Posted on 04/30/2008 5:15:30 AM PDT by fweingart
OUR OPINION: NO OFFICIAL SHOULD HAVE SUCH POWER TO IGNORE U.S. LAW
In the poem, Mending Wall, Robert Frost questions whether ''Good fences make good neighbors.'' In the Department of Homeland Security's push to complete a 670-mile fence along the Mexican border, it's bullying and intrusiveness that are making us a bad neighbor. By disregarding more than 30 U.S. laws, not to mention common sense, DHS will damage the environment and violate property rights in the region. Already the fence has raised hackles among U.S. residents and Mexicans along the border. And it has drawn deserved constitutional challenges.
And for what? There are signs that, no matter how high and thick the wall, determined immigrants will find the means to breach it.
470 miles to go
This month, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff invoked the power that Congress gave him in 2005 to waive any federal law that deters completing the fence. He wants to finish the 470 miles left to build before the year ends. To do so, he suspended laws that protect endangered species, migrating birds and specific habitats.
This puts at risk fence areas such as the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas, home to 17 federally endangered or threatened species. Among them is the ocelot, a small wild cat. Only 80 to 100 ocelots remain in South Texas. Their survival depends on crossing into Mexico to breed. Also threatened in an Arizona refuge are 70 Sonoran pronghorn antelopes, the swiftest mammal in North America.
The fence has provoked the ire of many border communities, and DHS has had to take property owners to court just to survey land. No one government entity should have such sweeping authority to ignore laws that protect individual or collective rights.
DHS Secretary Chertoff defends the waiver of the laws in the name of national security. Yet national security does not exist in a vacuum, nor does it justify the potential environmental damage and human ill-will this fence poses. What is the point of national security if the nation's ideals and laws are destroyed in the process?
More work visas
Even the national-security argument is specious. Keeping out farmworkers, dishwashers and wait staff does little to make our country safer. If anything, it serves to drive up the price of food. As long as U.S. employers have jobs that Americans won't fill, needy immigrants will find a way to enter this country. Congress could better address the labor demand by increasing the number of legal work visas.
Whether Congress had the authority to cede so much power to the DHS may be considered by the Supreme Court. Better yet, Congress should repeal the DHS secretary's unwarranted waiver power, thus allowing the rule of law to govern the fence project.
What an utterly stupid comment.
Bad neighbor? We're stuck with millions of Mexico's castoffs and we need to shove this scum of society back across that border!
Something's missing here...
As long as U.S. employers have jobs that Americans won't fill at third-world wages,
That's better!
I guess these pinheads can't be bothered to research the fact that the unemployment rate in Oklahoma dropped a full percentage point after that state passed severe restrictions and penalties on hiring illegal aliens. Amazing how Americans DID take those jobs once employers could no longer fill them with cheap illegal labor.
Mexico never was a friend. They just happened to have the good luck to have a real nation develop right next to it they can leach off of.
Like people in Florida know a damn thing about walls or which species might be effected.
They’re mouth-pieces for the OBL. STFU!
MY OPINION: NO CRIMINAL ILLEGAL ALIEN BORDER AND IMMIGRATION LAW VIOLATOR SHOULD HAVE SUCH POWER TO IGNORE U.S. LAW.
We should ship them to the border and force them back into mexico at gunpoint in front of TV cameras that can be viewed from any computer that has internet access.
The fence causes environmental damage, and placing the fence violates the property rights of those landowners at the border?
The border area is a brownfields location already, with the continuous trampling by ignorant peasants (yes, PEASANTS, like in the days of medieval England and France), who with little regard of either their environmental impact or the property rights of those whose lands they are crossing with seeming impunity, are already doing much more damage than the fence ever would.
Building a fence STOPS the traffic across that particular stretch. The obvious solution that problem would be taken by the border-jumpers, who would then go to some point BEYOND the end of the fence, and cross there, where there is no physical barrier.
Even a hog knows that much.
Now, any and every Mexican ever born, on the other hand...
I see they rely on the old argument that the fence will not stop every single illegal immigrant, so it does not make sense to build it at all.
Apply this argument to other areas of human endeavor...
Seatbelts will not save every motor vehicle crash victim, so we might as well just remove them from all cars.
Condoms will not prevent all unintended pregnancies or STDs, so we might as well just throw them away and have at it!
The list goes on and on!
So, why is it imperative that the US fund Mexico's own southern border fence next to Guatemala to the tune of $1.4 Billion of US taxpayers' money?????
There’s no reason that the fence couldn’t be placed along a more strategic geographical route back from the actual border as required by either border towns that don’t want it or places where putting it right on the border (e.g. along the center of the Rio Grande) aren’t the most easily monitored.
After all, when it comes to deficit spending, Congress is just as a addicted as a $2 crack whore.
“Only 80 to 100 ocelots remain in South Texas. Their survival depends on crossing into Mexico to breed.”
Now that’s a big stretch there.
Thanks for reminding me of this obnoxious little tidbit. There's so much crap flying out of the D of C that it's hard to sort it all out.
However, this insanity on the part of our legacy hungry president is 'troubling' or 'disturbing' as our pussy-footing parsers would comment.
I think we should just play the Marine Corps Hymn for any visiting Mexican politician to remind them that it’s better to be a good neighbor than to once again have the US Marines sitting in your capitol. ( of course then the streets would be safe, and the administration would not be corrupt.)
That has been THE biggest hold up to completing the fence. Right of way needs to be surveyed, roads built, materials moved in, and the owners, about 150 of them, have fought tooth and nail to keep the fence from being constructed and DHS off their land.
Now, there have been a LOT of FReepers here that have done nothing but Bush Bash about the fence not being completed with little or no knowledge of the facts.
The money is there.
The materials are there.
The workers are ready.
BUT, the DHS is bound by the rule of law. Property rights, and due process are the basis of the nation.
What bothers me more than anything else, is the property owners have more interest in personal gain rather than national security. Some have been unwilling to even sit down and talk with DHS and have been unwaivering in their claim to denying access.
The travesty here is the government is duty-bound to protect and defend, and whatever is necessary to accomplish that should be done. Had the owners been a lot more patriotic, rather than personal gain driven, the fence would have been finished 4-5 years ago.
Once again we're left to deal w/ a problem created by democrats w/ a fix that will benefit democrats at the expense of everyone else.
The dhimmis raised minimum wage rates such that the employers can't afford Americans to do the work. Therefore employers must hire illegals. And so dhimmis say no American will do this work, and its true because they have made the work essentially illegal.
Their fix is to open the flood gates to illegals, sign them up to vote and build a new dependent class, forever on the public teat.
ARTHUR: Bloody peasant!
DENNIS: Oh, what a give-away. Did you hear that? Did you hear that, eh? Ah, now we see the violence inherent in the system. Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help! 'm being repressed! That's what I'm on about. Did you see him repressing me? You saw it, didn't you?
Shucks, and here we thought illegal aliens were all harmless farmers violating our borders for a better life---to take jobs Americans won't do---flipping hamburgers and picking lettuce. (/sarc)
Ocelots need tequila in order to... ummmmmmm... "get busy." Just plain need it, is all.
Cripes, I thought everybody knew THAT. ;)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.