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The journalist and counterterrorism expert Todd Bensman knows the USA’s southern border inside-out. His book Overrun is an exposé of the recent “crisis” down on his nation’s doorstep. Published in February 2023, it chronicles the almost total withdrawal of border controls under President Joe Biden.

Whether in Europe or in the USA, modern culture often appears to be eerily blind or indifferent to huge migrations of people. We don’t expect the next astonishing new voice in the contemporary novel to be a migrant’s, however obviously such a voice would freshen everything up. Here and there, Overrun offers glimpses of the migrants who Bensman has bumped into on his travels. It is always disorientating to hear about them, because you are hit with how little you really know about their world. Bensman describes their hopes and fears, but also the ruses, the loopholes and the insider-knowledge that together, for them, comprise the only meaningful passport to the USA.

When one considers how defunct meritocracy is today across the West, this migration could be the nearest that we still have to the social mobility that people had experienced in the post-war period. Nonetheless, Bensman explodes the idea that those crossing the southern border are destitute or in any way refugees from failed societies. As a class, they are roundly entrepreneurial; as individuals, they are clients and their migration is often a deliberative investment strategy.

The Mexican cartels are the organisational force behind this immigration. They are running not so much a “black market” as a kind of black state, whose invisible infrastructure openly processes multitudes of applications. Gradually, a tone of epic history – a little of the Siege of Troy – seems to creep over Bensman’s book. The migration across the border is an “invasion,” with waves of attackers striking over a vast landscape. The aspiration is clearly to isolate the thin fibre of what is historically momentous within all the synthetic tissues of technocratic politics.

Where Overrrun could malfunction is in the sudden appeal that it may awaken in the British reader. I had always assumed that immigration to the USA would be impossibly complicated and expensive. After reading this book, however, I think I will try my luck. My dream of being a croupier in Las Vegas actually looks surprisingly achievable.

I have chosen to review Overrun in order to set myself a challenge. I believe in open borders and for me the chaos that Bensman presents is a thing of beauty. Every time I had read about another million migrants making it over the Mexican border I drank a toast to them with brandy. So I don’t remember half of Bensman’s book, only that I had a great time. But I am also somewhat distressed that a celebration of this free movement is being increasingly abandoned by centre-left politicians in my own country, the UK.

The SNP’s Stephen Flynn struck a brave and wonderful note recently when calling upon the voters to “rise up” against the anti-immigration consensus. This had also felt hauntingly nostalgic though. Generally amongst centrists, such viewpoints are now dismissed as “out-of-touch,” as “luxury beliefs” or as estranged from the true working-class experience.

I believe that a nation’s borders should be under democratic control and that the majority should have the final say on whether the immigration policy is welcoming or unfriendly. That said and within this context, I think that progressives in the UK should stick to their old guns on immigration. Just because immigration has swung out of style lately changes neither its moral status nor the reality of its economic benefits.

In the USA, key elements of the immigration policy are occasionally decided through judicial re-clarifications. But on the political front, Bensman gets into an immediate mess on the question of democratic consent.

He wants to imply that there is something underhand or conspiratorial about Biden’s approach. For him, it is surrounded by a “political smoke… so thick that many Americans are left unsure that anything out of the ordinary happened at all.” He complains that policymakers now use sinister “new encrypted synonyms” like “humane” and “fair” to hypnotise the public into accepting open borders. As if this is materially different to any other form of political jargon (such as calling warmongering “defence”).

Bensman is persuasive in arguing that the Democrats’ recent lurch towards open borders is a political novelty and out of keeping with their party’s traditions. It sounds like he personally prefers the authoritarian gravitas of Barack Obama to the crudities of MAGA. Where his analysis becomes silly, however, is in its claim that, “Hardly anyone noticed that the tectonic plates had shifted on immigration.” This is so confusing because once we are on the other side of the southern border, mass movements of people are suddenly intimately coordinated with what is being said at the very top of US politics:

With my iPhone camera rolling, I asked groups of these migrants if they were coming now with children because Biden had said they would be let in. In one typical clip, all the women, some holding infants nodded vigorously, saying, “Si!,” “Si!, “Si!,”…

As with the rest of capitalism, migrants follow what happens in general elections closely and they make their investment decisions accordingly. This soon leads to a paradox in which illegal migrants, who are supposed to be excluded from US citizenship, generally seem to possess a more active political knowledge about the nation than those who are not migrants. Bensman’s regular US citizen is too dopey to see beyond the “encrypted synonyms.” This leaves the reader wondering whether such passivity is in itself not a form of second-class citizenship.

Bensman could instantly crack the whole conundrum by admitting that there is sufficient democratic consent for Biden’s policy. Yet to concede this risks being flushed out into an open discourse about immigration, where one would have to finally confront the puny or even negligible overall damage that it is doing to the USA’s economy. Clearly not wishing to be exposed on this ground, Bensman loiters back in a narrative in which open borders are a conspiracy that has been hatched against the public. The conspirators are a do-gooding, left-leaning equivalent of the military-industrial complex, a vast, shapeless hegemony of NGOs, charities and activist networks.

