parking it somewhere close to their turf but on your home street, or maybe even kill you or yours on some street on _your_ part of the city… there is resentment already, for now it’s mostly underneath the surface, but if they keep pushing that will change.

          And remember that not all here are college educated cubicle dwellers. The descendants of the former factory workers are getting a bit restless as it is, but for now there is the money to keep even the out of work ones comfortable, they can pay for their beer and sports. Take that away while giving them a clear and obvious enemy living next door…and hey, the ruling classes may even help there, it’s a time honored tradition to stay in power by directing the anger of the subjects somewhere else, they protect those groups only as long as it is good for them, but if being pro-immigrant turns into an obvious liability politically they will most likely change their tune fast enough – or they will be replaced by rulers who do sing a different tune (and as you said, the money will not last forever, and the subjects will be very pissed once it runs out. The rulers – or wannabe rulers – will be on the lookout for suitable lighting rods sooner or later. An already disliked immigrant group might seem like a godsend.).

          Now imagine a couple of those foreign looking angry young men killing a popular soccer star on the street instead of some unknown soldier…

          But if they manage to push us into that backlash, well, we tend to change rulers, at most how the rulers are picked, not the system itself.

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  2. I generally agree with your observations, but I think the motivations for letting in the “kids” are simpler. I would argue that the nomenkultura sees borders as an inconvenience and the magical thinking extends to a lack of thought about the consequences of their actions. “The poor kids are suffering, we should let them in.” They think. There is no deeper thought. And since they are buffered from the consequences, they don’t care. It just means that there kids nanny will be even cheaper in 10 years.

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    1. I’ve read a number of academic histories and articles about how the notion of borders and the very idea of a nation-state are obsolete. We should all be “citizens of the world,” and (especially) the US has no moral right to restrict access to people migrating for economic reasons. Oh, and a few toss in the additional argument that opening the borders is justice for the US not allowing more Jews in during WWII, and for the Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1800s, and for the Bracero laws and restrictions of the 1940s-1960s. And since all cultures are equal, there’s nothing to be concerned about by proportional immigration (i.e. more people from the most populous nations and Southern Hemisphere, far fewer from Northern Europe.)

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      1. I am certain that this all sounded like a perfectly brilliant notion when it was first bruited about by the upper echelons of this administration – yes, lets Cloward-Piven the border, and it’s a win-win, all the way around. But the for-real consequences will land in working-class and middle-class neighborhoods , schools, hospitals and police stations in flyover country: vicious young criminals, kids with no vaccinations who can’t/won’t speak English, epidemics of diseases that haven’t been seen here ind decades, thirty people crammed in a 2-bedroom 1-bath house, and legitimate worker’s wages undercut by illegals willing to work for much, much less. This will not rebound in the real world on the people who thought it up — oh, no, it will rebound on the rest of us. Which is why I believe that ordinary people are starting to really get angry about it.

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            1. An epidemic of resistant TB, Chagas and a few other fun things make yet make it onto the 6:30 news. Particularly when the feds are shipping these people all over the country clandestinely.

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                1. Oh my, no. It’s climate change now. ;-)

                  That way they don’t have to worry about a few good winters, because whatever the weather, it will become support for expanded governmental intrusion.

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        2. This is, in my opinion, the real reason why the elite are doing this. They WANT the middle class of the United States to cease to exist. That will make everyone ‘equal’ (except for them, of course, as they are ‘more equal’ than the rest of us). They may have some ideas about eliminating borders, etc., but I think their primary goal right now is to break the economy of this country and make all of us into a poverty-stricken underclass that they can use and abuse however they wish. It will also make it simpler for them to force people to move to wherever they want them, in order to implement Agenda 21.

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    2. I think their conception goes a step deeper. They think that, by bringing in children, they can get those on the Right to change their minds, because they are children and not adults. And if those on the Right DON’T change their minds, then the Left can scream about how evil and uncaring they are.

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      1. the right is uncaring but the left is supporting something causing girls around 8-10 or so and up to be regularly molested … eggs and omelets and all that rot

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        1. And just to keep our proverbs going, “pot calling the kettle black,” with respect to the Left ranting about the Right.

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        2. No, Wayne, I think it’s more cynical than that. I think that by bringing in children, they believe the Right will either have to drop the rhetoric about closing the border or be seen as child-hating monsters. They think it’s a win-win, because they believe, as JP says, that the right is uncaring. They REALLY BELIEVE that. I don’t think they ever dreamed that $2 million plus in donations would be sent to McAllen, TX over the weekend from (drumroll…) Glenn Beck and Mercury One.
          That kind of action, volunteering and helping those kids get the food and medical care they need (as well as pushing the Feds to let the press into those facilities so we can see what they’re doing to those kids, I’m hearing some horrible stories), a) puts paid to the notion that the right is uncaring. We’re not. (Someone tell Stephen King that, apparently he missed the memo) and b) gives us room to maneuver on other issues. We don’t want the border closed because we hate brown kids. We want it closed because it’s the border. Because of all the problems an open border causes. Because the kids are being enticed here by our refusal to enforce our own laws and build a fence.

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            1. Yeah, I just don’t think they believe the Right will change their minds. They don’t want the Right to change their minds. They need the Right to hate on. Like I said, they REALLY BELIEVE that the Right is a bunch of uncaring monsters – they get to feel a morally justifiable anger and get to act against a monstrous opponent, thus justifying any and all actions taken against them.

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              2. They don’t care. They can delude themselves. As Haidt showed, the farther left you go, the more delusional you are about your opponents.

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              3. Whatever you say, having a boggy man on the other side has been put to good use for fun raising. For one reason and another I had been on the mailing lists of both major political parties at the same time. I observed that in the fund raising letters I would get much of the language was interchangeable: If we don’t defeat Sen. Jesse Helms or if we don’t defeat Sen. Teddy Kennedy XYZ is going to suffer and the world will go to hell in a hand basket.

                And, yes, I think that both sides believe that there are people on the other who will destroy the country if allowed.

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      2. ‘Friends come through the gates, enemies come over the wall.’

        This came from Romans, and hence is part of my cultural heritage.

        Thus, anyone who has a problem with it is a racist.

