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At War with Mexico It’s an issue that will dominate the elections in 2008. It is illegal immigration, but there was scarce attention paid during the debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. The candidate that promises to put a stop to it will be the candidate that wins. The party that temporizes will be the party that fails. The conflict in Iraq has siphoned the energy to pay attention to Mexico, but as that battlefront recedes, the eyes of voters will be on our southern border. A war is being fought there. Some may argue that no such war has been authorized or declared, but a full-scale invasion has been taking place for years, resulting in an estimated one tenth of all Mexicans presently living in the United States. They are not pilgrims. They are parasites. The drain on our economy is something that, while well documented, has not received sufficient attention from the mainstream media. After all, we are "neighbors" with Mexico, so how could they hardly be considered an invading horde costing Americans billions of dollars every year? Good neighbors don’t do that kind of thing, but Mexico is not a good neighbor.
Perhaps, however, the real war receiving scant attention is the one being conducted by Mexican drug lords and their cartels. At present most of the war is being fought in Mexico and, as Terence Jeffrey, the editor-in-chief of CNSnews, recently pointed out, one episode was fought in Cananea. Where’s that? "It is almost in Arizona." Cananea is about 20 miles south of the U.S. border in Mexico. "The nearest town of any size is Nogales, Arizona and the nearest big city is Tucson. Cananea is a war zone. How long before that shooting war takes place in the streets of American cities? Not long at all. In June 2007, World Net Daily reported that, "The ultra-violent, U.S.-trained elite, Mexican paramilitary commandos known as the ‘Zetas’, responsible for hundreds of murders along the border this year, have expanded their enforcement efforts on behalf of a drug cartel by setting up trafficking routes in six U.S. states." Texas law enforcement officials report that the Zetas "have been active in the Dallas area since 2003." The war is all about the provision of huge amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the U.S. market. While the illegal aliens send back an estimated $25 billion U.S. dollars to Mexico, the drug market represents an estimated $40 billion. The lifeblood of America is being poisoned while money that would have been legitimately earned by Americans is drained off to become an essential element of the Mexican economy. Millions must be deployed to capture and imprison the illegals who are here to commit crimes. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, "In 1980, our federal and state prisons housed fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens. By the end of 1999, these same prisons housed over 68,000 criminal aliens. Today, criminal aliens account for over 29 percent of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities and a higher share of all federal prison inmates." The figures are staggering. "Among the alien federal prisoners, over half (55%) were illegally in the United States at the time of their conviction." By way of just one example, on November 30, 2007, border patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona captured six Mexican career criminals. They had a combined total of 80 previous arrests in the United States, but that pales in comparison with news in mid-December that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested almost twice as many "criminal aliens" and "immigration fugitives" in fiscal year 2007 than the previous year. The year ended September 30 and the total was 30,408 individuals. As of October 1, 2007, ICE had a case backlog of 595,000 fugitive aliens! It’s not like these criminal aliens are deported when they finish their sentences. In March 2000, Congress revealed Department of Justice statistics that the former Immigration and Naturalization Service had released more than 35,000 criminal aliens back into the U.S. population. It gets worse. More than 11,000 went on to commit serious crimes that included more than 1,800 violent ones that involved 98 homicides, 142 sexual assaults, and 44 kidnappings. A 2001 Supreme Court decision required INS (later changed to ICE) to release more than 3,000 criminal aliens.
In November 2007, commentator Jim Kouri broke the news that some 1,000 ICE agents had been reassigned to work as U.S. Customs officers. This is part of the Bush Administration’s efforts to keep the southern border as open as possible and explains why two border control agents are still in jail for having shot at a Mexican drug smuggler who has since been re-arrested. The message to the Border Patrol officers is clear. This has been occurring at a time when Americans had to mount a major effort to thwart an effort by the White House and Congress to extent amnesty to the millions of illegals in America, including of course, the criminals among them. Despite highly publicized joint programs between the U.S. and Mexico to spend billions to thwart the Mexican drug gangs, the enormity of the amount of money generated by drugs and the thorough corruption of the Mexican government, its military and police, will render the effort a meaningless charade. Public officials and ordinary Mexicans are understandably thorough intimidated. The violence across the 2,000-mile border from America is already here. The crime statistics in the six states that are home to an estimated sixty percent of all illegal immigrants—California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey—are testimony to the greater war that will soon explode in these and other states nationwide as local gangs, including illegal aliens, will fight to protect their market for drugs. Meanwhile, Americans in just those six states are forced to spend an estimated $27 billion annually for the education, health care, and incarceration of the illegal and criminal aliens in their midst. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), more than three-fifths of all the states have seen their illegal alien population more than double since 2000. The drug wars between the army and the cartels in Mexico have left more than 2,000 dead in 2007 and the Bush Administration’s answer has been to propose giving the government of Felipe Calderon $500 million worth of military equipment and training, including Bell 412 helicopters and surveillance aircraft among the hardware to be transferred, but in too many cases, the problem is members of the army moonlighting for the drug lords. The last Mexican-American War was an armed military conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas. The new Mexican-American War is being waged by the demographic shift of Mexican citizens to the U.S. At risk is both the sovereignty and economy of the United States of America. Have you been putting off a donation to the Center? As 2008 begins, your support is vital to insure that the Center can continue to inform and educate with this website and our communications program. This is where you find facts instead of the fantasies offered by environmentalists, liberal politicians, and other power-grabbers. A donation via this site is a secure procedure. While efforts to create a North American Union that would meld Canada, the United States, and Mexico into one national entity have and will continue to evoke strong opposition from Americans who value our national sovereignty, I suspect that many Americans have looked at the map and wondered why Canada is a separate nation? Canada’s sovereignty is beyond question, but it often seems to me that the most natural North American union would occur if Canadians decided to become part of the United States. It may surprise you to know there is even a Canadian group called United North America that advocates unification. Check out http://www.unitednorthamerica.org. There is any number of good reasons for the Canadian Provinces to become States and they are not lost on some Canadians. I am confident they would be warmly welcomed if they elected to become part of our national system. For most Americans, Canada is that nation to the north with whom we share a long and historically safe border. Its history, culture, political system, and much else are mostly unknown. I got to thinking about this while reading an interesting book, "Uneasy Neighbors: Canada, the USA and the Dynamics of State, Industry, and Culture", by David T. Jones and David Kilgour. Jones is a retired U.S. senior Foreign Service officer who served as a political minister counselor at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa from 1992 to 1996. Kilgour has had a distinguished career in Canadian federal politics as a Member of Parliament and served as the Deputy Speaker of the House. Over the course of twenty-six years, he also served as Secretary of State for Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. These two have an encyclopedic knowledge of their respective nations, laying out the facts regarding both in a way that permits for serious comparisons. They begin by saying, "On a geographic basis, there is no reason for the existence of two countries in the northern portion of North America." It is worth noting that approximately 85 to 90 percent of the Canadian population lies within 200 miles or less of the U.S. border. Canada is called the frozen north with good reason. Much of it is uninhabitable. With most of the population living so close, it is inevitable that Canadians also share what passes for American culture. Indeed, many Canadians are among American’s favorite entertainers. Canada boosts a rich literary tradition as well and, of course, we share a common language. Jones and Kilgour point out that, among other commonalities, Canada is very high tech, sharing a common technology from automobiles to plumbing to computers with the U.S. "Moreover, doing business—bureaucratic as well as economic—is easy in Canada." We also share a North American communications grid with the same electrical voltage. So the question of merging with America—one that can only be made by Canadians—comes down to questions of their pride in their nation as a separate entity and their attitude toward the superpower to the south of them. In that regard, it must be said that Canadians have some stereotypes about Americans that are widely held throughout the world. "Canadians view Americans as insufferably arrogant and indifferent to the interests of any citizen except a U.S. one. Americans are insular, self-centered, and hyperpatriotic flag-wavers." Fear not, polls inevitably demonstrate that Canadians generally like Americans. "They do not, however, want to be like Americans." There are differences, but they are mostly matters of style dictated by the different governmental structures the two nations adopted. From the day the U.S. Constitution became the law of the land the nation has emphasized unity. We fought a Civil War to preserve the Union. Canada, by contrast, "has tolerated an almost unprecedented level of discontent, separatism, and alienation between its national government and both provinces and regions…" The result is that "the Quebec problem" has long been the defining national issue in Canada with many Quebeckers still wanting their own sovereignty. Further exacerbating Canada’s problems is the way, there is an "inner" and "outer" Canada because Ontario and Quebec are the two most populous provinces and control the political life of the nation. The tensions this generates are real and likely to get worse. There’s not enough space to get into the differences between our governmental systems. Suffice it to say that the Prime Minister as a member of the three party leaders holds all the real political power. Party discipline is such that "outer" Canadian voters have little input regarding issues of importance to the "inner" population. Elected representatives must vote the party line and the upper body of Parliament, the Senate, is appointed by the PM. The checks and balances that require compromise and consensus in the U.S. governmental system have no counterpart in Canada. Despite this, Canadians have great faith in government while Americans traditionally regard it as a necessary evil. I suspect that voters in Manitoba or Saskatchewan could get used to having their vote really count for something in the American Congress. Getting past the machinery of Canadian government, its history, and understandable sense of national pride, the fact remains that there would be many benefits for Canadians to become part of an expanded United States of America and, conversely, many benefits for Americans as well. It will always have to be their choice and I hope they join their future to ours someday. If fifty separate republics, the United States, can make it work, they can too. Can’t get enough insight per week here? Well, then, visit our blog! Or pick up a copy of my book at Amazon.com
©
2008 Alan Caruba. |
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Mexico is working very hard to provide the seaports for goods shipped more cheaply there than to American ports. They would then be transported via a super highway from the Texas-Mexico border to a Mexico owned and operated customs port in Kansas. Presently, some 40% of all imported goods arrive in the U.S. via the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Putting American dockworkers in the unemployment lines and harming our trucking industry is of little concern to our "neighbor" to the south.