Posted on 12/20/2004 12:21:42 PM PST by nanak
After the White House news conference this morning, Bill Kristol on Fox News praised President Bush's remarks about "immigration reform" as "eloquent." Beg to differ. The president's open-borders statements were empty, garish platitudes strung together sloppily like cheap Christmas lights:
Illegal aliens "do the job Americans won't do." President Bush used that dog-tired phrase about a half-dozen times during today's press conference as he defended his impending illegal alien amnesty plan. Mark Krikorian effectively puts this mindless rhetoric to rest here.
"Family values don't stop at the Rio Grande." Uh huh. Well, terrorists and gang members and drunken murderers and cop-killers don't stop there either. And based on past and recent experience, granting amnesty to 13 million law-breakers will only result in more illegal immigration, not less.
We need immigration reform that "recognizes reality." Rank-and-file immigration enforcement officials give a real reality check on the amnesty debacle here, here, and here.
As immigration enforcement veteran/former U.S. prosecutor Peter Nunez put it:
[W]e need to stop the talk of a coming amnesty, or of a guest worker program, both of which, by themselves, serve to encourage additional illegal immigration. What kind of message are we sending when we dangle that possibility before people desperate enough to put their lives at risk? Doesn’t this kind of talk also indicate that we really don’t care much about law breaking, that we don’t really care that much about the rule of law, that these immigration laws exist only as a token objection to the violation of our sovereignty? Now, that is eloquent.
I say we plant 40,000 50-story apartment buildings around Bush's place in Texas. Let him experience this lunatic plan close up.
I dated her, too--TWICE.
Damn, that was STOO-PID.
Is this what you call citing a case? Is this the only way you can back up your statements?
You bet Nick. Lets import 60 million of the uneducated, illegals, muslims, and poor, so all those retirees can continue to golfing in Palm Springs.
Its ashame that Fox is not held accountable for his actions. Where is the media?
I guess the best we can do is mock these elitist.
Poor Dane, don't be so sensitive. The only thing that will happen is that someone will point out that you live in Pennsylvania, and that illegal aliens are as big a problem in your little town as space aliens.
Fine. Why don't you cite every case that has gone to a jury and generated a conviction?
After today's little press gathering, I find myself in an inexplicable position: Please, merciful Father, let the status quo on the border continue. The present political reality says that it can only grow worse.
| so all those retirees can continue to golfing in Palm Springs.
You refuse to see this problem. The only problem you see is that you don't want any of them thar Mexicans around you. It's all about you. A culture that kills its old is on its way, and what you're worried about is how it will affect you in the short term. I think that's sad. |
The heck it would. Bush doesn't address these things at all. Nothing in his proposal uncovers anyone who wouldn't be legalized as a guest worker. In fact, the Bush amnesty is being sold as the only way to locate even those illegal aliens. If there was another way, then presumably we wouldn't need to legalize any illegals.
Was that when we shared 2,000 mile borders with those countries?
That's the biggest joke about the "guest worker" plan --- and people who applaud it by saying we can't send them back now ---- but boy in 3 years we're going to find a way!
Guess what - they TRIED to enforce the law about hiring illegal immigrants. The juries acquitted, often in as little as fifteen (15) minutes.
No conviction - no penalties. That's how our system works. Or do you think that is something to be tossed aside?
The system's different now because we have a voluntary workplace verification program, and David Dreier has introduced HR 5111 to make it mandatory. Earlier employers of illegal aliens could raise reasonable doubt because they had no reasonable way to verify a worker's eligibility.
Thanks to President Bush, that's no longer the case.
And Mexico does great things for it's elderly??? How does bringing all of Mexico to the USA improve the lives of the elderly here? And Mexico's social security plan is due to go bankrupt quite a bit sooner than ours --- so the extreme birth rate isn't saving it too well. Mexico's elderly are coming here to get in on our SSDI programs --- and how does it help the elderly of America that Mexicans work for 18 months here --- legally or otherwise and can receive a full social secuity check. Or that their property taxes are going sky high to support the free health care and education system set up for the immigrants pouring in.
It certainly doesn't --- not when Mexico's pension plan is collapsing --- and any talk of reforming it gets big protests going --- like we saw just a couple months ago --- Fox talked of a couple reforms and they threatened to shut the country down --- and he didn't even mention raising their retirement age from 53 to something higher.
How can foreign people who can't save their own pyramid plan somehow save ours?
And Mexico represents the Culture of Life to you? I don't see how bringing all this over to the USA is supposed to benefit our elderly.
Violent crimes rack populace of border city
Louie Gilot
El Paso Times
JUAREZ -- Three young men beaten to death, their fingers cut off and stuffed inside their mouth and pockets. A store owner shot dead with a large-caliber rifle. A 9-year-old boy tied up and choked to death.
The killings, which happened in Juárez during the weekend, are representative of a town rendered violent by the economic desperation, by a powerful drug cartel and by corruption, experts said.
