Posted on 05/07/2005 5:09:05 AM PDT by billorites
LIKE MANY other southern Arizonans, I am deeply grateful to the few dozen vigilantes calling themselves Minutemen who set up camp along the Arizona-Mexico border last month. That few people around here were much impressed with a bunch of retirees in camouflage playing soldier, and that there turned out to be almost as many reporters as patriots on the ground, was irrelevant: We were just thrilled by the publicity. We’ve been trying to get the rest of the country to notice what’s going on down here for years. U.S. immigration policy has turned the Arizona desert between Tucson and the border into a nightmare zone of suffering, death, destruction and terrible ironies, and the people who live here are sick to death of it. Human beings, fragile desert and a whole way of life are perishing, and no one out there seems to care. For example: Ten days ago, the U.S. Border Patrol rescued 77 “illegal entrants” stranded in a barren stretch of desert 20 miles west of Tucson. After walking for five days, they’d overpowered their coyote (people smuggler), taken his cell phone, called 911 and written “Help” in big letters in the sand. Temperatures were in the 90s, and the group had run out of water the day before. Four people were taken to the hospital by ambulance for hyperthermia and dehydration; two stopped breathing while being examined. The story was so familiar, though, that the morning paper didn’t bother to run a follow-up. The first thing to understand about the border is that the immediate problem isn’t so much the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who flood into the United States from Mexico every year. It’s our government’s response to them. While President Bush and others are trying to shape a realistic, orderly guest-worker program, one that would be more humane and presumably free up law enforcement to chase smugglers and terrorists, policy on the ground is to keep everyone out. From a free-market point of view, this movement of people looks like a classic example of the law of supply and demand. Mexico is poor, overpopulated, intensely corrupt and has a nearly limitless supply of cheap, willing labor. Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, competition with inexpensive American corn has ruined tens of thousands of small Mexican farmers, while many of the light manufacturing plants just south of the border that drew so many northward a decade ago have moved operations to Asia. People are going hungry. The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don’t want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teen-ager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen’s dreams were granted overnight — if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported — America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way. Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation. Still, we maintain the pretense that we don’t want a docile underclass of workers coming into the United States, and we keep trying to catch them as they cross an increasingly policed border. The militarization of what had been a fairly porous border started in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan’s “war on drugs,” but began in earnest in 1994, when the Border Patrol mounted Operation Gatekeeper and started building a fence between San Diego and Tijuana, eventually closing the entire California-Mexico border except for one small, environmentally sensitive gap. Then Operation Hold the Line at El Paso and Operation Rio Grande further east shut down most of the Texas border. These changes did not stop the traffic; they simply funneled it into New Mexico and Arizona. Operation Safeguard was implemented here in Arizona in the border town of Nogales, where a fence went up dividing the American and Sonoran sides of town and diverting migrants out into the desert. The theory on our side seemed to be that no one would be desperate enough to try to cross 50 waterless miles of the Sonoran or Chihuahan desert on foot. This supposition has proved to be wrong. The Border Patrol’s apprehensions between Oct. 1, 2003, and Sept. 30, 2004, in the Tucson sector totaled 491,771, or 1,347 per day, but the population of undocumented immigrants “has been growing robustly during most of the period of ‘concentrated border enforcement’,” according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The crossing has not become impossible, just more expensive and dangerous. Since 2000, more than 750 migrants have been found dead in the Arizona desert, according to county medical examiners. And from January 1995 through May 2004, more than 2,600 people have died along the whole border — roughly one death per day, 10 times the rate before operations began. These are just the documented deaths. No one knows how many more lie out there unknown, unrecovered and unrecoverable — after skeletons bleach in the sun long enough, cows and other animals eat them for the calcium. Driving around the spectacular country south of Tucson, it’s hard to get your mind around the drama taking place just out of sight. A precarious trail along the slopes of the Baboquivari Mountains to the southwest, for instance, became a popular route last year because it’s so hard to patrol. Looking up at the shining white scopes of the National Observatory on Kitt Peak, at the towering sacred monolith of Baboquivari Peak further south, it’s hard to believe that dozens of human beings could be risking their lives on those rugged slopes even as you watch. Anyone who takes a bad fall along that trail is unlikely ever to be found. The strategy of driving border crossers out into the wilds has also been hell on the people who live north of the line. Ranchers’ land has been covered with trash, their fences cut, livestock scattered, water tanks fouled and property destroyed. Some have given up and left, but it’s hard to sell out because people already know about the trouble. Residents of small, isolated towns have been faced by sudden buildups of equipment and personnel. The Border Patrol set up a “Special Operations” base over the ridge from the tiny settlement of Arivaca without informing inhabitants that 10 large trailers, 10 to 30 trucks, generators, stadium lights and night operations involving helicopters were about to become a feature of their lives for the foreseeable future. At an emotional meeting held in the Arivaca civic center recently, several people who own land along the ridge