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  3. You raised your children to be self-sufficient, unlike many today who ONLY look at kids as more money in handouts… And you also had the advantage of a two parent household, unlike many today… Re the 3rd world kids, the current elites see them as votes to dump into historically red states to turn them blue and continue the freebies for another generation… Marxism cannot survive without the unwashed low information voters…

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  4. You raised your children to be self-sufficient, unlike many today who ONLY look at kids as more money in handouts… And you also had the advantage of a two parent household, unlike many today… Re the 3rd world kids, the current elites see them as votes to dump into historically red states to turn them blue and continue the freebies for another generation… Marxism cannot survive without the unwashed low information voters…

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  5. What’s the worst that can happen? A bunch of children die, the GOP is blamed and maybe the Dems keep the house? How can they lose? This is pure genius! Sure, a lot of people will get hurt but who cares as long as their side wins.

    I think it says something that the other side is (apparently) more than willing to use children as a means to a political end. They really don’t see people as humans, they see us as pawns. This really illustrates this.

    Thanks for the perspective on how other cultures view children. It wasn’t that long ago the same was true here.

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    1. “I think it says something that the other side is (apparently) more than willing to use children as a means to a political end. They really don’t see people as humans, they see us as pawns.”

      Obama doesn’t even view other people as pawns. Remember, he voted IN FAVOR of letting newborns die of exposure.

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    2. “The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.

      “He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

      ― Adam Smith

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    3. I think Byron’s pegged it: this is simply a scheme to discredit conservatives—only I’d go a step farther. Borrowing the language of Bastiat’s famous essay, we have the following situation:

      What is seen is the 100,000 children that are here, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. Anyone who would send them back to the poverty and gang violence they’ve escaped from is a terrible person.

      What is not seen is the millions of children whose parents are reading the news and still considering whether to try sending them. Is it worth paying the coyotes $10,000 per child, and putting your daughter on birth control before handing her over to them? they wonder. Well, when you calculate the risks vs. the benefits of illegal immigration, the likelihood of spending the money and running the risks and still being sent back by the INS has to be taken into account. Anyone who would ignore the cost, in enslaved and raped and murdered children, of a policy that encourages ever more illegal immigration—is a terrible person.

      But terrible people of the second sort don’t have to deal with the pictures of the children their policy affects, and the simplistic slogans, and the Brigades of the Caring and Very, Very, Sensitive.

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      1. BTW, I would (in theory) agree with a policy somewhat along these lines: Show up at a U. S. A. consulate with a valid case for refugee status and we’ll bring you over here.

        There are all sorts of practical problems with this idea, the cost not least among them, but I submit it would be an improvement over the status quo.

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        1. Heh. How about: you give us your children we take them, but then they are ours, not yours. Boarding schools, similar to those once built for Native American kids, the kids will be taken in and, er, indoctrinated fully, they can leave when they are educated, healthy, speak perfect English and think like Americans… and no contact with former families is allowed. >:)

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      2. Terrible people of the second sort view these children as victims of an exploitative capitalist culture that fosters the inequality and criminality that drove these children from their homes, and it is past time the capitalists had their noses rubbed in the harm their philosophy inflicts and were forced to deal with the consequences of their sins.

        One thing about the second sort of people is that while they are quick to take credit (Seal Team 6 Barry & Joe brought down Osama) for success, the responsibility for failure is never theirs. Either the problems are due to racist/sexist/whateverthepuckist opposition or somebody forced them to do it.

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        1. Ah, yes; the 21ˢᵗ-century amendment to Bastiat: That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, and That Which Cannot Be Seen Because it Exists Only in the Minds of Raving Lunatics. :-)

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          1. Sort of a political and economic version of Harvey . . . That makes a great deal of sense, especially after the governor of Washington state’s comments about the POTUS yesterday. He’s “bending the arc of the moral universe forward,” and we all know what happens when you start bending the universe.

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  6. Actually, I’d say the goals of the so-called progressives here is best described as “all of the above.” The various factions that comprise the Left do see the illegals as a source of political power; they do see the illegals as an opportunity to crash the system Cloward-Piven style (or just watch the world burn for the hell of it); they do see the illegals as a political (and eventually, a physically violent) counterweight to established taxpaying American citizens (and particularly the *white* ones; you know how dangerious *they* are) and they think that the “browning” of America is a worthy goal in its own right. They’re quite open about all that. Indeed, Illinois Congressman Luis Guiterrez was quoted on one of the blogs this morning saying that all the illegals should receive amnesty just to “punish” all the citizens who oppose it.

    But as for the elites’ “magical thinking:” I’d say that what that’s all about is to deceive themselves, as much as the American people, as to what’s actually going on here. Their Childrens’ Crusade is nothing less than organized human trafficking and child prostitution for political profit, and nobody likes being called a pimp and a slaver. Especially when it’s true.

    But then again, the Democrat Party has always been the party of slavery and segregation, hasn’t it? The truly despicable thing about all this is that so many of the heirs of the party of Lincoln (e.g. Boehner, McCain, Graham) are willing to go along with the slaving and pimping.

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    1. Some days, I wouldn’t mind watching the world burn, as long as I was sure it would take the vileprogs with it.

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      1. This is the one unsung danger of encouraging people not to have children and separating those children that are had from their fathers.

        You get a large number of people who don’t give a damn about the long term because they have no attachment to it.

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        1. I should note that I normally don’t feel so nihilistic, but every now I then I start the day on a down note, get in to work to find crises awaiting, then peruse the news at lunch, only to hear of the latest atrocity of the vileprogs and America’s enemies. It can sometimes be hard to keep a positive, or even neutral, outlook in the face of such.

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    3. If the Left didn’t like being associated with pimps and slavery, why were so supportive of ACORN and Planned Parenthood when staffers from those organizations were shown advising someone who presented himself to them as a child-slaving pimp?

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    4. *Another* children’s crusade ending with the dupes being enslaved in one form or another…. I’m shocked I tell you! /sarc

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  7. At 9 I was riding my bike miles away from home, and if I hadn’t told Ma and Dad where I was going, the “Within Whistle Range” rule applied (and that was a rather large area), but we’d be down at the river fishing, or in the bay swimming or snorkeling (I grew up on Lake Michigan) and yeah, by todays nanny noseys was “neglected” and I loved every day of it. My relatives who still live there are almost as “lax” in their kids’ lives during summer, though most have some sport or other the kids do instead of just wandering about every day, but I know the kids are far freer than the ones I see here in Texas.

