Rewarding Lawlessness
William Norman Grigg
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The New American, November 3, 2003
While it tends to the security of Iraq’s borders, the Bush administration is collaborating with subversive groups to undermine our own. |
More than two years after Black Tuesday, our nation’s borders remain terrifyingly insecure, and our anemic economy continues to shed manufacturing jobs. Assessing this grim situation, the Bush administration has focused intently on the task of rebuilding critically wounded economic infrastructure and enhancing border security … in Iraq.
With annual budget deficits sagging to unprecedented depths, the Bush administration has requested an emergency appropriation of $87 billion for the occupation and reconstruction of war-ravaged Iraq. That request includes $20 billion to address “critical needs for security and infrastructure,” such as the nation’s electrical, water, sewage and telecommunication systems, as well as housing, roads and bridges. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent on “private sector business initiatives and jobs training programs.”
Why American taxpayers — drowning in debt, ravaged by inflation, and anxious about their own employment prospects — should pay to train Iraqi workers, the Bush administration won’t deign to explain. Nor has the administration explained why it appears more eager to secure Iraq’s borders than our own.
The Iraqi Provisional Authority has asked for $150 million to train new Iraqi border control and customs officials, as well as to refurbish scores of border outposts. “Without this investment,” insisted the authority’s request, “the nation will continue to be at tremendous risk of penetration by members of terrorist cells and other subversive organizations; smuggling will continue to bleed the revenues necessary for the Iraqi economy to stand on its own and Iraq will not be able to control its borders.”
Much the same could truthfully be said about the United States, of course. Two years after the most devastating terrorist attack in our history, our borders — particularly our enormous southern border with Mexico — remain wide open. To cite but one telling example: An estimated 1,000 illegal immigrants pour into our nation daily via Arizona’s Organ Pipe National Monument, where 28-year-old U.S. Park Ranger Kris Eggle was murdered in the summer of 2002 by an AK-47-toting illegal alien drug smuggler.
According to Ranger Bo Stone, a friend of Eggle, “We have caught people from China, Pakistan and Yemen coming through.... If 1,000 illegal immigrants can walk through the desert here, so can 1,000 terrorists.” Eggle’s father, Bob, a Vietnam veteran, regards his son as a casualty of war. “I gave an eye for one war,” Bob told syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin. “Now, I’ve given my son for another. What is our president going to do about the war on our borders?”
The answer to Bob Eggle’s question, tragically, is this: In the Border War, the president of the United States stands firmly on the side of our nation’s enemies.
The Amnesty Gambit
“A move to lower the barriers to immigrants who want to live and work in the United States is picking up steam again, two years after it was stalled by the September 11 terrorist attacks,” reported the Los Angeles Times on September 6. Last July, three Republican members of Arizona’s congressional delegation — Senator John McCain, and Congressmen Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake — introduced “guest-worker” bills intended to legalize illegal immigrants currently employed in the U.S.
The legislation (S. 1461 and H.R. 2899) would essentially allow the entire illegal alien population in this country to apply for permanent legal residency — provided that the applicant had an employer or family sponsor. There would also be no limit to the number of “guest workers” admitted annually. The legislation effectively seeks to reward those who violated our nation’s immigration laws, while demolishing any remaining limit on legal immigration.
President Bush and Mexican President Vicente Fox “were on the verge of a breakthrough two years ago on a package that would have combined an expanded guest-worker program with amnesty for undocumented workers,” notes the Times. The 9-11 attack demonstrated, at a hideous price, the mortal dangers we confront unless we regain control of our borders — and the lesson was not lost on the public. Reacting to the mood of the electorate, President Bush deferred action on the amnesty proposal.
However, “we are [now] out of the shadows of September 11th,” maintains B. Lindsay Lowell, an immigration researcher at Georgetown University. Still, Lowell continues, “I see it as a difficult thing to push through. You have to have all the players in the right place at the right time to make it happen.” “The major missing person is Bush,” adds Cecelia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza, a radical leftist Hispanic lobby. “That is interesting, considering he arguably started this whole debate.” Congressman Kolbe agrees: “We need to have presidential leadership to move this debate forward.”
