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Real Independence Means Secure Borders As we celebrate our nation’s independence, it is worth keeping in mind that real independence depends on having secure borders. A nation that cannot or will not protect itself from a massive and intentional invasion for the purpose of changing its population and politics is a nation that will not exist very long. The world’s elites, the jetsetters, the United Nations types who keep babbling about being citizens of the world and scoff at notions of national sovereignty, who deride a requirement to speak the language of the nation, and talk of multiculturalism when clearly not all cultures are equal, are a minority. The rest of us live in a specific town or city, in a specific State, in what we proudly call the United States of America. There are many issues the forthcoming national election will address, but if illegal immigration, a broken immigration system, and the deliberate invasion of America by Mexico with the aim of changing our population and policies, is not among our priorities in 2008, then our independence, our sovereignty, is imperiled.
In his new book, “The New Case Against Immigration”, Mark Krikorian presents a cogent, moderate case for the necessity to assert control over legal and illegal immigration. President Lyndon Johnson said it best in the 1960s, “The days of unlimited immigration are past.” The problem is that, in reality, unlimited immigration is the order of the day in America today! The problem is a Congress hell-bent on extending yet another amnesty to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, most Mexican, in America, thus opening the floodgates, as with the previous amnesty, for the arrival of their entire family, despite the fact that many lack the most fundamental skills required of any legal immigrant seeking citizenship. In a nation with more than 300 million citizens in a world hurtling toward a population of 7 billion, the failure to get control of our borders can so transform the America that it can disappear. As Kirkorian says, “Modern America has outgrown mass immigration.” At the heart of the immigration debate that has been raging nationwide has been the huge influx of illegal aliens from Mexico. “Mexicans now account for some 31 percent of the total immigrant population—legal and illegal, naturalized and non-citizen—and accounted for fully 43 percent of the growth of the total immigrant population in the 1990s.” Mexico, a nation still angry over the loss of its former territories, California and the southwestern States, has hit upon a plan to reclaim them and, through the sheer power of demographics, population and birthrates, lay claim to the whole of the nation. This plan is so deliberate that just one statistic is enough to demonstrate it. “Mexico’s network of consulates in the United States is without parallel in the world: fifty-six consulates and consular agencies (or honorary consuls, who perform consular services on a part-time basis) in twenty-six states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, (is) the largest network anywhere.” By contrast, “The United States…has only nine consulates, plus thirteen consular agencies, in Mexico.” This network has evolved into an advocacy and educational role that is specifically forbidden by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the international treaty that governs such matters. It forbids any interference “in the internal affairs of the (host) state.” Despite this, this network of consulates distributes textbooks to American schools, supports lobbying by various Mexican-American organizations to challenge and change our immigration laws, and purports to speak for all Hispanics seeking to enter the United States or to remain here despite having overstayed their visas or simply entered illegally. Many States, unable to get the federal government to perform its duty with regard to the protection of our borders and the deportation of illegal aliens using our schools, our hospitals, and other social service benefits, have passed resolutions to limit or deny such services and have been overwhelmingly supported by voters, many of whom are Mexican-American citizens. The other side of the illegal immigration issue is the way our existing immigration services are totally overwhelmed when it comes to actually performing the security function of stopping visitors or immigrants before they ever get on a plane or other means of getting here. “In 2005,” Kirkorian notes, “about 800 visa officers issued about six million visas to foreigners, an average of 7,500 visas per officers, roughly one every fifteen minutes.” Kirkorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The data on which he relies is some of the best offered by any organization concerned about the effect of out of control immigration into the United States. A panoply of such organizations now exists to get Washington, D.C. to address the issues. The failure to stem the tide of immigration into America, not just from Mexico but from around the world, will ultimately undermine our national values, culture, and laws. It will ultimately steal America from the generations who came to a very different nation at a time when they were needed, who fought to protect it, and from present-day Americans and their descendents who still cherish it. Don’t miss the fun of my daily blog. Read now by visitors from around the world, it is a regular feature on CanadaFreePress.com and Borderfirereport.com. It’s full of timely and lively comment on events, personalities and issues of the day. As one of those old codgers who welcomes his Social Security check every month, even it’s only good for some groceries and a fill-up at the pump, I can understand why, in 1935, striving to dig out of the Depression, finding a way to help insure against poverty among older workers was seen as a worthy thing to do. There’s a catch though. In the 1930’s and 40’s, most of the nation’s workforce was already dead by the eligibility age of 65. Today, the average life expectancy of Americans has reached 78 and a large part of the business and health sector is devoted to people living well past 65. It’s what I call the tyranny of demographics, the science of tracking population trends.