poured out their frustration. You build your house next to a wildlife refuge, you tend to think your peace is guaranteed. The Border Patrol was invited to the meeting but did not attend. The worst and most lasting damage to the landscape, though, is in the 90 percent of the border land that’s owned and theoretically protected by the U.S. government. A chain of wildlife preserves and other protected areas, including Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, is being destroyed, first by the footpaths and litter left by the migrants; second, and more seriously, by quasi-military activities of the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol is flying Black Hawk helicopters and driving all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles around rare, beautiful desert lands, and no amount of complaint from locals, land managers or environmentalists has slowed them down. It is illegal to take vehicles off-road in national parks and preserves, and illegal for citizens to pull off the awful dirt roads of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge anyplace where the soil is undisturbed, or to drive at all when the ground is wet. Cabeza Prieta, home to the last 40 Sonoran pronghorn antelope in the United States, is the wildest and driest of American deserts. The Border Patrol has a major base of operations within the refuge. The remaining traces of the centuries-old Camino del Diablo, the Devil’s Highway, have been obliterated, and miles of delicate desert turned to moonscape. In spite of the collateral damage, what happens next will be more of the same. This March, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Robert C. Bonner announced that the patrol is more than doubling the number of helicopters and planes along the Arizona border and bringing in 534 more agents. Local opinion on the buildup ranges from outrage among social activists who want an open border all the way to approval from those who think “those people don’t belong here.” Recent immigrants from the Midwest who don’t know or care that Tucson has always been a “brown town” and the desperate ranchers along the border are pleased, if not convinced. Others are horrified that the government, finding that what it’s doing isn’t working, simply proposes to do more of it, and to do it here. The majority just want the whole mess to go away. And so we who love this beautiful, dying region now live in a sort of occupied zone within our own nation, pinioned by politicians’ indifference and officials’ lack of imagination. We expect another bad summer. Renee Downing is a freelance writer who has lived in southern Arizona for more than 30 years.
It truly was. I'm printing out and saving that article in case I ever run out of toilet paper. I'm going to quote it below, so hide your eyes:
"The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don't want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teen-ager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen's dreams were granted overnight — if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported — America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way."
"Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation."
Post #9 - Sounds just like the Los Angeles, Mexifornia area.
"Infinite posts"? What an outlandish exaggeration.
Got anything to back up your statement? Or is this just more BS from Dane the Agitator?
It's a shame people get banned here for telling the truth and pi**ing off the OB crowd.
Shouldn't you, dane, stop playing the tom tancredo card? It's getting old.
What, is he becoming an embarassment to you now, especially with his backstabbing towards Tom Delay.
Bush had done nothing, and a handful of Minutemen have now proven how easy it is to protect the borders.
You just described California, only it is much more pervasive here.
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/5/5/121134.shtml
Mexicans Still Think They Own the U.S.
Jim Meyers, NewsMax.com
Friday, May 6, 2005
Many Hispanic activists, Mexican citizens and perhaps even members of the Mexican government believe the American Southwest rightfully belongs to Mexico.
They refuse to accept the legality of the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo following the Mexican-American War, which gave large parts of Mexico to the U.S., or the 1852 Gadsden Purchase of Mexican territory now in Arizona and New Mexico. A Zogby poll found that 58 percent of Mexicans agreed with the statement, "The territory of the Southwest U.S. rightfully belongs to Mexico," and therefore they believe they don't need permission to enter.
In 1997, then-Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo told the National Council of La Raza in Chicago: "I have proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders."
And current President Vincente Fox "repeated this line during a 2001 visit to the U.S., when he called for open borders and endorsed Mexico's new dual citizenship law," according to Investor's Business Daily.
Activist Charles Trujillo, a professor at the University of New Mexico, predicts that a new Hispanic nation will be formed within this century, encompassing much of the American Southwest and part of northern Mexico.
He says U.S. states have the right to secede under our original Articles of Confederation, and this will occur in the future when several Southwest states have Hispanic majorities.
The Hispanic student activist group MECHa (a Spanish acronym for Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan) claims that Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico and southern Colorado were stolen by the U.S. and should be returned to the people of Mexico, under the name "Nation of Aztlan."
Aztlan is the mythical original home of the Aztec people.
Some Californians seem to think that Los Angeles has already been "returned" to the Mexican people. As NewsMax.com reported in April, billboards touting a Spanish-language TV news program showed two newscasters in front of the L.A. skyline, with "Los Angeles, Mexico" printed above.
The billboards angered groups fighting illegal immigration. Stuart Fischoff, who teaches media psychology at California State-Los Angeles, told the L.A. Times: "The joke here is, ‘We're taking back California.' Underneath the joke is part of the truth."
And dumber than a brick wall. Don't bother posting to Lil D
[[America has always been a land of immigrants and has prospered for 229 years, despite the gloom and doom predictions.]]
