When news first broke that the mock border wall would return to JCU this week, many of my colleagues at The Carroll News were excited to see a revival of such a controversial campus event — controversy sells copies. (Never mind that our paper is free.) I was excited too, because egregious demonstrations of mindless leftism typically give me lovely opportunities to expose our progressive overlords (and their quasi-communist snowflake army) for what they are. From my colleagues’ descriptions, I expected some massive, obnoxious obstruction blocking my entrance to the Student Center. I was ready to get angry. I was ready to write a 700-word diatribe against John Carroll University’s massive leftist conspiracy. I was ready, if necessary, to stage several pointless, self-congratulatory mass-protests akin to the Women’s March, the March for Our Lives and the hundred other far-left demonstrations that have plagued our country for the past two years.

But Sunday, returning from a weekend trip to Boston — a liberal cesspool that makes the John Carroll campus look like the Reagan Ranch — I saw nothing but a few sad feet of fencing placed inconspicuously on a patch of grass across from the Student Center. I was, to say the least, disappointed.

I wondered why, if they felt it was necessary to repeat this political demonstration, they no longer felt the courage to do so as aggressively as they did last time in the spring of 2016. One Student Union senator, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation, offered his explanation: “They don’t want to provoke student outrage, because they know that the overwhelming majority of the student body is opposed to their agenda.”

It seems that the activists among our students and administrators, while they still want to shove their confused blend of utopian socialism and globalist fascism down our throats, are becoming increasingly aware of their inability to fight this battle head-on. It is a battle they should not be able to win, not just because they are outnumbered, but because their platform is unsupported by rational analysis of the situation.

Let’s examine the basic premises of their argument: Citizens of severely dysfunctional countries choose to flee horrific living circumstances. In fleeing, many of these people decide to enter illegally into the United States. U.S. authorities prosecute these violations of our laws and pursue policies to deter further violations, uphold the rule of law and protect our national security and the sovereignty of our borders. Because of these actions, the U.S. authorities are vile racists infringing on the human rights of these innocent migrants.

The most obvious irrationality here is the claim of human rights violations. There is no right to violate the legal, sovereign borders of a nation of which you are not a citizen. Similarly, the claim that migrants are being “forced into the desert” to die by policing of high-traffic points of entry is absolutely ludicrous. The obvious solution to all non-desert points of entry being closed is simply not to attempt an illegal border crossing. In fact, this is the whole point of closing all non-desert points of entry.

But even before that, the problems begin in the very first premise, precisely because the entire point is ignored in almost all mainstream discussions of the issue, including that being (meekly) forced on us by the Students for Social Justice. The epidemic of illegal immigration is treated by American liberals as a problem which begins and ends at our southern border. The horrors from which these people are fleeing are hardly ever part of the conversation.

The reasons for this omission are obvious: immigrants from Central and South America are fleeing socialist dystopias modeled on the very framework endorsed by economically illiterate campus radicals; the only Bern they’re feeling is the unending pain in their stomachs as their democratic-socialist governments slowly starve them to death. It is interesting to note that the violent, impoverished nations which the SSJ literature cites as spawning most of the incoming migrants — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and many others which they do not name — either operate on the very system which these people want to impose on the United States or currently dwell in the anarchy which inevitably results from that system’s collapse — whether these particular incarnations have been openly socialist or military juntas traditionally characterized as right-wing but plainly discernible as authoritarian-socialist upon closer examination.

To address the roots of the migrant problem would be to denounce some of the central philosophies underpinning the worldview and political framework of the American left. Rather than question their beliefs, they choose to treat this as a problem of immigration and not emigration, as a problem with America and not with the many countries so terribly governed that their citizens see no other option than to flee. But you don’t treat lung cancer with cough syrup, and you don’t treat a global crisis of socialism and terrorism with deregulation of mass migration. The symptom will continue until the disease is cured, and the disease will not be cured until those struggling nations manage to buck the leftist tyrannies which currently hold them down.

Perhaps, deep down, this is the real reason that our school’s social justice warriors are scaling back the fight which once they fought so openly and aggressively: they are waging a war against themselves, and it cannot be won until its warriors step back and make an honest appraisal of who they are, what they stand for and the despicable crimes their comrades are perpetrating against mankind.