You don’t have to be an economist to know that individually or as a family, spending more than you earn eventually will get you in deep financial trouble. Well, the United States of America is in deep financial trouble. Andrew L. Yarrow is vice president and Washington director of Public Agenda. He teaches U.S. history at American University. He formerly was a reporter for The New York Times. His latest book is “Forgive Us Our Debts: The Intergenerational Dangers of Fiscal Irresponsibility.” The odds are that the lawmakers and executive branch of our government will ignore what he says in this excellent book. To me, Congress looks more and more like a kindergarten class of kids who haven’t a clue and even less of a desire to solve deal the problems they have created. The problem, of course, is that they are politicians whose only concern is the next election. They have concluded that socialist economics, the redistribution of money, and lots of discretionary projects in their home states and districts, is the way to stay in office. Having lived through much of the last century and into this one, I can verify that Yarrow is right on the money (pun intended!) when he says that, “Until the 1970s, during peacetime, and over the long haul Americans basically succeeded at keep deficits low.” Today is a very different story. Yarrow points out that “the United States will be nearly $50 trillion in debt by Election Day 2008. It has promised another $50 trillion or so in explicit and implicit benefits to be paid in the future—a number that has almost doubled during the presidency of George W. Bush; in fiscal parlance, these are “unfunded liabilities,” which businesses and state and local governments are forced to report on their books—but the government is not.” It adds up to a half-million in debt for every American household! Worse yet, “these numbers exclude an additional $2 trillion in state and local government debt and unfunded liabilities for employee pension and health care benefits. They exclude American’s $2 trillion in consumer debt and $10 trillion in total personal debt, which rose to 130 percent of disposable income in 2007.” Five times between 2001 and 2007, Congress voted to raise the national debt ceiling by nearly $4 trillion. The ratio of debt to national income (gross domestic product) rose from 57 percent to 66 percent in the four years beginning in 2001. During the same time period, Congress enacted six tax cuts during the first five years of the Bush administration. The result was the loss of approximately $1 trillion in lost revenues. In actual terms, the Bush tax cuts for the average middle-income worker earning $56,000 in 2004 about $1,200. Now ask yourself how much that actually purchased. The answer is not much. The average $300 rebate Congress pushed through this year to keep taxpayers happy and stupid, and to pump up retail sales was and is meaningless. To cover the difference between what it takes in and spends, America borrows and borrows and borrows. “In the 2008 fiscal year the U.S. government is projected to pay $261 billion in taxpayer dollars in interest payments,” says Yarrow. This expense “is more than the federal government currently spends on education, homeland security, justice, science, natural resources, and the Department of State and the Treasury put together, or on the Iraq War.” The government also “borrows” the Social Security surplus to pay for its operating costs and to mask the true size of federal deficits. Meanwhile, the Democrat Party is churning out news releases criticizing Republican John McCain for wanting to “privatize Social Security” and thus begin to bring some fiscal sanity to a hopelessly crippled program that depends on taking more and more out of today’s generation of workers’ paychecks in order to send money to a huge and growing segment of retired senior citizens like myself. I could go on describing the vast imbalances that exist between what the nation earns, what it borrows, and what it spends, but that would be boring and incredibly frightening at the same time. There is ample blame for both parties, but what worries me most of all is that neither party has shown any real indication of wanting to address this most fundamental problem regarding the near and long-term future of the nation. Freedom is not free. That’s why the Center asks for your support by way of a donation so that we can maintain our communications programs to educate and inform visitors to this site and to the many news and opinion sites that post our weekly commentaries. Give what you and thank you
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Real independence means secure borders. We don’t have them. What we have is a porous excuse for borders, a federal government that has not and still does not take our national security seriously enough to fix our immigration system, and a lack of will by Congress to call a moratorium on the influx of both legal and illegal immigration.
Does anyone doubt that the United States has some serious problems regarding the funding of “entitlement” programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Is there anyone who isn’t somewhat concerned about the growing indebtedness of the nation as the deficit—the amount of revenue between what the federal government takes in and what it spends—grows larger by the hour?