For his part, President Bush reportedly told the Arizona legislators he was “enthusiastic” about the amnesty proposal. But he may prefer to lag behind the debate, allowing others to absorb the political consequences of what will be a very unpopular proposal. Seeking a way to make the amnesty proposal palatable to the public, Senator McCain (who prefers the euphemism “earned legalization”) has sought to frame it as a way of enhancing national security. McCain insists that amnesty would eventually leave federal agents free “to focus their efforts on the individuals who do pose a potential threat to national security.” Of course, this statement ignores the fact that people who break our nation’s immigration laws are, by their own actions, defining themselves as potential threats to our security.
Pressure from Below
While the Bush administration, its congressional allies, and the Mexican government quietly push the amnesty proposal, a large claque of radical groups supported that proposal by staging a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience.
The fall 2003 “Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride” was an event “reminiscent of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s,” claimed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The campaign attracted busloads of “riders” — most of them illegal immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Colombia — who converged on Washington, D.C., before heading to a final rally in New York City. A delegation from the event visited Atlanta to lay a wreath at the grave of Martin Luther King Jr., thereby symbolically claiming the slain activist’s mantle.
The Journal-Constitution, in a fashion typical of the mainstream media, was less than forthcoming about both the agenda and sponsors behind the “Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride.”
“The campaign is calling for immigration reform that will open a path for legalization for immigrants already here, permit their families in foreign countries to join them, and protect the rights of workers, regardless of their legal status,” reported the paper. “The campaign is supported by a coalition of labor unions, religious groups and civil rights activists.”
In fact, the event’s organizers put forth a rather more sweeping list of demands, including amnesty, driver’s licenses, in-state tuition benefits, and open borders. Furthermore, among the “civil rights” groups helping to organize the “Freedom Ride” was the Communist Party U.S.A.: The event’s website conspicuously listed the Party among its sponsors and provided a link to the Party’s website. It’s impossible to believe any similar mainstream media organ would decline to mention the involvement of (for example) the Ku Klux Klan in a similar campaign. Other radical groups listed as endorsers included the ACLU, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.
D.A. King, an insurance agent from Marietta, Georgia, was on hand when approximately 2,000 “Freedom Riders” passed through Doraville, a town of 7,000.
“I got the sense that I had left the country of my birth and been transported to some Mexican village, completely taken over by an angry, barely restrained mob,” wrote King in an essay for the V-Dare website. “The demonstrators carried signs including ‘The Red Brigade of the Communist Party,’ complete with hammer and sickle, and the large banner of the local U.A.W. union.... Ever present was the flag of Mexico. The mostly jean and sneaker-clad marchers were led by more well-attired bullhorn-carrying Hispanic ‘platoon leaders,’ who were in turn led and instructed by non-Hispanic-looking U.A.W. members with larger bullhorns, complete with logoed caps and polo shirts.”
Even though hundreds, maybe thousands, of illegal immigrants were present, not a single illegal was arrested. According to King, “the local police chief … made it clear to our band of American counterprotesters — six of whom were women, one in a wheelchair — that any attempt to ‘antagonize’ the mob of defiant illegals and their enablers would be met with our arrest.”
Where’s Our Country?
King, a member of Georgians for Immigration Reform, is a novice at the art of public protest. “I was in boot camp during the Vietnam War when the ‘peace protesters’ were staging their marches in the 1960s,” he told The New American. “Activism like this isn’t something I’ve been eager to do. I’ve got an insurance business to run, and it’s suffering now because I’m spending so much time trying to stop what I see happening to our country. It’s eerie to watch your system of laws and your culture being trampled while your government does nothing to stop it.”
“I’ve seen it happening all across the state as I’ve traveled on business,” King continues. “We’re now a bilingual state in all but name. We’ve seen whole neighborhoods, or entire small communities, entirely transformed by illegal immigration from Mexico. Drug smugglers and street gangs have been transplanted into small communities. Local school systems have been overwhelmed. And we’re expected to adapt to the culture or cultures invading our country.”
Cedartown, Georgia, resident Don Gamel relates a similar story. “People don’t hate Mexicans — they hate crime,” Gamel observed to The New American. “If they come to work, obey the law, learn our language, become citizens — that’s fine, and they’re welcome. But what’s happened is that people come up here from Mexico to work six-month shifts [at local poultry processing plants], then swap their green cards with another batch. Many of the people coming here have brought drugs and crime into our community.”
“Ten years ago we didn’t have a noticeable drug problem — now there are drug labs everywhere,” Gamel reports. “Just recently we had a string of execution-style murders in this town that were probably connected to a turf war between Mexican gangs. People in this community are scared to death — and the government’s doing nothing to stop what’s going on.”
Bleeding Kansas
Joyce Mucci of Kansas City, Missouri, has experienced this same sense of being dispossessed from her own community. In a V-Dare essay Mucci described how she was banned “from entering a state-funded public school” to listen to a presentation by the immigrant “Freedom Riders.” After the riders arrived at the Primitivo Garcia School — an Hispanic-themed charter school — Mucci “decided to follow them in so I could hear the scheduled speeches. To my dismay, an individual who — I assume — was a representative of one of the sponsoring organizations, prohibited me from entering the school.... My transgression? I was told that I was ‘anti-immigration’ and my presence would be ‘disruptive.’” A few days prior to that incident, Mucci had taken part in a “civil and respectful” debate about the “Freedom Ride” on the local National Public Radio affiliate.
Mucci’s treatment offers a very mild foretaste of the way dissent would be dealt with as “La Reconquista” — Mexico’s gradual re-conquest of the southwestern U.S. (or “Aztlan”) — proceeds. Miguel Perez, a spokesman for the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA), explains: “The ultimate ideology is the liberation of Aztlan. Communism would be closest [to it].” Once Aztlan is established, continued Perez, ethnic cleansing would commence: “Non-Chicanos would have to be expelled … opposition groups would be quashed because you have to keep power.”
MEChA and its comrades don’t have that kind of power yet — but to judge from the actions of this country’s political authorities, one would think they might. For example, nine states — California, Idaho, Indiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wisconsin — accept “matricula consular” cards, a form of I.D. issued to Mexicans (including illegal immigrants) by Mexican consulates as either a primary or secondary document to obtain a driver’s license. In North Carolina, noted the October 6 Washington Times, “even a Mexican voter card or Mexican military card is an adequate form of identification to obtain a driver’s license.”
Mucci points out that the Kansas City municipal government recently used a “stealth method” to change its policy regarding the Mexican government I.D. cards. “On September 26, the city government posted an ‘administrative regulation’ on its website recognizing the matricula card as a valid ID,” Mucci told The New American. “A few days later there was a small notice published at the back of the Kansas City Star announcing this policy change, which was done without the approval of the City Council.”
While political leaders in Kansas are working to make it easier for illegal immigrants to stay, local employers are sending jobs overseas or importing foreign workers. “Just a little while ago, Sprint, our largest local employer, laid off 400 workers and sent their jobs off-shore,” Mucci informed The New American. “And Cerner Corp [a medical software company] has been bringing in Indian and Pakistani engineers and testers. They’re good people, for the most part, who do their jobs well. But what’s wrong with our workers here? If I were of a conspiratorial frame of mind, things like this would make me suspect that there’s a deliberate effort underway to get rid of the middle class, and make us into a society like Mexico.”
Mucci’s suspicions certainly have merit. The blanket amnesty sought by the Bush administration would be a prelude to the amalgamation of the United States and Mexico into a single economic and political bloc under the rubric of the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). This process includes importing Mexico’s surplus poverty and exporting much of our manufacturing sector. For the political elite, this would have the happy result of devastating the troublesome middle class, thereby removing the most significant obstacle to the erection of the Total State.
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