As the Numbers Surge

Border Incidents Increase in Arizona (Part I of II)

By Janice Kephart December 2012 Border Incidents Increase in Arizona

Janice Kephart is the Director of National Security Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Data gathered by a private organization has documented a sharp rise in illegal entries along the Arizona border.

The non-governmental volunteer group Secure Border Intelligence uses various official and unofficial sources, including hidden cameras, to compile a list of incidents along a portion of Arizona's border with Mexico. All data are verifiable, but confidential, given the sensitive nature of the work.

Secure Border Intelligence's footage was used in the Center for Immigration Studies video "Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border 3: A Day in the Life of a Drug Smuggler" (viewable on the right panel).

This Memorandum attempts to catalogue and analyze the current sharp rise in illegal entries since August in the context of what the president and Congress should consider as the nation launches into another post-campaign season of "let's talk immigration reform".

Illegal Activity Surging since August. From August 1 to September 23, 2012, more than 1,000 incidents occurred in 915 "hot spots" in a small area stretching from the central Arizona border to about 70 miles north to the Interstate 8 east-west highway, crossing north over the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation to the Barry Goldwater Firing Range and into the Sonoran Desert National Monument. There have been 3,275 incidents from August 1 to October 19. In contrast, just 509 incidents were logged from January through July.

"Incidents" are defined as groups of individuals involved in illegal activity, such as those on foot being smuggled by coyotes, drug packers on foot, drug vehicles operating in tandem, ultralight planes dropping drugs to a group of waiting vehicles, or even a pack of lookout scouts crossing in preparation for another series of drug loads in the near future. Incidents can range in size from a handful to as many as 90 individuals at once. One incident in late October included 200 individuals amassing just south of the border and then dispersing into smaller groups to cross.

As we reported in a recent blog, on October 2, Agent Nicholas Ivie died immediately after being shot in the head by a fellow agent due to confusion surrounding a group of individuals who had set off a sensor about six miles east of Bisbee, Ariz. With bounties on Border Patrol agents and a surge in numbers, it is almost predictable that agents operating in such a tense atmosphere could make such a tragic and fatal mistake.

While the Border Patrol is not apprehending in the traditionally heavily trafficked area of Casa Grande and Gila Bend about 80 miles north of the border at east-west corridor I-8, sometimes they are tracking as many as seven groups at a time in this area via air support. Primarily working this corridor on the ground to fill in the gap left by the Border Patrol is the "West Desert Task Force".

The Bureau of Land Management leads often, and operations include representatives from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area force, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and Pinal and Maricopa County sheriff's offices. Most often these operations occur at night. When operating, the task force often is picking up two incidents per day just between Gila Bend and Casa Grande. This could mean there are actually up to six incidents a night, if the conventional estimate is correct that law enforcement catches just one-third of actual activity in the vicinity of the border.

Liken These Five Parts to Illegal Immigration Consequences of Spain, France, Germany & U. S. A.

The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part V of V)

Britain too is a small island, yet other British government ministers tell the British people that they must embrace mass immigration, and that

it is simply racist for British people to oppose the altering of their country’s social, cultural and economic fabric. What makes the Caribbean and South Atlantic islanders noble in defending their culture, and the British racist in defending theirs? It is largely about being a minority, and being outnumbered. But western people are a global minority. There are more citizens of either India and China than all the people of Europe, North America and Australasia put together. There are as many people in Bangladesh and Pakistan together as in the US.

In the developing world, there are simply no significant equivalents of Europe and the US, where around 10% of people are foreign born, or Canada and Australia where the proportion is around 25%. The foreign born in the developing world rarely exceed 1% of the population.

Indeed, developing countries have been the most draconian in clamping down on immigration. In 2002, Malaysia started forcibly returning some of the thousands of illegal immigrants from Indonesia, while India put soldiers on its borders with Bangladesh to force illegal Bangladeshi immigrants back home. Western countries do not cane illegal immigrants or point a gun at them, but provide them with free immigration lawyers, free shelter, free food, free schooling and free healthcare – then express disappointment when they are reluctant to leave.

Several countries outside the developed west actively discriminate in favour of their own nationals. Saudi Arabia has adopted an official policy of “Arabisation” of many commercial sectors; Nigeria pursues “indigenisation” of its engineering industry, and Zimbabwe’s agricultural policy has similar motivations. In 2002, India began issuing residency cards to the 20 million “people of Indian origin” currently living in the west, specifically writing the legislation to exclude any white people born in India. Meanwhile, the South Korean government insists it is not a nation of immigrants, but an ethnic group with shared history and culture, while Japan has no desire to dilute its unique identity by opening the floodgates of mass immigration.