    Back when my folks were still traveling in their retirement, they still summered on the old family farmland (more a forested area than Farm, what little farming there was mostly pigs and the oak trees shedding acorns supplemented the food), and my Nephew in Memphis would spend part of the summers there. When he was 9 or so, he learned the truth about freedom. 100 or so acres and his only three rules were “Let Gran or Pops know when he was wandering off”, “Stay on the property (sorta) so you can hear Pops whistle if they need you to come back” (Dad is a VERY loud whistler) and “Be back for dinner”. He’d go wander in the woods, and sneak up on deer or chase chipmunks and turkeys.

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    2. Sounds much like my childhood in Texas. That it’s impossible now makes me sad and angry.

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    3. I was reading about the poor woman arrested for letting her nine year old go to a park alone with a cell phone, and I told Robert “Likely they’d arrest me now for the way I raised you and your brother.”

      All the parents in the suburban neighborhood where I lived from around ages 4 to 10 would have been arrested. No one had cell phones. I had to stay in range to hear the big old cow bell my Momma used to call me in. Other children had other signals.

      Then we moved into center city Philadelphia. Most mornings I walked most of the way to school accompanied by my Daddy, who was on his way to work. (Sometimes he would skip and I would squeal, because everyone knew that Daddies in three piece suits carrying brief cases don’t skip through down town.) The first week my Momma met me when school got out. After that I walked home alone, as did most of the other children my age.

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      1. The Powers That Be don’t want people to learn how to be self-reliant. They want people to be dependent. I’m sure it galls them that they have to let children be dependent on their parents for so long before they can become depended on Government.

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        1. Which is why we are hearing more and more about year-round school and four (and three) year old kindergarten. Sure, they say they want to see kids get a better start. The better start they desire to see is the start on becoming a good little citizens of the state.

          Home education totally flummoxes them. So they warn us. The parents are not trained and certified teachers. The parents may not use a proper scope and sequence risking the child’s intellectual development. The children will lack socialization and not fit into society in the future. A few parents have used it to hide abuse. The parents are failing the system by selfishly taking care of their own children rather than becoming involved in the schools.

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  8. All this is true, and I think there is some more to add to this. How we react to these children is going to influence their generation, whether they remain or are repatriated. If we turn them over to government agencies, we will teach them that Americans are as heartless and cruel as anything they went through getting here (the stories confirming this are already coming out). BUT–and it’s a big but–if we respond as Americans historically have, with individuals stepping in to help individuals, then this generation, no matter where they end up, is going to have reason to love America, not hate it. And that will cause a different shift than what the political class hopes for.

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    1. I think you are an idealist gnardopolo– too many of these invaders are gang members… too many of them are for the handout and not the handup. I used to know a Basque that would come up from Mexico every year to herd sheep. He was independent, hardworking, and had no problems working in the US until the first immigration reform under Regan. Then he was unable to do his work. I wouldn’t have minded having him in the US. But, he had family in Mexico and they were well settled there. Even when you talk to Mexicans who immigrated and repatriated to the US in the late 70s and 80s, they don’t want this group of people coming into the Country. They bring no skills, and no work ethic. There is a reason that other countries do not allow children without accompanying adults and even then don’t allow them to stay– they become a burden… It is easy to give and help when you have the resources. When the resources are taken through — government intervention– then people lose the ability to help anyone outside their families.

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      1. Not just Mexicans – other people from other South American and Central American countries btw. I know Guatamalens, Panamanians, Brazilians as well.

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      2. That’s why you have to approach them as individuals. You cannot treat them as numbers, or faceless cogs, because that’s how you get the gang members in–and keep the shepherds out. There has to be a better, more humane way of treating the people who are coming here, for good or bad. And the first priority would have to be securing the border, because right now there are too many people coming across at too many points to be able to know how bad the problems are. You have to be strict in who comes across and how so that you can be compassionate when they get here.

        And again, the biggest key is to keep the federal government out of the process as much as possible. They might be able to help with securing the border–maybe–but they for damn sure should never be put in charge of any group of people, especially children.

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        1. I agree about keeping the federal government out of the process– no governing body imho has the requisite compassion– statistics and more damn statistics.

          People helping people — is the only way to do it. Since I am not in a situation physically or financially to help anyone, I won’t be one of those individuals btw.

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        2. Civil disobedience is not a hammer that gets things done, it is a finger on a long lever, and from the time of the Super Fragile Mystic with halitosis that lever has been a sympathetic press in order to press willing to put you in it’s best light and your opposition in their worst.

          Does that sound like the press today?

          It also requires people who can sit in jail, take beatings and generally do things that make it hard to get to work on time and make money to pay the bills.

          if you don’t have bills, have a sympathetic boss, or whatever, and think you can get sympathetic media coverage, have at it.

          But consider, when you get 400 normal, middle class folks in slacks and shirts with buttons on it at a tea party rally and the news media shows some the live action version of that fat pervert from the comic shop on the Simpsons, how do you think YOUR act of civil disobedience will be treated? I saw what’s happened at the few marches, gatherings and protests I’ve been a part of. The goofiest ‘tard in the bunch is the that gets airtime.

          Look, there might be ways to solve these problems, but the left did what they did because they OWNED THE MEDIA and the media showed them (to jump forward 2 generations to something we all remember) the face of a boy who could have been the Presidents son, not a recent picture of a drugged out street fighting thief.

          You know another reason why MLK got so much traction in the 60s? Because middle class white people were scared shitless of the black panthers who promised a LOT more than civil disobedience, but they were ALREADY felons and street thugs. So they could give in to MLK, or they could fight the panthers. Since what MLK was asking for was basically equal rights, it was a no brainer.

          We aren’t. We don’t have anyone to the right of us who is for freedom and liberty, only willing to kill large sections of the population for it. We have jobs and houses and stuff that matters to us that can be lost with a single signature on a document–how much do YOU have in savings to hire a lawyer to fight a federal charge that everyone knows is bullshit, but the FBI has evidence from their labs (you have been following that haven’t you?)