Although Bensman gazes with clear eyes across the Mexican border, the pro-immigration lobby remains a foreign country to him and one that grows ever more unfathomable. He complains about the “enduring and deeply troubling mystery… that progressives insist their absolutist umbrella covers murderers, child rapists, drug traffickers, and aggravated felons.” I have some sympathy with him here, not least since the disorganisation at the Mexican border becomes rather mind-boggling when considered in plain or non-ideological terms. For example, instead of the state simply charging the migrants for work visas, billions of dollars in transaction fees are being allowed, ridiculously, to flow on unhindered to the Mexican cartels.

Bensman is nonetheless happier to attribute most of the wickedness at the border to “progressives” whilst remaining noncommittal or strangely incurious about the nature of the relationship that the migrants have themselves forged with the USA. A danger for him is that the nation itself – the political body that is being urgently protected from the migrants – begins to appear hollowed out and devalued.

On the one hand, the migrant is already demonstrating citizenship and alertly participating in the life of the “imagined community.” They will have educated themselves about the nation with a thoroughness that few resident citizens will have matched. On the other hand, they continue to view the nation in purely transactional terms. If Canada suddenly offered a far greater value than the USA, they would continue on to Canada, just like customers opting for a savings bank with a superior rate of interest. This spills the guilty secret of the nation. It is hardly indispensable. You can, in fact, get by just as well without it.

Unable to point to any mechanism within the concept of national citizenship by which people are cleanly included or excluded, Bensman has to fall back on reducing citizenship to legality alone. He harps on the disrespect that the southern crossings are showing to the USA. He sees migrants “break the law against illegal entry, lie to defraud U.S. asylum laws, and then live illegally for years.” He soon sounds more offended by the illegality of illegal immigration than by the immigration per se. The cost of this is that the nation is deglamorised, degenerating from an idealised moral community to a mere legal container.  

Where one begins to admire Bensman enormously is in his book’s fifth chapter. An ideologue or an intellectually dishonest writer would have cut out this chapter altogether, since it in effect demolishes half of the book’s argument. Unblinkingly, Bensman pushes on, absorbing all of the unhelpfulness of what he has discovered.

It turns out that many of these migrants are going home again. They are not so much illegal citizens as people who have purchased temporary US visas from Mexican cartels. Bensman visits western Guatemala where he inspects the fine houses that have been built there with money earned in the USA. “Poverty is not an eligibility of American asylum,” he sniffs, but if we are standing on technicalities then these people were never asylum seekers or even immigrants to begin with. They have as much attachment to the USA as to any factory that they might go off to work in for a while.

Bensman speaks of Guatemalans as having a “thirst for large houses” and of coveting “pretty houses.” This sounds disrespectful to me and I doubt that he would describe New York real-estate investors in similarly childlike terms. Unlike a nation, of course, a house has an innocent practicality to it. One lives in a house rather than belonging to it. It is like a nation but without all of the messing about.

Bensman’s dismay takes him all the way to Colony Ridge, Texas, a community that is being supposedly overwhelmed by cross-border migration. With his usual fairness he relays the community’s hostility to this migration but by now we may sense a certain dispiritment with what he is hearing. There is a gap where one expects there to be an enthusiastic endorsement.

The anti-immigrant feeling at Colony Ridge has effected a wondrous transformation. The patriotic campaigner Lee Ann Penton-Walker has been essentially flipped head-over-heels into a Native American. During Bensman’s encounter with her, she sounds ever more like these hapless people from the olden days. “I was born and raised by the forest,” she announces. “My father was an original. His mother was an original. We’re all on the same land. We are called the originals of Plum Grove.” She is now a self-styled custodian of the land and a protector of the trees, which the incomers are, naturally enough, too philistine to appreciate. She thinks that the “illegals” are bad neighbours, whereas her own superior approach is “[in Bensman’s words] to shut down the settlement and see the illegal immigrants cleared out…”

Walker is insisting upon a distinction between herself and the un-originals that is, of course, impossible. The only thing going for it is its impeccable legality, but it is otherwise devoid of any real or meaningful quality. She is trying to replace organic society with Donald Trump’s military-industrial border and all of its totalitarian regulation of human interactions. If Stalinism could have ever been an option for Crazy Horse, then the results may have looked like this lady.

Walker can either accept that she is part of the same society as the migrants and fully participate in it, or she can retreat into behaviours that are no better than the insularity of those unassimilators who skulk in ghettos and refuse to learn English. Bensman encounters this insularity in the “white flight” from the Texas school system, a monstrously antisocial phenomenon. “The percentage of white students in CISD fell from 45 per cent a decade earlier to less than 10 per cent in 2021-2022.”

The fairness of Bensman’s journalism means that his story does not stop here. Over in Dayton, Texas, he meets a restaurant worker named Benjamin. This migrant’s words are allowed to fall into a natural rivalry with those of Walker. A shaft of light picks out this lone figure who is swimming superbly against all the tides that Bensman has otherwise gathered.

“‘We are illegal, but I know this country has done a lot for me… How do I pay it back? By being nice to everybody.’ And, he added with no hint of irony, ‘by being a good citizen’.”

[Previously on Tychy: “Book Review: End Times by Peter Turchin.“]