It’s been, oh, a good two hours since we’ve had a reminder that Democrats unambiguously support continued illegal immigration. How’s about another, from a former Speaker of the House?

They don’t want the border secured. It really is this simple.

The Democratic leadership’s hard line raises the prospects of an impasse on Capitol Hill that leaves the Obama administration with no additional resources to deal with the border surge…

“I do think the bill that was introduced is exactly the wrong way to go,” she said. “Is the only immigration bill we’re going to have one that hurts children?”

She said the Congressional Hispanic Caucus had united against any bill that changes the way children migrants are treated. The rest of the House Democratic caucus will follow the Latino lawmakers’ lead, she said.

“This crisis is an opportunity to demonstrate who we are as a country,” Ms. Pelosi said.

If she wants an additional bill to remove some adult illegals too, especially some of the many, many, many people with criminal records whom Obama hasn’t gotten around to deporting, I think she’ll find a few votes.

She said previously that she might agree to change the 2008 child-trafficking law to speed up deportations from illegal immigrant kids if House Republicans agreed to Obama’s request for $3.7 billion, most of it in humanitarian aid, to handle the border crisis. Republicans said they wouldn’t grant the funds without changes to federal policy, which sure sounds like the makings of a deal: House Dems amend the child-trafficking statute and O gets his money. Easy peasy — until today. Since the Congressional Hispanic Caucus has decided that identity politics trumps tougher border enforcement, Democratic leaders like Pelosi have decided that it does too. So Dems will get the best of both worlds: A brand new round of demagoguery this fall that Republicans hate Latinos because the GOP has the gall to oppose letting countries transfer huge chunks of their populations to the U.S. illegally, and an excuse for Obama to let the illegals keep coming because Congress won’t give him the funds to stop them. They don’t want the border secure, not now and certainly not later as part of some sham comprehensive immigration reform deal.

And when I say the number of kids who might end up here eventually is “huge,” it’s with good reason. John Sexton wrote about that yesterday, seizing on something Kirsten Powers said on Fox about how America should be able to handle 60,000 refugees. How about 600,000? Six million?

If we were talking about 60,000 refugees, then the answer would probably be yes, we can handle that. But in reality, the problem already far exceeds this figure. For starters, we had 40,000 child immigrants arrive last year and 20,000 the year before that. Very few of those ever went home. So we’ve already absorbed more than 60,000. Add to that the 90,000 that are expected by the end of this fiscal year and you’ve now got 150,000. The real question is how many come next year once they hear through the grapevine that the U.S. is accepting “refugees?”…

There are 30 million people living in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the three countries from which the kids are now coming in relatively equal numbers. That means there are quite literally millions of teens who would arguably be better off living in the United States.

How many teens are there in Iraq and Afghanistan? In Syria and Libya? The great mystery of the future of immigration in the U.S. isn’t whether the border will be secured — it won’t — but whether the left’s impulse to absorb entire countries will stay focused on this hemisphere or eventually spread out. There’s a huge constituency already here from Mexico and South and Central America that supports continued illegal immigration from those regions, but not such a huge constituency from the Middle East. Does a principled amnesty shill in Congress remain content with that arrangement, enjoying the political benefits of pandering to Latinos while quietly ignoring Iraqi kids being terrorized by ISIS, or does principle demand that we find a way to start importing tens of thousands of kids from Iraq and Syria too? And if it’s the latter, why force them to risk their lives to make it across the border in order to claim their right to reside in America? Hand out visas and plane tickets in Mosul and Damascus and let them travel in style. Sexton’s whole point is that there’s no limiting logic on any of this, really. And given that the two parties’ respective cronies have a financial stake in continued expansion, from immigration lawyers on the left to the Chamber of Commerce on the right, that’s how I’m betting. Exit quotation: “We are not going to stop sending people, and you guys are not going to be able to stop them from getting in.”