          Heck, I’ve got a 7 year old who has to eat. I can’t go to jail for 6 months hoping enough people on the internet will rally to my cause and pay for a decent lawyer.

          Push comes to shove I’ll shove back, but it’s like I tell my daughter, never *hit* first, always hit back.

          They gotta cross the lines clearly enough that everyone sees it.

          And given their volunteer whores in the media, that’s going to come WAY too late.

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          2. “You know another reason why MLK got so much traction in the 60s? Because middle class white people were scared shitless of the black panthers who promised a LOT more than civil disobedience, but they were ALREADY felons and street thugs. So they could give in to MLK, or they could fight the panthers. Since what MLK was asking for was basically equal rights, it was a no brainer.

            We aren’t. We don’t have anyone to the right of us who is for freedom and liberty, only willing to kill large sections of the population for it. We have jobs and houses and stuff that matters to us that can be lost with a single signature on a document–how much do YOU have in savings to hire a lawyer to fight a federal charge that everyone knows is bullshit, but the FBI has evidence from their labs (you have been following that haven’t you?) ”

            THIS. You are dead on.

            As Malcolm X said, “I want Dr. King to know that I didn’t come to Selma to make his job difficult. I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

            He was right, King would not have gotten nearly as much (if anything) accomplished without the threat of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. They were the stick, Dr. King was the carrot.

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            1. X was very lucky. Whites outnumbered blacks as much then as now (if not moreso), and many/most were armed. Had the white population not been willing to truckle to King, and had X then tried his violent revolution…well, it’s unlikely we’d have nearly so many black people in the country today as we do.

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              1. Salon’s rewriting of history to the contrary, the NRA supported the civil rights movement before the formation of the Black Panther party in 1966. In 1957 in Monroe, NC, in reaction to Ku Klux Klan violence, an all black NRA-charted rifle club was formed.

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              2. They weren’t entirely dumb– I know that one gang made a point of walking the nurses at the hospital where my aunt worked home each night. Bought them a lot of loyalty from the guys who would be patching them up if things got really bad. (I carefully do not ask said aunt and uncle if walking her home made up for the women raped and murdered by the same group.)

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          3. I’m not talking about the showy version of defying the government, I’m taking about the willingness of the common man to break the law. This whole “I’ll only prosecute laws I think are just,” has the pushback of the citizenry only following the laws they think are just. And bureaucracy is easily stymied with creative appeals. You’re right, not everyone will do it, but more and more will, and they will teach others, until a critical mass is built, and change will happen. We can’t predict the outcome of that change, but we shouldn’t support the status quo out of simple fear of the future.

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              1. That’s true. I was thinking of it more in a samizdat mindset, though, where it is an act of active defiance, despite its covert nature.

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  9. I’ve read (no citation I’m afraid) numbers of up to 30 million illegals in the U.S. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the correct number was somewhere between 11million and 30mil. I doubt the open-borders types are overstating the number as that would hurt their cause. They’ll want to downplay it and pretend that illegals constitute only a smidgen of the population. Certainly not enough to skew populations for purposes of representation, and they only do jobs that Americans won’t anyway, so it’s not like they’re putting Americans out of work!

    Yeah, and I’ve got a nice bridge to sell…

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        1. Big headlines in the regional paper today about the city of Amarillo being overwhelmed. Apparently Amarillo already has the highest per capita number of refugees in the entire country, and the social welfare system and schools are reaching their limits.

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  11. This reminds me of my childhood. One of the things I hated growing up was when someone found out I was a foster child, because inevitably whomever I was speaking to would immediately stop treating me like a normal person and act like I was a cross between a cancer survivor and rape victim. Even as young as ten or eleven that used to bug the crap out of me. It got to the point that from middle school on up I would keep my living situation a need-to-know-only secret.

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    1. Sadly– my hubby used to talk about being a foster child (he was abandoned). Being a foster child is a very hard thing and I sympathize. There are a lot of trust issues there. He was lucky in that his foster family did their best to help him grow up in a good environment.

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  12. “Children- Purity of oppression- something happens – fall of capitalism.”
    Step 1: Collect underpants…but I digress.

    Far too many Americans are so completely severed from history that they have no appreciation of the difference the free-market maturation of our economy made to our attitude toward children. At this point, an American kid is a “luxury good;” his parents expect him to be a liability until he’s out of the house…and possibly for a while thereafter. Julian Simon tried to draw attention to this divergence between the West and the Rest in The Ultimate Resource, but not enough people have paid attention to that invaluable tome either.

    If there should someday be a free society that remembers the U.S. in its current agonizing stage, its historians and sociologists will scratch their heads in wonder over how insouciantly we slaughtered over a million children of our own each year…but wept tears of heart’s blood over the waifs and strays pouring over our southern border, unable to imagine how we could possibly return them to the hellholes whence they came. For my part, I can’t fathom it today.

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  13. According to the data I’ve been reading, the issue started back in 2012 – and the number of children involved in crossing has dropped since the end of June. The word was the Permisos were good until June. But, it also seems that until the government started talking about moving people from the border area to other parts of the country, especially areas like NY or MA, it wasn’t a problem. Suddenly having unwashed masses released in those areas seems to have made this an issue we have to solve now.

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  14. Look, even in its worst aspect, what we’re seeing is not of a number sufficiently large to make a difference.

    nd then there is the people who invited them – who promised these children and by extension these families the ability to become Americans

    In “Caliphate” Tom Kratman does some math. He’s better at both numbers and math than I am, but let’s give it a go.

    Let’s say it’s “only” 200k kids and women. They get citizenship, then they can bring their family in. That’s about 800 to 1.2 MILLION.

    Latinos and immigrant families *generally* have higher birthrates than whites and middle and upper class Americans (and about the same as poor blacks). They start earlier and have more kids. To use Kratmans example, they have 5 generations a century and we have about 3.2 per century.

