There’s a great exchange in the 1975 classic, Three Days of the Condor, that serves as a prophecy of what’s to come.

As the world heats up, more mass migrations will occur. Millions of people will retreat from the undeveloped “shithole countries” that Donald Trump detests and try to enter the United States and Europe.

This will be entirely natural. What will also be entirely natural is that those who have a decent life will want to hold onto it—and not be overwhelmed by millions who don’t share their same race, values, education and religion.

In Three Days of the Condor, Higgins, the deputy director of the CIA’s New York Division confronts Joe Turner, an idealistic ex-CIA employee on the realities of espionage.

Higgins (played by Cliff Robertson): “It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In ten or fifteen years, food. Plutonium. Maybe even sooner. Now, what do you think the people are gonna want us to do then?”

Joe Turner (played by Robert Redford): “Ask them?”

Higgins: “Not now—then! Ask ’em when they’re running out. Ask ’em when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask ’em when their engines stop. Ask ’em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won’t want us to ask ’em. They’ll just want us to get it for ’em!”

That day has come for millions of desperate people in Central and Latin America. And it is coming for all of us in the foreseeable future.

On October 13, a caravan of at least 5,000 men, women and children from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras set out for the United States. Many of them claim they have been threatened by street gangs such as MS-13 or by government officials.

On October 18, President Trump threatened to deploy the United States military and close the U.S.-Mexico border to keep the caravan from entering the country.

And then Trump did just that. 

By November 19, migrants had begun piling up in Tijuana, which borders San Diego.

And that’s when Tijuana residents began carrying signs reading “No illegals,” “No to the invasion” and “Mexico First.” And marching in the streets wearing Mexico’s red, white and green national soccer jersey and vigorously waving Mexican flags. 

“We want the caravan to go; they are invading us,” said Patricia Reyes, a 62-year-old protester. “They should have come into Mexico correctly, legally, but they came in like animals.”

And the situation will only worsen in the months ahead.

Trump has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to draft new rules to limit the number of asylum-seekers.

As increasing numbers of migrants pour into Tijuana, access to housing, schools, hospitals and other social services will become increasingly strained. Violent clashes between Tijuana’s 1.6 million residents and its thousands of uninvited arrivals will almost certainly be the result. 

Tijuana’s mayor, Juan Manuel Gastélum, says Tijuana lacks the funds to continue supporting the migrants. He has requested support from Mexico’s federal authorities.

For decades, the Mexican Government did nothing to stop millions of its own citizens from routinely violating America’s immigration laws.

The reason: Mexicans still remember the bloody upheaval known as the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) which slaughtered one to two million men, women and children. Massacres were common on all sides, with men shot by the hundreds in bullrings or hung by the dozen on trees.

A Mexican “fruit tree”

As a result, every successive Mexican government has lived in the shadow of another such wholesale bloodletting. These officials have thus quietly turned the United States border into a safety valve.

If potential revolutionaries leave Mexico to find a better life in the United States, the Government doesn’t have to fear the rise of another “Pancho” Villa.

Suddenly, with the escape route to “El Norte” shut off, Mexicans have discovered that “illegal alien” is no longer a dirty phrase.

More than 500 years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli outlined the reason for such conflicts. In The Discourses, his masterwork on preserving liberty within a republic, he writes: 

Niccolo Machiavelli

It was a saying of ancient writers, that men afflict themselves in evil, and become weary of the good, and that both these dispositions produce the same effects. 

For when men are no longer obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition, which passion is so powerful in the hearts of men that it never leaves them, no matter to what height they may rise.  

The reason for this is that nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it.  Desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it. 

This causes the changes in their fortunes—for as some men desire to have more, while others fear to lose what they have, enmities and war are the consequences.  And this brings about the ruin of one province and the elevation of another.

Those who want the United States to allow unchecked immigration are ignorant of such truths—or deliberately ignore them.