The wellspring of diversity

Pro-immigrationists tell everyone else they should “celebrate diversity” within our nations, while they work to destroy the diversity between nations. Small ethnic communities enrich a culture, but the question of scale is crucial. If it continues, unfettered mass immigration would simply stir all the different nations into one indistinguishable global melting pot.

For myself, I like Ireland because it is Irish, I like Sweden because it is Swedish, I like Vietnam because of the Vietnamese, and I like Japan because it is Japanese. Yet I like diversity; I enjoy (for example) London’s Chinatown and appreciate the economic and cultural contributions of Britain’s Indian community, but that does not extend to a wish to open my country’s borders – as the People Flow report suggests – to 1.3 billion Chinese and 1.1 billion Indians. In that case, Britain would no longer be Britain.

I leave the last word to another universally respected author, who struggled against another ideology that tried to transform the culture of a nation against the will of the people, and tried to make all nations under its control the same. In accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked at length about the struggles of people around the world to retain their culture and identity, and then alluded to mass immigration, the multicultural ideology and the global melting pot:

“In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilisation. I do not agree with this opinion...the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.”

The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part IV of V)

The intolerances of western liberalism

The People Flow authors make a mistake common among pro-immigration advocates: seeing a nation as nothing more than a geographical entity with a functioning economy and a legal system. But a nation is first and foremost its people. It is the French people that define what France is, not lines on a map.

The pro-immigrationists are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country the right to sustain its own culture. British-born white people, the progeny of the generation who survived the Nazi attempt to obliterate Britain as an independent nation state, now account for only 60% of the population of London. England has for more than 1500 years been a Christian country – its flag is a cross, its head of state is head of the national church – but in its second city Birmingham, Islam is now more worshipped than Christianity. In two boroughs of London, whites are already in the minority, and they are expected to become a minority in several cities in the coming decade.

If current trends continue, the historically indigenous population of Britain will become a minority by around 2100. Islam is the fastest growing religion, and much immigration to Britain comes from Muslims fleeing Muslim lands – around 75% of intercontinental asylum seekers are Muslim. But where are the limits? In an extreme example, would British Christians have a right not to live in an Islamic majority state?

For an answer to this, consider what that most liberal of American writers, Gore Vidal, said in a lecture in Dublin in 1999:

“A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. But now with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.”

But at what point are people of the west allowed to say that enough is enough, it is time for us to be allowed to preserve our culture? This is an issue of almost total, mind-numbing hypocrisy among western governments and political elites. They defend the inalienable right of other peoples – the Palestinians, Tibetans, native Americans – to defend their culture, but not the right of their own peoples.

It is vital to emphasise that mass immigration and the remarkably intolerant ideology of multiculturalism are exclusively western phenomena. Indeed, the striking thing about the global immigration debate in the west is its determined parochialism. If people in India, China, or Africa were asked whether they have a right to oppose mass immigration on such a scale that it would transform their culture, the answer would be clear. Yet uniquely among the 6 billion people on the planet, westerners – the approximately 800 million in western Europe, North America and Australasia – are expected by the proponents of mass immigration and multiculturalism to abandon any right to define or shape their own society.

This liberal hypocrisy was perfectly illustrated in 2002, when the British government gave full UK passports to 200,000 people living in British overseas territories, such as St. Helena, Montserrat and the Turks & Caicos islands. The inhabitants were allowed to live in Britain, but there was no reciprocal right for British people to live there. The justification for this one-sidedness was given in the House of Lords by the foreign office minister Valerie Amos:

“The right of abode is non-reciprocal. The territories which fall within the scope of the Bill are for the most part small islands. In consultations on the content of the Bill the governments of the territories concerned made clear that granting British and European citizens the right of abode in their territories would risk fundamentally altering the social, cultural and economic fabric of the territories.”

The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part III of V)

Mass immigration cannot be stopped

The second assumption is that mass illegal immigration cannot be stopped. This is demonstrably false. In 1924, the US government passed legislation that effectively closed the door on European immigration, opening the door to immigration from poor countries with new legislation only in 1965. Australia has shown in recent years that tough policies can reduce illegal immigration to virtually zero. The Netherlands and Denmark have cut back asylum applications by around a half in the last year and cut many other forms of immigration abuse, but the political elite only found the will to do this when their voters turned in desperation to far right parties.

Pro-immigration campaigners who tell the people of Europe that “mass immigration cannot be stopped, so it must be welcomed” are adopting the policies of despots through history of quelling opposition by telling opponents that resistance is futile. The evidence is otherwise. All that is needed is political will.

