Criminals illegally entering the U.S. present a problem because they oftentimes continue their criminal lifestyle once they enter the U.S. As we learned from "The Mariel Boatlift" from Cuba in 1980, illegal immigration means there is no screening whatsoever of who enters the country.
On November 3-5, 2005 the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office held the Southwest Conference on Illegal Immigration, Border Security and Crime in Scottsdale, AZ. This was an attempt to bring interested parties to the table to discuss issues of common concern. Panelists came from very diverse backgrounds, including law enforcement, university professors, think tanks, and groups that represent immigrants, whether legal or illegal. This successful conference attempted to reach concurrence on common ground wherever possible.
Recently, however, the government of Mexico has chosen once again to support illegal immigration into the United States. This time their National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded agency, said it will distribute at least 70,000 maps showing highways, rescue beacons and water tanks in the Arizona desert to curb the death toll among illegal border crossers. They also claim that this does not encourage illegal immigration into the United States; it just makes it safer for those who choose to act illegally.
In early 2005 this same government-funded agency distributed 1.5 million comic book-style pamphlets for illegals that give them safety tips on how to safely cross the desert into the U.S. Detractors of this Mexican government policy ask the obvious question: What is next; Will the Mexican government now start buying illegal aliens, once they are inside the U.S., bus tickets to California, New York and Florida?
Instead of this illegal and regressive policy, the Mexican government needs to adopt a strong, proactive policy that only supports legal immigration into the U.S., not illegal immigration. Governments should not be in the habit of breaking their own laws and those of their neighbor countries as well, while using their own peoples’ taxes to pay for it. There is already a flood of illegal immigration into the U.S. not only from Mexico, but from other Central American countries that use Mexico as their expressway into the U.S. Overwhelmingly, most of these illegal immigrants want to come to the U.S. for economic reasons; they want to make a better living.
Their home countries also realize that almost all illegal immigrants will send money back to family members in the country that they just left. Thus, there is a financial incentive for these countries to support illegal immigration into the U.S. because of the $100s of millions of U.S. dollars that flow back into the country in the form of money orders and wire transfers, generating greater economic activity within the country itself.
An associated problem with illegal immigration is national security and criminal activity. Hidden within the droves of people crossing the Rio Grande River and the Baja and Sonora Deserts for economic reasons, could be terrorists and criminals. Since no background checks are ever run on them before they enter the U.S. anyone can get in. Terrorists have shown that they can be ingenious as well as devious. Multi-lingual terrorists can use the maps supplied by the Mexican government to navigate their way safely across the deserts into the U.S. Thank you, Mexican government.
Criminals entering the U.S. have been another problem because they oftentimes continue their criminal lifestyle once they enter the U.S. Because of serious internal economic problems, in 1980 Cuban President Castro opened up Cuban immigration to the U.S. ‘The Mariel Boatlift,’ as it came to be called, was a mass exodus of mentally ill, imprisoned and freedom seeking refugees from Cuba's Mariel Harbor, between April 15 and October 31, 1980 when Fidel Castro eventually closed the harbor to all refugees seeking asylum. 2,746 Cubans were identified by U.S authorities as criminals, while many others probably slipped through the cracks. Over the next 35 years many immigrants from the Mariel Boatlift ended up in U.S. prisons for criminal activity. The mentally ill from this fiasco also burdened state mental hospitals, and U.S. tax payers, for years to come.
This episode served to bring home the importance of proper screening of immigrants prior to accepting them as legal immigrants. With illegal immigration, there is no screening whatsoever. Anyone who crosses the border and is not caught is in. Legal immigration should be encouraged and illegal immigration discouraged.
There is a horrible movement afoot by our compassionate Liberal “friends” to not only grant amnesty to illegals, but to give them limited rights, including the right to vote. I beleive that we should turn the clock backwards on this issue. Take funding from someplace else, maybe some social or social engineering entitlement and bulk up INS and the Border Patrol. Send the illegals back to their homes and stop the flood. A nation must have defined borders.
Every foreigner who crosses our borders illegally ‘is’ a criminal. What does it matter that only a small minority of them were marauding thieves in their home countries, break additional laws while here, or terrorists sneaking in amongst all the so called “good” illegals. Every one of them has violated a law and someone’s home; and their lawlessness only serves to mask the presence of far worse characters swarming in among them. This is nothing less than forcible break-and-entry. Were some homeless American to decide it is okay to break into your house, raid your refrigerator, haul off all he could carry, and then have the audacity to show up on your door step asking for a job and asking you to forget his other little indiscretions, you would have him immediately arrested. But because these people live in atrocious conditions, because they are willing to work, and because calling for their arrest gets you in trouble with their PC advocates, we figure they are okay and haven’t done any real harm.
