The people of the small San Diego area town of Imperial Beach, California, were surprised when the mayor took the stage at a beach-side concert on a beautiful August evening to greet visitors and then touted the fact that his recent proclamation made Imperial Beach a "Welcoming City."
The crowd politely applauded the popular, young, surfing mayor who didn't bat an eye. What city does not want to proclaim itself as "welcoming"?
For a hundred years, highway travelers have been greeted by signs on the edges of towns that say, "Welcome to Whoville" or "Welcome to Halfway." Often, especially in the South and Midwest, the sign will include plaques from the private organizations that sponsored it, like the Optimists, 4-H Club, Knights of Columbus or Chamber of Commerce. People pass the hat to pay for these sign out of their own pockets to welcome visitors. That is who we are.
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Sadly, the cynical "Welcoming Cities" scheme starts with the horribly offensive false premise that many among us are unwelcoming. The motives and goals of the "Welcoming Cities" proponents are to slander all of us, the "basket of deplorables," unless we end our support for the rule of law (which is rooted in racism) and embrace the most extreme open-borders agenda. To "Welcoming Cities" proponents, no rule – no hindrance of full inclusion of every human being without regard to the how they got to the United States – is acceptable.
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My husband was an exchange student. Our adopted Latino son could have been his parents' anchor baby. We have hosted visitors from around the world and been visitors in much of it. Anyone who has hosted foreign visitors at all knows the refrain, "I love Americans. You are so friendly."
We are friendly!
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Did you know we hug more than any country in the world? We do welcome people, and we always have when the people visiting come through the front door. The monied interests behind "Welcoming Cities" are using a twisted narrative suggesting that "front-door-only" view is racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and even, as Hillary Clinton proclaimed, somehow, homophobic.
Ironically, the first mention of the "Welcoming Cities" proclamations was Chicago, the deadliest city in America. The cabal pushing the proclamation on Imperial Beach was headed by the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium.
The members of the consortium are mostly "interfaith" groups. Never mind that they derive major funding as government contractors settling immigrants. It includes the ACLU and the highly controversial, litigious, Hamas-linked Council on American Islamic Relations and open-borders advocating labor unions. What could be wrong with these friendly groups telling us we should be more welcoming? And when did labor unions like the SEIU, created to protect the rights of American workers, become the biggest advocates for flooding the nation with job-competing non-citizens?
It is entirely likely that the mayor had no idea of the real open-borders agenda of the nice people who asked him for the proclamation. The bigger question is why the proclamation was such a big deal to these groups. Why was it such a big deal that they gave up family time to come down to Imperial Beach to lobby and have their pictures taken?
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No doubt, the "Welcoming Cities" proclamation will be used by people pushing open-borders policies to show that the population is on their side. It will be used by these San Diego groups to show that 900 Syrian refugees with questionable vetting is not nearly enough. It will also be used to show that Imperial Beach would be a great place to relocate them.
"Welcoming Cities" has been compared to the sanctuary cities movement, but really, it is far worse. Sanctuary cities feature an act of law, a formal policy whereby police are refrained from enforcing immigration laws by cooperating with federal officials. "Welcoming Cities" is a scheme to flood communities in the United States with as many immigrants as possible, legal and illegal, without regard to resist public safety and public health.
