Crime: The Open Borders Lobby's Dirty Little Secret

On August 26, 2005, the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and the Coalition for Immigration Reform of California co-sponsored a conference on illegal immigration at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Below are the transcripts of speeches given by three of the participants in that conference: Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Dr. James Edwards, an Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute; and Dr. Glynn Custred, a Professor of Anthropology at California State University, the East Bay. All three touch on the interrelated nature of illegal immigration and crime in American society. -- The Editors.

Heather MacDonald: Thank you. I’m honored to be here at this beautiful spot with such an extraordinary group of thinkers.

I think I detected in Mr. Hayworth’s presentation this morning a slight note of irony towards the mainstream media. I want to continue that a little bit on their treatment of illegal immigration, and take as my text for this morning a Washington Post editorial from August 10th called, “The Reality of Gangs.” Now, the title was misleading. It would have more appropriately been called, “The Unreality of Media Coverage of the Illegal Alien Crime Wave.”

The editorial describes the unending series of maimings, stabbings, killings, that have been unleashed recently in the Northern Virginia area by Mara Salvatrucha – usually shortened in the media to “M13” – a gang predominantly of Salvadoran descent that has spread from its home in Los Angeles across the country.

And predictably the Washington Post called for more social programs to try to dissuade ever-younger Hispanics from joining the gangster life they’re starting at ages 8-12 now. I’ve seen a picture of a class of kids from Shenandoah standing in front of the Washington Memorial in D.C. flashing gang signals.

Even as the Post called for more social spending, it completely ignored the most salient feature of Mara Salvatrucha, which is the astoundingly high number of illegals within its ranks. The Justice Department estimates that more than 50 percent of all members of Mara Salvatrucha are illegal. I talked to an LAPD Officer who deals with this gang daily, and he puts the figures much higher. I’ve heard cops tell me they think it’s almost 100 percent. I think that’s too high, but it’s somewhere between there.

And the press, of course, also picks up on this. How many stories have you read of some egregious crime or gang violence, and you wonder, ‘I wonder if that person is here illegally?’ You will almost never find out. Reporters just don’t bother to ask.

Those of you who live in LA may have been following the recent debacle to hit the poor, hapless LAPD; the shooting of Jose Raul Pena on July 10th. This was the guy who started on a barrage of gunfire at the LAPD, trying to kill as many officers as he could, and used for his shield his own 19-month-old daughter.

He was eventually killed, and his daughter was, as well, by an LAPD Swat Team. And, of course, this has turned into yet another crisis for the LAPD, with accompanying protests of “police brutality.” Nobody talks about Pena’s role in this.

In all of the stories that the [L.A.] Times has been running about this, they’ve mentioned only once the fact that Pena was here illegally. The New York Times has written about…the evil LAPD. They haven’t deigned to mention Pena’s status a single time.

Now, the policy – the prohibition I’m mentioning regarding the contribution of illegal criminals to gang and other types of crimes – has a policy counterpart. And that’s the prohibition on the police, local police, from taking any hand in getting rid of illegal gang-bangers in this country.

Had the Washington Post been willing really to address the reality of gangs it would have called for an immediate involvement of every police force in the D.C. area to get these guys off the streets. But, instead, in city after city, in what I think is the purest demonstration of the perversity of our attitudes towards illegal immigration, the police are prohibited from noticing, much less asking, what somebody’s immigration status is.

Now, what does this mean in practice? Well, you’ve got an LAPD officer, let’s say at Hollywood and Vine. He sees a guy on the street that he knows has been deported for a gun assault. He’s back, undoubtedly committing more crimes, as they all do. He cannot arrest that guy for his immigration felony, although it is a felony to return to the country following deportation. But he can’t put his hands on him because that would be unfair.

The biggest myth behind these sanctuary rules is that they’re immigrant-friendly. Of course they’re really not. The result is to keep violent criminals within immigrant communities in order to give them sanctuary, and so those communities are not able to advance economically.

Now, these are some examples of what has been wrought in L.A. alone, and this is something that exists in every immigrant-heavy city across the country. There are cousins, Mexican illegals, who recently committed a murder and a hijacking in Los Angeles after returning to the city following deportation. The police had come across them many times, but, of course, couldn’t do anything about their immigration violation of reentry following deportation.

