Who should show up to throw a stick into these turning wheels but California's Gov. Gavin Newsom, who's announced his first gubernatorial trip abroad to El Salvador for the purpose of "lifting up our immigrant communities and understanding the root causes of migration."

With 1.5 million illegal aliens from Central America rolling into the U.S., President Trump has declared an emergency in order to construct a badly needed wall at the border, and now he has threatened to shut the gates of the border down, too, unless Mexico's government quits enabling the problem. It's a major issue, and a recent poll shows that many Americans want it dealt with as a top priority .

Oh, really? Here's his tell-nothing statement about it for the press:

While the Trump Administration demonizes those who are fleeing violence from Central America, California is committed to lifting up our immigrant communities and understanding the root causes of migration," Newsom said in a statement. "I am looking forward to traveling to El Salvador in April to talk with the nation's leaders and activists while deepening the bond between our families and communities.

One can just picture how this trip looks from the Salvadoran side of things. Here come Big Daddy, the California governor, the gringo who's already laid out a banquet of goodies for Salvadorans in California, from free health care to free education, to sanctuary state protections to enable illegals to work, coming there supposedly to find out how he can offer...even more goodies to Salvador's uneducated lower middle classes. The idea is to get even more of them to come over. Big Daddy comes down with the Santa sack full of goodies.

From the Salvadoran perspective, his reception is likely to be warm from the Salvadoran government, which benefits hugely from the remittances sent home by El Salvador's mostly illegal aliens, allowing it to finance itself and employ ever larger numbers of bureaucrats without having to house, educate, or medically care for its nationals. This is one reason why remittance economies tends to underdevelop a country, according to the World Bank.

Last year, in fact, that game was going full speed. El Salvador's remittances hit a record $5.47 billion. Literally one out of six Salvadorans now lives in the U.S., and 680,000 of those make their home in benefit-rich California. Salvadoran politicians actually campaign for office in California, owing to the sizable number of Salvadoran voters, many of whom are here illegally, signaling that there's a lot of work to be had for the newest (and least likely to be legal) migrants in the states now, most of which is coming from California. From the Salvadoran private sector, maybe not so much, given that the country is losing a critical component of its work force and is already looking at labor shortages even as the government grows bigger and more powerful from the remittances. Big California Daddy coming in to scoop up more of the Salvadoran labor force may well prompt some anger and disgust in those quarters.

Newsom doesn't care about any of that, because that's economics, and he's a leftist.

Obviously, his mission is domestic: to undercut President Trump's effort to control the border at a time of national emergency, with very large numbers of Salvadorans now planning to come to the U.S. without authorization. The technical infrastructure has emerged with the new (and supercharged) phenomenon of the caravans, aided also by the fact that the U.S. is legally powerless to stop them, so the numbers are projected to soar. Why not goose them a bit? It leaves the question on the table of what Newsom's plotting with the foreigners, and why this isn't classified as subversion.

Newsom's already signaled his strong support for "sanctuary state" policies, as well as pulled U.S. National Guard troops from the California border, creating a good entry point for the caravans on the long stretches of California's wide open border. This, in addition to all the free health care, housing, education, driver's licenses, and legal privileges he's set up for the Salvadorans and other illegal migrants. What more can he offer them? He's met with the farthest of the far-left Salvadoran "community leaders" here, excluding any reasonably minded Salvadorans, and now he's going down to El Salvador to find out how.

It's nothing but a bid to trawl for votes, legal or otherwise, since legality no longer seems to matter to California's ruling class.

It's worth noting that Newsom has already pulled this stunt once before, shortly before he was sworn in to office, right when President Trump shut the border last November. Remember this one, reported by Politico?

As President Donald Trump threatens to shut down the Mexican border access and demands $5 billion from Congress to build a wall, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Xavier Becerra and state lawmakers are heading to Mexico City this week to celebrate the inauguration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The message: The country's most populous state wants to work with Mexico despite the president's rhetoric.

The purpose was declared to be this:

"We're ushering in new leadership and there is a vital strategic interest for the state of California for continued economic growth on both sides of the border, with collaboration and cooperation that benefits both California and Mexico, regardless of Washington's lack of leadership," said state Sen. Kevin de León, the former Senate leader who authored California's "sanctuary state" law. "A lot of folks view foreign policy through the prism of Washington, D.C., however, because California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and because we share a border with our neighbor to the south, we have many shared interests."

He's as transparent as crystal glassware on that. It's about time he be called out on it - and maybe sanctioned, too — at the national level.