Sanctuary cities encourage selective application of the law.

Link: Texas Governor Abbott signs Sanctuary Cities Bill.

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill which provides police officers with the authority to inquire about the immigration status of anyone they detain.  In addition, the bill requires local officials to hold criminal suspects for possible deportation.  Previously, immigration officers would place an Immigration Detainer on the suspect, which required that local authorities hold the suspect for up to forty-eight hours, to give federal law enforcement the opportunity to arrange deportation proceedings.  The new bill signed by Governor Abbott is in response to the Sanctuary Cities phenomenon, in which certain communities were choosing to ignore the Detainer request.  Opponents of the bill argue that it will encourage profiling and create fear in Hispanic communities,  while supporters call for even enforcement of the law.  San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Dallas are just a few of the communities who
self-publicize their "sanctuary" status.  Police Officers in sanctuary municipalities are not allowed to inquire about a person's citizenship.

According to the law of the land, a person present in the United States without documentation is in this country illegally.  For years these persons were identified as "illegal aliens".  That term has since been designated "dehumanizing" by the progressives and the politically correct in our society, and since they make all the rules, "illegal alien" is a term no longer utilized to describe persons in our country without authorization.  At the same time, the politically correct machine has decided that any foreign national in the United States who wishes to stay permanently should be identified as an immigrant.  Again, back in the ancient days when I was studying Cultural Geography at College, the term "immigrant" was reserved for persons who had arrived in the United States legally, and had some form of documented status.  My mother was a French citizen who married my U.S. Citizen father; she obtained her legal residency through marriage.  The U.S. Department of State, through its various Embassies around the world,  issues Permanent Resident Visas by the hundreds of thousands every year.  These people follow the legal pathway to living in the United States.  With some rare exceptions, Visa applicants must wait years on the list before being selected.  These people are the true heroes in this mess.  While they wait to obtain legal authorization to live in the United States, hundreds of thousands cross the U.S./Mexico border every year without documentation.

The Democratic Party is very sympathetic to the plight of persons who are in the United States without permission; not surprisingly, every Sanctuary City has a Mayor and City Council dominated by Democrats.  The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to include Amendments to allow the people to change unpopular laws.  Its not the simplest of processes, nor should it be.  Laws are enacted to protect people and property.  Coincidentally, Sanctuary Cities, which flaunt the law, have become magnets for Mexican and Central American criminal gangs.  The criminal alien sans documentation but with a bit of common sense, will gravitate to the communities that are not allowed to ask his/her citizenship.  Gangs like the evil, violent Mara Salvatrucha Trece , which is roughly translated as "Gangster Salvadoran Soldiers", have established a dangerous presence in most of the Sanctuary Cities, as have the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels.  One way to combat these groups is through identification, but how to you identify someone when the law prohibits Police Officers from determining nationality?

For many years, undocumented immigrants kept a very low profile.  The idea was to find a job, send some of the money back home to help out, and hopefully find a way to adjust status to Resident Alien (Green Card).  Basically, all persons involved on both sides of the issue agreed that the rule of law was central to the discussion.  Not anymore.  The rule of law has no place in Sanctuary Cities.  Municipal authorities in places like San Francisco, Houston and Seattle have decided that they get to decide which laws should be respected and which should be ignored.  At the same time, they claim that undocumented immigrants have civil rights GUARANTEED BY OUR CONSTITUTION.  The hypocrisy would be funny of it weren't so scary.  The longer we allow Sanctuary Communities to exist, the greater the encouragement for others to give their life savings to a smuggler and enter the United States illegally.  Many Central Americans are tempted by the lure of Sanctuary Cities to first attempt illegally entry into Mexico.  The Mexican government has not the slightest sympathy for persons entering Mexico "sin documentos".  People are robbed, beaten, sometimes assaulted, and dumped back on the other side of the border.  For all the bleeding heart liberals who believe that the United States has some humane obligation to persons trying to enter the U.S. illegally, does it matter that thousands are ruined, with many losing their lives, because of the existence of Sanctuary Cities?

National security is any nation is only as strong as its borders.  It is unfair to expect the American taxpayer to support ten million citizens of the Republic of Mexico.  In 1776, we were faced with tyranny and taxation without representation.  Our Founding Fathers went to war, to build a Democracy under the rule of law.  Mexican citizens must follow our example and stand up to the corruptocracy that pretends to be a government, and enforce their Constitution.  This includes going to war with the narcotraffickers who have an unwritten understanding with the government to stay out of each other's way.  Like it or not, the problem of undocumented immigrants has become an issue of national security for the United States, and we must get control of our borders.  At the same time, we must stand up for the rule of law and eliminate the reasons people are tempted to risk their lives, break our laws, and cross our border illegally.  This includes legitimate sanctions and jail time for employers who knowingly hire "cheap" labor provided by undocumented workers, and the elimination of communities who promise a safe haven for persons to live whose entire presence in the United States is predicated on breaking the law.        