    “We” have a tendency to about 1.5 to 2 children per couple, while the immigrant and lowest economic rung (there’s a lot of overlap there) have 2.5 to 5 children per “couple” where sometimes those couples don’t last long>

    So basically if the kids & women on the border import their familes AND have the number of kids that their demographic suggests, they’ll triple or quadruple in 20 years (because remember that you’ll see almost no die off in that time).

    Historically what has “saved” this country was income mobility. The poor came here, were poor for a few years until they learned the language and could get better jobs, then they bought little houses with little gardens, and their kids became middle class.

    Progressive programs have pretty much put an end to that for lots of reasons. I hate to ascribe evil to people, so I think this is just stupidity, but it does seem like they’re intentionally destroying the middle class (since that is where most of their opposition comes from) and trying to build a permanent underclass that *cannot* participate fully because of language and cultural barriers.

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    1. Like what New Labour has almost managed to pull off in England – use demographics and immigration to develop the electorate of their dreams. Until it turns around and bites them in the @ss.

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    2. Terminate parental rights on the grounds that sending your kid on that trip was abuse. Then there’s no families to bring over.

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        1. Time to get radical, and start ignoring the law, especially the federal laws that are clearly (or at least should be clearly) unconstitutional. And not let the feds intimidate us into giving away or freedoms anymore. Civil disobedience has a long and honorable tradition in this nation. It’s time to start using it effectively again.

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      2. What Would The Romans Do?

        Soften a bit, because Americans are maybe still Romans-Lite.

        Romulus killed his only brother for an offense on this level.

        Romans-Lite: if they are of military age, kill them, if they are younger than military age, have your own families adopt them and raise them.

        Refusing to recognize that other cultures can have a lower military age is discriminatory and racist.

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      3. Just end chain migration. You come over here, you can bring a spouse (with a marriage license from your or her home country) and kids (with valid birth certificate) and that’s it. Your parents and uncles can wait in line like everyone else.

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        1. You come over here, you can bring a spouse (with a marriage license from your or her home country) and kids (with valid birth certificate) and that’s it.

          Sudden visions of the birth rate for immigrants reaching (on paper) record highs…..

          “Of course I have twenty three children! So what if I’m only thirty? I was a very, very busy lady….”

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          1. If every Chinese claiming to be a native-born American whose records were lost in the fire actually was, every Chinese woman in American before the earthquake would have had to have hundreds of babies.

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                1. Cheaper and better: drug tests for all trying to come to and live in the US.

                  Fail it, or break any other laws, and you’re out of here.

                  Apply also to all cash welfare. (And make up food boxes for kids of druggies.)

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        3. Operationally that will work. It’s a way of choosing which way to err.

          There have been any number of would be immigrants who were legitimately married yet did not have a meaningful or any marriage license from any national authority.

          One of the fun issues in facing an Administrative Law Judge with the issue of marriage by such a would be immigrant spouse is telling too good a story.

          The marriage might be by a priest on a hacienda -where the parties were born and raised as agricultural laborers on the estate – in rural Mexico.

          The ALJ will ask each party to describe the marriage day. Man and woman will tell identical detailed stories. This sounds rehearsed and so bogus to Americans who don’t make allowances for the developed memories of illiterates for that important if only to themselves event. No photographs, no papers no other record but the memory of the parties and the community. Properly excludable when a paperwork marriage for green card only is admissible?

          If I wrote the rules I would extend the rules of immediate family to include say sole surviving relative when the relationship on paper is more remote. The case involved a rather sparse family because of the Holocaust. Survivors were a well assimilated and well to do single old man in the United States and a next generation married couple in Eastern Europe with a young daughter. The parents died in a joint disaster. Under the law, and it was applied, far better for the young girl to be fostered in a Rumanian style orphanage than reunite two sole surviving relatives and allow an old man to support the girl to adulthood as he was well able to do.

          On the third hand even a three day fact finding and hearing, or three hour for that matter, would be impossible. Results will be arbitrary but it doesn’t make me happy.

          What about anchor babies? The King of Thailand is a US citizen – doesn’t help our relations – because born in the U.S. while his parents were at the Thai legation in the US. Many women of all ethnicities – especially in the Middle East – will visit the United States on voluntary departure visas be they tourist or business to deliver a just in case anchor baby.

          Good bad or indifferent?

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          1. I’ll admit that my knowledge of administrative law – especially in other countries – is rather shallow. Maybe a different set of acceptable documentation would be better, but no system is going to be perfect. Frankly right now I lean toward rejecting people. After a few years, once we’ve gotten a handle on the situation we can look at where we can relax and where the system is still being abused.

            I agree that birthright citizenship is a problem, but that would take amending the 14th Amendment, and that’s not happening in today’s political climate.

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            1. The and subject to the jurisdiction thereof really should exclude illegal immigrant’s children. (Which is traditional, anyways– same way an invading army having kids wouldn’t be citizens.)

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            2. Isn’t there a system for revoking citizenship based on acting as a citizen of another country?

              Actually APPLYING that would work rather nicely. I’d say being king of another country indicates a rejection of citizenship, no?

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              1. Not really for citizens by birth – I’m not going to research it and it may well have changed but the traditional precedential decision said that the constitutional rule brooks no exceptions no how. Folks like Korean War stay behinds were welcomed back by law. Man Without a Country is a nice sentiment but bad law.

                The next question is to what extent can a naturalized citizen be distinguished from a natural born citizen for such purposes.. There have been some rules about allegiance reverting to their previous state and so their citizenship by rights ought to revert too and of course the oath as a nice idea or as an enforceable contract? Currently the general rule as I see it applied – no research, no legal advice or opinion, I am not your lawyer – is once a citizen always a citizen most always.

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                1. Maybe a slight touch of fraud in the inducement applied to ex-camp guards to make the naturalization void from the beginning (ab initio) but once a valid citizen it sticks in some odd circumstances. LIke an adopted child in the law being treated as a natural born child so to a naturalized citizen pretty much gets the rights of a native born and the native born is clearly irrevocable – what the Constitution has created let no man put asunder.

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                2. Nope.

                  Read a passport– it has a long list of the stuff that can be grounds for removal of citizenship.

                  The steps actually have to be taken, they’re not automatic– this was a big point that folks missed about the upset at Obama assassinating the technically-American-terrorists, not that they were killed but that they died being legally Americans when it would’ve been simple and quick to fix that– but the steps do exist.

