Human Tidal Wave Spills Over Border
By all reports, the wave of illegal immigration across our nations southern border has accelerated threefold since President Bush announced his confusing guest worker proposal in January 2004. Just last week, estimates of unauthorized border crossings range from 10,000 daily, according to Glenn Spencer of American Border Patrol, to a shocking figure raised by Bill OReilly during the March 31 broadcast of The Radio Factor.
The Border Patrol now estimates that a million illegals are coming to the U.S. per month. Yes, that's per month, said the nations top talk show host.
This figure is entirely plausible, and in fact, may be on the low side as we are only considering the southern border. The U.S. boundary with Canada is considered even more porous than the frontier with Mexico.
Below the southern border, as NBC News reported on April 5th, the word is out: if you are arrested, youll simply be released. The jails are full, and 86 percent never show up in court. Even liberal apologist Tom Brokaw admitted during the broadcast that, Last year over 900,000 people were caught sneaking into the U.S. This year that number is up over 46 percent.
I do not in any way blame the people who flee poverty and hopelessness, to come to this rich nation. If I were a poor young man with no hope in Mexico, Id do the same thing: cross illegally. Most of us would do the same. While wed prefer of course to enter the U.S. legally, that option doesnt appear to be available.
And why not come here in droves? President Bush has literally invited the entire southern hemisphere to come to America, with a promise of legal status. President Vincente Fox of Mexico, long a pretentious advocate of open borders, has recently forged an arrangement with the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala to permit easier passage of foreign nationals through Mexico onward to the U.S.
In the past, Mexico demonstrated visible hypocrisy in "protecting" their southern border against encroachment by arresting and deporting intruders. This became a source of international embarrassment. Problem solved.
Fox as well, does not want Mexicos fleeing citizenry to become U.S. citizens, and has clearly stated his position: "We agree with the rejection of amnesty. These workers are not going to become American citizens, nor do they want U.S. citizenship. For that reason, the issue of amnesty is out."
What Fox and Bush wont discuss is the simple fact readily available to most people with more than a third-grade education: most everyone who comes here illegally from Mexico and other countries stays.
However, this chaotic, dangerous, costly, and duplicitous condition is now reaching critical mass. This isnt theory, or piggybacking on the growing number of authoritative articles documenting the recent explosion in border crossing, we Californians are living the experience every day. We all know the liquor stores or Home Depots where hundreds of day workers converge. The numbers have doubled and tripled in the past few months.
On the one hand, President Bush said the new guest-worker program "would bring millions of often-mistreated undocumented workers out of the shadows and into legal status as recognized contributors to the US economy. "
Yet in the same speech he double-stepped: "Granting amnesty encourages the violation of our laws, and perpetuates illegal immigration," Bush said. "America is a welcoming country, but citizenship must not be the automatic reward for violating the laws of America."
As a resident of California for 22 years, I can tell you firsthand that the number of illegal immigrants working strawberry fields in the South Orange County city of Irvine has increased dramatically in the past three months.
In the heart of high-tech Irvine with its impressive office buildings, sometimes antiseptic social sameness, and perfect landscaping, lay hundreds of acres of untouched, highly valuable real estate being used for massive strawberry fields, all requiring human hands to till and reap.
If you are of the disbelieving, come to the intersection of Alton and Muirlands between 7 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. any weekday. Upwards of 400 workers garbed in jeans, jackets, boots and headscarves perform backbreaking work picking and weeding the meticulously organized rows.
The workers cars are lined up along side the field. And theres not many "junkers." Most of the late model vehicles are pretty nice. Last year at this time, the number of migrant laborers was a third of this years total.
In a February 24, 2004 Christian Science Monitor column ("Border agents feel betrayed by Bush guest-worker plan"), correspondent Eilene Zimmerman said:
"The guest worker proposal would allow undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States to apply for a work permit for up to three years, if they can prove their employer could not find a US citizen willing to take the job. While the proposal is an attempt to reform ailing immigration policies, patrol agents feel the measure will only further undermine their effort at the border."
According to senior patrol agent Thane Gallagher, "I risk my life everyday dealing with people who would just as soon see us dead than submit to an arrest, and now we have the administration saying, 'We're going to legalize them anyway.' "You have no idea what this does to us."
And our indifferent state government wonders why California is broke!