Mass immigration is mostly beneficial to the host society

The third assumption is that mass immigration is beneficial to the host society. This is at best contentious. In a relatively empty land, such as Australia, Canada or the US, the desire to boost the population via mass immigration can make sense. But in Europe, mass immigration only makes crowded countries even more crowded and unpleasant to live in. It can also create severe problems of coexistence between communities of people forced into unwilling proximity.

Mass immigration can also be very detrimental to the sending countries. In a November 2002 report, the World Bank said that Africa had lost a third of its professionals in recent decades as western nations reduced immigration controls for skilled workers, and that the brain drain was delaying economic growth in the continent, increasing the wealth divide between the west and the rest. Promoting mass immigration just creates a world where everyone with education and energy seeks to move to, or is poached by, the west. This retards development where it is most needed and leaves poor countries in a state of dependency.

However, some particularly failing societies are turning to mass emigration to solve the problems they are unable to solve for themselves. In 2000, the then president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the country was going to feed, clothe, house and employ the expected doubling of her population by 2050. She replied: “We’ll send them to America.

Globalisation will take that problem away, as you free up all factors of production, also labour. There’ll be free movement, country to country. Globalisation in its purest form should not have any boundaries, so small countries with big populations should be able to send population to countries with big boundaries and small populations.”

But most immigration to Europe is not from full countries to empty ones, for the simple reason that most of Europe is still more densely populated than most of the developing world. Most of the people migrating to Britain each year are in fact moving from a less to a more densely populated land.

Mass immigration is a right not a privilege

The fourth (and most philosophical) assumption is that immigration is a right of individuals, but that societies as a whole have no significant rights to decide who lives among them, except on grounds of “security”. This is the founding principle of the People Flow report, and it is thoroughly wrong. Immigration has always been a privilege, not a right; throughout history, societies have always had the fundamental right to determine who should belong to them. It is hypocritical to profess belief in democracy, then deny people any democratic control over immigration policy, one of the crucial influences on a society’s development.

The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part II of V)

The illusions of immigrationism

The approach to mass immigration embodied in the Demos/openDemocracy pamphlet rests on four assumptions, each of which is open to serious challenge.

Mass immigration is normal

The Demos/openDemocracy vision tells us that the instinct “to migrate between different environments is part of our inheritance”. This approach may be described as ‘immigration-apologetics’, which regards present trends as historically unexceptional and thus not to be resisted – although it does graciously admit that revolutions in transport and telecommunications do mean that the scale of current immigration is without precedent.

Of course, there has always been immigration, especially of an ‘invasive’ sort which was resisted by wars as people sacrificed their lives to defend their way of life. Arabs conquered their way across North Africa; Moguls invaded India; Romans, Vikings and Normans invaded Britain, killing or driving away those who stood in the way of their migration.

People from China and Korea moved to Japan, taking land from the indigenous Ainu. Over a 200-year period, 55 million Europeans migrated to North America and Australasia, committing genocide against those who already lived there and obliterating the societies of the native Americans, the Maoris and the aborigines.

But even unaided by war and genocide, what is currently happening is indeed far from normal. A hundred years ago, most people in the west rarely moved even to the next village; now whole villages from Bangladesh are relocating to northern England. People once, at most, moved to their neighbouring country, one often culturally and ethnically similar, whereas now they move around the world to radically different cultures whose populations have a completely separate history and character.

Immigration is historically rare. The fact that there were virtually no border controls until the 20th century illustrates this: there was no need to control borders because so few people ever wanted to cross them. Virtually no society anywhere in the world throughout history has ever wanted to attract immigration for its own sake – the white settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are virtually empty lands built on immigration; as such, they are extraordinary historical anomalies.

The historical rarity of immigration allowed humanity to evolve different languages, cultures, customs and family names unique to each society. Human immobility is such that intensely localised regional accents emerge, with, for example, villages in Ireland just a few miles apart having distinguishable speech patterns. None of this would have happened in a world of mass immigration.

In the last quarter century, immigration has doubled, so that over 3% of people on the planet now live outside the land of their birth. Contrary to People Flow‘s claims, most of this migration increase is in the developed world; the numbers have actually decreased in the developing world in this period. People flow in all directions, but there is now just one dominant flow: south to north. The UN says that 2.3 million people are moving from the developing world to the west every year.

This scale is unprecedented. There is more immigration from the non-west to the US now than there was from Europe at its peak of emigration a century ago. Britain gave shelter to 200,000 Huguenots and 100,000 Jews, but never in modern history has Britain’s population growth been almost exclusively driven by immigration; in the past, population growth was almost exclusively self-generated. Since the second world war, immigration from the ‘third world’ has increased the British population by 5 million more than it would otherwise have been, and current levels of immigration are predicted to push the current figure of 59 million up to 68 million by 2030.

An Open Letter to America:                                                                        12/16/2012

When a man enters a building with a gun and starts shooting innocent people the first thing the frightened and defenseless people do is call 911 for help. The person answering the call quickly sends men and women with guns to come and save them. How is it then that the gun is blamed for the crime? The gun is nothing more than a tool. In the hands of a deranged person the gun is dangerous and can cause death and destruction. In the hands of a stable competent person the gun is protective and can swiftly end an attacker's assault.

The real problem is deranged people. So, if we are going to ban something we should ban deranged people. This, of course, is not possible, but at least we would be focused on the real source of the problem.

A gun is not good or bad, it is inanimate. The person holding the gun is responsible for whether the gun is used for good or evil. By banning guns the only thing we will accomplish is insuring fewer good guys have guns. The bad guys will always find ways to get guns.

Even if we could rid the world of guns, do you believe that would stop deranged people from killing?  Was there peace and harmony prior to the invention of the gun? Hardly; mankind has been killing each other from the beginning of time. The weapon has never been the problem. The weapon can be used to maim and kill or protect and save. Man is always the source of the action, not the weapon.

In China, a deranged man slashed 22 school children with a knife; there has been several of these stabbings recently. Would banning knives stop these deranged people from acting irrational and dangerously? No, deranged people intent on harming others will use whatever is available to them. If deranged people start running their victims over with cars will we then hear a cry for banning cars?

No matter what society does, there will always be deranged people who act in ways we find horrifying and inexplicable.

These senseless and highly emotional murders motivate us to want to 'do something'. Let's not make matters worse by taking guns out of the hands of people who are already on site, or could be, and capable of stopping a deranged person who has decided to kill innocent people.

Respectfully,

Steve MacFarlane Veyo, Utah

The Folly of Mass Immigration (Part I of V)

Anthony Browne is environment editor of the Times. He has previously been economics correspondent for the BBC and the Observer, and deputy business editor and health editor at the Observer. He is author of The Euro: should Britain join? (Icon Books) and Do we need mass immigration? (Civitas). His series of articles on immigration in the Times, led to the Home Secretary denouncing him in parliament as “bordering on fascism”. In fact, a former Labour party member he has only ever voted Labour in general elections.

The argument of the ‘People Flow’ report that mass immigration is normal, irreversible and beneficial to host societies is a damaging illusion. Rather, the current experience of developed western countries, faced with huge inflows of people – refugees, asylum-seekers, economic migrants – from poorer parts of the world, is unprecedented and damaging. The process can and should be stopped, in the interests of the rich diversity of nations it will otherwise crush.

There are two ways to tackle serious social problems: evading them by linguistic trickery, or confronting them openly and honestly. One is easy, though it merely postpones the day of reckoning. The other is difficult, but it alone holds out the promise of a solution.

Europe has a problem of illegal mass immigration, much of it in the guise of unfounded asylum claims. Europe can either address it directly, or just legalise and relabel it. The new Demos/openDemocracy report on migration, People Flow, embraces wholeheartedly the easy, evasive, relabeling route. Mass migration from the developing world to Europe cannot be stopped, it argues, so it should be taken out of the hands of the illegal people-trafficking industry, legalised and facilitated, in order to “harness the positive effects of people movement.” The report seeks to “replace the illusion of control with the concept of flow management.”

From this premise, the report makes many vaguely sensible suggestions for legalising and promoting mass migration. Its proposals imply the “free movement of migrants in and out of Europe”. This, of course, is an open door policy implying mass immigration without limits – a process that would enormously increase mass immigration to Europe from the poor countries of the world, and transform Europe beyond recognition.

A failure of vision

The desire to regularise, and thus sanction, irregular immigration is founded on four assumptions. First, that mass immigration is a normal part of human life; second, that it cannot be controlled; third, that almost all immigration is beneficial to the host society; and fourth, that immigration is a right not a privilege and that the host society has no right to choose who can live amongst it.

Together, these assumptions take the politically fashionable and emotionally comfortable route of focusing almost exclusively on the needs and desires of actual and potential immigrants, and almost completely ignoring the needs and desires of both Europeans and sending countries. Thus, they fall into the trap of so much of the current immigration debate – failing to imagine and project a vision of the sort of world that it might be desirable to create in the long term.

The active promotion of mass immigration does nothing to stem its causes. On the contrary, by fuelling the brain drain from the developing to the developed world, it increases the former’s dependency on the latter. It intensifies a world of flux, divided families, splintered communities, cultural alienation and ethnic resentments – a world where those who can, live in the west, while those who cannot live in the rest.

A different, humane vision is needed, one of a world of “sustainable societies”. This involves capacity building in the developing world so that most people are able to live in their society rather than feeling they have to leave it. Such a world will be enabled to celebrate the diversity between nations, rather than demographically engineering nations to look alike.

Misplaced Compassion

In a letter, Milford Patch reader Paul Carlin explains how illegal immigration offers a perfect example of how priorities are misplaced in Massachusetts. Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt of a letter submitted by Milford Patch reader Paul Carlin, who grew up in Milford and now lives and works in a neighboring town.

We have many problems in Massachusetts. Many are connected at the roots. The people in power in our Commonwealth have and apply compassion for the wrong people. From lawmakers to the court system to union officials the system works to protect some.

Those who have the protection take advantage; while those who require and deserve protection remain vulnerable and ultimately become victims.

Illegal immigration illustrates this perfectly. Citizens lose jobs, business owners are undercut for contracts, and restaurant patrons are exposed to health risks because our officials won’t protect us by obeying and enforcing the law. Schools are crowded, budgets are tight and students are held back while teachers spend an unfair amount of time with those who don’t want to learn.

The judicial system also paints a grim picture. Judges are far too lenient on multiple offenders, violent offenders and even young offenders committing adult crimes. They worry about the rights of offenders who are returning to society rather than society. Lawmakers pretend to concern themselves with obesity rates of young people while many parents are afraid to let the kids play at the park, or even walk home after school.

Public sector unions protect teachers based on tenure, not results. Quasi-public authorities pay pensions and sick pay of outrageous proportions. Public contracts are practically written by the companies that have already been promised the jobs with a wink and a nod, and are never questioned by those who serve to protect the public.

The reason all of this continues is because there is no accountability and no consequence. This is by design and it is disgusting. Many people working in the public sector are out for themselves and don’t care what that means for the rest of us.

This is the result of generations of single-party political dominance. It is the result of voting for the letter after a candidate’s name, instead of voting for a candidate and their beliefs. It is the result of voting for the candidate that your boss or union rep tells you to vote for. Or worse yet, it is the result of not caring enough to vote at all.

I was very disappointed in the last round of elections in Massachusetts. Not because of who won and who lost but because it was clear to me that the establishment got exactly whom they wanted at almost every turn.

I want elected and appointed officials to have compassion for those who follow the rules. Compassion for those who help not hurt. I want protection for the victims, not the perpetrators. And I want the protection before people become victims. I want social programs to assist those that truly need and deserve assistance. The need or warrant alone should not be enough.

I will be voting again next year. I will be voting based on the records, experiences and beliefs of the people running for each office. I do not have much hope. My disappointment and disenchantment remain. But I will not let that turn to contempt or negligence.

This is my home and I want it back.

Honor Caesar Chavez's Legacy by Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration

By Tom Tancredo 10/10/2012

President Obama’s decision to honor Latino Labor Icon Caesar Chavez with a national monument was no doubt intended to try to draw Hispanic voters to his cause. Even the mainstream media recognized the obvious timing with headlines like “Obama dedicates Cesar Chavez monument, courts Latino voters” in Reuters and “With Cesar Chavez monument, Obama reaches out to Latinos” in the Los Angeles Times. Obama’s speech dedicating the monument did not mention immigration policy, but many commentators instantly tied Chavez’s legacy to liberal immigration policies.

Chavez’s slogan “si se puede” was taken up by the pro-amnesty protesters and 2006 and 2007, and the English translation—Yes We Can—became Barack Obama’s campaign slogan. Writing in the Huffington Post, Jeff Biggers argues that “Cesar Chavez's ‘si se puede’ spirit is alive and well in Arizona today … in the fight against SB 1070's ‘show me your papers’ provision.”

Ironically, however, Caesar Chavez was a firm opponent of illegal immigration. Chavez was first and foremost a labor organizer, founding the National Farm Workers Association which later became the United Farm Workers. He organized legal American workers, and when they struck, the employers would often employ illegal immigrants as scabs. As Ruben Navarrette writes in CNN.com,

“According to many historical accounts, Chavez ordered union members to call the Immigration and Naturalization Service and report illegal aliens who were working in the fields so that they could be deported. Some UFW officials were also known to picket INS offices to demand a crackdown on illegal aliens.”

Navarrette continues, “Under the supervision of Chavez's cousin, Manuel, UFW members tried at first to persuade Mexicans not to cross the border. One time when that didn't work, they physically attacked and beat them up to scare them off, according to reports at the time.” Pat Buchanan’s excellent book State of Emergency describes these events under the section header as “Caesar Chavez, Minuteman.” It’s worth noting that the Chavez actually did what the Minuteman were accused of doing by the media. While Chavez used vigilante force to stop illegal aliens, The Minutemen merely called up federal immigration officials to report illegal aliens.

Some amnesty supporters acknowledge Chavez’s views on immigration, but insist he would have changed his mind and supported amnesty. Bianca Guzman of the Chicano Studies Department at Cal State told the Los Angeles Times "He was always proactive and I think he would have come around. … I couldn't picture him at a press conference coming out against the Dream Act."

Maybe she’s right, but it seems pretty silly to invoke Chavez to support amnesty on the grounds that he might have decided to change his views.

Chavez was not alone among labor leaders opposing massive immigration. T Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor argued that “America is for Americans alone” and that “those who favor unrestricted immigration care nothing for the people. They are simply desirous of flooding the country with unskilled as well as skilled labor of other lands for the purpose of breaking down American standards.”

Today almost every single labor union and Hispanic group supports amnesty for illegal immigrants. What has changed? Certainly not the fact that illegal aliens directly compete for jobs against Hispanic Americans and other working class citizens. Rather, the unions and ethnic lobbies are more concerned about helping elect more Democratic politicians elected and increasing their own membership rather than fighting for the interests of their constituents.

Tom Tancredo represented Colorado's 6th Congressional District from 1999 until 2009 where he chaired the 100+ member bipartisan Immigration Reform Caucus. He currently serves as co-chairman of Team America PAC and president of the Rocky Mountain Foundation. He authored "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security.

Immigrants are Often the Victims of Crimes

Committed by Transnational Gangs and Illegal Aliens

By Michael Cutler, Senior Special Agent, INS (Ret.), CAPS Senior Fellow

November 16, 2012

All too often, romanticized accounts about how illegal aliens are simply seeking their share of the “American Dream” fail to deal with the true stories about the criminals and their victims. Often the opponents of immigration law enforcement play on the compassion of Americans, convincing them that immigration law enforcement is unfair and racist.

A recent ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) news release entitled, “Man pleads guilty to luring 15-year-old girl into prostitution” illustrates the harsh and frequent brutal reality of illegal immigration.

The news release had a deceptive title that did not even mention anything about immigration or the fact that the thug who pleaded guilty of coercing a 15 year old girl into being a prostitute, was a 29 year old illegal alien from Guatemala who is nearly twice the age of the girl mentioned in the title of the news release.

It is especially incomprehensible that while the title of the news release ignored the immigration component of the story that, in point of fact, most if not all of those who were reported on in the report were, in fact aliens and that ICE is the federal agency that bears the primary responsibility for enforcing America’s immigration laws.

According to the release, since 2008 or earlier, hundreds of young Hispanic women, including a number of underage minors were coerced into becoming prostitutes.  Reportedly the criminal alien in this case, Julio Cesar Revolorio Ramos, was a part of a large conspiracy that operated in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. and had a direct involvement with a particularly pernicious and violent transnational gang, MS-13.

Here is an excerpt from the news release that explains how this prostitution ring operated:

Ramos admitted in court that he was part of a conspiracy that prostituted Hispanic women and girls – most of whom were illegal aliens – in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. He advertised the prostitution business by handing out business cards purporting to be for plumbing, landscaping or snow removal business, but which contained a telephone number a customer could call to obtain sexual services from a prostitute. Ramos and others would hand out these cards to those congregating at sites for day laborers, Hispanic restaurants, and check cashing stores in Virginia.

What is important to note is that while nothing was said about the customers for these prostitutes, that given where business cards were distributed, it is extremely likely that these customers were, themselves, illegal aliens.

This is a point I have raised in Congressional hearings and in other venues — illegal immigration is not a “victimless crime!”

The most likely victims of crimes committed by transnational criminals and transnational gangs are the members of the ethnic immigration communities.  This holds true of every ethnicity.  This is not based on mere conjecture but in my personal experiences as an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) Special Agent.

While the news release focused on the one defendant in this case and made note of his “co-conspirators” the news release did not delve into the many other criminals in this case- the men who paid for the “services” of the prostitutes, especially those who were underage minors.

The administration’s policies of non-enforcement of the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States coupled with the current program of providing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of illegal aliens with employment authorization under the aegis of the failed DREAM Act has served to encourage ever so many more illegal aliens from around the world to head for the United States.

Continued promises of enacting “immigration reform” which would amount to the most massive and sweeping amnesty program in the history of the United States shows the utter and complete disdain that those politicians, starting with the President of the United States and including all too many members of both the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, have for America’s immigration laws- laws that were enacted to protect lives and the jobs of American and lawful immigrant workers across America.

These actions and statements have served to act as the firing of a starter’s pistol and the finish line for these aspiring illegal aliens from across the planet is the border of the United States of America.

The race is on and for all too many, it is a race to the bottom where wages plummet and more people than ever stand to suffer the violence and degradation of crimes committed by those criminal aliens and gang members, whose violations of America’s borders and immigration laws are just the beginning of the laws they will eventually ignore and trample.  They have come to expect that there is little or no likelihood of getting caught or punished for their crimes.

Incredibly, their encouragement to violate the borders and immigration laws of the United States comes from the very leaders of the United States of America!

The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part III of III)

The blurring of America’s Southwestern frontier is becoming a geographical fact that all the security devices on the border cannot invalidate.

Nevertheless, while I admire Huntington’s ability to isolate and expose a fundamental dilemma that others in academia and the media are too polite to address, I do not completely agree with his conclusions. Huntington believes in a firm reliance on American nationalism in order to preserve its Anglo-Protestant culture and values in the face of the partial Latinoization of our society. I believe that while geography does not necessarily determine the future, it does set contours on what is achievable and what isn’t. And the organic connection between Mexico and America is simply too overwhelming. Huntington correctly derides cosmopolitanism (and imperialism too) as elite visions. But a certain measure of cosmopolitanism, Huntington to the contrary, is inevitable and not to be disparaged.

America, I believe, will emerge in the course of the 21st century as a civilization oriented from north to south, from Canada to Mexico, rather than as an east-to-west, racially lighter-skinned island in the temperate zone stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This multiracial assemblage will be one of sprawling suburban city-states, each nurturing its own economic relationships throughout the world, as technology continues to collapse distances. America, in my vision, would become the globe’s preeminent duty-free hot zone for business transactions, a favorite place of residence for the global elite. In the tradition of Rome, it will continue to use its immigration laws to asset-strip the world of its best and brightest and to further diversify an immigrant population that, as Huntington fears, is defined too much by Mexicans. Nationalism will be, perforce, diluted a bit, but not so much as to deprive America of its unique identity or to undermine its military.

But this vision requires a successful Mexico, not a failed state. If outgoing President Felipe Calderón and his successors can break the back of the drug cartels (a very difficult prospect, to say the least), then the United States will have achieved a strategic victory greater than any possible in the Middle East. A stable and prosperous Mexico, working in organic concert with the United States, would be an unbeatable combination in geopolitics.

A post-cartel Mexico combined with a stabilized and pro-U.S. Colombia (now almost a fact) would fuse together the Western Hemisphere’s largest, third-largest, and fourth-largest countries in terms of population, easing America’s continued sway over Latin America and the Greater Caribbean. In a word, Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich is correct when he suggests that fixing Mexico is more important than fixing Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, as Bacevich claims, Mexico is a possible disaster, and our concentration on the Greater Middle East has diverted us from it. If the present course continues, it will lead to more immigration, legal and especially illegal, creating the scenario that Huntington fears. Calderón’s offensive against the drug lords has claimed 50,000 lives since 2006, with close to 4,000 victims in the first half of 2010 alone. Moreover, the cartels have graduated to military-style assaults, with complex traps set and escape routes closed off. “These are war fighting tactics they’re using,” concludes Javier Cruz Angulo, a Mexican security expert. “It’s gone way beyond the normal strategies of organized crime.” Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign-policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, writes: “If that trend persists, it is an extremely worrisome development for the health, perhaps even the viability, of the Mexican state.”

The weaponry used by the cartels is generally superior to that of the Mexican police and comparable to that of the Mexican military. Coupled with military-style tactics, the cartels can move, in Carpenter’s words, “from being mere criminal organizations to being a serious insurgency.” United Nations peacekeepers have deployed in places with less violence than Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. Already police officers and local politicians are resigning their posts for fear of assassination, and Mexican business and political elites are sending their families out of the country, even as there is sustained middle- and upper-middle-class flight to the United States.

Mexico is now at a crossroads: it is either in the early phase of finally taking on the cartels, or it is sinking into further disorder—or both. As of this writing, violence is dropping significantly, but that’s mainly because the cartels are consolidating their control. What the United States does could be pivotal. And yet the U.S. security establishment has been engaged in other notoriously corrupt and unstable societies half a world away—Iraq until 2011 and Afghanistan at least until 2014. Unlike those places, the record of U.S. military involvement in the Mexican border area is one of reasonable success. As Danelo points out, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the United States and Mexico reduced banditry on the border through binational cooperation. From 1881 to 1910, Mexican President Porfirio Díaz joined with American presidents to jointly patrol the border.

Mexican rurales rode with Texas Rangers in pursuing the Comanche. In Arizona, Mexican and American soldiers mounted joint campaigns against Apaches.