Allow me to correct you. We are NOT a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of descendants of immigrants. 90% of Americans were born here but their families may have immigrated here generations ago.
Remember the old song by Peggy Lee:
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
Well, if that's all there is,
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all...
I've come to the conclusion that there is almost nothing left that _can_ be done to save ourselves from the Immigration Bomb. Time is running out. We are fast approaching the point of "is that all there is?", and, as it will follow, the reality of "if that's all"...
Any talk of actually sending back the millions already here is met with guffaws. Who's going to send back 10 million? Yet each new arrival is (to paraphrase James Q. Wilson) "one more broken window" in our notion of borders, citizenship, and European-American culture. And each and every new arrival sends a signal to the millions more waiting to come in, that they can get away with it, so, go for it!
For the record, I'm for sending every illegal that can be identified and proven as such _back_. Every one. If that means I have to pay more taxes to get rid of them, so be it. I (and you) are certainly going to be paying far more to support them.
Any talk of building a security barrier to protect our Southern Border from the illegal onslaught is, too, met with guffaws. No one here doubts the effectiveness of the Israeli security fence as to protecting their own borders, in their case, against the infiltration of Palestinian terrorists. If a security fence around [nearly] the entire country of Israel can protect them against intrusion, why wouldn't a security barrier on our southern border protect _us_?
For the record, I advocated building a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico back in the early 90's, before Pat Buchanan was even considering such notions. I've been to the Berlin wall (when it was in existence), seen it from _both_ sides, passed through Checkpoint Charlie. For what purpose it was intended, the Berlin Wall worked.
The lie that the border cannot be sealed and properly policed was laid to rest by the few hundred "Minutemen" patrolling in Arizona - for even in their small numbers, they seemed to produce a surprising effect!
But real deportations en masse aren't going to happen (I know that). And a security barrier isn't going to be built (I know that too). So what's left to be done?
Well, when you stop to think about it.... nothing. Because, nothing else is going to work at keeping the hordes of illegals out. We won't stop them from coming in, and once here, we won't send them back.
Thus, "is that all there is?"
So, better get used to it. Since no one will ever be willing to take the hard steps to STOP the illegal invasion, might as well fill your glass with whatever you like, hoist it high, and drink a hearty toast our fading civilization.
Because as the song says, "that's all"....
Cheers!
- John
"For the record, I'm for sending every illegal that can be identified and proven as such _back_. Every one. If that means I have to pay more taxes to get rid of them, so be it. I (and you) are certainly going to be paying far more to support them."
There are numerous simple and inexpensive ways to catch the illegals. Most have paid 250-300 dollars for a phony social security card and a drivers license.
You mean the modern western European culture of abortion, euthanasia, socialism, homosexual marriage, etc.etc..
For what purpose it was intended, the Berlin Wall worked.
Yeah ask the hundreds of familes that had their loved ones wounded or killed trying to escape communism.
The Berlin wall worked really well for them.
We are close to that point I agree, but I sense a profound backlash by Americans, as the minutemen have proven that it is easy to control the borders.
Uh this nation was built by immigrants.
Oh yeah and if an immigrant, Andy Grove, founder of Intel, hadn't come to this country, we probably wouldn't be having this online conversation right now.
Take it away, she's got nothing.
There are sixty million Mexicans in Mexico. That means probably 20 million workers. Half of them are already here. I don't know but given the situation as we have it now ... the best way to deal with the problem, for now, is to absorb them.
So what if some of the radical hispanics think they can form a new world called Astlan. The South thought they could form a new nation once as well. If a civil war is what it takes to stamp out this crazy idea so be it. They won't win. It won't come to that. In a way we are already having a war with the gangs of the SW and they are losing. We just need to build more prisons. Work camps would be better.
Building a wall would cost dozens of billions and stopping them from tunneling under ... more billions. Industrializing Mexico would be cheaper. Might even make a profit. If China can industrialize ... Mexico can.
Twenty years from now we will wish we could get the Mexicans to come back as they will all be working in Mexico.
There aren't enough of them to overrun us. Yes they are causing problems, as they do our dirty work. Cutting off all wellfare and jailing the criminals would fix that problem.
The final necessity is to create an ironclad immigrant worker program and to shut down any American businesses that hire illegals that do not have a card.
American parents need to drastically raise their expectations for their kids. Nothing less than a B should be accepted. If your kid can't get Bs they need to go into a trade school. So many American parents think the school is going to raise their kids. This is a one way ticket to the penal system. There will be no economic freedom for those without higher education, strong work ethics or a skill in demand. There will be no factory jobs and the immigrants will have most of the unskilled AND many of the skilled trades jobs.
If you can find a moment between your flame bytes, perhaps you could elucidate your immigration reform plan, that constitutes "real" reform. Just a thought.
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