Monica Showalter, American Thinker, August 19, 2018

Remember how Arizona Governor Jan Brewer got piled on by 17 Latin American nations in 2010, condemning her state for attempting to enforce federal immigration law based on the reality that Arizona was being overrun by illegals and the Obama administration was doing nothing? It was bad enough that the Obama administration sued her state to end the law, something it only did with partial success. But then Latin states such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador joined the fun, piously weighing in to sign on to a highly questionable Friend of the Court brief led by Mexico, condemning Arizona for trying to enforce U.S. immigration law.

Scroll forward to 2018. Now the shoe is on the other tootsie.

Because right now, those are the very nations pulling up the drawbridge to illegals as their own countries get inundated by vast human waves of Venezuelans flooding over their borders without papers.

Ecuador has announced that anyone entering its country is going to need a passport. No more entries without papers, given that 500,000 of them have already gotten in. “This is going to skyrocket,” said one Ecuadoran official. After that, Peru, which just recently saw 5,000 Venezuelan border crossings without papers in one day, announced the same bid to enforce borders. It follows from Colombia tightening its passport requirements, and both Colombia and Brazil just plain sealing their borders to make the human waves stop. Chile, too, tightened entry rules after it got flooded. The latest news is that Brazil is now deploying troops to fight the migrants.

Comically, Colombia, which has pretty much let all comers in and expected them to fan out across the continent, says it is upset about Peru’s and Ecuador’s new passport requirements, because, well, they now get to keep the million or so people who had been ready to move onward. (More than 2 million Venezuelans have fled socialism, most running to the first place they could find, which was Colombia, but they have also overrun Brazil). It probably doesn’t help that a Colombian judge recently ruled that the incomers were fully entitled to the benefits of Colombia’s vast health care system without having paid anything in. The U.S. has just dispatched a hospital ship to the Colombian coast to help pick up the pieces, given that Colombia is otherwise a good American ally.