Today, the job of thwarting drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain is a job for the military, quietly assisting Mexican authorities and subordinate to them. But the legal framework for such cooperation barely exists. While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, we are curiously passive about what is happening to a country with which we share a long land border, that verges on disorder, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Adapted from The Revenge of Geography, by Robert D. Kaplan, published by Random House, Inc., and on sale from Sept. 11, 2012. Copyright © 2012 by Robert D. Kaplan. By arrangement with Brandt & Hochman Literary Agents, Inc.

The Border is Vanishing as Mexico Pushes North

Sep 10, 2012  Thedailybeast.com (Part II of III)

Northern Mexico contains its own geographical divisions. The lowlands and desert of Sonora in the west are generally stable; the Rio Grande basin in the east is the most developed and interconnected with the United States—culturally, economically, and hydrologically—and has benefited the most from NAFTA. In the center are mountains and steppes, which are virtually lawless: witness the border city of Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of Mexico, where 700 people were killed in the early months of 2010 alone.

In 2009 more than 2,600 died violently in the city of 1.2 million; some 200,000 more may have fled. In Chihuahua, the state where Ciudad Juárez is located, the homicide rate was 143 per 100,000—one of the worst in the Western Hemisphere. The northern mountains and steppe have always been the bastion of Mexico’s tribes: the drug cartels, Mennonites, Yaqui Indians, and so forth. This harsh frontier was difficult for the Spanish to tame. Later on, in the 1880s, it was a lair for Geronimo and his Apaches.

Think of other remote highlands that provided refuge for insurgents: the Chinese communists in Shaanxi, the Cuban revolutionaries in the Sierra Maestra, and al Qaeda and the Taliban in Waziristan. The drug cartels come out of this geographical tradition.

Most of the drug-related homicides have occurred in only six of Mexico’s 32 states, mostly in the north. That’s another indicator of how northern Mexico is separating out from the rest of the country (though the violence in Veracruz and the regions of Michoacán and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels completely falters, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose control of the north, with grave implications for the United States.

If that happens, writes Robert C. Bonner, former administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “the United States will share a 2,000-mile border with a narcostate controlled by powerful transnational drug cartels that threaten the stability of Central and South America.”

The late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, who made a career out of clairvoyance, devoted his last book to the challenge that Mexico posed to the United States. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington posited that Latino history was demographically moving north into the U.S. and would consequently change the American character. Huntington argues that it is a partial truth, not a total truth, that America is a nation of immigrants: America is a nation of Anglo-Protestant settlers and immigrants both, with the former providing the philosophical and cultural backbone of the society. For only by adopting Anglo-Protestant culture do immigrants become American. Dissent, individualism, republicanism ultimately all devolve from Protestantism.

“While the American Creed is Protestantism without God, the American civil religion is Christianity without Christ.” But this creed, Huntington reasons, might be subtly undone by an advancing Hispanic, Catholic, pre-Enlightenment society. “Mexican immigration is leading toward the demographic reconquista of areas Americans took from Mexico by force in the 1830s and 1840s, ” Huntington writes. “It is also blurring the border between Mexico and America, introducing a very different culture.”

Boston College professor Peter Skerry writes that one of Huntington’s “more startlingly original and controversial insights” is that while Americans champion diversity, “today’s immigrant wave is actually the least diverse in our history. To be sure,” Skerry continues, paraphrasing Huntington, “non-Hispanic immigrants are more diverse than ever. But overall, the 50 percent of immigrants who are Hispanic make for a much less diverse cohort than ever.

For Huntington, this diminished diversity makes assimilation less likely.” And as David Kennedy observes, “the variety and dispersal of the immigrant stream” smoothed the progress of assimilation. “Today, however, one large immigrant stream is flowing into a defined region from a single cultural, linguistic, religious, and national source: Mexico ... The sobering fact is that the United States has had no experience comparable to what is now taking place in the Southwest.” By 2050, one third of the population of the United States could be Spanish-speaking.

Geography is at the forefront of these arguments. Here is Huntington: “No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to American territory. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can and do make that claim.” Most of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah were part of Mexico until the 1835–36 Texan War of Independence and the 1846–48 Mexican-American War.

Consequently, as Skerry points out, Mexicans arrive in the United States, settle in areas of the country that were once part of their homeland, and so “enjoy a sense of being on their own turf” that other immigrants do not share. Huntington points out that a nation is a “remembered community”—that is, one with a historical memory of itself. Mexican-Americans are for the first time in America’s history amending our historical memory. By 2000, six of 12 important cities on the U.S. side of the border were more than 90 percent Hispanic, and only two (San Diego and Yuma, Ariz.) were less than 50 percent Hispanic.