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Remember that scene where a discouraged Charlie Brown pleads for someone to tell him what Christmas is all about? “Isn’t there anyone…who knows what Christmas is all about??” he pleads, frustrated.

Linus, blanket in tow, steps up and gives one of the most touching renditions of the Christmas Gospel ever.

He finishes, walks over to Charlie Brown, and says simply: “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

I’m not here to talk about Christmas today (although I’ll confess I’ve been slowly dragged over to the dark side in recent years; that is, turning November into a second month of Christmas; #sorrynotsorry).

I’m here to talk about the situation at our border.

(I promise, there’s a connection.)

This last week, nine American citizens—including babies as young as 8 months old—were brutally murdered in Mexico for the crime of driving through cartel-run territory.  It’s still up for debate whether they were targeted specifically, or if one cartel mistook the vehicles for those of a rival cartel.

But that last part is irrelevant.

The fact remains that, like it or not, the nation to our south is a place where this kind of unabashed violence is a thing of ROUTINE.

For some reason, there are vast swathes of people in the media, entertainment, and academic complexes (and their following) who refuse to see this, or any other difficult truth about other nations. And they perpetuate instead the idea that an open border is compassionate—and that anything less is racist. It is, in fact, the core from which the “Donald Trump’s a big fat racist” narrative has grown and thrived.

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg even went so far as to say that the United States owes reparations to the migrant families detained at the border.

They refuse to see the truth.

They refuse to see that you don’t have to go to Syria or Iraq or the Congo to witness one of the world’s most dangerous, war-torn countries. Mexico’s #4 on the list of the world’s war torn countries, with upwards of 120,000 deaths directly associated with the cartels’ battle for power.

They refuse to see that the Mexican government has zero control over this violence. Last month, the Sinaloan city of Culiacan became a literal war zone when Mexican authorities arrested the son of famed drug lord El Chapo Guzman—prompting a “siege of the city” when it was summarily swarmed by Sinaloa cartel members there to liberate him. The “outgunned and surrounded contingent of Mexican soldiers” were ordered to release Ovidio Guzman Lopez by President Lopez Obrador himself, who feared more innocent deaths were a given.

They refuse to see that Latin America writ large has a violence problem, regardless of how it ebbs and flows. They refuse to see that along with those genuinely coming to seek refuge from the violence in their countries, come thousands upon thousands of cartel-connected, gang-connected, and otherwise violence-connected criminals pouring over the border. The Government Accountability Office did a study on “the criminal histories of 55,322 illegal aliens in prison showed that they had been arrested 459,614 times for some 700,000 criminal offenses.” That same GAO did a study of well over two hundred thousand criminal aliens in all levels of our prison system “had been arrested nearly 1.7 million times for close to 3 million criminal offenses ranging from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, burglary, and larceny.” As recently as this last year, there was a 212 percent increase in MS-13 gang apprehensions.

They refuse to see that Americans are dying in what are COMPLETELY preventable deaths at the hands of illegal immigrants. Every single death—whether it’s the gruesome murders carried out by MS-13, or a drunk driver killing those in the vehicle he hit—was preventable, because those individuals weren’t supposed to be here in the first place. And yet instead of talking about that, they’ll go a step further and talk about how “immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans.” Inconveniently for them, however, “most states don’t keep comparative crime statistics.”

The piece continues: “Regardless of the statistical breakdown, media outlets purposely ignore stories that upend their preferred immigrants-as-choirboys narrative.”

They refuse to see that there are those who may not actually have a credible fear of violence in their country, but are taking full advantage of our utterly overwhelmed and broken immigration system to push and shove their way to the front of the line for the American dream (and then of course proceed to complain later on about the fact that they fear deportation). As James Jay Carafano put it recently:

“Of those caught entering the country illegally in FY 2017, either as family units or unaccompanied minors, 98 percent remain in the U.S. today. Of those who pass a credible fear hearing and are released, 40 percent never file for asylum. Even with the no-shows, the sheer volume of illegal immigration is overwhelming our immigration court system. Over the last decade, the average wait time for a court hearing has grown from a little over one year in 2009 to almost two years today. This ill-serves those who have valid claims, while giving others more time to ‘disappear.’”

They refuse to see there’s a multi-pronged, multi-layered, extremely complex and nuanced problem. Instead, it’s just easier to call the president a racist. Oddly enough, for a racist, the president is unabashedly vocal about who/what/when/where/why, but never seems to quite get around to actually spouting racism (and no, telling anti-Semitic, anti-American terrorist-supporting dictatorship-supporting congresswoman to “go back” isn’t racist. It’s pragmatic.).

(For more on that astute theory, which I cannot take credit for, see Steven Crowder’s commentary here.)

As the blood dries on that desolate Sonoran road and the ashes blow away with the desert dust, remember this: that’s what protecting our border is all about. Not jingoism, not racism, not xenophobia.

That’s what protecting our border is all about, America.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com, and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show on KSEV 700 Radio in Houston, and on Newsmax TV. She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree