Allow me to excerpt just a few of your many observations that deserve (constant, drumbeat) repetition:
If that’s what it takes to once and for all stop the illegal alien lawbreakers, I’m all for one big honkin’ wall and the sooner the better.
They [illegals] represent a threat to those values I consider most important: sovereignty, borders, culture, customs, traditions and language.
I do not support the Bush proposal because it is essentially an amnesty dressed up as a guest worker program … A guest worker program which merely passes a magic wand over 20 million illegal aliens and pronounces them all “guest workers” is nothing this country is going to accept. Ever. You do not eliminate “illegality” by pronouncing everyone “legal”.
The problem we have here, and have been discussing ad nauseum, is that what you are “for” comes up short when tough measures must be put in place because that is where you go all wobbly on us with “compassion”. I reserve my compassion for our citizens in the border states and elsewhere who have had to bear the brunt of the illegal alien invasion. Save your compassion for them.
You’re either for aggressively defending American sovereignty, protecting and securing our borders, and the preservation of American culture, customs, traditions and language, or you’re not. According to your own words: yes, you believe in this provided I don’t have to use lethal force to do so; yes, I believe in that as long as I don’t have to build a wall.
You may consider yourself a loyal American conservative. I do not. Feel free to come back and apply again when you don’t have to hang so many “ifs, ands and buts” onto your answers.
You happened to hit on one of the explosive issues about which I am particularly sensitive … and I don’t intend to be posting much over the next couple of weeks … so I feel a case of ‘wordity’ (as fellow FReeper First_Salute would call it :) welling up. You may want to bookmark this for reading sometime when you’re down with a cold, or you may want to schedule a bathroom or dog-walking break somewhere in the middle. :)
I believe the most erosive threats to our republic’s sovereignty, security, and retention of our ancestral roots lie in the threats posed by terrorism, illegal immigration, the tyrannical nature of the judiciary, federal fiscal irresponsibility, and the desperate need for tort reform (in that order).
I live in Lancaster Country, in south-central Pennsylvania. Rural farm country that boasts the most fertile, non-irrigated farmland east of the Mississippi. We have virtually no illegal alien problem. We have a fairly large Vietnamese and Ukrainian population -- as a matter of fact a Ukrainian electrical engineer just purchased the house we have lived in for thirty-two years, and two of my younger piano students are from Vietnamese families. Every one of the Vietnamese and Ukrainian immigrants that I have met is here legally, and is employed, hard-working and extraordinarily family-oriented.
So I can’t empathize, firsthand, with the hell on earth that is being created by illegals for those Americans living in the border states. Heck, my blood pressure rises significantly every time I read accounts of the cost to the American taxpayer (and the borders state residents in particular) of educating the children of illegals, providing benefits that their employers do not, subsidized housing, disproportionately high incarceration, pro bono legal services, etc. … and the increasing arrogance with which these perks are demanded. I find unimaginable the thought of personally dealing with such circumstances on a daily basis.
A couple of months ago, I wrote a detailed description of where I believe the solutions to this deadly problem lie. Many of the suggestions would have to be implemented by those with a much more specific knowledge of the logistics, structural, personnel, etc. considerations, but I believe the proposals are feasible.
From our correspondences, and your posts here, I do not believe there is any major aspect of this issue on which we disagree, but I’d like to add a few more thoughts, even though I strongly suspect that you have formulated them yourself, or, if not, you will be justifiably predisposed to accusing me of preaching to the choir. :)
Americans used to take pride in the fact that we were considered the ‘melting pot’ of the world. That label presupposes that the various ‘ingredients’ poured into the mix eventually are going to be combined into one relatively homogeneous whole.
The concept of the ‘homogeneous whole’ has found itself relegated to the dustbin of history, as more recent (over the past four decades) immigrants, both legal and illegal, have simply refused to ‘melt’. Assimilation is no longer pursued, and past allegiances are no longer renounced in deference to the ideas and principles that once made this republic unique among civilizations, past and present. Instead, balkanization has been increasingly encouraged, even sometimes initiated, by leftist leadership that has developed (over the same four decades) an insatiable desire to increase the number of people living within the borders of this republic who are:
(1) dependent on the ‘largesse of the state’ for their survival, and
(2) willing to vote for politicians who will see to it that the continued burgeoning of the nanny state is not imperiled.
Those who cross our southern borders without following the proper channels make up an inordinate, and illegal, portion of (1). At the same time, any American citizen who observes the above aloud or in print will invariably find himself branded (by the political, media and academic elites) as ignorant at best, and racist at worst.
In five years (more than four of which occurred post-9/11), the Bush administration has authored absolutely nothing of substance in its policy-making targeted at confronting the illegal immigration threat. Indeed, the half-hearted, dangerously ‘compassionate’ political trial balloons being launch of late almost seem aimed toward diffusing the anger of the electorate rather than actually addressing the festering, potentially deadly problem. And the administration is accomplishing neither of the above.
The last time Congress attempted to address the issue of illegal immigration was during the Reagan administration – twenty years ago. And that attempt was scuttled, mainly because the general public was not yet as aware of, and enraged about, the issue as we are today, and the voices of those businesses who employed illegals at the time were significantly louder than the relatively small fraction of the (then) electorate who had a vital interest in stemming the flow from the south.
The countless amnesty (although those proposing the programs have employed the semantics of political convenience in order to tap dance around the term) programs currently being proposed by the administration and other inveterate compromisers on the Hill (McCain and Kennedy chief among them) also conveniently tap dance around the unwritten bottom line in all of their proposals: Eventually rewarding those who have committed a crime amounts to defining as naïve suckers those who have played by the rules and entered the country through legal channels. And, even worse, it encourages others to follow the example of the lawbreakers. Always has … and always will.
Our so-called leaders’ unwillingness to punish lawbreakers – both the illegals who have already entered from the south, via deportation … and those hundreds of businesses who knowingly employ them on the financial backs of the American taxpayer, via fines and imprisonment – is at the core of the present problem.
And our so-called leaders’ unwillingness to funnel resources out of supporting crime (i.e., using taxpayer money to subsidize illegal activity) and into formulating viable ways of walling off our southern border, portends a deadly sovereignty and security risk, and a looming economic cataclysm that defies description.
Walling off our porous southern border must be our first line of defense – a fifteen-foot high cement tourniquet, if need be, Any other proposal is simply political window dressing … a band-aid applied to a severed artery.
A porous border is not only an invitation to illegal workers, and non-citizens who freely feed at the tax-payer-funded public trough. It is also an invitation to the criminal element whose crossing is being aided and abetted by the Mexican government itself (‘Here’s your official government copy of ‘The Guide for the Mexican Migrant,’ courtesy of Vicente Fox, and replete with tips on how to steal across the border and avoid detection … and good riddance!)
And then there are the drug smugglers … and the terrorists of all stripes.
Ernesto Zedillo appears to have been not only Vicente Fox’s predecessor, but also his mentor. Zedillo told a public audience of Mexican-Americans in the US about ten years ago that they are not Americans, but Mexicans living north of their country’s border. And, when addressing a La Raza meeting shortly thereafter, he told the members that ‘the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders,’ and that Mexican immigrants are a very important part of this expansion.
Both Zedillo and Fox appear to be intent on creating a trans-national North America, using the European Union as an example. The only problem with that comparison is that the nations that make up the European Union entered that union (1) on a relatively equal basis, and (2) with a formal written agreement.
And it would appear that the past three American administrations and their respective congresses have been, and continue to be, far less focused on preserving the American language, tradition, republican form of government, and sovereignty than their Mexican counterparts of the past two decades have been focused on insidiously and covertly erasing their northern border.
We cannot allow the most moral, prosperous civilization in the history of the world to fall as a result of a combination of phony ‘compassion’ born of political expediency … and citizen malaise.
We must see to it that people like this …
are free to spew their socialist, one-world propaganda on the other side of something like this …
(Wake up! This was a rambling political rant, not a lullaby! :)
~ joanie …