Abolishing Our Borders
William Norman Grigg
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The New American, October 8, 2001
Amnesty for illegal Mexican immigrants is only part of larger drive to erase the U.S.-Mexican border and to create a regional power bloc in this hemisphere à la the European Union. |
Mexican President Vicente Fox’s September state visit to the United States was an event unprecedented in the annals of U.S. diplomacy: It was the first time that a foreign head of state behaved like the ruler of a separate nation within our nation.
Acting as the supposed representative of the “Mexican nation beyond its borders,” Fox seized the initiative and set the agenda for “normalizing” — that is, granting a blanket amnesty to — unspecified millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in our nation. Speaking in front of the White House’s Truman Balcony with President George W. Bush at his elbow, Fox declared: “We must and we can reach an agreement on migration before the end of this very year which will allow us, before the end of our respective terms, to make sure that there are no Mexicans who have not entered this country legally … and that those Mexicans who have come into the country do so with the proper documents.”
Fox likes to refer to himself as the president of “all Mexicans,” including those who have violated our nation’s immigration laws. It was in the name of this criminal sub-population that Fox made the audacious demand that we change our laws and further undermine the security of our borders. Even more remarkable than Fox’s audacity in making such a demand was Bush’s docility in letting it pass without criticism. An AP account of the incident recorded that “Bush, asked whether he thought Fox’s timetable [for an illegal immigrant amnesty] was too ambitious, pretended not to understand the question and joked in Spanish, ‘I can’t hear....’”
Some “conservative” members of Congress were even more servile in their reaction to Fox’s demands. During an address to a joint session of Congress (which was delivered in alternating English and Spanish), Fox tried a Clintonian formulation of his demand to “regularize” (that is, legalize) illegal Mexican immigrants. “Let me be clear about this,” Fox stated. “Regularization does not mean rewarding those who break the law; regularization means that we will provide them with the legal means to allow them to continue contributing to this great nation.” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) all but swooned over Fox’s performance. “I think President Fox did a magnificent job,” he gushed. “A boffo performance. Viva Fox.” Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who is consistently identified in press accounts as a hard-line critic of Mexico, also genuflected before the Mexican ruler: “I think he’s a great leader.”
Electoral Calculus
While Fox’s credentials as a leader have yet to be established, his canniness as a politician is plainly evident. Nicholas M. Horrock, a White House correspondent for UPI, notes that while “Mexico’s indigenous population is 100 million,” Fox’s description of the “Mexican nation” is much larger, either 117 million or 123 million; the larger figures would include “U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage” and the millions of Mexicans here illegally. During his successful campaign for the presidency in 2000, Fox “campaigned in Southern California to get votes,” observed Horrock. “He clearly recognizes that if he wins a good immigration deal from Bush, it would legalize 4.5 million potential voters, and as legal residents they could travel back to vote” in Mexico.
A similar desire to win the allegiance of the growing Mexican population explains, in part, the Bush administration’s courtship of the Fox regime. Neo-conservative commentator Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal places the Fox-Bush “amnesty” proposal squarely in the context of the GOP’s electoral agenda. Gigot blames California’s 1994 Proposition 187 ballot measure, which would have cut off some public services to illegal immigrants, for “turning millions of Hispanics into Democrats and the [California] GOP into a minority party.” This assumes that the real problem in California is the erosion of the GOP’s voter share, rather than the fact that the state has lost control of its borders and is now playing host to a large constituency that places ethnic solidarity above the principle of equal justice under the law.
Gigot insists that developments in California foreshadow the future for the rest of the nation. While this is a sound assessment, Gigot, in a fashion typical of defenders of amnesty for illegal immigrants, insists that “conservatives” have no choice but to placate the growing Mexican voting bloc. “Hispanics are gaining in overall voter share, from 5% in 1996 to 7% last year and an expected 9% in 2004,” he writes. “Matthew Dowd, Mr. Bush’s pollster, says that this trend is already turning safe GOP states into tossups, notably Nevada and Florida. And Hispanic voter growth will continue whether or not there is more immigration.”
While former California Governor Pete Wilson “defined Republicans down for Hispanics” by supporting Proposition 187, “Mr. Bush has a chance to redefine his party’s image back up,” insists Gigot. Thus President Bush and his party have a political interest in devising some formula for amnesty. Once again, there is a dubious assumption at work here, specifically that this gesture would induce “legalized” Mexican immigrants to vote Republican — an assumption that seems to be refuted by the GOP’s own polling data showing how Hispanic voter growth has undermined states that previously were Republican strongholds.