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                  1. I wouldn’t be too trusting of reading a passport for the state of the law. Dean Rusk lost the lead case in his capacity as Secretary of State.

                    Blockquote>Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), is a major United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily.[1][2] The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a Polish-born man, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim’s right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court overruled one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier. Emphasis added this from Wikipedia but there are many sources. For an extended authoritative discussion see e.g. the fifth edition of American Constitutional Interpretation. at Princeton.edu/ACI in a pdf on the case.

                    “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.”

                    AFROYIM v. RUSK Hugo Black writing for the court.

                    The impact of Afroyim v. Rusk was narrowed by a later case, Rogers v. Bellei (1971), in which the Court determined that the Fourteenth Amendment safeguarded citizenship only when a person was born or naturalized in the United States, and that Congress retained authority to regulate the citizenship status of a person who was born outside the United States to an American parent. However, the specific law at issue in Rogers v. Bellei—a requirement for a minimum period of U.S. residence that Bellei had failed to satisfy—was repealed by Congress in 1978. As a consequence of revised policies adopted in 1990 by the United States Department of State, it is now (in the words of one expert) “virtually impossible to lose American citizenship without formally and expressly renouncing it.”[4]

                    again from Wikipedia and again there are many sources.

                    Under Jimmy Carter the administration pretty much abandoned any effort to regulate dual (or triple etc.) citizenship whether by treaty or otherwise. Nobody in the U.S. has tried since.

                    And in fact when I was practicing in the area the rule was that it was never actually lost but just mislaid. That is was always there to be reclaimed. I don’t think that particular issue has reached the Supreme Court of the United States but it may have.

                    There may well be later cases changing the case law at the national level and I’d invite cites and shepardizing supporting the passport in terrorem text but I’d be surprised.

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                    2. Wikipedia is a useful source of copyright free material.

                      I’m not much impressed myself by the site you include which says inter alia

                      Types
                      A U.S, citizen can lose his citizenship if he commits treason, refuses to serve in the military after being drafted, joins the armed forces of a foreign country, votes in a foreign election [directly contradicts the Supreme Court of the United States speaking through Hugo Black op.cit.] or holds an office in another country, according to MyTVJax.com. Obtaining citizenship fraudulently by lying is also grounds for revocation.
                      Other Considerations
                      An individual who engages in subversive activity can also have his citizenship revoked. Engaging in actions intended to harm U.S. government representatives, or undermine or overthrow the government are reasons for revocation.
                      Effects
                      After revoking a person’s citizenship, the government has the power to deport both the individual and his family. In some cases, the U.S. may also revoke the family’s citizenship, according to Lawyers.com. Naturalized citizens must be denaturalized through court action.
                      Read more : http://www.ehow.com/facts_7576781_can-usa-citizenship-revoked.html

                      To my eye, this your preferred authority (at least to a Wikipedia mere summary of the court cases) is asserting that [a]fter revoking a person’s citizenship the government has the power to deport both the individual and his family thus imposing collective punishment and depriving the family of the incidents of their own citizenship in the United States if any. I don’t think so but maybe if the assertions can be supported?!

                      The full text of the cases mentioned is readily available all over the web including the Princeton site I mentioned and many many more. I would have settled for simple incorporation by reference except for the need to obfuscate links to avoid moderation and a desire to inform casual readers who wouldn’t follow the links no matter how clear..

                      We or at least I am talking case law here not relying on Wikipedia for legal advice but for a concise edited summary of the case nothing more.

                      Cite me a case or just an example from the news or any other source where the rules you mentioned have been applied and accepted by the Courts to strip someone of properly acquired by birth or naturalization citizenship in the United State. Or if you know of any an extrajudicial proceeding where the actions to strip were effective despite the Supreme Court rulings mentioned. John Walker Lindh – aka many things – presumably is still a citizen of the United States by the skin of his teeth because he was not properly commissioned when he joined the armed forces of a foreign power or perhaps it wasn’t a sovereign power at the time?

                      Absent of course fraud in the beginning where I suppose we agree citizenship was never properly acquired so the rights did not attach FREX this from the Princeton.edu site mentioned assuming you give Princeton greater weight than Wikipedia. Again the full text is readily available but again unlikely to be preferred to a synopsis.

                      (3) Fedorenko v. United States (1981) reaffirmed federal authority to revoke the citizenship of a naturalized alien who had fraudulently obtained naturalization. (See fn. 2 to Black’s opinion in Afroyim. Fedorenko had given false answers to important questions when initially applying for a visa to enter the United States. During World War II, he had been a Russian soldier; but he concealed from immigration officials the fact that, after being captured by the Germans, he had become a guard at Treblinka, a death camp in which the Nazis murdered several hundred thousand Jews. For the majority, Justice Marshall tersely disposed of the
                      constitutional issue: On the one hand, our decisions have recognized that the right to acquire American citizenship is a precious one, and that once citizenship has been acquired, its loss can have severe and unsettling consequences…. For these reasons, we have held that the Government “carries a heavy burden of proof in proceeding to divest a naturalized citizen of his citizenship.” … At the same time, our cases have also recognized that there must be strict compliance with all the congressionally imposed prerequisites to the acquisition of citizenship. Failure to comply with any of these conditions renders the certificate of citizenship “illegally procured,” and naturalization that is unlawfully
                      procured can be set aside. The sole reference to Afroyim in the majority opinion was to fn. 2, “naturalization unlawfully procured can be set aside.” White and Stevens dissented on statutory grounds.

                      I really did practice some in the area but it was mostly getting otherwise excludable war brides admitted:

                      Again if Princeton rings better than Wikipedia then see

                      This site is designed to accompany the fifth edition of American Constitutional Interpretation. ….
                      Last Updated: January 14, 2014

                      as one of many websites giving the text, explicating the text, and saying the cases I mentioned are still good law.

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                    3. Everything I can find says that acting with INTENT to revoke your citizenship– like Al-whatzisname did on video– is sufficient, and high enough treason likewise.

