The difference between immigration and invasion is whether the people of the host country have anything to say about it.

High-school geography classes are going to get really confusing next year, because Nebraska, Massachusetts, and Connecticut are now located along the southern border of the United States. Democrat Governor Martin O’Malley takes the cake for sheer hypocrisy, as he publicly opposes doing anything effective to halt the flood of Unaccompanied Alien Children from Central America… but then privately dissolved into a sobbing hot mess when he realized many of the new arrivals are getting settled in his backyard, at taxpayer expense. CNN reports:

After his strong criticism of the Obama administration’s plans to return thousands of young undocumented migrants back to Central America, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley asked a top White House official that the children not be sent to a site that was under consideration in his home state, sources familiar with the conversation said. “He privately said ‘please don’t send these kids to Western Maryland,'” a Democratic source told CNN. The heated discussion between O’Malley and White House domestic policy adviser Cecilia Munoz occurred during a phone call late Friday evening, sources familiar with the conversation added.

O’Malley’s people claim he’s willing to take some of the young colonists in other parts of his state; he just doesn’t like the Department of Health and Human Services’ plan to convert a former Army Reserve Center into a shelter. But that doesn’t jibe with his absolutist rhetoric last week, before he discovered Maryland was being relocated to the Rio Grande:

A potential Democratic presidential candidate in 2016, O’Malley surprised some in his party when he sharply criticized a White House proposal to give new legal authorities to the Department of Homeland Security to expedite the deportation of the unaccompanied minors and their families. �??We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death,�?� O�??Malley said last week at a National Governors Association meeting in Nashville. Instead, the governor urged the administration to show compassion toward the children, describing some of the facilities where the young detainees are being kept as “kennels.” �??Through all of the great world religions we are told that hospitality to strangers is an essential human dignity,�?� O�??Malley said.

“Hospitality to strangers?” Good Lord. Just for starters, Governor, “hospitality to strangers” does not apply to people who kick in your front door, and even when the strangers politely ask for permission to enter, there is an understanding that their stay will be temporary. Let’s house a few dozen illegal aliens in the Governor’s mansion, and see if he understands.

You can’t remain free if you keep electing people this dumb, America. In a way, that’s what Obama’s manufactured border crisis is all about: an overwhelming attack on the American system, pushing through weak spots created by soft-headed rhetoric like this. In fine Cloward-Piven style, Obama is calling the bluff of everyone who rhetorically justified passivity in the face of invasion. America’s sense of what citizenship means had become a leaky dam, dribbling through hundreds of cracks created by mush-headed arguments that various forms of “compassion” trump the rule of law. Obama hit that leaky dam with a tidal wave of “migrants,” and it predictably exploded.

The Democrat governor of Connecticut, Dannel P. Malloy, drew the line at a federal plan to house 2,000 Unaccompanied Alien Children at the Southbury Training School… which is a home for the developmentally disabled. Furthermore, according to the CT Mirror, it’s already in rough shape:

The state Office of Policy and Management wrote in an email Monday that its concerns about the aging school�??s condition, the sensitive nature of caring for the developmentally disabled clients already there, as well as several legal and procedural hurdles, prevent Connecticut from assisting. �??The vacant property that the state of Connecticut has is too small to accommodate your needs (which clearly must be at least several hundred thousand square feet of building space alone) and is typically in a state of disrepair to the point where a certificate of occupancy would be difficult to obtain,�?� Patrick M. O�??Brien, assistant director of OPM�??s Bureau of Assets Management wrote to an official at the U.S. General Services Administration�??s New England regional offices. �??Indeed, many existing structures are beyond salvage and require environmental remediation and demolition.�?� Built in the late 1930s as a home for the developmentally disabled, it is the only large residential facility of its kind in the state.

Years go by without any resources being made available to fix this place up, and then suddenly Uncle Sam appears with a fat bankroll to pay for “living, medical, and maintenance costs” for Obama’s invited “guests.” Tough break, developmentally disabled people of Connecticut. If you wanted attention from this government, you should have gone to Mexico and then walked across the Rio Grande.

