Those of you with a knowledge of history may recall that Australia was first settled as a British penal colony. The Brits send their miscreants to Botany Bay to start over, hoping they’d make something of their second chance. And I know from personal experience, having witnessed it first hand, what Castro did to South Florida in April of 1980.

In what looked like a liberalization, Fidel Castro told anyone who wanted to leave communist Cuba they could go, from the port at Mariel. I was in college at the time and my family still lived in South Florida. I was home when Mariel began. Initially it was welcomed, as many South Florida Cubans thought relatives may finally be able to escape the imprisoned island. But when the refugees got here something different was apparent.

Not everyone had been allowed to go. In fact, if you requested to go you were denied permission and put on a secret police list as an enemy of the state. Bad things ensued for you and your family. Who were on those boats, rafts, etc.? Convicts, mental patients, intelligence officers, and anyone who Castro deemed generally undesirable. The situation is fictionalized in the movie “Scarface”. The Cubans in South Florida said of the Mariel Boatlift, “Castro flushed his toilet on our shore.”

I think at this point, with crime spiraling across the US, we must ask ourselves: Is the same thing going on at our southern border? Former President Trump warned about this. But his warnings have not been heeded and crime has spiked since the Biden administration opened the southern door wide and welcoming. Is there a connection between the Biden policy and the crime spike? Have we become Botany Bay or, again, Mariel, but for Mexico and Central America?

Recently leftists have had the temerity to refer to the Biden open door policy as reminiscent of the Ellis Island period. Nothing could be further from the truth. We were a different country then and those immigrants came here with different values and different work ethics than do those who crowd our southern border today. I don’t mean to say all who crash the border are criminals and parasites. Some no doubt are legitimately seeking a better economic life and willing to work for it. But when the Ellis Island immigrants came here there was hardly any government safety net. That was handled by private groups like churches and private organizations and the help that was available was meager. Thus, they were not a burden on the taxpayer.

And Ellis Island immigrants waited in line, played by the rules, and didn’t break the law getting here. Those who cross our border without permission today are called “illegals” for a reason. Social norms were different then too. Our culture wasn’t the cesspool it is today and so a culture of upward economic mobility was predominate in immigrant communities. Is it the same today?

America faces enough of its own problems without handling the surplus issues of other nations. The southern door must be closed shut and tight until we can assimilate those here already. If not, then it will be worse than Botany Bay, because Australia turned out to be a fine country.