Another illegal Mexican, eight months ago, mugged three people, burglarized two apartments, and tried to rape a five-year-old girl in Hollywood. He’d been stopped twice for traffic violations in L.A., but, again, the LAPD are not allowed to ask, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.

Now, the scope of the illegal crime wave is difficult to measure, because we’re not supposed to ask. But some figures are illustrative. In Los Angeles, the LAPD has a fugitive warrant section. And 95 percent of all murder outstanding warrants target illegal aliens, and two-thirds of all outstanding felony warrants target illegal aliens. This doesn’t mean that 95 percent of all murders or crimes are committed by illegals, but the people who have turned fugitive are predominantly illegals.

The California Justice Department estimated that 60 percent of the 18th Street Gang is illegal. Jill Stuart recently suggested that in California 14,000 inmates are illegal aliens.

The only category of crime nationally that has been going up in recent years is gang crime. Between 1999 and 2002, gang crime skyrocketed 50 percent, an unprecedented increase. And that increase which is going on across the country is driven by one thing: immigration.

Now, I want to contrast the squeamishness in the Washington Post editorial towards discussing the high membership of illegals in Mara Salvatrucha with a more typical example of media zealousness. And this was an article in the L.A. Times from June. Again, you locals will probably remember the brouhaha over the Border Patrol’s effort last in the spring of 2004 to arrest illegal aliens in inland cities, like Riverside and San Bernardino.

This, of course, drew an immediate reaction from Asa Hutchinson, then-Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, who said, “this will never happen again. They’re racial profiling.” ICE threw out a rule saying, “You cannot enforce immigration laws across the border.”

At the time these agents had said, “But we’ve been working with local police officers who pointed out to us where the illegal immigration problem is the heaviest.”

Well, the L.A. Times, in conjunction with the ACLU, decided to test these claims. And they went to police agencies who denied offering the Border Patrol any help.

So, the L.A. Times concluded, and I quote, “The agents may have scoped out the areas on their own, finding areas where large numbers of undocumented immigrants gather.” Now, this to the Times was a scandal. This is the sort of investigative reporting that the Times prides itself on: the fact that immigration agents actually took some initiative to make arrests on their own.

Now, thanks to groups like the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, and FAIR, and CIS, I think the taboo is starting to melt a little bit. And I think we have to start demanding that our government officials start asking questions in prisons, “How many people here are illegal?”

I have one caveat, however. It would be nice if we could solve the gang problem by focusing exclusively on illegals. And we should, start there of course, because this is the obvious place to start.

But it’s not going to solve the problem. What I’ve seen, unfortunately, in second and third generation Hispanics is the rapid spread of underclass culture. And a lot of kids who are born here are getting sucked up into gang culture. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for teens now among Hispanics has far surpassed that of Blacks. The dropout rate among Hispanics has also surpassed that of Blacks.

So, the lesson I draw from this is not only the absolutely crucial need to start enforcing the law against illegal gang-bangers and to use every law enforcement agency that we have in the country, but also I think our current open borders policy is folly. It won’t work until we figure out how to persuade recent immigrants to keep going up the economic ladder, which many of them do. I mean, there’s no question that whole neighborhoods of LA have been revived by the contribution of Hispanic immigrants.

At the same time, a significant portion of second, third, and fourth generation kids are going downhill. And this is going to impose social costs that in the long run may even dwarf the costs of illegal immigration.

Dr. James Edwards: Let me read you some newspaper headlines. “Gang Violence Puts Idaho Town on Edge.” “Dad Slayer Was to be Deported.” “Maryland Driver Receives 10 Years in Fatal Crash.” “Miami Police Say Serial Rapist Caught.” “Man Who Raped Strangled Nun Sentenced to Life in Prison.” “Man Stabs Infant Hostage.” “Gang Rape Pack Bares Evil Scheme.”

Nearly all of these crimes involved illegal aliens. Nearly all of the aliens could have been prosecuted or deported or both, solely on their immigration violations. Many of the aliens had already crossed paths with American police.

For example, the Mexican illegal aliens who gang raped a woman in Queens, New York, had rap sheets. But New York’s sanctuary policy tied the hands of cops from acting on the immigration violations. The Honduran serial rape suspect in Miami had overstayed his visa. He also had a rap sheet, but police gave him a free pass on his immigration violations to the detriment of his seven victims.

These headlines are indicative of the problem of unfaithful immigration enforcement. Lack of faithfully enforcing our immigration laws has led to avoidable costs and sometimes dire consequences.

Inconsistently enforcing the immigration laws on the books means there’s no rule of law in immigration. Unfaithful enforcement breeds contempt for our immigration laws. Unfaithful enforcement breeds lawbreaking. It’s like letting street punks get by with loitering, harassing passers by, painting graffiti, and breaking the windows of old buildings.

Also, it’s notable that current levels, the historically high levels of sustained mass legal immigration feed illegal immigration. Lamar Smith has said that, “legal and illegal immigration are two sides of the same coin.”

That means when you have high legal immigration you also tend to have high illegal immigration, and you see this pattern among different immigrant groups by country of origin. And the reverse is true, lower levels of legal immigration among a certain category of immigrants also tends to correspond to low illegal immigration.

Mass immigration in the extended family categories often leads to chain migration which can create an expectation to immigrate. Mass immigration feeds an entitlement mentality in which family members believe that relatives may come here illegally ahead of their time, before their turn.

And I think the Pugh Hispanic poll that Janet mentioned, bears that out. It states that 40 million Mexicans; 40 percent of Mexicans from rich to middle class to poor say they want to immigrate to the U.S., and 20 percent would come here illegally if they had the chance.

Lack of faithful enforcement has degenerated into loss of control of our borders and more. When two Democratic Governors of Southwest border States declare States of emergency in their border counties such as in Arizona and New Mexico recently, the situation has truly gotten out of hand. Only faithful enforcement and restoration of the rule of law in immigration will make a difference.

The public, of course, knows about the prominent cases of crime that involve immigrants, such as D.C. sniper John Lee Malvo, and the Queens, New York gang rapists, and the Miami serial rapists, and so forth.

Well, to quantify it a bit, foreign born now comprise a disproportionate share of our criminal population. Aliens make-up about 11 percent of the U.S. population but are 30 percent of the Federal prison population. Criminal aliens, whether legal or illegal, simply stay put in our country. There are more than 400,000 alien absconders who remain at large. 80,000 of those have dangerous criminal records.

89,000 State and Federal inmates are foreign born. And, of course, Heather’s great work on foreign gangs shows how deeply they have stretched their tentacles in and around our country, including in rural areas.

Meanwhile, law abiding Americans pay taxes to fund the extra criminal justice costs that these people impose. Incarceration, trials, defense counsel, interpreters, pretrial detention, increased public safety: all of that costs money.

The cost of immigrant crime, of course, does not stop with dollars. Residents experience fear, danger, and the loss of their loved ones’ loving care. Think about this: you’re missing out on a parent’s embrace, or a laugh over family dinner. Those losses are non-quantifiable but they’re real. It’s hard to overstate the public’s concern about all of this, yet among elites the beat goes on.

In a 2003 Roper poll, among other polls, findings show that an overwhelming majority of Americans support vigorous enforcement of our immigration laws. 88 percent in the Roper poll support requiring State and local government agencies to notify the Feds, and for local police to determine whether someone is lawfully or unlawfully present in this country, or whether they’re using false identification. 85 percent would require local law enforcement and governments to apprehend and turn-over the illegals that they encounter in their routine duties. 83 percent favor the mandatory detention and the forfeiture of assets of illegal aliens.

Since September 11th the public, if not the officials and elites, truly has connected the dots between routine law enforcement, routine immigration enforcement, and securing our homeland.

A terrorist suspect from Pakistan, you will remember, was arrested in Charlotte, North Carolina on immigration violations, when a local police officer saw him taking a videotape of tall buildings. This guy pled guilty for failing to leave the U.S., making false statements, and possessing fake IDs. Well, guess what? His immigration violations got him off American streets, and he was a potential terrorist. I think that’s a pretty good thing.

With the growth of the foreign gangs that Heather mentioned, al-Qaeda is seeking their help in crossing the border. MS13 has been approached, we know. The 9/11 Commission and others have noted that al-Qaeda has already used established smuggling rings to enter the U.S. from Latin America. The 9/11 Commission said, “abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were working together to support terrorist activity.”

Routine illegal immigrations and illegal immigrants can aid, knowingly or unknowingly, more dangerous aliens. If you will recall, the Salvadoran illegal alien was happily standing at 7-11 in Northern Virginia when he was approached by a couple of future 9/11 terrorists. And he offered to help them get Virginia driver’s licenses. And he was “hurting nobody” -- he was just here....

When local police encounter illegal aliens in the routine course of their work, and they contact the Feds, they are often told “to release the aliens.” Well, we know that Middle Eastern terrorists are recruiting non-Middle Easterners. We know that smuggling rings and foreign organized crime do operate in the U.S.. While some of these immigration crimes are seemingly mundane, to ignore them would invite a huge risk.

I submit that we should help police pursue the strategy that put mobster Al Capone behind bars. The FBI couldn’t make a criminal case against him even though he had a massive record of other crimes. However, Treasury officers could make a case against him based on tax evasion charges. That got one of the major mobsters of that era off American streets.

In the same way, police may not be able to make a criminal case against a known MS13 gangster; however, they could make a felony case against them for reentering the U.S. after deportation. Through a greater likelihood of being caught and held accountable for even nonviolent immigration offenses, illegal immigration can be reduced by attrition.

Legislation like the CLEAR Act, which Congressman J.D. Hayworth mentioned this morning, will help state and local law enforcement get some help from immigration authorities. CLEAR would apply the broken windows policing model to immigration, and it would apply an attrition strategy to fighting immigration lawlessness. You would see fewer and fewer illegal aliens start to arrive and you would see more and more aliens self-deporting if we built on ideas like the CLEAR Act and more faithful immigration enforcement.

I’m going to conclude with this quote from the 9/11 Commission Staff Report: “Had the immigration system set a higher bar for determining whether people are who or what they claim to be and ensuring routine consequences for violations it could potentially have excluded, removed, or come further into contact with several hijackers, who did not appear to meet the terms of admitting short-term visitors.”

The bottom line is this: there’s no acceptable way to control immigration without consistently enforcing the immigration laws and involving state and local police officers through the course of their routine duties.

Dr. Glynn Custred: I would like to thank the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Coalition for Immigration Reform of California, and FAIR for holding this conference.

The immigration issue reminds me an awful lot of Proposition 209, that Janet mentioned. Proposition 209 is the law in California that ended racial and ethnic preferences in the public sector.

As Heather was saying, talking about illegal immigration is sort of impolite: you don’t do it in polite society. Well, that’s the way it used to be with affirmative action. And you’d say, ‘well, why not talk about it?’ And we’d say, ‘Well, we just don’t do that.’ In other words, there it was, taboo. We broke that, and we broke it partly through 209.

But at that point the time had come. It seems that events reach a certain point and you can’t hide it anymore, you can’t intimidate people anymore. You can’t tell them, ‘it’s impolite to ask questions.’ That happened with preferential policies, and it’s now happening with illegal immigration. And for that reason, conferences like this are springing up, and I think that’s a very, very good thing. And I think that we may have some movement on this issue soon. I hope it’s in the right direction.

We’ve heard here about how some negative effects of illegal immigration are spreading throughout the country. Besides crime, there are other problems: depressing wages at the lowest end of the scale, high cost to taxpayers. I’m sure you’re all familiar with those.

And more and more people are realizing this in places like Idaho, and Virginia (which is close to Washington D.C.), that illegal immigration - this historical mass exodus from the South into the United States - brings with it some pretty bad consequences, along with some good consequences, too. I mean, there are a lot of people that are here that I’m happy to have here. I’ve got some friends and neighbors who are immigrants, but they came here legally.

And I just think about what my life would be without them. My Wife is a legal immigrant. She has a green card. So, there’s nothing about immigration itself that bothers me at all. It’s just this massive illegal immigration, with all of its effects.

One of the worst places where the open border policy exists is at the United States/Mexico border. The border itself was the place in a sparsely populated, arid countryside where two expanding settlement frontiers met and crystallized in the form of a national boundary. The border separates two different nation States, each with its own culture, and each with its own language.

And, unfortunately, these states are not equally governable. What that means is that on one side of the border there’s more corruption and less efficiency than on the other. This fact ought to give pause to people who would like to see a North American union, similar to the EU.

At any rate, this is the situation. This is what the border is. Now, the border itself has never been stable. But the border’s short history (it was only established in the 1850s) is one of constant change and recurrent violence. Cross-border banditry, cross-border Indian raids, these are the stuff of our folklore and of our popular culture.

Also, there was ethnic animosity. Texans, for example. They gained their independence through a war with Mexico, a revolution, and then they were a separate Republic for 10 years. So that fact, among other considerations, meant that there was a great deal of hostility in Texas and some persecution of Mexicans living there. So, one of the aspects of the border from the beginning was ethnic tension.

The Mexican Revolution caused a lot of problems, too. A lot of people came from Mexico to the U.S. to escape the violence.

Also, some Mexicans (or so-called Mexican-Americans) on this side formulated something called ‘the San Diego Plan’ in San Diego, Texas. The idea was to go into the countryside and massacre all of the Anglos and to try to establish a new order that way.

And it seems that some of the historians who have looked at this can detect the hands of the Mexican Government in the incident, but I don’t think they quite had a smoking gun. Still, it’s an indication of the violence that was prevalent during that time.

Also, we all know the story of Poncho Villa and how his raiders came across the border into Columbus, New Mexico, killed some Americans, burned the town, and were pursued by Black Jack Pershing and the United States Army into Northern Mexico. This was the last cavalry charge, by the way, of the United States Army.

The Tiananmen telegram is another example. The German Foreign Minister, Tiananmen, promised the President of Mexico at the time [Cadenza], that if he would join the Germans in a war against the United States they could get back what they had lost in the Mexican War. Well, this caused a great deal of consternation in the United States, and most of the American Military was sent down to the border. So, there’s been a lot of tension there, and a lot of other international problems as well.

After the Volstad Act was passed (that is, Prohibition), smuggling flourished. And the Border Patrol, which was newly formed, found itself combating drug smugglers. The drug in this case was alcohol, and they took on as much or more than their primary duty.

You can see how history sort of repeats itself. The more you look at the history of the border, the more you see that it’s just the same thing over and over again. Only now in our historical position do we see begin to see consequences that are going to be far, far different than anything in the past.

What we have also seen in the border region is that it became a region of development. When the railroads connected the two parts of the United States - East and West, and the railroad in Mexico, Mexico City, with its far-flung northern territory - the border became a very different kind of place. It became an area where things were developed. As one social scientist put it, ‘the border originally didn’t separate anybody. But the border created conditions that attracted people and, therefore, created border conditions.’

Now, so you can see why there’s been violence on the border. Part of it is frontier conditions of development, the difficult conditions that exist with every mining frontier; another was the fact that in those days the United States Government really didn’t have the resources or the organization to deal with the border. Remember, I’m talking about the earlier days here. And, also, in those days the border was a long way off, and distance played a role.

Today, what we find are conditions that are probably as bad or worse than they ever have been on the border. What we find is a mass migration of historic proportions: individuals running through people’s backyards, breaking down their fences, slaughtering their cattle, cutting their dogs’ throats if they bark too much, and terrifying people. Men and women who live right on the border walk around armed. Women accompany their children to the bus stop with a gun in their purse in the most heavy cross-corridors.

We find that people are afraid to go out at night. Husbands and wives can’t go out together unless somebody is home because someone may break-in and tear the place up. Water tanks are emptied. Stock gets killed. Fences are destroyed. It’s a very, very negative situation for people in the rural countryside.

One of the reasons for this, in fact, I think the major reason is a deliberate stand-down of enforcement on the part of the Federal Government. Now, this stand-down didn’t start with Bush, but let’s take a look at some of the things that he’s done in the past or that his Administration has done recently.

