Free Republic

PHOENIX, Ariz. Federal authorities say members of a violent Mexican gang are using the Arizona border as a corridor to the country. In the past year, Border Patrol agents have arrested about ten members of Mara Salvatrucha -- a notorious international street gang in Mexico. Yet according to federal and local law enforcement officials, the gang members don't appear to stay in the state. The gang is commonly known as M-S-13 and has been linked to murders from Honduras to Los Angeles to Virginia. Original Mara Salvatrucha members were guerrilla fighters who fled the Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s....

So what is a “totalization” agreement? These are bilateral agreements between the U.S. Social Security Administration and its counterpart in foreign countries to coordinate their Social Security programs. Presently the U.S. has 20 such agreements, mostly with European nations. This overall program has been in place since the Carter Administration. However, this is the first totalization agreement between the United States and a nation responsible for nearly 70 percent of the illegal immigration into the United States.

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...