At least O’Malley and Malloy had a chance to object to the federal colonization plans for their states. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman, a Republican, received no warning when the southern border was redrawn to run through Omaha, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

In a sign of the far-reaching impact of the U.S. immigration crisis and its political fallout, Nebraska’s governor says 200 children who entered the country illegally were sent to his state this week without warning and that federal officials are refusing to identify them or their locations. Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, said federal officials also wouldn’t answer questions about public school attendance by the children and the potential costs to taxpayers. “Governors and mayors have the right to know when the federal government is transporting a large group of individuals, in this case illegal immigrants, into your state,” Mr. Heineman told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Saturday. “We need to know who they are, and so far, they are saying they’re not going to give us that information.” An Obama administration official on Saturday said the Central American children now in Nebraska aren’t at a facility but are being housed with family members and sponsors while they await immigration proceedings. Some of the children arrived in the recent border surge, while others came earlier in the year.

The same thing happened in Illinois, where Fox News tells us how Unaccompanied Alien Children found themselves fleeing the violence of Honduras and Guatemala, only to end up in… Chicago.

Fox News has learned that 748 unaccompanied minors have been transferred from areas near the border to the Chicago area. Of the original group of 748 kids, 319 have been placed with family members or sponsors while they await an immigration hearing. The other 429 have been placed in facilities run by the Heartland Alliance, a nonprofit organization that receives grants from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told Fox News Friday that he did not know the exact locations of the facilities where the children were being kept, and stated his belief that the White House did not want the children’s living conditions to be made public.

“My worry is the administration doesn�??t want people to know what the condition of these place are or how these kids are being treated in detention,” Kirk said. “Kids can sometimes to be pretty cruel to each other, they don�??t want those stories to get out and they don�??t want us to know what is going on in these detention facilities. These detention facilities should be completely open to the press and to the American people so that we know how what conditions are, we should be able to talk to the kids who are there. “I can�??t explain the incompetence of the Obama administration,” Kirk said later. “This is a tremendous self-inflicted political wound … This narrative, [that] this is Obama�??s Katrina, [is] sticking really hard.”

The Republican Governors Association warned that more of these secret shipments were on tap, and as the Wall Street Journal reports, the Obama Administration agrees with them:

“There are concerns that this type of activity�??placing children in locations across the country�??is occurring throughout the United States, and information is not being shared appropriately with states,” the Republican Governors Association policy director, Marie Thomas Sanderson, wrote in an email to members on Friday and viewed by the Journal. Will Jenkins, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseeing the immigrant children, said the health and human services department is required to protect the privacy of unaccompanied children and keep their personal information confidential. “Federal law requires that HHS feed, shelter and provide medical care for unaccompanied children until it is able to place them in safe settings with family members or sponsors while they await immigration proceedings,” he said in a written statement. “These family members and sponsors live in many states, including Nebraska.”

They’ll be dispersed as widely as possible, which will make it more difficult to deport them, even if the Administration ever gets around to doing that instead of talking about it. One nation, under Cloward-Piven, irreconcilable, with liberty and justice distributed as the Washington aristocracy sees fit, once they decide which laws they feel like obeying.

(Hey, remember when they were going to spend millions putting up billboards in Central America warning people not to send their kids to the U.S., because they’d be immediately returned home? Are we still blowing money on those billboards, or have they been updated with the New Truth that the “refugees” can stay forever, in all fifty states? We might as well recapture some of our national dignity and be honest about this, because obviously the people of Central America are learning the truth anyway.)

By the way, the same article says the federal estimate of Unaccompanied Alien Children this year is up to 90,000. Even though the number keeps getting higher, that’s a very lowball estimate, and it should be remembered that the UACs account for less than half of the total influx across the border. Ruben Navarrette at CNN writes, “My sources tell me that it is well-known that in the Rio Grande Valley, there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of people from Central America — mostly women and children — in northern Mexico right now, waiting for their chance to cross into the United States. We should stop looking for an endpoint. This story has no end in sight.”

Which means people in various states and communities will be given increasingly less to say about what happens next. Immigration is an act of communion, in which the people of the host country voluntarily agree to accept new citizens, in an orderly process governed by the rule of law. Invasion is an act of force, in which the people of the target country have nothing to say about who crosses their border, or where they settle. Which definition better fits what’s happening to the United States right now? It doesn’t matter that the invaders aren’t violent conquerors. Violence is just a crude way of asserting that the target populace is not allowed to deny entry.

As these stories make clear, not only are the American people being told they have no choice but to accept the new population – indeed, they have no moral standing to object! – but they’re not even being told what’s going on. We, and our elected representatives, are not even granted the simple dignity of information. Decisions have been made by administrative fiat; our submission is now demanded, and when it’s not given – as in the town of Murrieta, California, where protesters blocked busloads of illegal aliens shipped to the community against its will – the aristocracy grows very angry.

A month ago, we were told the situation was under control, and assured that large-scale repatriation operations would commence shortly – only fearmongering right-wing extremists said otherwise! Then we were told the Imperial President finally discovered the one law he cannot break, and it’s one section of a Bush-era law that covered human trafficking, not mass migrations. Now the Democrats are actively blocking efforts to fix the law they claim has tied America’s hands and effectively erased our national borders. From The Hill:

Democrats in the House and Senate said Tuesday they would oppose any changes to a 2008 human trafficking law Republicans have blamed for the wave of child immigrants crossing the border. The opposition sets up a standoff and raises serious doubts about whether Congress will be able to act before its summer recess in response to what both parties argue is a humanitarian crisis. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said he would work to make sure any changes to the 2008 law do not make it into a final funding package. �??The 2008 law, as you know, sets up a reasonable standard for requesting asylum,�?� he said. �??That should never be changed.�?� Other Democrats said the Obama administration never should have signaled a willingness to change the law. �??The White House shouldn�??t have opened the door at all on that discussion,�?� said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.). �??The White House makes every effort, particularly on immigration, to try to split the baby. But in this case it�??s impossible.�?� The 2008 law allows authorities to send immigrant children from Mexico or Canada back to their home countries within 48 hours of a screening, but requires that children from Central America and other countries be granted an asylum hearing that can take weeks to set up. President Obama has signaled a willingness to consider changes to the law, but did not propose new language in his request for $3.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with a crisis that has overwhelmed authorities at the border.

Obama shouldn’t be given a nickel of that money without immediate changes to the law, which doesn’t actually say what these people keep claiming it says anyway. (It explicitly prioritizes repatriation as the primary goal of the federal government.) In fact, there shouldn’t be any $3.7 pork-infused spending bills anyway. Make the Democrats tear apart their precious social programs to find money for Obama’s invited guests. After all, these Unaccompanied Alien Children are supposed to be the responsibility of the entire nation, aren’t they? (I mean our nation, not the ones they come from, because evidently we agreed to absorb the entire population of Central America in 2008, and nobody noticed until now.) Then let’s have everyone pitch in and pay for it, including those dependent on other government programs. Let the entire American population have some skin in this game, so they can make appropriate, informed decisions when they head to the polls in 2014 and 2016.

There’s already a backlash growing from people who wonder why the federal government is making vast resources available to people who aren’t even American citizens, on top of gigantic foreign aid payments to their countries of origin, while the needs of Americans are neglected. Barack Obama spent the last six years telling us America has been permanently diminished – we must accept his New Normal of high unemployment, slow economic growth, crushing government regulations, and historic levels of welfare dependency, because we are no longer the people who defeated the Axis, rebuilt Europe, landed on the moon, and threw down the Iron Curtain. Well, that’s not the sort of country that has resources to spare for hundreds of thousands of “refugees,” swelling a non-citizen population that already numbers in the millions. The open-borders crowd keeps telling us the new arrivals will magically become economic assets, rather than placing further stress on the beyond-broke welfare system. Okay, let’s put all our chips on the table, dismantle the welfare system, unleash the engines of progress, and see what happens. If you really believe mass uncontrolled immigration is a net economic plus, you should be all in favor of that, right?