The notion that “regularizing” illegal Mexican immigrants would create a new pool of Republican voters is even more doubtful in light of the 1998 Mexican law permitting Mexicans living in the U.S. to obtain dual citizenship. In effect, the law promotes “Balkanization” by undermining the Americanization of Mexican American immigrants. It was because of this law, which permits such dual citizens to vote in Mexico if they travel there to cast their ballots, that Fox became the first candidate for the Mexican presidency to campaign among Mexican populations north of the border. Furthermore, notes UPI, “Fox has said that he wants the legislature to adopt absentee ballots, and thus Mexicans would be able to cast their ballots in the United States either at embassies or consulates or by mail.”
The 1998 Mexican “dual citizenship” law is an invitation to naturalized Mexicans in the United States to defy their Oath of Citizenship, which states, in relevant part: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen....” (Emphasis added.) Fox’s electoral strategy thus depends upon his ability to promote an adulterated view of American citizenship, in a very literal sense: The allegiances of Mexican “dual citizens” are as divided as those of a bigamist.
Juan Hernandez, the American-born head of Mexico’s office for the protection of immigrants, is of the opinion that Mexico will be the singular beneficiary of the loyalty of “dual citizens.” Hernandez, who has referred to illegal Mexican immigrants to the U.S. as “the new pioneers,” told the June 7th edition of ABC’s Nightline program: “We are betting that the Mexican-American population in the United States … will think Mexico first.”
The Mexican first lady, Marta Sahagun de Fox, drew a similar portrait of an indivisible Mexican “nation” in remarks presented on September 6th at the Terra Museum in Chicago. “Those of us lucky enough not to have to leave our homeland must welcome our countrymen and countrywomen with open arms, letting them know that they have never been forgotten by their own nation, and that their birthplace, their families, and their countrymen will be waiting for them,” stated Mrs. Fox, who has been called the “Hillary Clinton of Mexico” by people who consider that description a compliment. “The governments of Mexico and the United States are working together to support our migrants, your immigrants.”
This peculiar vision of the U.S. and Mexico collaborating on behalf of the indivisible Mexican “nation” was given substance by a bizarre September 6th dual campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio, by Presidents Bush and Fox. Toledo is a community with a large and growing Mexican immigrant population, and the joint visit was an attempt by both presidents to ingratiate themselves with the “dual citizen” community. A New York Times account of that visit described how both Presidents Fox and Bush “praised the contributions of Mexican immigrants and pledged to improve their lives.” Immigrant worker Noelia Reynoso summarized the impact of the visit by what could be called the “co-presidents” of the United States’ unassimilated Mexican population: “I liked what both of them said, knowing that as Mexicans we count.”
Just hours before the arrival of the “Two Amigos,” as the Bush/Fox duo was referred to in the press, union workers in the city held a protest rally to dramatize the impact of the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on American jobs. “We’ve had enough of it,” complained Toledo city councilman Pete Gerken, who asserted that the NAFTA agreement had resulted in plant closings in the U.S. as production has been shifted to Mexico. USA Today pointed out that “workers at Toledo’s Jeep assembly plant were angered this spring when DaimlerChrysler announced it would increase production of the hot-selling PT Cruiser at a plant in Mexico instead of in Toledo.” “Why are they taking it from us and giving it to a new country?” protested Rosa Ealy, who had worked for Jeep prior to its NAFTA-inspired decision to send the work south of the border.
The situation in Toledo is a very useful snapshot of what the NAFTA supporters call “harmonization.” In this instance, the term refers to the process whereby the United States imports Mexico’s surplus poverty, while Mexico — because of its lower wage costs — imports America’s industrial jobs.
While speaking before a carefully selected crowd of 8,000 in Toledo, President Bush declared: “We want Mexico to grow a middle class so that the citizens of Mexico can find work and feed their families, just like the citizens of American can find work and feed their families.” For some reason, the president wasn’t eager to test this applause line on Toledo-area workers who are being “harmonized” out of their jobs.
La Reconquista
During his address in Toledo, President Fox maintained that he and President Bush would work on behalf of “the cause of all of the citizens of the United States and Mexico.” As noted above, Fox’s public insistence that “regularizing” illegal immigrants would be a “win-win” proposition is a rhetorical façade for a calculated effort to increase Mexico’s influence within the United States. Indeed, this effort is central to the Fox administration’s plans for Mexico’s national development.
The Fox administration’s Plan Nacional de Desarrollo 2001-2006, or five-year development plan, refers to that government’s determination to “strengthen our ability to protect and defend the rights of all Mexicans abroad.” The document (as translated by Howard Sutherland, a commentator for the immigration reform website VDARE.com) frankly admits that this will require that the United States change its laws to accommodate unrestricted immigration from Mexico: “[T]he issue of migration, especially in the United States, needs a new focus over the long term to permit the movement and residence of Mexican nationals to be safe, comfortable, legal and orderly, and the attitude of police persecution of this phenomenon must be abandoned....”