If I were some bad-ass from south of the border, I would be among the first to crash this party. Who has a better chance of making it across the border: a big, nasty character who has lived on the fringe or some church-going, mostly law-abiding laborer? Because the former is more likely than the latter, I think the real numbers of criminals and lawless people coming in are higher than we are given to believe. The media would have us believe the typical illegal alien is more law abiding than the average U.S. citizen, and that our prisons are choked with them only because they are picked up by INS. Yet, we know INS does little to incarcerate or repatriate illegals once they get in.
Depending on your sources, illegal aliens constitute ¼ to ⅓ of our prison population. The U.S. Government estimates there were 10-12 million illegals in the U.S. in 2000, with roughly 1-million new illegals entering each year. This number would be much higher except for the occasional amnesty programs which have wiped the slate clean. Also, many illegals are not counted in the census despite promises they won’t be deported. Some estimate the real number as high as 20-million people who have entered illegally since 1971, and if you add those given amnesty closer to 30-million. If you use the government figure of 12-million, then illegals represent 4% out of 281-million. If you use the 20-million figure, then they represent 6.5% of our total population. Either way, illegals in our prisons are grossly disproportionate to their base numbers, and represent a huge risk in our population. Pro-immigrant groups and liberal prison reform groups (e.g, http://www.notwithourmoney.org/03_prisons/immigrants02.html) will tell us most illegals in jail are there for immigration violations or minor crimes like drug use. What they don’t tell you is most are picked up for violent crimes, but are reclassified either by lenient judges or by prison wardens being PC to avoid action by immigrant advocacy groups. If anything, illegals get away with more than legals and far more than native citizens (see: http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_illegal_alien.html).
Consider, were the situation reversed and you crossed into Mexico illegally looking for work, hid out as best you could, stole food when hungry, snuck into someone’s barn or warehouse to sleep, gained access using false papers, got medical assistance without paying, lied to get work, associated with known criminals from your native country, and passed yourself off as a local, would you expect to be treated with kindness and generosity when found out or thrown into some stinking cesspool of a jail and left to rot? You would expect the latter, and know it’s not undeserved. I guarantee if you were to suggest to Mexico’s President, Vicente Fox, that he should open his borders to still more desperate Guatemalan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Salvadoran illegals, Fox would slam his gates shut. In fact, he does. They still sneak in, but, those that do, he just forwards to us.
Sending money back home only increases the wealth there for a moment. The money soon departs again in exchange for necessities not being produced back home. Money (i.e., wealth) is principally a measure of productivity and has a very short half-life in the absence of production. If poor, unproductive countries merely encourage their people to leave, they only bleed off a little pressure without significantly reducing the problem of a populace that’s starving to death. I feel for these people, I really do. I have been to Central America and seen the way they live and work. I have seen barefoot men walking on rebar exposed to flesh ripping wire-ties, working without power equipment, with few hand tools, taking pride in their work, and getting the job done under a sun that would have left me gasping and blistered. I could see in their hollow faces and frames they live on a poor diet, yet they exhibit an energy that belies hunger. I saw mother’s bathing children in garbage strewn streets; right before dressing them in the finest they had to attend school. These are people who want to be self-sufficient, and don’t want our scraps. I also saw many toughs weilding assault weapons and employed as security guards by the wealthy and politically connected. The country had just gone through civil-war, and violence was still much the rule. Ordinary people were visibly sensitive to violence, and warned me not to wander around alone. I would guess, many more did not find work as guards or were let go. Many of these headed north. Soon after I left, a hurricane swept over the narrow country, leaving tens of thousands homeless and hundreds dead. Seeing these things, you, naturally, want to do something to help.