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                    4. There was a big deal about dual citizenship, and it no longer being allowed just a few years ago. A friend of mine’s mother was a dual citizen of both Canada and the US, and she was following it because she thought she was going to end up having to revoke one of her citizenships (and since it was the US that was going to force her to do so, she was thinking about revoking that citizenship, even though that is where she has lived for the last 40+ years). I moved away and never kept up with it, I know she is still living in the same place, but don’t know what was decided on the dual citizenship issue, or what she ended up having to do.

                      So yes it has been attempted to regulate since Carter, but I’m not sure what the results were.

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                    5. Realigning after hitting a wall. This from the State Department of the United States of America

                      Dual Citizenship

                      The concept of dual nationality means that a person is a citizen of two countries at the same time. Each country has its own citizenship laws based on its own policy. Persons may have dual nationality by automatic operation of different laws rather than by choice. For example, a child born in a foreign country to U.S. citizen parents may be both a U.S. citizen and a citizen of the country of birth.

                      The U.S. Government acknowledges that dual nationality exists but does not encourage it as a matter of policy because of the problems it may cause. Claims of other countries on dual national U.S. citizens may conflict with U.S. law, and dual nationality may limit U.S. Government efforts to assist citizens abroad. The country where a dual national is located generally has a stronger claim to that person’s allegiance.

                      However, dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country. They are required to obey the laws of both countries. Either country has the right to enforce its laws, particularly if the person later travels there. Most U.S. citizens, including dual nationals, must use a U.S. passport to enter the United States. Dual nationals may also be required by the foreign country to use its passport to enter that country. Use of the foreign passport does not put into jeopardy your U.S. citizenship. Most countries permit a person to renounce or otherwise lose citizenship.

                      A U.S. citizen may acquire foreign citizenship by marriage, or a person naturalized as a U.S. citizen may not lose the citizenship of the country of birth. U.S. law does not mention dual nationality or require a person to choose one citizenship over another. Also, a person who is automatically granted another citizenship does not risk losing U.S. citizenship. However, a person who acquires a foreign citizenship by applying for it may lose U.S. citizenship. In order to lose U.S. citizenship, the law requires that the person must apply for the foreign citizenship voluntarily, by free choice, and with the intention to give up U.S. citizenship. Intent can be shown by the person’s statements or conduct.

                      If you are a U.S. citizen who has acquired or plans to acquire Canadian citizenship, and you intend to relinquish your U.S. citizenship or wish to relinquish your U.S. citizenship, please discuss with the U.S. Embassy or Consulate the procedures necessary to formalize this. There will be a US$450 fee to document formal renunciation of U.S. citizenship. More information relating to the loss of citizenship is on this Travel.State.Gov information sheet. In addition, please review this page, regarding the making of a citizenship claim.

                      Information on losing foreign citizenship should be obtained from the foreign country’s Embassy and Consulates in the United States or Canada.

                      Embassy of the United States – Ottawa Canada. This site is managed by the U.S. Department of State. External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.

                      Read the following from a source NOT Wikipedia but rather a site operated by the U.S. Department of State at travel.state.gov and still citing and interpreting the case law of Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967) as good meaningful and final for the time being statement of the law.

                      Loss of Citizenship and Nationality
                      A U.S. citizen by birth or naturalization INA 301 (8 U.S.C. 1401), INA 310 (8 U.S.C. 1421) or a U.S. noncitizen national INA 308 (8 U.S.C. 1408), INA 101(29) (8 U.S.C. 1101(29)) will lose U.S. nationality (“expatriate”) her or himself by committing a statutory act of expatriation as defined in INA 349 (8 U.S.C. 1481), or predecessor statute, but only if the act is performed (1) voluntarily and (2) with the intention of relinquishing U.S. citizenship. The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken (Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967) and Vance v. Terrazas, 444 U.S. 252 (1980)): a person cannot lose U.S. nationality unless he or she voluntarily relinquishes that status.

                      U.S. Department of State – Bureau of Consular Affairs
                      To repeat the United States Department of State has on its own website the statement that a a person cannot lose U.S. nationality unless he or she voluntarily relinquishes that status

                      To repeat myself my observation which does not include all possible cases or circumstances has been that something very close to a simple I didn’t really mean it or my family/spouse/whatever pressured me has been sufficient later to invalidate the expatriation. I don’t know of any current authority on changing one’s mind but it may be out there.

                      And again “a person cannot lose U.S. nationality unless he or she voluntarily relinquishes that status” and IMHO maybe not even then.

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                    6. Portugal allows dual citizenship. I might TECHNICALLY be a dual citizen maybe? Depends on whether they took seriously my mailing back my passport and a notarized letter renouncing citizenship.

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                    7. In your shoes I’d look into the question of dual Portuguese citizenship. In the current, and foreseeable, state of the world citizenship in an EU country is very handy for travel to and within Europe. I’ve known loyal Americans by choice who did better in their jobs for having immediate no hassle access to all of the EU for working business travel.

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    3. There are concerns about what Kratman did in Caliphate.

      As I recall, Green Bear made some points about these once in Kratskeller.

      When you start talking about things like ‘this many immigrants are not going to disappear on their own’, ‘more kids per family’, or the more significant ‘lower age of mother at birth of first child’, you are essentially doing mathematical modeling.

      It is really easy to slip in modeling by accident, and to do so without the background to evaluate whether the model is useful.

      Say, looking at an impressive thing like a volcano or a steel mill, thinking that the thermal energy must go somewhere, and concluding that the world is increasing in temperature. While some who can better evaluate such things might better judge whether such a conclusion is like proposing use a single match to boil a kettle with 4 or 5 gallons of water.

      Kratman does not seem to have had that good a mathematical education in the grand scheme of things. Sure, better than very many people. Sure, a lot of practical experience with certain sorts of problems. But as I recall, the math he took wasn’t the load that a science, engineering or math major might take.

      Whereas Green Bear has a fairly strong background.

      As I recall, Green Bear said that his experience with mathematical modeling of populations lead him to think that they could not be reliable enough for long range forecasting. Between him saying that, and what my own weak background lets me imagine, I’m inclined to think this is so.

      Neglect the other confounding factors for just a bit. Blood is not ideology and culture. Ideology, culture, and loyalty are the roots of the future victory.