In the section dealing with “Defense of National Independence, Sovereignty and Territorial Integrity,” the Fox regime’s five-year plan promises that it will “demand decent treatment for our countrymen who travel or reside abroad.” It also refers to Mexico’s determination to work “with other nations and international organizations … [to defend] the rights of Mexicans abroad....” This is apparently an oblique reference to recent efforts by Mexico to enlist the aid of the United Nations in combating efforts by American citizens to protect our nation’s borders (see sidebar).
At the same time that the Fox regime is denouncing enforcement of U.S. immigration laws as a form of “police persecution,” it is energetically cracking down on illegal immigration to Mexico from Central America. The August 13th Washington Times reported that Mexican authorities, in an initiative called “Plan Sur,” are “clamping down on the hundreds of thousands of Central Americans crossing Mexico’s southern border.” Mexican immigration officials deported 150,000 illegal immigrants in 2000, and another 100,000 in the first six months of 2001.
Felipe de Jesus Preciado, the head of Mexico’s immigration service, insists that “the flow of Central American migrants north is a national security problem for Mexico. It wouldn’t be such a big problem if they were getting through to the U.S., but they get stuck and hang around in the frontier cities making trouble, sleeping in the streets with no money.” That similar dangers to U.S. national security result from the inundation of U.S. cities along the Mexican border troubles our “good friends” to the South not at all. From the Fox regime’s perspective, the United States has a duty not only to absorb whatever portion of the Mexican population it chooses to send our way, but also to relieve Mexico’s own problem with illegal immigration by keeping the borders open to Central American immigrants as well.
But the Mexican government is not merely using the United States as an immigration “pressure valve.” It is quite literally conducting an invasion of our country in what has been described as a campaign of “demographic warfare.”
In a 1982 article published in Excelsior, the Mexican analogue to the New York Times, columnist Carlos Loret de Mola described the outpouring of Mexican immigrants into the United States as “The Great Invasion”:
A peaceful mass of people … carries out slowly and patiently an unstoppable invasion, the most important in human history. You cannot give me a similar example of such a large migratory wave by an ant-like multitude, stubborn, unarmed, and carried on in the face of the most powerful and best-armed nation on earth.... [Neither] barbed-wire fences, nor aggressive border guards, nor campaigns, nor laws, nor police raids against the undocumented, have stopped this movement of the masses that is unprecedented in any part of the world.
Loret pointed out that the migrant invasion “seems to be slowly returning [the southwestern United States] to the jurisdiction of Mexico without the firing of a single shot, nor requiring the least diplomatic action, by means of a steady, spontaneous, and uninterrupted occupation.” This is an allusion to the concept that California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, the states created in the territory obtained from Mexico through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, compose “Aztlan,” the mythical homeland of the Aztec Indian. For decades, Chicano militants have demanded that the territory of “Aztlan” be taken back from the United States.
Loret is hardly the only member of Mexico’s media elite who has described the immigration onslaught as an invasion inspired by dreams of “Aztlan.” According to a July 4th story carried by Mexico’s EWE news service, the celebrated Mexican novelist Elena Poniatowska “asserted today that Mexico is at this moment recovering territories it lost in the past to the United States thanks to emigration.” “The common people — the poor, the dirty, the lice ridden, the cockroaches are advancing on the United States, a country that needs to speak Spanish because it has 33.5 million Hispanics who are imposing their culture,” declared Poniatowska in a press conference unveiling her new novel La Piel del Cielo (The Skin of Heaven). “Mexico is recovering the territories yielded to the United States by means of migratory tactics.”
Seen in this light, the Fox administration’s demand for “regularization” of illegal Mexican immigrants amounts to a demand that the United States consolidate Mexico’s gains in its demographic war upon our nation.
The Grand Design
It’s by no means surprising that Mexico would seek to erase our southern border, thereby reversing its defeat in the Mexican-American War. Many Americans might be surprised to learn that our nation’s political Establishment shares the same objective: It seeks to eradicate the borders that separate Canada, Mexico, and the United States as part of a larger design to create a regional political and economic bloc duplicating the European Union. And the administration of George W. Bush is vigorously promoting this design.
“Whatever else George W. Bush does, or doesn’t do, he has earned a place in history as the first American president to place Hispanic voters at the center of politics, and the first to view the land between Canada and Guatemala as one,” writes Newsweek political analyst Howard Fineman. “It makes sense, if you think about it: Texas, long ago and far away, was part of Mexico. Now a Texan is trying to reassemble the Old Country, and then some.”
