In the cinematic arts, if you’re not biased left, you’re on the right. So did Lynch’s discoveries turn him into a right-wing activist? In fact, he said, “[t]his film has turned me into a better American.”
Dennis Lynch told me there were many revelations during the fourteen months he spent making They Come to America, his riveting documentary about illegal immigration. “I was shocked about how many Americans are furious but too afraid to speak on camera,” he said in July when I interviewed him by phone. “I was surprised to learn people can’t land jobs [in Miami] because they don’t speak Spanish.” The list of revelations is long, but the biggest: “At any given moment, we could have another 9/11.”
In the film, Arizona ranchers tell Lynch about the exhausted foreigners crossing over from Mexico they’ve rescued from hunger, heat, and thirst along the scarcely patrolled border. And about finding the occasional prayer rug or Quran dropped by what Homeland Security classifies as OTMs, “other than Mexicans,” whose fates are unknown.
Some revelations aren’t on film, like stories from border control agents who didn’t want to be identified. Lynch said they’re still coming:
I got one the other day from a woman agent, I could tell she was crying when she wrote it to me. … They’re taking 4- and 5 year-old children, the cartels, putting them at the fence and telling them to run to the main road, that there will be cars and trucks waiting for them, and they can’t stop running because if border patrol catches them they are going to kill them. The reason why they’re being put in the vehicles is they’re being sold for the sex trade.
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