State Sen. Tom McClintock recently submitted a bill that would have ended the policy of in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants. The legislation died in committee.
"This year, approximately 7,500 qualified California residents who would otherwise be attending California universities this year will be turned away and diverted to community colleges for lack of funds. Meanwhile, approximately the same number of illegal immigrants will receive the in-state tuition subsidy of up to $16,476 per year to attend those same universities -- at a cost between $45 million and $65 million."
A recent Orange County Register article described a teacher who has helped hundreds of immigrant mothers, some as young as 15, graduate from high school. Heres how the explosion in illegal immigrant children having babies is incentivized:
For most social service programs such as welfare and food stamps, if a person is here illegally, they are not eligible at all. But if an illegal immigrant has children born in the U.S., then a literal bounty of taxpayer-funded programs become available. The eligibility and entitlement amount depends upon the recipient familys income level.
The qualification rules are highly flexible and it is well-understood that most people who apply for benefits will receive something. For instance, the policy at Health and Human Services is not to report an illegal immigrant who comes in for Aid to Dependent Children.
Step into a checkout line at grocery stores such as Vons or Ralphs once a week and you are bound to witness the cashier tabulating qualified items purchased with state-paid food vouchers or coupons from the popular Women Infant Children (WIC) program. These are immigrants who have been deemed "low-income mothers," which is just about everyone who applies.
The number of easy-to-obtain giveaways defies explanation. Illegal immigrants now qualify for low-income housing subsidies. Immigrant children may enroll in public school without questions of their residency. The substantial majority of new immigrant parents pay no state taxes, nor do they have a social security number that would track reportable income. Thus they do not file state or federal tax returns, and California employees who do so, pick up the tab.
Here in Southern California, we have the Los Angeles Times, a once relevant newspaper that now caterwauls in a never-ending language of condescension, while burying the story of one of the planets largest migratory movements of people in human history. Those who seek journalistic honesty free from leftist ideology have already cancelled their subscriptions to the self-impressed Times, and consider the paper a lost cause.
Increasing numbers of informed readers are going to the internet and reading newspapers online. After all, not to report on the explosive acceleration of illegal entry into the U.S. through Mexico is to evade the biggest story in national politics.
For instance, News 13 (KOLD-TV, Tucson) reported on March 29th: "Tent cities are in the works to hold illegal immigrants captured near the Arizona-Mexico border. Authorities are catching a skyrocketing number of people; at least 30 percent more in the last five months. On Sunday, March 27th, 3,067 people were apprehended in the Tucson sector alone. The Tucson sector shares 261 miles of border with Mexico and stretches from Yuma County to the New Mexico state line. "
Or, surprisingly, theres the New York Times on March 29th, describing cattle rancher Bud Strom and his 1,000 acre ranch 95 miles south of Tucson: "The border is so porous that we probably get a thousand people a week coming through the ranch it's a sieve," said Strom, 72.
In one day on March 27th, two groups of illegal aliens (totaling 126) arrived at the Armys Ft. Huachuca Military Reservation. One of the Border Patrol Agents was overheard saying, "We're headed for a record year."
On March 30th, the Arizona Daily Star reported that the Border Patrol busted three large groups of illegal entrants that weekend, apprehending 484 people.
The numbers are staggering. Anyone who cannot make the connection between increasing demands to raise taxes to pay for services received by the roughly one million people per month who cross our borders seeking the promise of myriad incentives and giveaways, either doesnt care, or have decided to stay quiet and let the American people subsidize a rich source of cheap labor that can be easily exploited.
Certainly there are two people who qualify: President Bush and challenger John Kerry, who screech at each other over "jobs," while businesses continue to lay off thousands or send their operations to Mexico and China. As the flood of humanity, estimated at 250,000 per week, pours over the borders, chasing hundreds of federal and state-paid incentives free money many who come realize that they dont even have to work.
As Fred Francis stated in the revealing April 5th NBC broadcast, At this rate, well over a million illegals will slip by this year. Mixed in will be many thousands of OTMs (non-Mexicans). Almost all looking for work, but some will be bad guys using this enormous hole in the homeland security fence."
If some in the mainstream media are finally reporting the truth, why cant our leaders?
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within." -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Statesman, Philosopher and Orator 106-43 B.C. Patrick Mallon can be reached at [email protected]
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