You all know the story about how after the 9-11 Commission issued its report, Congress authorized 2,000 Border Patrol agents. However, the Administration authorized and allocated money for only about 210. That’s less than would cover attrition. And when Tom Ridge of Homeland Security was asked about it, he calls such money, ‘fool’s gold.’ I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that comment, but it showed that he didn’t have much respect for Border Patrol.

Border Patrolmen complained bitterly that they have to sit on X’s. What this means is they have to be stationary. They can’t move around. This started earlier under the Clinton Administration. But Heather told you about Asa Hutchinson’s order, not too long ago, when they did some sweeps here in California. Temecula, and other places like that, told them to stop. ‘Don’t have your sweeps. Don’t go to places where you know that immigrants are concentrated.’

And so an order came down saying, ‘only the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency, that is ICE, should take care of anything, any kind of enforcement internally. The Border Patrol should sit at their appointed spots on the border or on checkpoints.’

Well, this is ridiculous because ICE simply doesn’t have the resources to do it. And the Border Patrol has the manpower, resources, experience, and authority; and yet it’s told, ‘don’t do it.’

I was recently talking to Bill King, some of you might know him. He was the former Chief Border Patrol Agent, and Head of the Border Patrol Academy, and he was tearing his hair out when he heard this. He said, ‘when he was in charge of these sectors that if his sector chiefs didn’t do a sweep periodically as he would have, he would ask them why? It was part of their duty.’ Now, they’re told, ‘sit on an X, don’t do anything.’

In other words, what’s happened is internal enforcement has been chilled. It’s just not there anymore. And this is something that the Administration has done. This has come down from the higher levels of authority.

One young Border Patrolman told me this. He said that, ‘this policy is like putting a 10-yard limit on bank robbers. If you get across the limit you can keep the money.’ He also said that, ‘we’re spending millions and millions of dollars not to enforce the law.’

Joe Desarlo is a Border Patrol Union Official who’s now retired. In his farewell letter he told his colleagues, ‘the Border Patrol was one of the most inefficient and misleading agencies in the history of government.’ These are men on the line. These are guys who are told, ‘don’t do your job.’ And if they say anything they get into trouble, so, of course, they keep their mouths shut. And they’re leaving like crazy.

I mean, I’ve been impressed, actually. I go up and down the border and talk to people all of the time. And I’ve been impressed by the patriotism of some of these guys. One reason they’re in the Border Patrol is because they want to get outside. As one guy said, ‘I don’t want to be a doughnut-dunking cop; I want to get out in the desert.’ Well, he is, he’s out there. And he’s told, ‘don’t do your job while you’re there.’

We’re losing good, patriotic people who want to do their jobs. One guy told me, ‘my Father was so proud when I went into the Border Patrol because I would be defending our country at its borders.’ And the Government is simply telling him, ‘don’t do it.’ Now, this is bad for morale, and it’s bad for the country as a whole.

One more point: in the San Francisco Bay area, up near where I live, one Border Patrol official told me that man-for-man it was the most effective sector in the country, due to internal, interior enforcement. Well, they closed it down, and it’s not there anymore, it’s not doing anything.

Now, I can’t really go into the history of internal enforcement right now, but it all began under the Clinton Administration. Congress also put its two cents worth into it by putting pressure on the enforcement agencies not to enforce the law.

You may know of Mark Greed, a former INS Commissioner for the Central States, with jurisdiction all the way from the Canadian to the Mexican borders. And during the period he was there he tried to tighten up interior enforcement. He was going to start with the meat-packing industry, and try to find out how many of the people working there were actually legal.

Well, to put it mildly, he’s no longer with the Government. He had to leave his job. I’m not sure of the details, but I’ve heard him talk and I’ve read his testimony. He gave a very interesting testimony before Congress in May of this year. So, this is just one example of what has been going on.

Interior enforcement has been shut-down, and everybody knows it. We have a situation here which is known as network migration, which grows and grows. As the population in the receiver country grows, information goes back to the sender country about conditions here, and so on.