However, we cannot house and feed the whole world, and it is a mistake to open the gates to the flood. That does not improve their lot; it strains ours. We do far more helping them improve their country’s means to the point they can feed, clothe, and house their own. We have been doing that (and will continue doing that) by utilizing their workforce in place, favoring their exports, establishing business and generating jobs there, and by transferring knowledge they can use to improve their lot. Charity is a stop gap that works to stabilize a people while they get back on their feet. As a perpetual prop, it only serves to keep people down. The expansions of enterprise and markets have done more to help the poor in underdeveloped nations than all the charity we can provide, and it does it without disruption and denigration. I would open the gates to more ‘legal’ immigrants who want to work if we could, but, right now, we are letting in more than we should to remain stable and viable. No culture can absorb more than a small percent without causing disruptions and altering the structure that makes it work. We are the base of the global economy. That economy has been expanding at an unprecedented rate, and is bringing prosperity to the poor faster than anything else we can or should do. If we, instead, allow the poor to swarm over us, do we risk that economy and progress? If so, then, everyone suffers.
Of course liberals want illegals to vote. Hispanics tend to vote…Democrat.
We, as Americans, have the right to own and defend our property, and that includes our country. I am sick of the liberal rhetoric on this issue. To me, it’s a non-issue. As middleclassguy said, send ‘em home!
Republicans are courting illegals nearly as much as Democrats. What else would you call Bush’s worker program and stealth amnesty? Bush is playing it both ways, and many on the R-side of the aisle do the same. Courting illegals is less about garnering their votes as retaining the support of key Hispanic groups already in the Republican sphere. Many of these groups give funding to both parties, and some are genuinely conservative on most issues. Yet, most remain hypersensitive to Hispanic profiling or targeting and are quick to hamstring any politician who voices a complaint against Hispanics, legal or otherwise. In this, they are no different from any other group with a strong minority identity and history.
Hispanic-Americans were, for a long time, excluded from political expression, subject to discrimination, and regarded foreigners in the land of their birth. These are valid complaints; and we cannot make headway by sweeping that history under a rug. Many Hispanic-Americans rightly understand illegals harm them as much as other Americans, but far more only or also feel threatened by alarms that focus on Hispanics as “the problem”. We know it makes no difference whether an illegal is Hispanic, Middle-easterner, Bulgarian, Irish or Canadian, but the fear is that an intemperate response will flare into a repeat of the past. Our Southern border is currently our biggest problem; and it is primarily uninvited Hispanics (74% Mexican) who represent 90+% of this invasion. That is a fact, and not an assumption. If nothing is done to stem this tide, gangs and crime will continue to swell, hospitals will close, schools will be overloaded by unaccounted attendees, the first language in many schools will be Hispanic with it’s own identity struggling against assimilation, and terrorists will find ample opportunity to sneak in disguised as Latinos. Though the crimes of illegals affect all of us, the principle victims of illegal-Hispanic crimes are newly arrived Hispanics. The rationale of Hispanics who defend these miscreants is difficult to follow and accept, and creates an atmosphere of mutual suspicion that is dividing us as a people. Hispanic-Americans and legal residents are going to have to choose whether they are primarily Americans (or wish to be), or are foreigners who merely reside here but put their allegiance somewhere else. They are going to have to put aside the fear this is about turning back the clock, and confront the probability that an Hispanic invasion harms more than enhances the thriving Hispanic-American culture that exists here. The clock can’t be turned back, because the American people genuinely don’t want a return to a segregated past. I am white, but I only recognize one color: American. The white-racist-segregationist is virtually non-existent. There will always be a tiny few, but that is not who most of us are. It is time that blacks, Hispanics, and other minority ‘particularists’ accept that and move on to a truly united people.
There are some who come here seeking to change who we are, to force us to accommodate them and/or assimilate with them. They are not Americans and have no wish to be Americans. They come here because they could not practice their own form of extreme non-conformity elsewhere and/or were causing problems there. They come here because we turn a blind eye to their misbehaviors. Ours is a culture of acceptance, but an acceptance that allows an adversative extremism to flourish is merely suicidal. There are liberals here of all races who, steeped in the picturesque mantra of multiculturalism, believe our cultural fabric can be stretched infinitely without rending. Assuming they are Americans first, then the answer is that they, and/or their liberal non-Hispanic supporters, must stop misrepresenting the problem as a civil-liberties and intolerance issue instead of the simple border security problem it is. Assuming they wish to retain their cultural identity (and I support that), they must place it in the proper perspective that recognizes no nation can be all things; and a country without borders and cultural norms soon ceases to exist.
The idea/policy of “once they’re in they’re in” is frustrating to me. As a parent I would never reward bad behavior bu
but that is exactly what that policy does. Why shouldn’t we have the freedom to grab these lawbreakers by the back
k of the collar and throw them right back. The fact that they have crossed some line a map should confirm their
guilt, not their rights.