Obama's 'Hispanicazation' of America
Monday, January 10, 2011 08:28 AM
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/08/obamas-hispanicazation-of-america-most.html
How
Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html
By John Dillin
WASHINGTON – George W. Bush isn't the first Republican
president to face a full-blown immigration crisis on the US-Mexican border.
Fifty-three years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower
moved into the White House, America's southern frontier was as porous as a
spaghetti sieve. As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded
northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona,
Texas, and points beyond.
President Eisenhower cut off this illegal traffic. He did it
quickly and decisively with only 1,075 United States Border Patrol agents -
less than one-tenth of today's force. The operation is still highly praised
among veterans of the Border Patrol.
Although there is little to no record of this operation in
Ike's official papers, one piece of historic evidence indicates how he felt. In
1951, Ike wrote a letter to Sen. William Fulbright (D) of Arkansas. The senator
had just proposed that a special commission be created by Congress to examine
unethical conduct by government officials who accepted gifts and favors in
exchange for special treatment of private individuals.
General Eisenhower, who was gearing up for his run for the
presidency, said "Amen" to Senator Fulbright's proposal. He then
quoted a report in The New York Times, highlighting one paragraph that said:
"The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' to a current
rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious
relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the
farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal
Government."
Years later, the late Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower's
first attorney general, said in an interview with this writer that the
president had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration when he took office.
America "was faced with a breakdown in law enforcement
on a very large scale," Mr. Brownell said. "When I say large scale, I
mean hundreds of thousands were coming in from Mexico [every year] without
restraint."
Although an on-and-off guest-worker program for Mexicans was
operating at the time, farmers and ranchers in the Southwest had become
dependent on an additional low-cost, docile, illegal labor force of up to 3
million, mostly Mexican, laborers.
According to the Handbook of Texas Online, published by the
University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association, this
illegal workforce had a severe impact on the wages of ordinary working
Americans. The Handbook Online reports that a study by the President's
Commission on Migratory Labor in Texas in 1950 found that cotton growers in the
Rio Grande Valley, where most illegal aliens in Texas worked, paid wages that
were "approximately half" the farm wages paid elsewhere in the state.
Profits from illegal labor led to the kind of corruption
that apparently worried Eisenhower. Joseph White, a retired 21-year veteran of
the Border Patrol, says that in the early 1950s, some senior US officials
overseeing immigration enforcement "had friends among the ranchers,"
and agents "did not dare" arrest their illegal workers.
Walt Edwards, who joined the Border Patrol in 1951, tells a
similar story. He says: "When we caught illegal aliens on farms and
ranches, the farmer or rancher would often call and complain [to officials in
El Paso]. And depending on how politically connected they were, there would be
political intervention. That is how we got into this mess we are in now."
Bill Chambers, who worked for a combined 33 years for the
Border Patrol and the then-called US Immigration and Naturalization Service
(INS), says politically powerful people are still fueling the flow of illegals.
During the 1950s, however, this "Good Old Boy"
system changed under Eisenhower - if only for about 10 years.
In 1954, Ike appointed retired Gen. Joseph "Jumpin'
Joe" Swing, a former West Point classmate and veteran of the 101st
Airborne, as the new INS commissioner.
Influential politicians, including Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson
(D) of Texas and Sen. Pat McCarran (D) of Nevada, favored open borders, and
were dead set against strong border enforcement, Brownell said. But General
Swing's close connections to the president shielded him - and the Border Patrol
- from meddling by powerful political and corporate interests.
One of Swing's first decisive acts was to transfer certain
entrenched immigration officials out of the border area to other regions of the
country where their political connections with people such as Senator Johnson
would have no effect.
Then on June 17, 1954, what was called "Operation
Wetback" began. Because political resistance was lower in California and
Arizona, the roundup of aliens began there. Some 750 agents swept northward
through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day. By the end
of July, over 50,000 aliens were caught in the two states. Another 488,000,
fearing arrest, had fled the country.
By mid-July, the crackdown extended northward into Utah,
Nevada, and Idaho, and eastward to Texas.
By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas,
and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State
voluntarily.
Unlike today, Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply
released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage
their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep
within Mexico before being set free.
Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the
Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel,
Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.
The sea voyage was "a rough trip, and they did not like
it," says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941
to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.
Mr. Coppock says he "cannot understand why [President]
Bush let [today's] problem get away from him as it has. I guess it was his
compassionate conservatism, and trying to please [Mexican President] Vincente
Fox."
There are now said to be 12 million to 20 million illegal
aliens in the US. Of the Mexicans who live here, an estimated 85 percent are
here illegally.
*
BORDER PATROL VETS OFFER TIPS ON CURBING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
One day in 1954, Border Patrol agent Walt Edwards picked up
a newspaper in Big Spring, Texas, and saw some startling news. The government
was launching an all-out drive to oust illegal aliens from the United States.
The orders came straight from the top, where the new
president, Dwight Eisenhower, had put a former West Point classmate, Gen.
Joseph Swing, in charge of immigration enforcement.
General Swing's fast-moving campaign soon secured America's
borders - an accomplishment no other president has since equaled. Illegal
migration had dropped 95 percent by the late 1950s.
Several retired Border Patrol agents who took part in the
1950s effort, including Mr. Edwards, say much of what Swing did could be
repeated today.
"Some say we cannot send 12 million illegals now in the
United States back where they came from. Of course we can!" Edwards says.
Donald Coppock, who headed the Patrol from 1960 to 1973,
says that if Swing and Ike were still running immigration enforcement,
"they'd be on top of this in a minute."
William Chambers, another '50s veteran, agrees. "They
could do a pretty good job" sealing the border.
Edwards says: "When we start enforcing the law, these
various businesses are, on their own, going to replace their [illegal]
workforce with a legal workforce."
While Congress debates building a fence on the border, these
veterans say other actions should have higher priority.
1. End the current practice of taking captured Mexican
aliens to the border and releasing them. Instead, deport them deep into Mexico,
where return to the US would be more costly.
2. Crack down hard on employers who hire illegals. Without
jobs, the aliens won't come.
3. End "catch and release" for non-Mexican aliens.
It is common for illegal migrants not from Mexico to be set free after their
arrest if they promise to appear later before a judge. Few show up.
The Patrol veterans say enforcement could also be aided by a
legalized guest- worker program that permits Mexicans to register in their
country for temporary jobs in the US. Eisenhower's team ran such a program. It
permitted up to 400,000 Mexicans a year to enter the US for various agriculture
jobs that lasted for 12 to 52 weeks.
John Dillin is former managing editor of the Monitor.
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES OBAMA'S AGENDA OF OPEN BORDERS FOR HORDES MORE LA RAZA DEM VOTERS, AND TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED
The Obama administration has also cut worksite enforcement efforts
by 70%, allowing illegal immigrants to continue working in jobs that rightfully
belong to citizens and legal workers.
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
"We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers," said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. "President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws."
Newsmax
Obama's 'Hispanicazation' of America Monday, January 10, 2011 08:28 AM
*
COME TO LOS ANGELES AND SEE WHAT LA RAZA INVASION, OCCUPATION, SUPREMACY and POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY has done!