One of the pieces of information that goes back from the U.S. is if you can get across the border you’re home free because the American authorities don’t care. Well, what does this information do? It just adds to the pull of the magnet, and it puts more and more pressure on the border.

The Government doesn’t want to simply say, ‘come on over, we won’t pay any attention to you.’ They’re doing that in the interior, but they can’t do that on the border because people still go to Tijuana for dinner. People choose to go across the border for a number of reasons, and they want to feel that there is some enforcement.

So, what do you have? You have a ritual enforcement of the border, and that’s all it is. It’s theater. You can see the Border Patrol every few yards, and you see them out looking mean. But then you go down a little bit further and it’s open desert, maybe three strands of a fence to keep the cattle from straying. And that’s it, and people just come right across. So, it’s deceptive and it’s dishonest. This started not with Bush, it started with Clinton. So, we’re talking about Clinton and Bush policies here.

This has led to lawlessness on the border, mainly on the Mexican side, but more and more on this side as well. And it’s not just the people coming through, leaving trash everywhere and running through people’s backyards in the middle of the night. That’s bad enough, but drug dealers are also involved in this. Sometimes they move with the migrating masses, but most of the time they have their own routes of entry. These are vicious, nasty people.

One Border Patrolman told me, ‘I see one of these guys driving along, I don’t know who he is,’ he said, ‘he had a gun on his hip,’ he said, ‘I walk up to the car like this.’ And he showed me how he did it. And he said, ‘these people are ruthless. They don’t care about anything. You get in their way, they kill you.’

In fact, just this summer two Border Patrolmen were shot in Nogales. They weren’t killed but they were badly injured. And they were shot on American soil in a military type raid. Where did you read it? The Washington Times? Did you see it in the LA Times? Did you see it in the Arizona Republic? Did you see it in the Washington Post? I didn’t; I heard about it from my friends on the Border Patrol down there, and I only read about it in one place. So, it’s something that the press still doesn’t want to talk about, but it’s a dangerous place for these Border Patrolmen.

Representative Hayworth told you this morning about a helicopter that was injured. Well, you can talk to the Border Patrol, you can read news articles in local papers, and you can check it out for yourself: it’s a dangerous job. Patrolmen get rocks thrown at them, and being hit in the head by a rock can kill you as quickly as anything else. So, it’s dangerous for these guys, and it’s even dangerous for Federal officers, as they even get bounties on their heads.

It’s gotten so bad in Pueblo Laredo - which is right across the border from Laredo, Texas - that the military had to come in. That actually did make the press, so you might have read about it. They closed the American Consulate down, and so on.

All right, the border is in bad shape. We also have these concurrent effects to the nation, itself. Wages going down, an increase in crime, etc.: all of these are concrete effects.

But I want to end by saying something about symbolic effects which in the long run are as bad, if not worse than the adverse concrete effects I’ve just been talking about.

We don’t know how many illegal aliens there are in the U.S. Judging by the most recent government figures I’ve seen, there’s around 11 million. Other estimates, including the Mexican’s Government’s estimate, by the way; put the number closer to 20 million. Who really knows how many there are? At any rate, there are a lot of people. And they’re coming in, and they’re staying in.

Now, what kind of life are you going to have as an illegal? You’re going to start life in a new country by breaking the first law of that country. Namely, you’re not supposed to be here. So, what kind of tone is this going to set for those 11 to 20 million? Most of them will simply get over it and be all right. Others won’t. So, it’s a breakdown right there in law.

The other thing is the breakdown for the citizens of this country, people who were already here. What we have in this case is that citizens are seeing their own citizenship eroded by rewarding non-citizens for breaking the law. Accepting identification cards from Mexican Consulates that aren’t even accepted in Mexico, giving away driver’s licenses, giving away in-State tuition: what kind of a message does that send? Ordinary citizens are going to look at that and say, ‘what’s happening, what’s happening to my citizenship? What’s happening to the concept of citizenship?’

In the case of the border, the government refuses to do two things to legitimate a Democratic Government. One is to insure internal order or domestic tranquility, to quote a famous document, and the other is to protect us from a foreign threat.