Immigration....The Most Important issue Facing Americans in 2014

Links: DC Prepares For A Flood Of Resident Aliens
            Thousands Of Undocumented Felons Released

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
    -From William Shakespeare's "The Tempest"

Any issue regarding the safety of U.S. citizens belongs in the realm of national security.  Immigration is and always has been part of the national security discussion.  I could also argue that the stampeding herd of elephants that is our national debt is an issue of national security, but today we will focus on immigration.  When Barrack Obama ran for President in 2008, he did not disguise his determination to reform the immigration system.  I assume other priorities, including Obamacare, took precedence during his first term, and so Obama has decided to fight the immigration battle in 2014 (following the Nov 2 midterm elections, mind you).  Actually, we won't get to observe a battle, or a debate, or even a vote in Congress.  President Obama has openly declared his intention to use Executive Action to address immigration reform.  Obama's intended Executive Action will be primarily focused on the thirty million undocumented persons living in the U.S. (there are many guesses as to how many people live in the United States illegally. . .thirty million seems a bit conservative, but let's give the benefit of the doubt).  We've had this conversation before.  During the Bush Administration, the decision was made to build a fence along the southern land border.  Not a white-washed picket fence like the one Tom Sawyer was supposed to paint, but an electrified fence that was intended to be part of a broader monitoring system.  Although a few stretches of fence were constructed, the effort never got close to completion.  From the get-go, the fence was opposed by Democrats in Congress, and a variety of legal challenges really killed the effort.  If you've read my blog more than a few times, you should know that I always appreciate keeping things simple, so this is my simple question:
 If the United States has an international border with Mexico, why is it wrong to demarcate that border with a fence?

We never got the fence.  But Congress has paid for a steady increase in Border Patrol, Customs and Inspections personnel.  I understand this issue because in a former life I was a Federal Agent working on the International Ports of Entry in Laredo, Texas.  Any honest Border Patrol or Homeland Security Officer will tell you that we probably only interdict five to ten percent of those who are trying to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico.  The percentage of drugs that we stop is probably close to five percent as well.  Should the average American be concerned about undocumented persons living in the United States?  The answer is yes.  No hospital emergency room is going to refuse service to a sick person because of lack of identification or documentation.   When the bill does not get paid, the physician/hospital system has to absorb the loss and the difference is passed on to the taxpayer.  And it happens all the time.  I'm not saying that emergency rooms should deny treatment, I'm only dissecting the issue.  Every public school system in the United States is required by law to teach the children of undocumented persons.  This has become a tremendous liability for the respective school districts.  Undocumented persons don't pay school or property taxes, so the district has to come up with the additional funds (not just to teach undocumented children, but to pay for bilingual teachers, create bilingual education programs, books, etc.) by raising the school tax rate.  Our prison systems have become heavily burdened with gang members from Mexico, Central and South America.   Gangs like Mara Salvatrucha 13 and the 18th Street Gang originated in Central America and are deeply involved in drug smuggling both inside prisons and on the outside.  We can only guess at the depth of the involvement that various Central and South American gangs have in the importation and distribution of drugs on the streets of America.  The smuggling of both people and narcotics used to be exclusively controlled on the south side of the border in Mexico.  That has changed: the gangs that run the coyotes (a smuggler of people) and the mules (an undocumented person smuggling narcotics) have established themselves in U.S. locations like El Paso, Del Rio, Eagle Pass, Tijuana, Yuma, Douglas, Nogales, McAllen, Laredo, and Brownsville.  A Border Patrol Chief who has been a close friend for decades told me that he believes at least five of the homes purchased and built in the exclusive, gated community in which is lives, belong to narco-traffickers.

These are only a few of the reasons why immigration is a national security issue.  We haven't even touched on the issue of terrorists sneaking across the porous border pretending to be Latino.  Special Interest Aliens (persons from countries with known terrorist connections, for instance Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan) having been pulling the "just pretend to be Mexican" trick for years.  Now that we no longer deport undocumented Mexican nationals, you can bet that a few bad guys are presently holed up in cheap hotels in Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, practicing a few words in Spanish.  No doubt at least a few readers have decided that I harbor some racist tendencies, a charge that often seems a futile effort to continue to refute.  Except to state the obvious; nothing in the above paragraph can be construed as applying to solely to one particular ethnicity.  More importantly, nothing I have stated applies to every person of a particular ethnic group.  I love Mexico, I love the Hispanic culture, and I speak fluent Spanish.  Whenever I return home from a long trip abroad, I never feel "at home" until I hear someone speaking Spanish.  So lets cut the crap and leave all that "racist" bullshit at the door.  We have a problem, and I'm beginning to fear that it may be out of control.  On top of everything that we have previously discussed, we must consider the fact that President Obama intends to issue an Executive Order that provides a path to citizenship for most of the nation's undocumented persons.  It's true that many of these people have been living in the United States for decades and certainly in their own way have contributed to the growth of the nation.  While it's been argued that providing a Social Security number for persons who were previously undocumented will increase the tax base, hold your horses, folks: it won't make that much difference.  Filthy rich Americans still constitute the great majority of the nation's tax base.

The piece of this issue which really gives me the red-ass has nothing to do with taxes or narco-trafficking.  What really pisses me off is that EVERYONE realizes that this fast-lane to citizenship is meant to create as many as twenty million additional Democratic voters.  Even Democratic talking heads on television admit this shameful fact.  The vast majority of persons affected by the impending Executive Action (forgive me for making assumptions, but see me in November and call me a liar) will be persons of Hispanic heritage (this proportion may possibly even as high as ninety-nine percent as not very many Austrians or Sri Lankans are hiding out from La Migra).  When this is taken together with the fact that in 2012, seventy-five percent of Hispanic voters cast their vote for Barrack Obama (stated in National Review magazine) the impact becomes clear. Every statistic I found echoed this kind of political dominance not just for Obama, but for Democratic candidates in general.  So, no "rocket science" here:  if President Obama signs an Executive Order fast-tracking citizenship for millions and millions of undocumented Hispanics in the United States, we will be staring a "one-party state" right in the face.  Why don't Hispanic Americans (documented or not) vote Republican?  On occasion, it happens.  The Cuban-American community in the Miami area have been staunch Republicans, mostly because of the Castro issue.  And a Hispanic Republican Governor (Martinez in New Mexico) and Republican Senator (Cruz in Texas) have been  recently elected, which seems to give some conservatives hope. I don't buy it.  Hispanic Americans have been loyal Democrats since the days of John F. Kennedy, and I do see a Sea-Change on the horizon (I love the phrase Sea Change; it comes from a song Shakespeare wrote as part of "The Tempest").

I don't have a problem with providing rights to persons who have been part of the fabric of our nation for decades.  I believe that, instead of creating a fast-track to citizenship, it would be preferable to provide an avenue for persons to obtain Resident Alien status (Green Card), and require that they utilize the system in place for adjusting to U.S. citizen.  Its terribly unfair for individuals who have followed the existing law and been waiting for years to become Americans, to be pushed to the back of the line by persons who entered illegally.  As tough as it may be for some people, we must remember that we are dealing with persons whose entire presence in this country is predicated on an illegal act.  I realize that Mexico can be a difficult country for young people with hopes and aspirations, and I don't judge anyone who is trying to provide for their family, but this issue is beginning to impact OUR families, especially those with children and grandchildren.  I had hoped for some form of political compromise, something that did not include a fast-track to citizenship.  I just can't see why that part of the equation is so important.  If someone entered the United States illegally in 1989, they should have the opportunity to apply for a Green Card.  Once that process is complete, if they are interested in becoming citizens, they can follow the law that is already in place.  IMPORTANT: Don't believe the Democrat narrative that Congress has been AWOL on this issue.  The House of Representatives has approved a number of Immigration Reform Bills that were not allowed to even reach committee.  Sometime in 2012, Harry Reid decided that President Obama should rule by decree. So for all practical purposes, he ended the functions of the U.S. Senate as of October 21. At that time, three hundred fifty-two Bills that had passed the House were languishing in Harry Reid's personal purgatory.  With Congress unable to act, Obama can say (without the hint of a smile) that the do-nothing Republicans won't act on immigration, and he is therefore obliged by his responsibilities as President of the United States to utilize Executive Authority.  Once he signs the Executive Order, no one knows how many formerly undocumented people will follow through with the process, but if they do, they get to be the latest addition to a rapidly expanding Democratic voter roll.