There’s an alarm being raised by the so-called ‘refugee caravan’ presently advancing against the sovereignty and self-government of the American people. I warned of “the strategic threat posed by allowing people to demand entry into the United States as a matter of right, in defiance of our laws. As if to affirm this characterization of the caravan’s intention, “the political outreach group who organized the caravan, released a press statement for the United States, Mexico, and their respective Central American governments”:

“We demand of the[sic] Mexico and the United States: that they respect our rights as refugees and our right to dignified work to be able to support our families,” the statement reads.

The second demand is “that they open the borders to us because we are as much citizens as the people of the countries where we are and/or travel.”

Speaking with the voice of the people of the United States, our nation’s Constitution assumes their power to grant or deny U.S. citizenship. It says that the U.S. Congress “shall have the power… “To establish a uniform rule of naturalization.” No foreign person may claim the privileges and immunities of a U.S. citizen except in accordance with laws made in pursuance of the Constitution.

With regard to our governments at all levels, the citizen body of the people of the United States, as a whole and respectively, exercises the sovereign power of election that decides which persons are to wield their powers. If foreign persons are ever allowed to demand citizenship in our country as a matter of specious right, without regard to laws made in pursuance of our Constitution, the power to determine the composition of our citizen body will pass into their hands.

Thus, without firing a shot, our Constitutional self-government will be overthrown. Whatever motives they ascribe to the participants in the so-called refugee caravan, the forces orchestrating its advance have revealed that this subversion of our sovereignty as a people is their objective. The so-called refugee caravan is the tip of the spear they mean to thrust again and again into the entrails of our nationhood. For the past hundred years, our nation has helped to forge the most effectual impediment to the globalist scheme of tyranny without borders. With the subversion of our Constitutional self-government, however, that scheme will advance unhindered by the U.S. led coalition of peoples, rightfully free, which defeated it time and again.

As JFK intended to say in the speech in Dallas pre-empted by his assassination, our role in the alliance of free peoples was not in service to ourselves alone. We acted, as our nation’s founders did, with a strong sense of our obligation to the decent people of the world, whose aspiration we felt obliged, by God’s Providence, to represent. So, we did not fight to impose our will but to encourage and respect the goodwill people who fight for right are supposed to have in common. On account of this goodwill, we strove to show respect for the sovereign dignity of our Allies. And we continued in that striving in the aftermath of victory, as we joined in promoting the structures of international cooperation that included the United Nations, and other international organizations.

As we did so, we asked some nations to surrender their colonial claims of sovereignty over others. But we did not ask any nation to surrender its sovereign self-government, and we emphatically and explicitly refused to surrender our own. We have no treaty obligation to allow foreign citizens to mount armed or unarmed invasions of our territory. We have no treaty obligation to stand idly by while other governments let their territory be abused to provide an avenue or staging area for such invasions. However, the security and defense of our nation do oblige us to put them on notice that such warlike behavior may have consequences that include the interdiction of those staging areas and avenues of attack.

We pray it will not come to that, but if it does, there must be no doubt of our resolve to do what is necessary to forestall the invasion. If we must risk armed confrontation with the governments at fault for supporting the attack against us, that is better than to let them abuse the desperation of unarmed people, using them as human shields in an overtly aggressive campaign to overthrow our sovereignty as a people.

We have laws to govern entry into the United States. We have every right to enforce those laws. An overtly organized invasion of our territory, in spite of those laws, represents a clear and present danger to the Constitution of our self-government. In response to such an emergency, that Constitution recognizes the president’s power to pardon otherwise unlawful failures to observe due process of law. Indeed, the existential threat to the Constitution makes it the president’s duty to do so.

Given this duty, it is imperative to respond expeditiously to the organized invasion force whose pretense of non-violence does nothing to mask its aggressive intent. While the emergency persists, the president should direct that the border between the United States and Mexico be closed to all commerce. He should further direct that our Border Patrol forces be put on alert. They should also be notified that the ‘catch and release’ policy is suspended for the duration of the emergency, so that all attempts to cross into the United States from Mexico are preemptively halted and repelled, using all non-lethal means available.

Finally, to prepare against any escalation to violence, appropriate elements of our armed forces should be mobilized and deployed along the southern border of the United States. It is time for us to remember that our military forces exist, in the first instance, not for use in foreign expeditions, but to protect our States against invasion, as the Government of the United States is Constitutionally required to do (Article IV.4)

While all this is underway, the president should see to it that every effort is made to defuse the imminent threat by diplomatic means, as I suggested in the first article mentioned above. Since the beginning of our nationhood, the American people have been led to recognize that the western hemisphere is not just a geographic region. It’s a neighborhood of nations informed, among many other things, by a common sense of justice.

That common sense includes the commitment to champion the cause of republican self-government, based on the decent hopes, decent conscience, and decent hearts of ordinary people. It may seem a distant goal toward which to labor. But for two hundred years or more we have, however haltingly, advanced toward that goal—enough to know that we labor not in vain. Now is the time to put that knowledge to the test.

Alan Keyes is a political activist, writer and former diplomat.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.