Immigration
As Chairman of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, it is Representative Tancredo (R-CO) who regularly exposes the corruption and incompetence at the I.N.S. (Immigration and Naturalization Service).
I’m particularly excited to have earned Congressman Tancredo’s endorsement, because immigration reform will be a major focus for me if I am elected.
Our immigration policy is nuts. Over 400,000 foreign students have overstayed their student visas, and we simply have no idea where they are! Over thirty thousand of these are from Muslim countries, and they’ve simply disappeared.
Most of those missing Muslims pose no threat to America, of course, but it only takes a handful of would-be “martyrs” to cause real problems, as we learned on September 11th, 2001.
The mastermind of the Twin Towers/Pentagon attack, Khalid Shaik Mohammed (whom we have captured), recently told U.S. officials that Al Qaeda is planning to carry out future attacks, including the firebombing of the Washington Metrorail, by smuggling terrorists, equipment, and toxic chemicals over our unguarded Mexican border!
We have troops in 120 countries around the world (including half a million in Iraq and Afghanistan), but we won’t defend our own borders with Mexico and Canada -- even after our mortal enemies tell us in advance that that is how they are going to hit us next!
With the communist North Koreans bragging that they will sell a nuclear bomb to Osama Bin Laden, why in the world do we refuse to defend our borders? Remember, a ragtag band of these Arab misfits used public transportation and a handful of box-cutters to kill more Americans in the 2001 World Trade Center attack than the Japanese killed at Pearl Harbor.
The next time they come at us, they may be armed with more than box cutters. How much more damage could an organized terrorist do with a nuclear bomb that he simply drove across the Mexican desert into San Luis, Arizona one night, like a common drug smuggler?
The threat is real. Vehicles routinely crash the border gates at the Otay Mesa ports of entry near San Diego, a few miles from an international airport in Mexico. Occasionally these gatecrashing vehicles get through. We have no idea who is in them, or what their cargo is. I will make it my personal mission in Congress to put an end to this madness. Enough is enough.
Even if there were no credible terrorist threat, we ought to be defending our borders against illegal immigration anyway. It is an absolute scourge that is attacking our culture, flooding us with drugs, and bleeding our treasury dry.
Aliens routinely cross our borders for free medical care in American hospitals, to pick up American welfare checks, to smuggle drugs, to work in sweatshops, to have their babies born here (so they will be American citizens eligible for benefits), and, yes, occasionally even to plot and carry out terrorist attacks on our citizens.
San Luis, Arizona, which I mentioned above, has around 3,000 residents, but 20,000 post office boxes. Why? So Mexicans living just across the border can come to the U.S. to collect their welfare checks every month that they signed up for using their post office box as their “permanent” address in the U.S. That’s your money, folks.
Roaming mobs of these aliens trying to sneak into our country beat ugly paths through our national forests, trample rare desert vegetation, and desecrate important Native American archeological sites. They leave their trash behind, start forest fires through carelessness (60,000+ acres of Coronado National Forest burned this way), and all too often die in the desert on the way.
Then their relatives sue us for not putting “relief stations” along the more popular smuggling routes. (And now we’re using scarce American tax dollars to install 30 of these relief stations!) They even fault us for having stronger border protection in the urban areas – they claim it “unfairly” forces them to cross in the more dangerous desert areas. This just galls me.
Those who manage to survive the trek through the desert take jobs away from legal immigrants and citizens, or turn to public assistance or a life of crime -- against Americans. This is not just alarmist rhetoric. Remember the Washington, D.C. area sniper? He was here illegally, and escaped deportation only because of an I.N.S. foul-up.
Even here in North Carolina there are so many of these illegals involved in crime that our local criminal District Court has had to hire full time interpreters – to make sure the criminals understand their right to free legal counsel, of course. They come here and commit crimes, but don’t even commit to learn our language. Enough is enough!
Part of the reason these immigration problems go unchecked is that there are now so many immigrants in the country that too many Republicans and virtually all Democrats actually compete to see who can pander to them the most. Washington Mayor Anthony Williams has even argued that these illegal aliens should have the right to vote! That’s where I draw the line.
This pandering is what created the explosion of so-called “sanctuary cities.” A sanctuary city is one whose liberal city council has forbidden its police officers to report illegal aliens to the I.N.S. so they can be deported.
New York City repealed its sanctuary resolution after four illegal aliens raped an American woman there last December. Three of the four had been picked up by the police before and should have been deported, but because of the sanctuary resolution, the cops had never informed the I.N.S. that the aliens were in custody.
My alma mater, the United States Air Force Academy, recently found it had 23 illegal aliens working for it – more than the number that carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks. But these illegal aliens were actually working for a military service academy!
Juan Hernandez, the head of the “Mexican Ministry for Mexicans Living in the United States” makes no bones about his intentions. He says he wants to increase the flow of Mexicans into the United States so as to turn our culture and influence American policy toward Mexico. He told Congressman Tancredo that we are not really “two [separate] countries; it’s just a region.” That offends me greatly.
These are not racist observations – these immigration problems threaten our national security, our fiscal security, and our national culture and identity. I look forward to working with Representative Tancredo to correct these failures in immigration policy. Enough is enough.
Vernon Robinson | RobinsonforCongress.com