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      1. Not much is reliable enough for long range forecasting of anything worth forecasting. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Nothing is.

        Most all meaningful time series are correlated (if something is unchanging it’s often trivial) in that if there is a joint trend line upward there is positive correlation if one series trends up and one series down there is negative correlation for n time series chosen arbitrarily.

        Past extrapolations of the sort mentioned that is: prosperity leads to declining birth rates [Marching Morons C.M Kornbluth] have led to an argument that Muslims will outbreed and so outnumber and so in a representative democracy outvote Jews within the borders of Israel however the borders be defined and to the extent Israel brings all or any part of Gaza, the West Bank (more remotely Jordan etc…. ) within those hypothetical borders the sooner the tipping point comes

        Most say the current figures for population change in Israel (immigration and birthrates) do not support the argument that Jews will quickly be a voting minority rather the reverse. TV pundits and even some fairly rational folk are still talking about demographic disaster for Israel as though it be inevitable.

        Maybe, maybe not but it makes a good story. Authors can weight the scales as in some of Dr. Pournelle’s CoDominium (and some of David Drake’s work as well) stories with among other morals there are no truly good solutions but there are good people in bad places. ” Goodness is better than evil because it’s nicer” not because it always prospers

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        1. Most say the current figures for population change in Israel (immigration and birthrates) do not support the argument that Jews will quickly be a voting minority rather the reverse.

          I know some of the Seattle orthodox community are moving over there as we speak. She’s part of why I’m going to homeschool, because she went and watched her daughter’s class for a day as part of the checking out process…. *horror*

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        2. It makes a good story, sure. Or rather, it can make one.

          Declining birthrate in Japan, doomed Japan, might be pretty dull.

          Declining birthrate in Japan, hilariously stupid government countermeasures, might be pretty fun.

          If population forecasting two years is like weather forecasting a week, I’d be very hesitant about extrapolating from ‘makes a good story’ to real world applications.

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          1. It can also produce unanticipated consequences, such as recent news that Japan, whose declining population means diminished military strength, is addressing the issue by leveraging its core strengths into drone production and deployment.

            The Chinese can deploy their “Million-Man Army” while the Japanese deploys a billion drone force — who do you put your money on?

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            1. As a consumer of SF Anime my head is going so many places at once. Shades of the flip phone nod to Star Trek. So when do they get to mecha?

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  15. Heck, some of these “children” are nothing of the sort. Just imagine the crap that’s coming if you try to stick 20-year olds in high school.

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  16. Mrs. H., someone did a terrible job of teaching you about the Children’s Crusade.

    To begin with, it was not ‘Europe’s effort’ to do anything. While the legends, of course, grew in the telling, the actual events had to do with two charismatic young leaders who were also absolutely barking mad: a shepherd boy from France, Stephan of Cloyes, and a grown-up shepherd from the Rhineland, whose name was Nicholas. After the scandalous failure of the Fourth Crusade, these two separately began preaching the idea that the Holy Land could be saved only by sending a ‘crusade’ of innocents to convert the Saracens to Christianity. They received no official encouragement or support; the Church never proclaimed a crusade on their behalf; none of them reached Outremer.

    When Nicholas’s followers reached the sea at Genoa, they were astonished that God did not simply part the Mediterranean for them to walk across, and they broke up into wandering bands of disillusioned idiots. Stephan’s band mostly gave up and went home even before he reached the end of his journey at Marseille.

    These events scarcely made news at the time; few contemporary sources even mention them; but later generations conflated the stories together and invented the idea of a hysteria that swept through Europe, sending hordes of children to their deaths. This idea has about as much factual basis as the story ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ has to do with emigration from Lower Saxony in the 13th century.

    The truly depressing thing about your government’s current idiocy is that it is all too real. In a way, you do it a disservice by comparing it with a legendary account of a ‘crusade’ that never happened.

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    1. I was wondering what it was roughly based on… I’m vaguely familiar with the myth of it, of course, but it’s not like it’s much worse than any of the other “everybody knows” from that time!

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  17. Wikipedia suggests it was either several different incidents none of which sounds much like a Children’s Crusade, or nothing like this happened. 20 more or less contemporary accounts ranging from a sentence to half a page, difficult to authenticate. I remember when I mentioned the Library of Alexandria here, and had a devil of a time remembering the one book that had ALL the stories, none of which sounds very likely.

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  18. Sorry, a few sentences to half a page. But still… a few very brief accounts, a few word on a few pieces of paper.

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  19. Which explains why Portuguese politics resembles nothing so much like the Roman system of patronage and why proverbs like “he who has no patron dies in jail” is not even vaguely scandalous.

    And you tell me that all you wanted is a copy of Permit 838?:

    All it takes is a smart little chap to gaul them. ;-)

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  20. Pingback: The Children’s Crusade | According To Hoyt | Head Noises

  21. The sad thing about this is, if we wanted to be cold-blooded enough; lining all these ‘children’ up and shooting them on national television would save thousands of lives. Because a) all those parents down in South and Central America thinking about sending their children north would keep them home, saving many from their deaths at the hands of coyotes/the elements, etc. b)a vast portion (probably a majority) of these ‘children’ are living on their own where they came from, and made their own decision to come north, they would almost universally rethink such a decision if something horrific was to publically happen to those who made it here. After all the whole goal is to make it here, they know the journey is going to be difficult and fraught with danger, but then so is their everyday life, and they imagine that the journey may be more so, but if they make it here to the land of milk and honey it will all be worth it. Make that land of milk and honey dangerous enough, and they won’t attempt the journey, if there isn’t a sufficient reward at the end, it simply isn’t worth it.

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    1. Romans 3:8 et. seq. and besides I have enough trouble with procrastination as it is (de Quincy)

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  22. Here’s the deal. I have a couple of grandkids in a small town in Florida(Florida where the thugs running the fedgov have already sent a few loads of the disease/ violence vectors).
    At this point in my life I’m kinda like the Godfather when he was talking peace with his rivals and considering the return of his remaining son. Nothing untoward had better happen to him(his son).
    If one of my kids comes down with one of the several wonderful(and deadly) diseases brought here by the dc gov and its minions, I will not forgive this; and I’m old enough not to give a damn…

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