COME TO LOS ANGELES AND SEE WHAT LA RAZA INVASION, OCCUPATION, SUPREMACY and POSTED! NO LEGAL NEED APPLY has done!
mmigrating America Into a Colony of Mexico
Article by Frosty Wooldridge
2004
America
faces a greater and more dangerous threat from within than from without. While
our armed forces secure Afghanistan and Iraq, our own borders stand unguarded
24 hours a day. Al-Qaeda insurgents plan their next attacks somewhere inside
our country. They advocate a violent overthrow of America.
We’ve got an even more
ominous enemy within our borders that promotes “Reconquista of Aztlan” or the
reconquest of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas into the country of
Mexico. With 9.2 million Mexicans now living in America, their goal of
colonizing our country back into Mexico moves forward. A more sobering reality
stems from the evidence that it’s Mexican-American citizens in the forefront of
this disintegration of our country.
*
*
The American Legion Takes A Stand
Against Illegal Immigration The American Legion Takes A Stand Against Illegal Immigration
The America Legion recently released a statement on ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION, a very
pointed statement. The Legion published their policy in a 30 page booklet,
spelling their policy out in detail:
The nation’s largest veterans organization released this week a policy bulletin that takes a firm stand against illegal immigration and calls on its members to hold elected officials accountable for implementing and enforcing U.S. immigration law.
The 30-page bulletin is officially titled, “The American Legion20Policy on Immigration: A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States.”
It is about time that a group who stands up for veterans of all services, whether they served in peacetime or wartime took a tough stand on a problem that is overwhelming this country. We have roughly 25 million veterans in this country who served honorably to protect the legal residents of this country, not the people who invade our borders nearly unchecked.
More from WND on the American Legion:
“The American Legion members have served in the U.S. Armed Forces throughout the world so that Americans can be safe at home,” the organization’s website explains. “This gives them a unique perspective to the threat that open borders present to their homeland.”
“America is a nation built by immigrants and the American Legion recognizes and celebrates that,” said National Commander David K. Rehbein in a press release. “We do take strong issue, however, with illegal immigration. It’s a matter of national security. The 9/11 hijackers and three of the men who plotted to kill innocent Americans at Ft. Dix were perfect examples of terrorists exploiting our weak immigration laws and our lack of enforcement. This booklet is a good reminder that America has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.”
The Legion’s stance on illegal immigration is clearly stated o n page 1 of the booklet, it stands alone:
“The American Legion is opposed to any person or persons being in this country illegally, regardless of race, sex, creed, color or national origin,” the bulletin states. “We believe the current laws governing immigration should be enforced impartially and equally.”
The America Legion has a long history that dates back to Theodore Roosevelt. The Legion knows something about supporting veterans and the laws of this country. Read on:
Originally founded in 1919 on an idea proposed by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (the president of the same name’s eldest son), the Legion has now grown to a membership of more than 2.6 million wartime veterans organized in more than 14,000 posts nationwide.
The policy bulletin explains, “Legionnaires subscribe to a creed, ‘To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order and to foster and perpetuate a 100 percent Americanism.’ These words are recited in unison at Legion meetings and represent a continuing contract of service to benefit America and it is this commitment by Legionnaires that is the fuel for action on illegal immigration and other national security concerns facing this country.”
The Legion hopes the policy booklet will educate the American public on how “the security, economy and social fabric of the United States of America is=2 0seriously threatened by individuals who are illegally in this country.”
“Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” the booklet states. “The poor, minorities, children and individuals with little education are particularly vulnerable. It causes an enormous drain on public services, depresses wages of American workers, and contributes to population growth that, in turn, contributes to school overcrowding and housing shortages. Directly and indirectly, U.S. taxpayers are paying for illegal immigration.”
In financial terms, the booklet cites a report by the Center for Immigration Studies that claims the average illegal alien household in 2003 paid approximately $4,200 in federal taxes while, on average, created $7,000 in costs at the federal level.
The booklet does highlight a real problem that the USA faces despite the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It spells out that it is about educating all people on the dearth of security issues still face this country today. Not only did they publish this booklet for education purposes but it also contains language that discusses ways to prevent these security issues:
In response to what it sees as a contributing factor to crime, terrorism, unemployment and depressed wages, the Legion proposes the following five-point strategy urging the federal government to enact the following steps:
1. Secure the borders and other points of entry in the United States, including construction of a physical barrier and sufficient Border Patrol presence.
2. Eliminate the jobs magnet and social services benefits that draw illegal immigrants to the U.S. by enforcing laws sanctioning employers who hire illegal aliens, implementing employment eligibility verification and eliminating government benefits for illegal aliens.
3. Eliminate amnesty laws that permit illegal aliens to break the law and remain in the U.S.
4. Reduce the U.S. illegal alien population by attrition through workplace enforcement, interagency and interstate cooperation, rejection of driver’s license plans, mandating English as national language and establishing parameters for noncriminal deportations.
5. Screen and track foreign visitors legally entering the United States. The plan further calls for reforms to current legal immigration policy, including alteration of the non-immigrant visa program that allows some nations’ citizens entrance to the U.S. without a visa application, elimination of the visa lottery that randomly approves visas from countries with low immigration rates and expanding visa allowances for seasonal and temporary workers.
The five step program is a good program. It is workable with some change in legislation and enforcement of current laws. It becomes more important when one considers the following report from WND:
Costs for securing the nati on’s borders are expected to increase 20.6 percent in fiscal year 2009. These include expenses for border patrol, electronic surveillance, the border fence and other security needs. President Bush allocated $44.3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security – a 4.5 percent increase from last year’s budget of $42.4 billion.
“While the U.S. builds a fence across much of the border, many illegals are taking a different route. Underground,” Rubenstein reveals. “Authorities have discovered dozens of illegal tunnels across the international border in recent years. Smuggling of drugs, weapons, and immigrants takes place daily through these underground passageways.”
Illegal aliens also use drainage systems to travel across the U.S.-Mexico border – from El Paso to San Diego.
“One tunnel, actually a system of two half-mile passages connecting Tijuana with San Diego, is by comparison a superhighway,” he wrote.
While the Border Patrol attempts to stop these underground incursions with steel doors, cameras and sensors, harsh weather conditions and human smugglers destroy the equipment and barriers.
These costs, and the expenses of providing “enhanced driver’s licenses” as alternative passports for citizens, RFID chips, government databases and watch lists are expected to soar.
In his research, Rubenstein finds that the average immigrant household generates a fiscal debt of $3,408 after feder al benefits and taxes are considered. At the state and local level, the fiscal debt amounts to $4.398 per immigrant household.
“There are currently about 36 million immigrants living in about 9 million households, so the aggregate deficit attributable to immigrants comes to $70.3 billion,” he writes. “… Immigrants could deplete the amount of funds available for infrastructure by as much as $70 billion per year.”
Rubenstein cites figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, projecting that the U.S. population will reach 433 million by 2050 – increasing 44 percent, or 135 million, from today’s numbers.
A full 82 percent of this increase will be directly attributable to new immigrants and their U.S.-born children.
“The brutal reality is that no conceivable infrastructure program can keep pace with that kind of population growth,” he wrote. “The traditional ’supply-side’ response to America’s infrastructure shortage – build, build, build – is dead, dead, dead. Demand reduction is the only viable way to close the gap between the supply and demand of public infrastructure.”
He concludes, “Immigration reduction must play a role.”
The five step program that the Legion proposes is a sound one. It will require the federal government to tighten immigration policies. The policies don’t appear to require bigger government. It does require ou r Democratic-led government to take a tough stand on illegal immigration, one I believe they will never take. Since our government at this point in time will never toughen the laws, this booklet will go largely ignored by our representatives in DC and that is the shame.
The American Legion wants to remind of us the facts surrounding 9/11 and the plot to kill Fort Dix soldiers, nothing more, nothing less. It is time for Congress to listen to the more than 2 million veterans who claim membership in this organization. It is time to secure our borders, it is time that the American people realize our security is at risk as long as our borders are not secure
The nation’s largest veterans organization released this week a policy bulletin that takes a firm stand against illegal immigration and calls on its members to hold elected officials accountable for implementing and enforcing U.S. immigration law.
The 30-page bulletin is officially titled, “The American Legion20Policy on Immigration: A Strategy to Address Illegal Immigration in the United States.”
It is about time that a group who stands up for veterans of all services, whether they served in peacetime or wartime took a tough stand on a problem that is overwhelming this country. We have roughly 25 million veterans in this country who served honorably to protect the legal residents of this country, not the people who invade our borders nearly unchecked.
More from WND on the American Legion:
“The American Legion members have served in the U.S. Armed Forces throughout the world so that Americans can be safe at home,” the organization’s website explains. “This gives them a unique perspective to the threat that open borders present to their homeland.”
“America is a nation built by immigrants and the American Legion recognizes and celebrates that,” said National Commander David K. Rehbein in a press release. “We do take strong issue, however, with illegal immigration. It’s a matter of national security. The 9/11 hijackers and three of the men who plotted to kill innocent Americans at Ft. Dix were perfect examples of terrorists exploiting our weak immigration laws and our lack of enforcement. This booklet is a good reminder that America has a serious problem that needs to be addressed.”
The Legion’s stance on illegal immigration is clearly stated o n page 1 of the booklet, it stands alone:
“The American Legion is opposed to any person or persons being in this country illegally, regardless of race, sex, creed, color or national origin,” the bulletin states. “We believe the current laws governing immigration should be enforced impartially and equally.”
The America Legion has a long history that dates back to Theodore Roosevelt. The Legion knows something about supporting veterans and the laws of this country. Read on:
Originally founded in 1919 on an idea proposed by Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. (the president of the same name’s eldest son), the Legion has now grown to a membership of more than 2.6 million wartime veterans organized in more than 14,000 posts nationwide.
The policy bulletin explains, “Legionnaires subscribe to a creed, ‘To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America; to maintain law and order and to foster and perpetuate a 100 percent Americanism.’ These words are recited in unison at Legion meetings and represent a continuing contract of service to benefit America and it is this commitment by Legionnaires that is the fuel for action on illegal immigration and other national security concerns facing this country.”
The Legion hopes the policy booklet will educate the American public on how “the security, economy and social fabric of the United States of America is=2 0seriously threatened by individuals who are illegally in this country.”
“Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime,” the booklet states. “The poor, minorities, children and individuals with little education are particularly vulnerable. It causes an enormous drain on public services, depresses wages of American workers, and contributes to population growth that, in turn, contributes to school overcrowding and housing shortages. Directly and indirectly, U.S. taxpayers are paying for illegal immigration.”
In financial terms, the booklet cites a report by the Center for Immigration Studies that claims the average illegal alien household in 2003 paid approximately $4,200 in federal taxes while, on average, created $7,000 in costs at the federal level.
The booklet does highlight a real problem that the USA faces despite the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. It spells out that it is about educating all people on the dearth of security issues still face this country today. Not only did they publish this booklet for education purposes but it also contains language that discusses ways to prevent these security issues:
In response to what it sees as a contributing factor to crime, terrorism, unemployment and depressed wages, the Legion proposes the following five-point strategy urging the federal government to enact the following steps:
1. Secure the borders and other points of entry in the United States, including construction of a physical barrier and sufficient Border Patrol presence.
2. Eliminate the jobs magnet and social services benefits that draw illegal immigrants to the U.S. by enforcing laws sanctioning employers who hire illegal aliens, implementing employment eligibility verification and eliminating government benefits for illegal aliens.
3. Eliminate amnesty laws that permit illegal aliens to break the law and remain in the U.S.
4. Reduce the U.S. illegal alien population by attrition through workplace enforcement, interagency and interstate cooperation, rejection of driver’s license plans, mandating English as national language and establishing parameters for noncriminal deportations.
5. Screen and track foreign visitors legally entering the United States. The plan further calls for reforms to current legal immigration policy, including alteration of the non-immigrant visa program that allows some nations’ citizens entrance to the U.S. without a visa application, elimination of the visa lottery that randomly approves visas from countries with low immigration rates and expanding visa allowances for seasonal and temporary workers.
The five step program is a good program. It is workable with some change in legislation and enforcement of current laws. It becomes more important when one considers the following report from WND:
Costs for securing the nati on’s borders are expected to increase 20.6 percent in fiscal year 2009. These include expenses for border patrol, electronic surveillance, the border fence and other security needs. President Bush allocated $44.3 billion for the Department of Homeland Security – a 4.5 percent increase from last year’s budget of $42.4 billion.
“While the U.S. builds a fence across much of the border, many illegals are taking a different route. Underground,” Rubenstein reveals. “Authorities have discovered dozens of illegal tunnels across the international border in recent years. Smuggling of drugs, weapons, and immigrants takes place daily through these underground passageways.”
Illegal aliens also use drainage systems to travel across the U.S.-Mexico border – from El Paso to San Diego.
“One tunnel, actually a system of two half-mile passages connecting Tijuana with San Diego, is by comparison a superhighway,” he wrote.
While the Border Patrol attempts to stop these underground incursions with steel doors, cameras and sensors, harsh weather conditions and human smugglers destroy the equipment and barriers.
These costs, and the expenses of providing “enhanced driver’s licenses” as alternative passports for citizens, RFID chips, government databases and watch lists are expected to soar.
In his research, Rubenstein finds that the average immigrant household generates a fiscal debt of $3,408 after feder al benefits and taxes are considered. At the state and local level, the fiscal debt amounts to $4.398 per immigrant household.
“There are currently about 36 million immigrants living in about 9 million households, so the aggregate deficit attributable to immigrants comes to $70.3 billion,” he writes. “… Immigrants could deplete the amount of funds available for infrastructure by as much as $70 billion per year.”
Rubenstein cites figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, projecting that the U.S. population will reach 433 million by 2050 – increasing 44 percent, or 135 million, from today’s numbers.
A full 82 percent of this increase will be directly attributable to new immigrants and their U.S.-born children.
“The brutal reality is that no conceivable infrastructure program can keep pace with that kind of population growth,” he wrote. “The traditional ’supply-side’ response to America’s infrastructure shortage – build, build, build – is dead, dead, dead. Demand reduction is the only viable way to close the gap between the supply and demand of public infrastructure.”
He concludes, “Immigration reduction must play a role.”
The five step program that the Legion proposes is a sound one. It will require the federal government to tighten immigration policies. The policies don’t appear to require bigger government. It does require ou r Democratic-led government to take a tough stand on illegal immigration, one I believe they will never take. Since our government at this point in time will never toughen the laws, this booklet will go largely ignored by our representatives in DC and that is the shame.
The American Legion wants to remind of us the facts surrounding 9/11 and the plot to kill Fort Dix soldiers, nothing more, nothing less. It is time for Congress to listen to the more than 2 million veterans who claim membership in this organization. It is time to secure our borders, it is time that the American people realize our security is at risk as long as our borders are not secure
…………………………….
MEXICAN GANGS HAVE NOW SPREAD TO ALL OVER
CALIFORNIA’S MEXICAN INVESTED CENTRAL VALLEY, AND TO 28 CA CITIES.
THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL NOW OPERATES IN 228
AMERICAN CITIES.
FBI
DIRECTOR:
"The
violent MS-13 - or Mara Salvatrucha - street gang is following the migratory
routes of illegal aliens across the country, FBI officials say, calling the
Salvadoran gang the new American mafia. MS-13, has a significant presence in
the Washington area, and other gangs are spreading into small towns and suburbs
by following illegal aliens seeking work in places such as Providence, R.I.,
and the Carolinas, FBI task force director Robert Clifford said. "The
migrant moves and the gang follows," said Mr. Clifford, director of the
agency's MS-13 National Gang Task Force."
INS/FBI
Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants 2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI
Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants CRIME STATISTICS
95%
of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.
*
83%
of warrants for murder in Phoenix are for illegal aliens.
*
86%
of warrants for murder in Albuquerque are for illegal aliens.
*
75%
of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix and Albuquerque are
illegal aliens.
*
24.9%
of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here
illegally.
*
40.1% of all inmates in Arizona detention
centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
*
48.2% of all inmates in New Mexico detention
centers are Mexican nationals here illegally.
*
29% (630,000) convicted illegal alien felons
fill our state and federal prisons at a cost of $1.6 billion annually.
*
53% plus of all investigated burglaries
reported in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are perpetrated
by illegal aliens.
*
50% plus of all gang members in Los Angeles
are illegal aliens from south of the border.
*
71%
plus of all apprehended cars stolen in 2005 in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,
Nevada and California were stolen by Illegal aliens or “transport
coyotes".
*
47%
of cited/stopped drivers in California have no license, no insurance and no
registration for the vehicle. Of that 47%, 92% are illegal aliens.
*
63% of cited/stopped drivers in Arizona have
no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle.
*
Of
that 63%, 97% are illegal aliens 66% of cited/stopped drivers in New Mexico
have no license, no insurance and no registration for the vehicle. Of that 66%
98% are illegal aliens.
BIRTH STATISTICS
380,000 plus “anchor babies” were born in the
U.S. in 2005 to illegal alien parents, making 380,000 babies automatically U.S.
citizens.
*
97.2%
of all costs incurred from those births were paid by the American taxpayers.
*
66%
plus of all births in California are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal
whose births were paid for by taxpayers
*
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
"We could cut unemployment in half simply
by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers," said Representative
Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus.
"President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on
immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal
immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce
immigration laws."
*
The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL
Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.
The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary
policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk
about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.
But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.
It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.
I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in
custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang
has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.
Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the
street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.
L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the mmigration felony.
The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.
The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open
a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.
But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a
politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.
But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police ommission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”
Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In
turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring. But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.
The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an
aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).
That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed
over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear
and let them go.”
But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or
two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.
To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they quire that it be by a superior.”
Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture
that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.
The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198
aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.
Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.
The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.
Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country ndefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism,
so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.
Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.
Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of
them than the Border Patrol.
For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of
millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration
authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.
Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the
local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”
Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her
across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.
The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.
Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination
against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.
The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to
believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.
For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.
Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.
Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the
border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal
to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis
Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”
Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California
assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, JoaquÃn Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.
Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with
efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.
However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.
But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 11-year-old Mexican. Such
pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.
For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.
Heather Mac Donald EMAIL
Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony. Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against enforcing immigration law.
The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and Houston. These “sanctuary
policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting immigration violations to federal authorities.
Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk
about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic, gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would speak for attribution.
But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national borders.
It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether. Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.
I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops had had the suspect in
custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant population.”
Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some examples:
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County. The gang
has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.
• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li. Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.
Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and stay in the business.
Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang “Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest an illegal dealer (known on the
street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.
L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime: enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers. Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation, against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S., say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the mmigration felony.
The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation, and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators: deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status police already know.
The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned the council: “This is going to open
a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.
But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes, but such anxiety can never equal a
politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without putting a witness’s life at risk.
But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police ommission: “It is not the time. It is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”
Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit, criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station houses. In
turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring. But even were immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming additional workload.
The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house, aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who have been deported following conviction for an
aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years in jail).
That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s, explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks, threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed
over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear
and let them go.”
But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal. Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or
two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in 2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring countries.
To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a letter. When we write a letter, they quire that it be by a superior.”
Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a culture
that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.
The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability. They included 1,198
aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.
Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami, fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California, probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.
The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early 1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in 1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed robbery, were naturalized.
Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can keep them in the country ndefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East, including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism,
so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently, he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions, used whatever it had to put him in prison.
Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.
Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens, the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are so many more of
them than the Border Patrol.
For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS had as much effect on the migration of
millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the shadows, seemed to regard immigration
authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.
Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices, and phone arcades, all catering to the
local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”
Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings, you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her
across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.
The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.
Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak. That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers verify work eligibility would result in discrimination
against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work illegally.
The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and thousands of employers pretend to
believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2 million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare seekers, criminals, and terrorists.
For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.
Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere, illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make it boon to money launderers, immigrant smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.
Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the
border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the language of “human rights” to appeal
to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed, grouses Illinois congressman Luis
Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you need to be forgiven.”
Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S. owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive their kids to school,” said California
assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, JoaquÃn Avila, a UCLA Chicano studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote, especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is a form of apartheid.
Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20 years ago: Americans “are fed up with
efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.
However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies. By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.
But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to 14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 11-year-old Mexican. Such
pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S. law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,” observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.
For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.
*
Heather
Mac Donald
The Immigrant Gang Plague
Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making.
Summer 2004
The Immigrant Gang Plague
Hispanic gang violence is spreading across the country, the sign of a new underclass in the making.
Summer 2004
Before immigration optimists issue
another rosy prognosis for America’s multicultural future, they might visit
Belmont High School in Los Angeles’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, gang-ridden
Rampart district. “Upward and onward” is not a phrase that comes to mind when
speaking to the first- and second-generation immigrant teens milling around the
school this January.
“Most of the people I used to hang out with when I first
came to the school have dropped out,” observes Jackie, a vivacious illegal
alien from Guatemala. “Others got kicked out or got into drugs. Five graduated,
and four home girls got pregnant.”
Certainly, none of the older teens I met outside Belmont was
on track to graduate. Jackie herself flunked ninth grade (“I used to ditch a
lot,” she explains) and never caught up. She is now pursuing a General
Equivalency Diploma—a watered-down certificate for dropouts or expelled
students—in the school’s “adult” division. Vanessa, who sports a tiny horseshoe
protruding from her nostrils, is applying to the adult division, too, having
been kicked out of Belmont at age 18. “I didn’t come to school very often,”
says this American-born child of illegal aliens from El Salvador. Her
boyfriend, Albert, a dashing 19-year-old with long, slicked-back hair, got
expelled for truancy but has talked his way back into the regular high school.
“I have good manipulative skills,” he smiles. After a robbery conviction,
Albert was put on probation but broke every rule in the book: “Curfews, grades,
attendance, missed court days,” he boasts. “But they still let me off the
hook.”
These Belmont teens are no aberration. Hispanic youths,
whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an
underclass culture. (By “Hispanic” here, I mean the population originating in
Latin America—above all, in Mexico—as distinct from America’s much smaller Puerto
Rican and Dominican communities of Caribbean descent, which have themselves
long shown elevated crime and welfare rates.) Hispanic school dropout rates and
teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding
nationally—rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002—driven by the march of Hispanic
immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass
indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive
generations of Hispanics—they worsen.
Debate has recently heated up over whether Mexican
immigration—unique in its scale and in other important ways—will defeat the
American tradition of assimilation. The rise of underclass behavior among the
progeny of Mexicans and other Central Americans must be part of that debate.
There may be assimilation going on, but a significant portion of it is
assimilation downward to the worst elements of American life. To be sure, most
Hispanics are hardworking, law-abiding residents; they have reclaimed squalid
neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles and elsewhere. Among the dozens of
Hispanic youths I interviewed, several expressed gratitude for the United
States, a sentiment that would be hard to find among the ordinary run of
teenagers. But given the magnitude of present immigration levels, if only a
portion of those from south of the border goes bad, the costs to society will
be enormous.
The Soledad Enrichment Action Charter
School in South Central Los Angeles is at the vortex of L.A.’s gang culture.
Next door to a rose-colored, angel-bedecked church, the boxy school glowers
behind barred gates like those that surround prisons. Soledad’s students, about
half blacks and half Hispanics, have been kicked out of other schools. They
have brought violence with them. In early March, a gunman opened fire on 20
students entering the school at 7:30 am, wounding two. Tensions were high again
as school let out one day this April. A boy had been sent home earlier for
fighting; the question now was, would he return to retaliate? The school’s
probation officer radioed the LAPD’s 77th Division to plead for some officers
to keep watch, without success. As the students, dressed in plain white
T-shirts, filed out to the sidewalk, two burly security guards and a gang
counselor warily eyed the street.
Asked about gangs, the teens proudly reel off their
affiliations: SOK (Still Out Killing); HTO (Hispanics Taking Over); JMC (Just
Mobbing Crazy). A cocky American-born child of Salvadoran parents says that
most of his peers from the eighth grade are “locked up or dead.” “Four are
dead—three were shot, one was run over.” Were you just lucky? I ask. “They were
gangbanging more than me,” says the 17-year-old, who won’t give his name. “I
try to control myself, respect my parents.” That respect only goes so far.
Asked if he’s been in jail, he swaggers: “Yup, for GTA”—grand theft auto. And
he has no intention of leaving his gang: “They’re the homeys, part of the
family.”
Eighteen-year-old Eric, born here to an illegal Mexican and
Guatemalan, is one of the few students I talked to who doesn’t gangbang, though
he is on probation for second-degree robbery, his second conviction. Half his
friends from elementary school are involved in crime, he says. Of course, gang
problems in Los Angeles schools are hardly confined to academies for
delinquents like Soledad. Gang fights in some of L.A.’s regular high schools
draw such crowds that youthful pickpockets have a field day working the
spectators and participants. “People would steal your pagers and cell phones,” reports
one student who has bounced through several schools.
David O’Connell, pastor of the church
next door to Soledad, has been fighting L.A.’s gang culture for over a decade.
He rues the “ferocious stuff” that is currently coming out of Central America,
sounding weary and pessimistic. But “what’s more frightening,” he says, “is the
disengagement from adults.” Hispanic children feel that they have to deal with
problems themselves, apart from their parents, according to O’Connell, and they
“do so in violent ways.” The adults, for their part, start to fear young people,
including their own children.
The pull to a culture of violence among Hispanic children
begins earlier and earlier, O’Connell says. Researchers and youth workers
across the country confirm his observation. In Chicago, gangs start recruiting
kids at age nine, according to criminologists studying policing and social
trends in the Windy City. The Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium
concluded that gangs have become fully integrated into Hispanic youth culture;
even children not in gangs emulate their attitudes, dress, and
self-presentation. The result is a community in thrall. Non-affiliated children
fear traveling into unknown neighborhoods and sometimes drop out of school for
lack of protection. Adults are just as scared. They may know who has been
spray-painting their garage, for example, but won’t tell the police for fear
that their car will be torched in retaliation. “It’s like we’re in our own
little jails that we can’t leave,” said a resident. “There isn’t an uninfested
place nearby.”
Washington, D.C., reports the same “ever-younger”
phenomenon. “Recruitment is starting early in middle school,” says Lori Kaplan,
head of D.C.’s Latin American Youth Center. With early recruitment comes a high
school dropout rate of 50 percent. “Gang culture is gaining more recruits than
our ability to get kids out,” Kaplan laments. “We can get this kid out, but two
or three will take his place.” In May, an 18-year-old member of the Salvadoran
Mara Salvatrucha gang used a machete to chop off four left fingers and nearly
sever the right hand of a 16-year-old South Side Locos rival in the Washington
suburbs.
Ernesto Vega, a 19-year-old Mexican illegal who grew up in
New York City, estimates that most 12- to 14-year-old Mexicans and
Mexican-Americans in New York are in gangs for protection. “If you’re Mexican,
you can’t go to parties by yourself,” he says. “People will ask, ‘Who you down
with? Que barrio?’ They be checkin’ you out. But if it’s 20 of you, and
20 of them, then it’s OK.”
For some children, the choice is: get
beat up once a week, or get beat up once to enter the gang. Others join for the
prestige and sense of belonging. Mario Flores was one of them; he joined Santa
Ana, California’s, Westside Compadres. “When I was 13, I was like, ‘Wow.’ I
wanted them to jump me,” he says in the soft near-whisper of the cool. “They’re
like, ‘You want to get down?’ They got to jumping at you, they go to call you,
‘Trips from Westside Comps’—you feel good.”
Flores (or “Trips”) is a depressing specimen of gang
culture: uneducated and barely articulate. He’s sitting on the other side of a
Plexiglas window in the Santa Ana Central Jail, talking to me over a phone. In
and out of jail with dazzling regularity over the last three years, he most
recently left prison on April 14; on April 21, he was arrested again on a rape
charge. Born in Portland, Oregon, but raised in Mexico, Flores went to live
with cousins in San Bernardino, California, at age 13 and has been traveling
the Southern California gang circuit—Riverside County, Santa Ana, East
L.A.—ever since. Now 20, he is slender and finely chiseled. Gang hand gestures
accompany his speech like hieroglyphics. “When I saw gang members,” he says,
pointing first to his eyes, then outward, “they’re like, ‘Are you down with my
shit?’ ‘I’m down!’ ” I ask if he speaks English or Spanish with his gang. “You
speak Chicano,” he says. “ ‘Hey, homey!’ You mostly talk English, you’ve got
some good words. But the way you talk, you don’t talk good. You don’t talk like
other people.”
Flores expresses the fierce attachment to territory that is
the sine qua non of gang identity. “I was like, ‘I love my neighborhood. If you
don’t love my neighborhood, I’m going to fuck you up.’ ” Charles Beck, captain
of the LAPD’s Rampart Division, marvels at this emotion. “They all come from
identical neighborhoods, identical families, and go to identical schools, and
yet they hate each other with a passion.” The territorial instincts can only be
compared to the Balkans, says Corporal Kevin Ruiz, a Santa Ana gang investigator.
“There’s people who all they do is patrol gang boundaries. They’re like me, in
a way: I’m looking for bad guys; they look for rivals.”
“Trips” showed his love for Santa Ana’s Westside Compadres
by doing “missions”—robbing bars, stealing wallets and cell phones, selling
drugs—to raise money for the gang. “If a big homey told me to fuck someone up,
I had to,” he explains. The gang reciprocated by giving him a place to
stay—when he was bringing in cash. Otherwise he lived in cars or on the street,
sometimes in a hotel.
The chance that Flores will ever become a productive member
of society is slight. Routinely kicked out of high school for fighting, he
lacks rudimentary skills. Like many prisoners, he claims to be reading the
Bible and thanking Jesus, but such prison conversions rarely last. His personal
life is troubled: “My lady, she mad at me”—not surprisingly, given his most
recent rape charge—and Flores is not certain she will be waiting for him when
he gets out of jail. Most likely, Flores will continue contributing to the
Hispanicization of prisons in California: in 1970, Hispanics were 12 percent of
the state’s population and 16 percent of new prison admits; by 1998, they were
30 percent of the California population, and 42 percent of new admits.
Even as it reaches down to
ever-younger recruits, gang culture is growing more lethal. In April,
16-year-old Valentino Arenas drove up to a courthouse in Pomona, California,
and shot to death a randomly chosen California Highway Patrol officer, in the
hope of gaining entry to Pomona’s 12th Street Gang. The assassination wouldn’t
surprise Dennis Farrell, a Nassau County, New York, homicide detective. “We’re
amazed at the openness of shootings,” he says. “When we do cases with Hispanic
gangs, we often get full statements of admission, almost like they don’t see
what’s the big deal.”
The unwritten code that moderated gang violence three or
four decades ago has now fallen away. “When I grew up,” says Santa Ana native
and gang investigator Kevin Ruiz, “there were rules of engagement: no shooting
at churches or at home. Now, no one is immune.” One of Ruiz’s colleagues on the
Santa Ana police force, Mona Ruiz (no relation), spent her adolescence in Santa
Ana gangs; now she tries to get kids out. “Back then,” she says, “if someone
got jumped, you responded with fistfights, not guns. Guns started in the
1980s.” Earlier gangbangers even showed a certain fastidiousness of dress:
“Guys used to iron their jeans for two hours,” Mona Ruiz recalls. “Then they
wouldn’t sit down” to avoid marring the crease. All that changed when heroin
hit, she says.
The constant invasion of illegal aliens is worsening gang
violence as well. In Phoenix, Arizona, and surrounding Maricopa County, illegal
alien gangs, such as Brown Pride and Wetback Power, are growing more volatile
and dangerous, according to Tom Bearup, a former sheriff’s department official
and current candidate for sheriff. Even in prison, where they clash with
American Hispanics, they are creating a more vicious environment.
Upward mobility to the suburbs doesn’t necessarily break the
allure of gang culture. An immigration agent reports that in the middle-class
suburbs of southwest Miami, second- and third-generation Hispanic youths are
perpetrating home invasions, robberies, battery, drug sales, and rape. Kevin
Ruiz knows students at the University of California, Irvine who retain their
gang connections. Prosecutors in formerly crime-free Ventura County,
California, sought an injunction this May against the Colonia Chiques gang after
homicides rocketed up; an affidavit supporting the injunction details how
Chiques members terrorize the local hospital whenever one of the gang arrives
with a gunshot wound. Federal law enforcement officials in Virginia are
tracking with alarm the spread of gang violence from Northern Virginia west
into the Shenandoah Valley and south toward Charlottesville, a trend so
disturbing that they secured federal funds this May to stanch the mayhem. “This
is beyond a regional problem. It is, in fact, a national problem,” said FBI
assistant director Michael Mason, head of the bureau’s Washington field office.
Open-borders apologists dismiss the Hispanic crime threat by
observing that black crime rates are even higher. True, but irrelevant: the
black population is not growing, whereas Hispanic immigration is reaching
virtually every part of the country, sometimes radically changing local
demographics. With a felony arrest rate up to triple that of whites, Hispanics
can dramatically raise community crime levels.
Many cops and youth workers blame the
increase in gang appeal on the disintegration of the Hispanic family. The
trends are worsening, especially for U.S.-born Hispanics. In California, 67
percent of children of U.S.-born Hispanic parents lived in an intact family in
1990; by 1999, that number had dropped to 56 percent. The percentage of
Hispanic children living with a single mother in California rose from 18
percent in 1990 to 29 percent in 1999. Nationally, single-parent households
constituted 25 percent of all Hispanic households with minor children in 1980;
by 2000, the proportion had jumped to 34 percent.
The trends in teen parenthood—the marker of underclass
behavior—will almost certainly affect the crime and gang rate. Hispanics now
outrank blacks for teen births; Mexican teens have higher birthrates than
Puerto Ricans, previously the most “ghettoized” Hispanic subgroup in terms of
welfare use and out-of-wedlock child-rearing. In 2002, there were 83.4 births
per 1,000 Hispanic females between ages 15 and 19, compared with 66.6 among
blacks, 28.5 among non-Hispanic whites, and 18.3 among Asians. Perhaps these
young Hispanic mothers are giving birth as wives? Unlikely. In California,
where Latina teens have the highest birthrate of teens in any state, 79 percent
of teen births to U.S.-born Latinas in 1999 were to unmarried girls.
According to the many young Hispanics I spoke to, more and
more girls are getting pregnant. “This year was the worst for pregnancies,”
says Liliana, an American-born senior at Manual Arts High School near downtown
Los Angeles. “A lot of girls get abortions; some drop out.” Are girls ashamed
when they get pregnant? I wonder. “Not at all,” Liliana responds. Among
Hispanic teens, at least, if not among their parents, the stigma of single
parenthood has vanished. I asked Jackie, the Guatemalan GED student at L.A.’s
Belmont High, if her pregnant friends subsequently got married. She guffawed.
George, an 18-year-old of Salvadoran background who was kicked out of Manual
Arts six months ago for a vicious fight, estimates that most girls at the
school are having sex by age 16.
Mexican and Central American
immigration to New York City is of much more recent vintage than in California,
but young Mexicans in New York have quickly assimilated to underclass sexual
behavior. Nineteen-year-old Ernesto Vega reports that his oldest sister dropped
out of school at 17 and got pregnant the next year. “I heard her boyfriend came
from Mexico to work, but he wasn’t working. He was on the street.” Ernesto says.
Then the boyfriend got arrested, probably on drug charges. “He says he was
arrested for doing nothing, but they don’t arrest you for doing nothing.”
Ernesto knows three or four Mexican-American girls with
babies, including a 16-year-old with two daughters. “Another just got pregnant
this year,” he says. “She’s 15.” None is married. None has a GED or will go to
college. As for the fathers of their children? “The boys be leaving the girls
alone,” Vega says. “The boy goes away.”
Some Hispanic parents valiantly try to impose old-fashioned
consequences on teen pregnancies, but they are losing the battle. Vega’s
father, a building superintendent and hardware store clerk, angrily told his
pregnant daughter, according to Vega: “You gotta go live with [the boyfriend].
I now want nothing to do with you!” The boyfriend offered to take the girl into
the apartment he was sharing with a female acquaintance, but she wanted her own
place. Eventually, she persuaded her father to take her back, but only on the
condition that she work. She now sells Yankee paraphernalia on the Grand
Concourse in the Bronx.
Traditional and contemporary family values continued to
clash throughout the pregnancy. Although the boyfriend vanished until the
birth, he showed up at Vega’s house with his whole family when the girl
returned from the hospital with her newborn. “He took his three sisters and his
mother; one sister took the nephews.” Vega recalls. The boyfriend’s demand: you
have to decide where to live. The girl told him to take a hike. The family
delegation, Vega judges, already adapting to American individualist norms, was
inappropriate. “The problem was not with the families,” he says, “but between
him and her.”
In one respect, Central American immigrants break the mold
of traditional American underclass behavior: they work. Even so, Mexican
welfare receipt is twice as high as that of natives, in large part because
Mexican-American incomes are so low, and remain low over successive
generations. Disturbingly, welfare use actually rises between the second and
third generation—to 31 percent of all third-generation Mexican-American
households. Illegal Hispanics make liberal use of welfare, too, by putting
their American-born children on public assistance: in Orange County,
California, nearly twice as many Hispanic welfare cases are for children of
illegal aliens as for legal families.
More troublingly, some Hispanics combine work with
gangbanging. Gang detectives in Long Island’s Suffolk County know when members
of the violent Salvadoran MS-13 gang get off work from their lawn-maintenance
or pizzeria jobs, and can follow them to their gang meetings. Mexican gang
members in rural Pennsylvania, which saw two gang homicides in late April, also
often work in landscaping and construction.
On the final component of underclass
behavior—school failure—Hispanics are in a class by themselves. No other group
drops out in greater numbers. In Los Angeles, only 48 percent of Hispanic
ninth-graders graduate, compared with a 56 percent citywide graduation rate and
a 70 percent nationwide rate. In 2000, nearly 30 percent of Hispanics between
the ages of 16 and 24 were high school dropouts nationwide, compared with about
13 percent of blacks and about 7 percent of whites.
The constant inflow of barely literate recent Mexican
arrivals unquestionably brings down Hispanic education levels. But later
American-born generations don’t brighten the picture much. While
Mexican-Americans make significant education gains between the first and second
generation, adding 3.5 years of schooling, progress stalls in the next
generation, economists Jeffrey Grogger and Stephen Trejo have found.
Third-generation Mexican-Americans remain three times as likely to drop out of
high school than whites and one and a half times as likely to drop out as
blacks. They complete college at one-third the rate of whites.
Mexican-Americans are assimilating not to the national schooling average,
observed the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas this June, but to the dramatically
lower “Hispanic average.” In educational outcomes, concluded the bank,
“Ethnicity matters.”
No one knows why this is so. Every parent I spoke to said
that she wanted her children to do well in school and go to college. Yet the
message is often not getting across. “Hispanic parents are the kind of parents
that leave it to others,” explains an unwed Salvadoran welfare mother in Santa
Ana. “We don’t get that involved.” A news director of a Southern California
Spanish radio station expresses frustration at the passivity toward education and
upward mobility he sees in his own family. “I tried to knock the ‘Spanglish’
accent out of my niece and get rid of that crap,” he says. “But the mother was
completely nihilistic about her child. It’s going to take direct action from
Americans to Americanize Hispanics.”
Perhaps the answer to the disconnect between stated parental
goals and educational outcomes lies in Hispanic culture’s traditional suspicion
of education. Santa Ana police officer Mona Ruiz recounts a joke told by
comedian George Lopez: “When a white person graduates, people say, ‘You did
good.’ When a Mexican graduates, people say, ‘You think you’re better than us.’
” The lure of an immediate income often proves more compelling than a four- to
eight-year investment in self-improvement. New Yorker Ernesto Vega says he
knows “Mexicans with papers” who drop out of high school. “They young. They
say, ‘I’m going to start working, I don’t need school.’ ” But Vega has no
illusions about the consequences: “Even with papers, you’re only making $300 a
week as a delivery boy in restaurants, because you don’t know anything else.”
Proponents of unregulated immigration
simply ignore the growing underclass problem among later generations of
Hispanics, with its attendant gang involvement and teen pregnancy. When
pressed, open-borders advocates dismiss worries about the Hispanic future with
their favorite comparison between Mexicans and Italians. Popularized by
political analyst Michael Barone in The New Americans, the analogy goes
like this: a century ago, Italian immigrants anticipated the Mexican influx,
above all in their disregard for education. They dropped out of school in high
numbers—yet they eventually prospered and joined the mainstream. Therefore,
argue Barone and others, Mexicans will, too.
But the analogy is flawed. To begin with, the magnitude of
Mexican immigration renders all historical comparisons irrelevant, as Harvard
historian Samuel Huntington argues in his latest book, Who Are We?. In
2000, Mexicans constituted nearly 30 percent of the foreign-born population in
the U.S.; the next two largest groups were the Chinese (5 percent) and
Filipinos (4 percent). By contrast, at the turn of the twentieth century, the
largest immigrant group, Germans, made up only 15 percent of the foreign-born population.
In 1910, Great Britain, Germany, Ireland, and Italy, in that order, sent the
most migrants to the U.S.; Italians made up only 17 percent of the combined
total. English-speakers made up over half the new arrivals; there was no chance
that Italian would become the dominant language in any part of the country. By
contrast, half of today’s immigrants speak Spanish.
Equally important, the flow of newcomers came to an abrupt
halt after World War I and did not resume until 1965. This long pause allowed the
country ample opportunity to Americanize the foreign-born and their children.
Today, no end is in sight to the migration from Mexico and its neighbors, which
continually reinforces Mexican culture in American Hispanic communities and
seems likely to do so for decades into the future.
Contemporary Hispanic immigration
also differs from the classic Ellis Island model in that the ease of
cross-border travel and communication allows Mexican and Central American
immigrants to keep at least one foot planted in their native land. Meanwhile,
the Mexican government does everything it can to bind Mexican migrants
psychologically to the home country, in order to safeguard the annual $12
billion flow of remittances. It encourages dual nationality, and Mexicans in the
U.S. can now run for office in Mexico. A Yolo County, California, tomato farmer
has already been elected mayor of Jerez. Not surprisingly, Mexicans and other
Central Americans have the lowest rates of naturalization of all
immigrants—less than 30 percent in 1990, compared with two-thirds of qualified
immigrants from major European sending countries, the Philippines, and Hong
Kong.
Even Mexico’s former foreign minister, Jorge Castaneda,
acknowledges the unprecedented character of Hispanic immigration. “Mexican
immigration,” he wrote recently, “does have distinctive traits that do make
[assimilation] difficult, if not impossible. This is . . . a matter of
history.” That “history” holds that the U.S. robbed Mexico of its natural
territory in the nineteenth century, as some Mexican immigrants never seem to
forget. “It’s kind of scary,” says Santa Ana gang intervention officer Mona
Ruiz. “I hear, ‘I was here first; this used to be Mexico. You stole it from
us.’ ” Mexican-American Ruiz is herself called a “traitor” for becoming
Americanized.
While proponents of the “reconquista” of “Alta California”
(as Mexican nationalists call the lost territory) are a small minority of
Hispanic immigrants, a much larger proportion hold on to their Hispanic
identities. Few of the American-born students I spoke to in Southern California
identified themselves as “American.” Many said they were “Mexican,” “Latino,”
or “Mexican-American”—usages encouraged by the multicultural dogma in the
schools, a far cry from the Americanization efforts of classrooms a century
ago.
Michael Barone’s Italian-Mexican
comparison also ignores the differences between the U.S. economies of 1904 and
2004. While Italian dropouts in 1904 could make their way into the middle class
by working in the booming manufacturing sector or plying their existing
craftsman skills, that is far more difficult today, given the decline of
factory jobs and the rise of the knowledge-based economy. As the limited
education of Mexican-Americans depresses their wages, their sense of being
stuck in an economic backwater breeds resentment. “The second generation
becomes angry with America, as they see their fathers faltering,” observes
Cesar Barrios, an outreach worker for the Tepeyac Association, a social
services agency for Mexicans in New York City. This resentment only increases
the lure of underclass culture, with its rebellious rejection of conventional
norms, according to Barrios. For this reason, he says, many young Mexicans
“prefer to imitate blacks than white people.”
The Spanish-language media, which reaches two-thirds of all
Hispanics, reinforces the sense of grievance. Stories about America’s cruelties
to immigrants and the country’s shocking failure to legalize illegal aliens
dominate news coverage. A billboard for Los Angeles’s Spanish newspaper La
Opinión conveys the usual tone: “Justice,” “Abuse,” “Deportation,” and
other hot-button topics blare out in massive lettering.
Chicago provides a cautionary tale about high levels of
Hispanic immigration combined with an ever more powerful underclass ethic.
During the 1990s, the Hispanic population in Chicago grew 38 percent, to
754,000, and became increasingly concentrated in the city’s barrios. Education
levels and fluency in English dropped lower and lower, while serious crime,
social disorder, and physical decay grew in direct proportion to the number of
Spanish-speaking Latinos. After a neighborhood became more than 60 percent
Latino, physical decay—including graffiti, trash-filled vacant lots, and
abandoned cars—jumped disproportionately. By 2001, social pathology among
Spanish-speaking Latinos was higher than for any other racial or ethnic group.
There are many counterexamples that
show a salutary effect of Hispanic immigration. Santa Ana, California, at 76
percent Latino the most heavily Spanish-speaking city of its size in the
country, has cleaned up the seedy bars from its downtown area and replaced them
with palm trees and benches, in large part thanks to a newly created business
improvement district. Many homes in Santa Ana’s wealthier Mexican neighborhoods
sport exuberant roses and bougainvillea in their front yards, and students I
spoke to there wanted to become lawyers, architects, and medical technicians.
In predominantly Mexican East Los Angeles, housing prices are soaring along
with the rest of the Southern California housing market: a 1928 two-bedroom,
one-bath bungalow with a lawn gone to seed was listed at $265,000 this April.
And in increasingly Hispanic South Central L.A., tiny bodegas selling milk,
diapers, and piñatas are replacing liquor stores.
Yet a seemingly innocuous block in Santa Ana can host five
to eight households dedicated to gangbanging or drug sales. A front yard may be
relatively trash-free; inside the house, a different matter entirely, says Santa
Ana cop Kevin Ruiz. “I’ve been to three houses just this week where they made a
mountain of trash in the backyard or changed their baby’s diaper by throwing it
over the couch. They don’t use the indoor plumbing, while letting their dogs go
to the bathroom on the carpet.” Ruiz drives by the modest tract home where his
Mexican father, who worked in Orange County’s farming industry, raised him in
the 1950s. A car with a shattered windshield, a trailer, and minivan sit in the
backyard, surrounded by piles of junk and a mattress leaning on the garage
door. “My mom taught us that even if you’re poor, you should be neat,” he says,
shaking his head. Fifty-year-old men are still dressing like chollos
(Chicano gangsters), Ruiz says, and fathers are ordering barbers to shave their
young sons bald in good gang tradition.
Without prompting, Ruiz brings up the million-dollar
question: “I don’t see assimilation,” he says. “They want to hold on [to
Hispanic culture].” Ruiz thinks that today’s Mexican immigrant is a “totally
different kind of person” from the past. Some come with a chip on their
shoulder toward the United States, he says, which they blame for the political
and economic failure of their home countries. Rather than aggressively seizing
the opportunities available to them, especially in education, they have learned
to play the victim card, he thinks. Ruiz advocates a much more aggressive
approach. “We need to explain, ‘We’ll help you assimilate up to a certain
point, but then you have to take advantage of what’s here.’ ”
Ruiz’s observations will strike anyone who has hired eager
Mexican and Central American workers as incredible. I pressed him repeatedly,
insisting that Americans see Mexican immigrants as cheerful and hardworking,
but he was adamant. “We’re creating an underclass,” he maintained.
Immigration optimists, ever ready to trumpet the benefits of
today’s immigration wave, have refused to acknowledge its costs. Foremost among
them are skyrocketing gang crime and an expanding underclass. Until the country
figures out how to reduce these costs, maintaining the current open-borders
regime is folly. We should enforce our immigration laws and select immigrants
on skills and likely upward mobility, not success in sneaking across the
border.
*
Immigration Enforcement Group Defends Against Amnesty Push
http://www.alipac.us/article4288.html
The ALIPAC Team
www.alipac.us
PS: Your questions, feedback, progress, reports, and personal messages to Congress are welcome at this tracking link...
http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-908939.html#908939
http://www.alipac.us/article4288.html
The ALIPAC Team
www.alipac.us
PS: Your questions, feedback, progress, reports, and personal messages to Congress are welcome at this tracking link...
http://www.alipac.us/ftopicp-908939.html#908939
Here is the Department of Homeland Security's Hotline for
reporting suspected illegal employees and employers: 866-347-2423
http://www.numbersusa.com
http://www.capsweb.org
http://www.fairus.org
http://www.immigrationwatchdog.com
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http://www.deportaliens.com
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http://www.thewakeupamericafoundation.com/
http://www.wehategringos.com
http://www.saveourstate.org
http://www.wehirealiens.com/
http://www.reportillegals.com/
http://www.illegalemployers.org
http://www.Vdare.com
http://www.protectourborder.net
http://www.friendsoftheborderpatrol.com/
http://www.americanimmigrationcontrol.com/
http://www.send-a-brick.com
http://www.betterimmigration.com
http://www.noinvaders.org/home.shtml
http://www.unitetofight.org
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http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/text/crimevictims.html
http://www.illegalimmigrationjournal.com/index.cfm
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http://mohaveminutemen.com/
https://www.ircot.com/
http://www.limitstogrowth.org/
http://www.steinreport.com/
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