Actually, what the Bush administration is doing is not rebuilding the Mexican Empire, but amalgamating the United States and Mexico. During the Vicente Fox visit, Bush convened a meeting of the U.S.-Mexico Binational Commission, a cabinet-level body in which officials from both national governments develop joint policies on such issues as immigration, counter-narcotics efforts, trade, energy, and foreign policy. In 1993, under the NAFTA framework, the U.S. and Mexico established the Border Environment Cooperation Commission and the North American Development Bank (NADBank).
Although the NADBank was originally designed to finance environmental initiatives at the border, the Fox administration seeks to use the bank to subsidize projects “in non-environmental sectors and in a wider geographic zone,” to use the delicate language of a White House press release. In an interview published in the September 4th Washington Post, Fox claimed that using the NADBank to subsidize economic development in Mexico is justified by the “broad spirit of cooperation, as well as justice and equity.”
Once such rhetorical flourishes are peeled away it becomes obvious that Fox and Company want to use the NADBank as a U.S. taxpayer-subsidized cookie jar.
The September 7th Atlanta Journal-Constitution, noted that Fox “envisions a North American economic alliance that will make the border between the United States and Mexico as unrestricted as the one between Tennessee and Georgia.” Of course, Tennessee and Georgia are not separate, independent countries, but states in the same constitutional union. This implies that the United States and Mexico, as well as Canada, would cede their sovereignty to a new, supra-national political union, and the Journal-Constitution warmly embraces that vision.
“The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union,” opined a Journal-Constitution house editorial for September 7th. “Unlike the varied landscapes and cultures of European Union members, the United States, Canada and Mexico already share a great deal in common, and language is not as great a barrier. President Bush, for example, is quite comfortable with the blended Mexican-Anglo culture forged in the border states of Texas, California and Arizona.”
Bush is also quite comfortable speaking the language of “inevitability” to justify the erosion of our national sovereignty. “There are people in Mexico who’ve got children, who worry about where they’re going to get their next meal from,” asserted the president during an August 25th speech. “And they’re going to come to the United States.... That’s a simple fact. And we’ve got to respect that....”
Speaking in the same vein, Jagdish Sheth of Emory University told the Journal-Constitution that any attempt to crack down on illegal immigration from Mexico would precipitate an economic crisis in this country. “Fundamentally, economic integration with Mexico is inevitable,” insists Sheth. Speaking of U.S.-Mexico convergence, Georgia State University economist David Sjoquist declares: “Our choice is to fight it and lose, or embrace it and come out better for it.”
But, as is usually the case, the developments described by the Establishment media as “inevitable” are the product of carefully planned, long-term initiatives by an international Power Elite. As William F. Jasper documents in his new exposé, The United Nations Exposed, the ongoing effort to “harmonize” the United States with Mexico and Canada is one facet of a long-term design to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would be a “building bloc” of a UN-dominated world order.
Amazingly, Fox said nearly as much in his September 7th address to the Organization of American States (OAS), which is a regional affiliate of the United Nations. Fox volunteered the services of Mexico to host a “Special Security Conference” of the OAS for the purpose of revising the 1945 defense treaty that created the alliance. The updated treaty would “create a new regional security structure” and outline “a new regional agenda” for “all nations of the hemisphere.”
While collaborating with the Fox regime to “harmonize” the U.S. and Mexico, the Bush administration is pursuing similar collaboration with Canada. The June 30th issue of Canada’s National Post quoted U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci as insisting that “Canada, the United States and Mexico should forge closer links as part of a ‘NAFTA-plus’ relationship based on harmonization of border controls, law enforcement, energy, environmental, and immigration policies....” The government of Canadian Prime Minister Jean Cretien has called for a “public debate on economic and social union” among the three NAFTA nations. David Zussman, an advisor to Cretien, will travel to Europe in November, “bringing 15 to 20 senior federal and provincial civil servants to investigate how the nations in the European Union have coped with the end of borders for the European market, and the implications for policing, immigration and social policies.”
“I think the debate certainly should take place on North American integration and it should be a no-holds-barred debate where nothing is taboo,” states Canadian Member of Parliament Maurizio Bevilacqua, who supports the concept.
Unfortunately, the subversion of our national sovereignty that such “integration” entails is being imposed upon the United States without the “no-holds-barred debate” described by Bevilacqua. To those who are aware of the semi-covert drive to “integrate” the Western Hemisphere, the surrealistic state visit of Vicente Fox in his role as “co-president” of America’s undigested Mexican population offers an unsettling foretaste of the future that the hemisphere’s would-be masters have in store for us.
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