Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is bitter. The rising Democratic star is apparently judged too harshly on semantics and facts, even when she is morally right on the broader issues. Apparently, whenever she has made a mistake, she has “restated” her facts, and corrected herself, but “it’s not the same thing like the President lying about immigration.”

This, of course, comes after a clearly cooked-up fiasco about a goofy video of her dancing which, according to Newsweek, outraged conservatives. The man who posted the video with negative comments promptly deleted the Twitter account and was roundly condemned by pretty much every single conservative I know.

But, as Ben Sixsmith wrote, “Millions of Americans will die believing that Republicans were united in condemnation rather than it being restricted to some obscure and anonymous fool who called himself ‘AnonymousQ1776’.” A lie, as Sir Winston Churchill once stated, and I humbly paraphrase, gets halfway around the world before the truth can trace back tweets.

Ocasio-Cortez is right about facts taking a backseat to emotions. Immigration is one such issue, where Ocasio-Cortez’s take-all-comers and dismantle Immigration, Customs, and Enforcement position is now the de facto standard in the Democratic Party.

There’s a tendency on the left to claim that no one is “for” open borders, but it’s also a neat trick of obfuscation because almost the whole Democratic Party has shifted to an extreme that opposes virtually any border enforcement. In three decades, Democrats went from supporting border security and opposing legal immigration—at least rhetorically—to holding the nation’s business hostage over giving illegals amnesty and preserving physically porous borders.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called a border wall “immoral” without ever explaining what morality it infringes. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer excoriates the Republicans, vowing they will never get any wall. Democratic National Committee Chairman Keith Ellison tweets “No on Republican ‘Wall of Hate.’” All insist border security is a proxy for racism. These major Democratic leaders mirror the ascending hard left within the party, represented by Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and other open-border advocates.

In November last year, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, “Asking to be considered a refugee and applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany.” This is deeply idiotic, and a common trope used by Islamists and job-seekers looking to flock to Europe.

Systematic, state-orchestrated brutality against millions of people is not the same as 5,000 people looking for jobs being fed, watered, and blanketed by activist nonprofit organizations and supported by politicians as vote banks, and it is offensive to equate them. One walk across the Imperial War Museum in London, or Auschwitz, which millions of American millennials have never heard about, can make people imagine the scope of the horror that this planet once witnessed.

It is simply incomparable to people demanding that citizens of another country have no choice about whether and how to fork over their centuries of infrastructure, cultural capital, anti-corruption norms, and economic stability. Wanting a better job and perhaps a better culture doesn’t make you a refugee.

The Math Doesn’t Add Up

More importantly, this is a deviation from Ocasio-Cortez’s run of the mill “democratic socialism” that she supposedly inherited from her mentor Sen. Bernie Sanders. Consider the difference. Bernie previously railed against importing cheap labor while neglecting the working class people of the United States. Sanders obviously garbed it in the Soviet-esque jargon of global capital mysteriously determining workers’ movement, but he had an overall point.

It is often said that Latin migrants do work that Americans will not do. Which Americans—the ones sold a dream of college degrees for all, with tens of thousands in debt after studying subjects like queer international relations, with no jobs that satisfy their inflated egos and perceived social status, who then live a life of resentment while working two part-time jobs?

For someone who pretends to be a social democrat, Ocasio-Cortez is surprisingly urban bourgeoisie liberal, like Emmanuel Macron in France, who is now famously on the verge of being toppled from his seat after introducing a carbon tax on people who struggle for two square meals a day. Not surprisingly, Ocasio-Cortez wants to tax high earners over 70 percent, even at the cost of folding their industries and moving offshore to low tax havens, all for her impossible New Green Deal. If you can’t have food or jobs, at least the government will provide you with a bicycle.

What to Ask Democrats About Immigration

The unfortunate reality is this. President Trump is right about immigration, even while some might have issues with his current handling of it. There are two major questions on immigration for the United States.

First, of the 328 million people in the United States, around 11 million are aliens, or one in 30. That doesn’t count legal migrants like Ronil Singh, the cop who was killed in the hands of a criminal illegal, or the students and professionals who work in companies and IT sectors. But illegal aliens are one in five of the people in U.S. prisons for crimes.

A recent report suggests 91 percent of U.S. criminal aliens are from Mexico, guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador: “They accounted for 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses. (The numbers, according to the GAO: 197,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons, arrested 1.4 million times for 2 million offenses, between 2011 and 2016; 533,000 in state or local facilities between 2010 and 2015, representing 3.5 million arrests for 5.5 million offenses.) The arrests include allegations of more than 1 million drug crimes, a half-million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses and 24,200 kidnappings.”

Most of these criminals are based in sanctuary cities. The United States has no coherent policy so far to deal with its expensive mass incarceration of foreign criminals problem, and no one has asked Ocasio-Cortez about it. So do that.

Second, the border wall will be ineffective if one doesn’t solve the fundamental problems of work visas for people coming from Central America, and stabilizing the region, through military means if necessary. These countries and their governments are incapable of running their affairs themselves. They are not only destabilizing America, but also pose a strategic risk, given that anyone from ISIS can buy a plane ticket and reach Costa Rica.

A Center for Immigration Studies report interviewed Bangladeshis in Central America planning to head to the United States, with the local governments at best ineffective, and at worst complicit in this trafficking. Unless that is stopped, no amount of border wall will be any deterrence. It is curious that the United States can focus on spending billions in Afghanistan, but cannot focus on law and order at her own southern border, and below, in lands that can actually lead to catastrophe.

Ocasio-Cortez, and her party with her, is turning to an American version of France’s failed Macronist utopia, arguing for open borders and no border enforcement, while taxing people for pet climate change projects. Unfortunately for them, as Peter Hitchens once wrote, “The problem of utopia is that it can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never arrive.”