It’s been fun to watch the media discuss the border crisis in real time, improvising their arguments on the fly. Let’s try A, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try B.

First, they said there was no surge at the border — it was a phony crisis manufactured by the Drudge Report. The facts on the ground quickly made that argument inoperable.

Next, liberals told us these “undocumented migrants” (the PC phrase for “illegal aliens” — because we’ll never figure out what that means) were mere children fleeing violence and drug cartels.

Then we found out that more than 80 percent of the “children” were teenage males, some being recruited for the homicidal Central American gang MS-13, right there in the detention facilities.

(Suspiciously, liberals’ wailing about a “humanitarian” crisis began immediately after Sen. Chuck Schumer emerged from a meeting with Democratic number-crunchers figuring out exactly how many more Latin American voters they’ll need to take Texas and Florida.)

Why would there be a humanitarian crisis now? Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — where most of the migrants are coming from — have been hellholes forever, even longer than Detroit.

The “horrendous civil wars in Central America” were a major topic during the presidential debates between Reagan and Mondale — and that was in 1984. Mondale campaigned on conditioning aid to El Salvador on disbanding that country’s “most lawless and notorious security forces” and bringing to justice the murderers of American nuns. Those guys are putting in for their pensions by now.

In 1992, Noam Chomsky described El Salvador and Guatemala as “murderous terrorist state(s),” adding that human rights abuses in Honduras were worse even than in Panama under Noriega.

So what’s new now?

Liberals finally settled on complaining that if only we’d passed “comprehensive immigration reform,” none of this would have ever happened. Why not a global warming bill? That might be nutty, but at least it wouldn’t be the exact opposite of the truth.

We are not dealing with a delicate point of logic here, some tiny flaw in liberals’ reasoning, where they neglect to consider this or that aspect of a situation. This is something I don’t recall encountering before. It’s anti-logic.

The Schumer-Rubio amnesty bill would have made this crisis 10,000 times worse than it already is.

The precise reason our borders are besieged is that the 11 million to 20 million “undocumented migrants” currently living here seem just a few more bad Marco Rubio speeches away from being legalized. And the reason they entered the country undocumentedly is that Reagan granted amnesty to 3 million illegal aliens in 1986.

Every powerful group in America is pushing for amnesty: President Obama, Sen. Schumer, Schumer’s new friends Sen. Marco Rubio and Gov. Chris Christie, Wall Street, the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, farmers, ethnic activists, the entire media, wealthy elites who need domestics and the Chamber of Commerce.

Instead of “living in the shadows” — the shadows of mass protests, New York Times magazine covers, TV shows, government housing, free schools, free medical care, free food stamps, the Catholic Church, state colleges at in-state tuition rates in 17 states — “undocumented migrants” seem poised to become full legal residents.

With that, they would gain the additional rights to more welfare programs, to vote for more welfare programs — and to vote for more amnesty. (Also, they won’t have to worry about being deported if they’re convicted of rape or murder after they’re amnestied.)

Obama has already effectively granted amnesty to millions of “undocumented migrants” by refusing to deport “children,” i.e., MS-13 members. (I’m starting to think somebody ought to sue that guy.)

Consequently, a lot of Latin Americans decided it was a good time to come to the U.S. to get in on Obama’s administrative amnesty and also to be here in time for the next amnesty.

So why are Obama, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Jeff Flake, MSNBC and The New York Times editorial page all telling us that if only we’d passed “comprehensive immigration reform” — which would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants — this never would have happened? That’s the reason it’s happening!

Usually, liberals push ideas that aren’t true, but sound like they could be true. Raise taxes and we’ll get more revenue! Give condoms to teenagers and we’ll reduce unwed pregnancies! Ban guns and we’ll have fewer gun crimes!

On immigration, they’re out of practice and don’t know what to say when their auto-pilot “living in the shadows” claptrap doesn’t work.

They seem to know that the prospect of amnesty has something to do with the current crisis, so the word “amnesty” pops into their heads, and then they end up blurting out that the cause is the solution.

We need to discourage people coming to America for amnesty, by passing amnesty! Yes, of course! If Congress would only pass amnesty, the people of the world would say to themselves, “Uh-oh! I better not cross the border into America now! I’ll never get amn –” Oh, wait.

It’s not that one small part of their argument is wrong. It’s more like there’s a whole section missing from the explanation. Or as if they’re talking about some other issue altogether, such as a solution to the elites’ servant problem. Or two totally different ideas got into a teleportation machine and their atoms were accidentally mixed up as they traveled across the universe, which I saw happen in the movie “The Fly.”

Immigration advocates don’t have a good set of arguments and, with tens of thousands of “undocumented migrants” crossing the border, their usual method of prohibiting any debate on the subject isn’t working.

The very inanity of their argument that amnesty would prevent people from coming here to get amnesty gobsmacks us into silence.

If the law requires us to admit all of Latin America’s poor who show up on our border, then repeal the law.

Addendum: Apparently, there is no such law.

COPYRIGHT 2014 ANN COULTER