But no, we’ll get the usual blizzard of lies, obfuscations, hypocrisies, and rhetorical inconsistencies. The bottom line is that nobody asked the American people if they’re willing to absorb this human wave, and nobody in the Ruling Class truly believes we should have anything to say about it. Texas Governor Rick Perry has been saying that Obama was explicitly warned about the growing potential for a migration crisis as far back as 2012, but he did nothing to prevent it, and everything to encourage it. He also did nothing to inform the American people about it, or ask us what we wanted to do.

We are the most generous nation that has ever stood upon this Earth. Told that hundreds of thousands of children were in desperate straits, we would have wanted to do something about it – something sensible, within our capabilities, and carefully managed. We would have asked our government some tough questions about how much money we’re giving the squalid hell-holes these children emanate from, and how that money has been spent. We would have recoiled in horror from a “plan” that involved giving children to violent gangsters for a thousand-mile journey that would kill some of them. We’d have asked about the health issues these children could bring with them. In all likelihood, we would have agreed to accept some number of them as refugees, and even sent transportation to bring them here, with careful preparations made for that arrival.

But we weren’t asked. We’re still being lied to by this Administration. We are on the receiving end of an invasion by force, in which our own government is providing the force. “We’re all becoming border states now,” said Massachusetts sheriff Tom Hodgson on Monday. “We want to know, what are the trends? What’s happening? What can we expect? We know there are going to be more coming here from Texas. We’ve already got two groups coming off the planes here?” We’re not getting the answers to those questions, and frankly our rulers don’t think we have any right to ask.

Update: Reacting to the detention of illegal alien activist Jose Vargas (which, as I anticipated yesterday, didn’t last long) a man identified as a “Mexican resident of the Rio Grande valley” at the Daily Signal said, “We are aggravated with the Border Patrol. It’s not fair. We are not criminals. We are fighting for the freedom we deserve. We will take it from their hands.”

That is the language of an invader, not an immigrant, and it is the sworn duty of the government of the United States to stop people from “taking” what they believe themselves entitled to, whether the taker is an American citizen or not.

Update: To clarify what I meant about how the “Bush law” that figures so prominently in Democrat talking points doesn’t say what they claim it says, here’s National Review on a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008:

CIS claims most of the children crossing the border do not meet the definition of an unaccompanied alien child found in federal law. In order for a minor to receive this designation, the illegal alien must be younger than age 18 and be without �??a parent or legal guardian in the United States.�?� The report says around 90 percent of non-Mexican and non-Canadian children arriving in America are placed with family or guardians in the U.S. The report also explains that the immigrant children are not victims of human trafficking because of a lack of coercion. The CIS report says families and their children are often willing participants in smuggling operations, and note that family members pay fees to smugglers who bring the children to the U.S. CIS notes that �??human trafficking�?� and �??human smuggling�?� are distinct criminal activities that provide important insight about how the children should be processed. �??An illegal immigrant who arrives at the U.S. border who is not a victim of trafficking and has family inside the United States should not be benefitting from protections in the 2008 trafficking law,�?� said Jon Feere, Legal Policy Analyst at CIS. �??Amending trafficking laws should not become a distraction from addressing the bigger problem of lax enforcement of immigration law �?? and inappropriate application of law �?? which continues to encourage people to come to the United States illegally.�?�

This is just another example of laws been stretched, bent, and selectively enforced to give Obama a fig leaf of legal justification for what he wanted to do anyway, with a health added jolt of blame-shifting from the President who still isn’t responsible for anything, six years into his seemingly endless term of office.