So, by not obeying the law, by permitting all of this to occur, the government puts its own legitimacy at stake. What we then have is an erosion of legitimacy and an erosion of citizenship. And with it we have an erosion of the confidence of the people in their government.

A law abiding community depends on faith, faith in their government, and goodwill. All of this is being squandered, mainly by the political elites because they’re the ones with the power to act right now. This is all so dangerous to our nation because as citizenship and faith and goodwill are eroded, so are the bonds that tie the people together with their community on the one hand and with the State on the other.

This leads to the encouragement of the growth of an unresponsive bureaucratic State and the withdrawal of citizens from any active participation in obeying the law. In other words, if this continues the way it currently is, we’re going to find the disintegration of the nation. Thank you.

What we have here, is a government that no longer needs voters as it's policies are formed by foreign influence. Citizens will wake too late to find their voice has been sold, and there's not a damn thing they can do about... as with the shell game, slight of hand (politics and the media), distracted our eyes from our treasure ... the preservation of the constitution.

*PING*

Now, there seems to be a taboo on talking about the contribution that illegal aliens make to criminal activity in this country. When I first started writing about this I would ask people in the LAPD, and I felt like I was violating some nicety of social convention. It was something that polite company is not supposed to address.
...And the press, of course, also picks up on this. How many stories have you read of some egregious crime or gang violence, and you wonder, ‘I wonder if that person is here illegally?’ You will almost never find out. Reporters just don’t bother to ask.
...The biggest myth behind these sanctuary rules is that they’re immigrant-friendly. Of course they’re really not. The result is to keep violent criminals within immigrant communities in order to give them sanctuary, and so those communities are not able to advance economically.

This report does sum up the situation in the country. I have believed our government officials have not been doing their jobs for along time now. This has always left me with some questions. Is there any recourse other than electing new officials? If things would actually deteriorate to the point where people actually immigrate from the U.S., where would they go?

14 farm workers arrested in kidnap, rape

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1496455/posts

Sheriff's deputies have arrested 14 men suspected of kidnapping and raping an 18-year-old woman in Florida.

The men arrested and charged are: Rene Perezgarcia, 22; Mario Lopez Luis, 19; Herman Sanchez Salas, 28; Ovidio Lopez Funez, 19; Napoleon Perez Lopez, 29; Edwin Albaladego Rivera, 28; Ermitanio Lopez Salas, 18; Israel Santiago, 56; Rolando Perez Claudio, 23; Alvarado Perez Luis, 21; Augusto Perez Lopez, 32; Cesar Perez Lopez, 29; Gabino Garcia Godinez, 24; and Augusto Garcia Velasquez, 30.

Each of the men told deputies they reside at the trailer, except for Perezgarcia, who said he lives nearby. All of the men told deputies they are field laborers. There was no word on their immigration status.

Let's see?? I wonder what their immigration status will turn out to be?

This has always left me with some questions. Is there any recourse other than electing new officials?

To me, no.. other than a bloodless revolution.. translated means, stop paying taxes. I'm quite sure though that they would extract the cash they need from businesses (driving up unemployment=starving the population in retribution) and foreign governments... but at least they won't be in your pocket.

If things would actually deteriorate to the point where people actually immigrate from the U.S., where would they go?

Good question... which is why we need to fix it. My fear however, is that our voice will be lost at the ballot box by allowing illegal aliens to vote.. That what Vincente Fox wants, and I'm sure with GW, he'll get it sooner rather than later. I saw a statistic yesterday that 1.2 million illegals ran got into the US in 2004.. I believe that's roughly the size of San Antonio, TX. And this has been going on for years. Just for grins imagine everyone in San Antonio were Republicans and 100% of aliens were Democrats.. POOF, your voice just got erased at the ballot box. Now add to that the lack of voter turn out, and you have a landslide smothering of the sanctity and integrity of the citizen vote. Scary to me.

Whoops, typo goober exposed.. ran got into = brazenly violated our laws and strutted

Question: If an illegal doesn't want to immigrate and become an American citizen, what does that make them? Alien doesn't fit, nor does immigrant.. how about 'parasite'.

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