Every year, tens of thousands of Mexicans and others from Latin America uproot themselves from small inland farms or fishing villages to find jobs in Juárez and maybe in the United States. These flotantes, or floating population, settle farther and farther on the outskirts of the growing city of 1.5 million, in shacks made of cardboard and wood pallets. Soon enough, they learn that there are not enough jobs in the ailing maquila industry and that crossing to the United States is beyond their means.
"They are stuck here with no money. They become hopeless. Survival kicks in. You'll steal, sell drugs, sell yourself," said Steven Slater, a former New Mexico police officer who advises Chihuahua district attorney's investigators on the murders of 80-plus women in the past 10 years.
"When you have so much crime, life becomes meaningless for some people," he said.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and the tightened security at the border, illegal drugs became harder to get across. They piled up in Juárez, where traffickers found new customers in the desperate job-seekers. These new addicts are partly credited for waves of violent armed robberies committed at neighborhood corner stores.
Ouisa Davis, executive director of the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso, said border violence should make everybody reflect on deteriorating values.
"If anything, the violence that we are experiencing in our community and in Juárez should make us ask why is human life treated with such little value," she said. "We need to ask if the world is becoming a more dangerous place."
Monday, after the discovery of the tied-up body of 9-year-old Ricardo Aquino Olivares, the Catholic Diocese of Juárez called the violence "diabolical." An editorial in one of Juárez's daily newspapers, El Diario, lamented, "Poor Juárez, so far from justice." Juárez has more than 200 murders a year.
Spiral of violence
Law enforcement officials blame the organized drug trade for setting the tone.
"One of the byproducts of the drug trade is corruption, kidnapping, torture and murder," said Hardrick Crawford, the special agent in charge of the FBI in El Paso. "It creates the belief that everything goes."
The Carrillo-Fuentes cartel took over the Juárez plaza, or drug market, after the 1988 death of Pablo Acosta Villarreal, the drug lord based in Ojinaga, Chihuahua. The FBI said the new drug lords enlarged the cartel at least fourfold. In 1997, when Amado Carrillo Fuentes died, allegedly during plastic surgery to change his appearance, his brother, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, took over in a wave of bold, daylight abductions and murders.
The three dead men found Friday, including Julio Cesar Navarro Manzano, an 18-year-old El Paso native who lived in Juárez, are most likely victims of the drug trade. And so is store owner Raul Gutierrez Reyes, 33, who was found shot to death and left by the side of a cemetery Sunday, Juárez police said.
Lately, worker bees -- as opposed to high-ranking drug lords -- are the ones being executed by cartel hit men, suggesting that the organization is stable, FBI officials said. They also said they have information that Friday's victims had been stealing from the cartel. This theory seems consistent with the killers' action of cutting off the right index fingers of two of the men and stuffing them in their pockets, officials said. The third man's finger was cut off and placed in his mouth, suggesting he had "snitched," officials said.
Corruption
Jaime Hervella is frustrated. The founder of the binational Association of Relatives & Friends of Disappeared Persons staged a modest protest Tuesday in front of the Mexican attorney general's office in Juárez. Corruption, apathy and political games are standing in the way of justice for the families of more than 300 men who have disappeared in this Mexican border city since 1993, he said.
Three months ago, federal police received a map from an anonymous tipster leading to a possible burial site, but nothing has been done with the information, Hervella said. The federal police could not be reached for comment. In 1999, such a tip led to the binational excavation of mass graves in South Juárez, the recovery of nine bodies and closure for their families.
"There is nothing like not knowing," said Hervella, whose godson disappeared in 1997.
Hervella is not the only victims activist who has berated the Mexican government for what he perceives as sloppy and dishonest investigations.
In the cases of the murdered women, investigators have left evidence behind at crime scenes, and several suspects have said they were tortured into confessing. And in 1999, U.N. Special Rapporteur Asma Jahangir chastised Mexican authorities for blaming victims of rape and murder for what happened to them.
"Unfortunately, our neighbors do not have the sophistication and the types of law enforcement resources that we have here. And there is a degree of informality (corruption) that makes it difficult to conduct a proper investigation," said Eduardo Garcia, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Economic impact
The violence is a black eye that the tourism industry in Juárez is trying to minimize. In 1999, then-mayor Gustavo Elizondo placed a $30,000 ad in the Washington Post to fight negative publicity from the widespread coverage of the mass graves. He also asked that the Carrillo-Fuentes cartel not be referred to as the "Juárez cartel."
But shocking discoveries like the mass graves fade without gravely affecting the maquila industry, the biggest employer in Juárez, officials of the chambers of commerce in Juárez and El Paso said.
"Interestingly we just completed a round of focus groups in Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles and it (crime in Juárez) was not mentioned by anyone as a concern," said Mark Matthys, spokesman of the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce.
Still, Matthys tells visiting businessmen to plan their trips to Juárez carefully and discourages them from going alone.
Uh.....OOOK Nick.
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At what age do you plan to commit suicide, Joe? At some point, you're going to become a drain on people. The doctors will be able to keep you alive until your brain goes, but that might be when you're 120. You expect to be working then? Who will be working to provide your food? Why should they sell it to you instead of giving it to their own kids?