There's a humanitarian crisis erupting on our nation's southern border. Or there is a ruthless plot — orchestrated by the Obama administration — to irrevocably shift the demography of Texas, and thus the whole country, into the Democratic Party's favor. Forever. Rational adults can differ on this. Let's examine.

Since 2011, there has been an escalating influx across the U.S.-Mexican border of what U.S. Customs and Border Protection calls "Unaccompanied Alien Children" or UACs, but what could also be more specifically described as human children, predominantly from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, with big wet eyes and rich inner lives capable of experiencing pleasure and pain as acutely as human children born in the United States.

During the last fiscal year, the U.S. Border Patrol documented 38,833 unaccompanied minors attempting to cross the border into the United States: a 59 percent increase over the previous year. Today, officials and advocacy groups estimate that the agency may apprehend as many as 74,000 of these young unattended migrants by year's end.

U.S. Congressmen Steve Stockman (R-Texas) and Steve King (R-Iowa) recently put forward an interesting theory as to why this crisis is happening now and how we can humanely resolve it. Rational adults can debate these things. As the two lawmakers told World Net Daily, a web-based news portal, they believe that President Barack Obama has consciously tailored his administration's immigration policies to engineer just such a humanitarian crisis, endangering tens of thousands of children for partisan gain.

"Obama follows all the far-left, Leninist, socialist-type stuff," Congressman Stockman explained to the news portal, adding that it's "an open secret Obama is trying to flood Texas with illegals to make it into a blue state."

"If we lose Texas, and it becomes like California, then the Republicans lose the chance of ever getting a Republican elected president."

Representative Steve King agreed, in his own exclusive interview with the venerable web portal, implying that Obama's reaction to the child migrant issue has only deepened his suspicions.

"You or I could shut that thing down in less than a week," King told World Net reporter Jerome Corsi, author of the books The Obama Nation and Where's the Birth Certificate?

"It's the Battle of the Bulge down there, and you send in George Patton and the Third Army to relieve the surrounded 101st Airborne."

Both Steves (Huh! Interesting.) expressed their feeling that the crisis was an implementation of the strategies advanced in the 1960s, by a husband-and-wife team of activist professors at Columbia University's School of Social Work, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. In a 1966 issue of the Nation, Cloward and Piven advocated for a mass movement educating the poor on the benefits to which they were entitled under existing public assistance programs. The couple hoped and believed that the ensuing fiscal crisis would reveal to the American electorate that these programs were criminally underfunded and inadequate to the scope of the problem.

Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and it is the opinion of a preponderance of conservative commentators that "the Cloward-Piven strategy" is in fact a recipe for anarchy; a putsch to be staged in advance of a Stalinist dictatorship in the United States. As journalist Steve Deace (Huh: another Steve.) explains it in an opinion piece republished on Alex Jones' Infowars:

That's exactly what you're seeing the Obama Regime doing on the issue of illegal immigration. They're not surprised or deflated by this. They're elated, and they're the ones conducting the cattle call – shamelessly using children born into poverty as a means of collapsing the system.

The "cattle call" Steve Deace is referring to is allegedly Obama's advocacy of the DREAM Act, which would provide conditional permanent residency to minors who have been living in America for over five years and who have completed certain service and education requirements. (The DREAM Act has never been passed, but variations of the law have been passed on the state level.) Other notes in the cattle call then would include Obama's memorandum to the DHS known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gives agencies some prosecutorial discretion in the deportation of minors. By showing mercy toward these youngest and most vulnerable, Deace believes, Obama has been practically inviting them to enter the country illegally.

But, what if, instead, some other factor proved to be more significant?

What if, say, prolonged campaigns of ultra-violence and a history of endemic poverty in the Central American countries of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador were actually what had provoked this mass exodus of children northward?

It would certainly account for the fact that the nations surrounding Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — including impoverished Nicaragua — have also seen greater numbers of unaccompanied minors from these three countries seeking asylum.

It would also account for the fact that Barack Obama would not actually need to do this to shift the demographics of Texas. Research from Pew shows that the percentage of Latino and Hispanic members of the U.S. population has been rising more rapidly than any other group since at least the Reagan era.

This alternate theory also has the ring of truth, because Honduras has been the undisputed murder capital of the world for years, following a brutal wave of repression after its 2009 military coup. Guatemala too has a long history of military dictatorship and civil war (sometimes CIA orchestrated), as well as an increasingly heated war between rival drug gangs like the Zetas. If you are unfamiliar with the life and death of Catholic Bishop Óscar Romero, perhaps you will find that looking up his name and El Salvador might further burnish the argument that these children are simply fleeing a miserable war zone.

It's really hard to know for sure. Could it possibly be that the United States of America has maybe spent over a century now turning Central America, South America and the Caribbean into its own God Damn Throne of Blood, its own private Agribusiness slave plantation, a covert ops training ground, illegal pharmacy, tax shelter and tourist destination?

Or maybe it is more likely that President Obama has undertaken a devious long-con, stacking the deck in Texas with hordes of Democrat-voting Latinos.

[Photo via Pete Souza]