Once again California is at the top of the national news every day.

The apocalyptic images of massive wildfires and destroyed towns like Paradise are gone.

Now the whole country is watching scenes of tear gas being used against the thousands of illegal immigrants from Central America who are trying to force their way into the United States near San Diego.

I hope the people bitching about how Donald Trump is handling this invasion of our southern border are paying attention to the news.

They might learn something most of us Californians already know.

Unlike most Americans, many of us have been to the U.S.-Mexican border.

We’ve seen what happens when the sun goes down. We’ve seen the invasion of illegals that comes across into the U.S. — every single night.

We don’t like it and we understand very well how much it has cost our state.

The national liberal media are, as usual, irresponsibly unfair and unbalanced in their coverage of events at the border.

They can’t stop showing video footage of tear gas being used to turn back the immigrants as they rush the California border.

In their never-ending effort to make Trump and conservatives look as mean and rotten as possible, the electronic media have made it seem like tear gas is some new and terrible weapon.

It’s not.

Tear gas is the weapon border patrol agents use when they’re trying to stop a rushing mob of illegal immigrants.

Critics of President Trump’s policy and the media should be applauding the border patrol’s use of non-lethal weapons like tear gas and pepper spray, not decrying it.

They should also point out that he’s following the lead of previous presidents like Barrack Obama, who now pretends to be appalled by Trump even though tear gas was deployed at the same border crossing during his administration.

Though you’d never hear it if from the liberal media, many of California’s Latinos, who now make up 39 percent of its population, are also unhappy with the invasion of illegal immigrants.

But few Latinos who support Trump’s immigration policy will dare to say so because they fear a backlash in their own community.

The Latino laborers and gardeners who work for rich white liberals also are afraid to say anything positive about Trump for fear of losing their jobs.

They keep mum — and the liberal media ignore them.

When the media reporters do their immigration stories for TV, they interview liberals and Democrats to show how compassionate they are toward the poor illegals.

They also interview conservatives and Republicans to show how compassionate they aren’t.

Somehow they never manage to find those everyday Latino workers — many of them here legally — who are worried about losing their jobs to new immigrants.

The only Latino I remember being interviewed about the serious problems caused by the arrival of thousands of Honduran migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing was the mayor of Tijuana.

He told the immigrants of the caravan the hard truth no one in California could say without being branded a racist, “We don’t want you here in Tijuana. Get the hell out.”

It’s too late to save California with a tougher immigration policy or a higher border wall.

Decades of liberal Democrats have already wrecked the Golden State with their high taxes, bad regulations, transit boondoggles and over-generous social programs for citizens and non-citizens alike.

Now we have a newly elected Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, who is for open borders and things like universal “free” health care.

With a super majority in both houses in Sacramento, Newsom will be able to do anything he wants and the state’s surviving Republicans won’t be able to prevent California from becoming the Venezuela of North America — with open borders.

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan