A Washington Post story headline claims the economic downturn in the US is actually increasing the lure of America to Mexicans who can't count on cash flows from unemployed relatives in the United States. But even with the decrease in money flows the absolute amount is still over 5 times the amount sent 10 years ago.
Buoyed by increased migration and lower money-transfer costs, remittances to Mexico peaked last year at just under $24 billion, more than 5 1/2 times the amount sent a decade earlier. Remittances recently vaulted over tourism to become the second-largest source of foreign currency in Mexico, topped only by oil exports.
The point about remittances being topped only by oil exports is important. Mexico's oil production has peaked. Their biggest oil field, Canterell, is heavily depleted and will never produce as much oil per day as it did at its peak.
The money has transformed the landscape of many small towns, paying for new houses and new kitchens, cars and childcare, medical care and clothes. But some economists also say the giant sums sent to Mexico have created a sense of complacency, especially among government officials who have failed to right the country's wobbly economy.
"This is demonstrating that there is an increased dependence on remittances and a great vulnerability for the country," said Rodolfo García Zamora, an economics professor at the University of Zacatecas and one of Mexico's leading authorities on remittances. "Neither the government nor the families who are affected have a good alternative to remittances."
The complacency in the Mexican government is bad news for Americans. Unless we close Mexico's safety valve with a border barrier and immigration law enforcement Mexico's elites aren't going to try to reform Mexico's schools and economy. Oil production in Mexico fell 7.8% in the first quarter 2008 and exports dropped 12.5%. With less money coming in from oil sales Mexicans will feel even more motivated to head north. We need to build a very substantial layered barrier to keep them out.
But the Wall Street Journal reports border crossings are way down due to job cuts in the US.
The number of illegal immigrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border is falling steeply, an indication that the economic downturn and beefed-up security could be deterring unauthorized crossings.
The U.S. Border Patrol said Tuesday that the number of apprehensions dropped 17% to 347,372 between Oct. 1, 2007, and March 31, 2008, from the same period in late 2006 and early 2007.
One academic quoted in the article claims she can spot recessions in the US at least a year in advance due to declines in arrests of border crossers. So it is hard to tell how much of the current decline is due to economic factors versus improved border enforcement and interior enforcement.
Arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border have been falling for more than two years. However, the dramatic drop in the first half of the fiscal year means that the number of apprehensions for the whole year ending Sept. 30 could dwindle to less than the 858,638 in fiscal 2007. That would be roughly half the nearly 1.64 million arrests during fiscal 2000, the peak year. Immigration experts also believe state laws to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants are discouraging attempts.
In Arizona, an employer-sanctions law has made finding work more difficult as companies start using an electronic system to verify worker documents. The state, currently the main gateway into the U.S. for illegal immigrants, has also stepped up enforcement beyond the border.
A big build of a border barrier during this recession could prevent an eventual post-recession surge of border crossers. We ought to take this recession as an opportunity to get ready to stop the next surge of illegal crossings.
We need a formidable multi-layer physical barrier along the entire US-Mexico border. But the Bush administration is trying to build something cheaper and less effective. The first attempt to build a sensor and surveillance system in lieu of a physical barrier worked very poorly and pushes out the virtual fence at least 3 years.
The Bush administration has scaled back plans to quickly build a "virtual fence" along the U.S.-Mexico border, delaying completion of the first phase of the project by at least three years and shifting away from a network of tower-mounted sensors and surveillance gear, federal officials said yesterday.
Technical problems discovered in a 28-mile pilot project south of Tucson prompted the change in plans, Department of Homeland Security officials and congressional auditors told a House subcommittee.
They can't even begin to try to appease conservative critics of lax border enforcement for another 3 years. I bet some of the amnesty and open border proponents in the Bush administration are pleased to know they've bought at least 3 more years of their preferred policy.
But officials said yesterday that they now expect to complete the first phase of the virtual fence's deployment -- roughly 100 miles near Tucson and Yuma, Ariz., and El Paso, Tex. -- by the end of 2011, instead of by the end of 2008. That target falls outside Boeing's initial contract, which will end in September 2009 but can be extended.
The excuse of "we've got years more engineering development to do before we can control the border" is unacceptable. We can seal the border using methods the Israelis developed years ago to seal off Gaza from Israel. We do not see many Palestinians sneaking across that border. That's why the Palestinians have had to resort to use of Qassem short range missiles to try to hit targets in Israel. They can't send physical terrorists across the border to do the job
The House of Representatives follows the US Senate in scaling back the scale of the border fence getting built along parts of the US border with Mexico. Unless we apply constant pressure our elites will continue to act contrary to our best interests.
Congress last night passed a giant new spending bill that undermines current plans for a U.S.-Mexico border fence, allowing the Homeland Security Department to build a single-tier barrier rather than the two-tier version that has worked in California.
The spending bill, written by Democrats and passed 253-154 with mostly their votes, surrenders to President Bush's budget demands, meeting his spending limit with a $515 billion bill to fund most of the federal government and setting up votes to pay for the Iraq war. But Democrats reached his goal in part by slashing his defense and foreign-aid priorities to pay for added domestic spending.
The fence has to be less formidable to allow easier illegal crossings.
The 2006 Secure Fence Act specifically called for "two layers of reinforced fencing" and listed five specific sections of border where it should be installed. The new spending bill removes the two-tier requirement and the list of locations.
The fence is still getting built. Future Congresses will come under considerable pressure to upgrade and expand its length. The outcome of future elections matter for immigration law enforcement. Pay attention to what the candidates say. Make your views known.
The biggest immigration battle currently raging is in the Republican Party for nomination for the Presidency. If a hard line immigration restrictionist takes the lead in the Republican primary then Hillary will have to move rightward on immigration. So which of the Republican mediocrities wins the early primaries will help set the tone for the wider election.
It has finally dawned on Jim Gilchrist that Mike Huckabee isn't really tough on illegal immigration.
Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist says he will have to reconsider his endorsement of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee after learning the Republican presidential candidate favors allowing illegal aliens to wait only days to receive documents allowing re-entry into the U.S.
Why is Gilchrist reconsidering his support for Huckabee? Because Huckabee wants the illegals to leave in order to apply for legal work permits and to return a mere days or weeks after they leave.
HUCKABEE: Well, I don't think there's an inconsistency. When I said a pathway, I didn't say what the pathway was.
I now believe that the only thing the American people are going to accept — and, frankly, the only thing that really makes sense — is a pathway that sends people back to the starting point.
But this idea of the waiting years — no, I don't agree with that. In fact, look, if we can get a credit card application done within hours, if we can get passports done within days, if we can transact business over the Internet any place in the world within seconds, do a background check instantaneously — it's our government that has failed and is dysfunctional.
It shouldn't take years to get a work permit to come here and pick lettuce. So part of the plan that I have is that we seal the borders. You don't have amnesty and sanctuary cities. You do have a pathway that gets you back home.
But that pathway to get back here legally doesn't take years. It would take days, maybe weeks, and then people could come back in the workforce.
So this heart throb of many fundamentalist Christian Republicans wants to end the illegal alien problem by rapidly turning all the illegal aliens into legal aliens with work permits.
Increased border enforcement along the US-Mexico border is creating difficulties for drug smugglers.
U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials told The Associated Press drug traffickers, in response to a U.S. border crackdown, have seized control of the routes they once shared with human smugglers and in the process are transforming themselves into more diversified crime syndicates.
The drug gangs get protection money from the migrants and then effectively use them to clear the trail for the flow of drugs.
The illegal aliens won't serve as useful tools of the drug smugglers once we have border-length walls and fences that made illegal crossings too difficult for the vast bulk of the illegal crossers.
The gangs use undocumented aliens “to maneuver where they want us or don’t want us to be,” said Alonzo Pena, chief of investigations for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona.
Note the way the Associated Press uses Orwellian Speak to refer to illegal aliens as undocumented. Our elites so want to brainwash us.
The article reports that border fences and more personnel to patrol the border have forced the drug smugglers to share crossings with people trying to cross over to live in the US illegally. This is a sign that increased border enforcement works. Contrary to the claims of the open borders advocates we can get control of the border. The drug smugglers are losing more of their contraband.
The Mexican border is providing a less reliable profit stream for drug smugglers, analysts and law enforcement officials say. The United States seized 20 percent more cocaine and 28 percent more marijuana along the border in the past six months, compared with the same period a year ago.
We should construct a border barrier layer made of multiple layers of walls and fences. The barrier should extend along the entire US-Mexico border. Such a barrier would stop almost all people smuggling and drug smuggling across the border. The drug smugglers will then make more attempts at tunneling. But people emerging from tunnels will become detectable with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which transmit images to computers which run image processing algorithms to detect human movements.
Two industrialized and civilized countries with low levels of official corruption can cooperate effectively to crack down on criminals operating across their shared border. But the United States can not hope to do the same with Mexico.
Along the border in Texas, local police departments have claimed to see Mexican army troops protecting drug smugglers, a claim the Mexicans deny. Corruption has been common among some Mexican police. The United States has constructed walls and fences and stationed National Guard troops along the border to keep out illegal immigrants.
Along the Canadian border, there are no plans for fences, and efforts focus on smuggling and terrorism. U.S. and Canadian authorities are patrolling together on the Great Lakes and have plans to operate a joint radio network. In a real-life repeat of the 1990s TV show "Due South" that featured a well-mannered Mountie and a hard-bitten Chicago cop, American agents and their Canadian counterparts have begun to investigate cases on each other's soil.
The article reports on a great scaling up of cross-border cooperation by Canadian and American law enforcement personnel. By contrast, American law enforcement see the Mexican police and military as hopelessly corrupt and criminal:
Border Patrol senior agent Bob Riffle, who worked on the Mexican border for a decade before transferring to Washington state, said the two borders have different cultures and had high praise for his Canadian counterparts. "I trust those guys implicitly," he said. "In Mexico, how can you have serious cooperation on a day-to-day level with guys who might have just robbed a group of illegals? It's a different world down there."
America can not totally isolate itself from Mexico. But we can not fix the place either. A barrier layer of fences and walls built along whole length of the Mexican border would reduce the damage done to the United States by the corruption and backwardness of Mexico.
US law enforcers can not risk sharing intelligence with corrupt Mexican counterparts.
The problem is any kind of cooperation and sharing of intelligence and communication systems with Mexico could run to the rampant corruption on the other side of the border.
Mexican government, police and military units struggle with corruption and direct links to drug cartels and immigrant smugglers. That creates problems when U.S. or border state officials looking to coordinate efforts. Information and intelligence sharing can often end up in the hands of organized criminal syndicates and cartels.
We are supposed to believe that Mexico is going to rise up and eventually the US problems with Mexican immigration, Mexican corruption, and the like will be solved by economic development. That is the argument you can hear from elements of the Open Borders crowd. But Mexico is not narrowing the economic gap with the United States.
Adjusted for inflation, Mexico's growth in gross domestic product has been flat for more than two decades. The cost to Mexico's people for this dismal performance is staggering. If Mexico's economy had grown at the same pace from 1980 to the present as it did in the period from 1960 to 1980, today it would have the same standard of living as Spain, said economist Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research in Washington. Instead, nearly half of Mexico's 106 million people live in poverty.
In fact, the US-Mexico economic gap is widening. (and economists who ignore the elephant in the room can not explain this)
The Harvard-educated Saracho has analyzed Mexico's post-1980 economic performance. His results are grim.
In constant 2000 dollars, the World Bank reports, Mexican per-capita GDP was $7,758 in 1980. It inched upward to $8,661 in 2003. Over that period, Chile went from trailing to topping Mexico, with its figures rising from $4,620 to $9,706. Former laggard South Korea leapfrogged from $4,556 to $16,977.
In 1980, Mexico's per-capita GDP was 34 percent of America's. By 2003, it had slid to 24 percent. Concurrently, South Korea began behind Mexico, at 20 percent, and then outpaced it to achieve a per-capita GDP 48 percent of America's.
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Registering a Mexican business takes 58 days, versus 48 in China, 27 in Chile, 22 in South Korea, and five here. During nearly two months of procedures, Mexican officials have numerous opportunities to encourage "tips" to speed things along. Mexico's Private Sector Center for Economic Studies calculates that, in 2004, 34 percent of businesses paid "extra-official" sums to functionaries and parliamentarians totaling $11.2 billion. As the late Carlos Hank Gonzalez — Mexico City's once-humble, eventually loaded, former mayor — put it: "Show me a politician who is poor, and I will show you a poor politician."
In the last 25 years per capita GDP in Mexico has grown by only 0.7% per year.
Well-off Mexicans pay almost no taxes and the government only takes in 14 percent of GDP. Welfare and unemployment benefits are unknown and job creation and salaries have stagnated. Mexico's per-capita real GDP has grown at only 0.7 percent annually since the early 1980s.
All else equal, rapid economic growth is easier for a country with lower per capita GDP because it can adopt existing technologies to raise living standards. Whereas the most developed economies must create new technologies in order to raise productivity and living standards. But all else is not equal. The elephant in the room is IQ differences. You won't hear much about that elephant since the left has managed to enforce a vigorous taboo regime against the truth. But the elephant is hard to miss if you use your own lying eyes to see it.
Calderón is promising to maintain the economic status quo of the last 25 years, but Weisbrot and Sandoval note that while Mexico's per capita GDP grew by 99 percent between 1960 and 1980, it grew by only 15 percent from 1980 to 2000. In the first five years of this decade, Mexicans have seen their economy grow by an anemic 2 percent.
By contrast, Richard W. Fisher is president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, provides details of US economic growth from 1980 to 2005 when the US per capita GDP increased by 63.7% in stark contrast to Mexico's own increase of only 15% over the same time period.
From 1980 to 2005, American workers filed 118 million claims for unemployment insurance. Many others lost their jobs, of course, but either didn’t qualify for benefits, were not unemployed long enough to file a claim, or quickly transitioned to new jobs. It is hard to find a figure that would include all the job losses, but it would be more than 150 million, surely. That is the destructive and painful side of the churn.
Yet, despite all these job losses:
Total employment over the period rose by 44 million—net. At annual rates, unemployment fell from 7.2 percent to today’s 4.7 percent. Productivity increased by 72 percent. Per capita real GDP shot up from $26,113 to $42,760. The average workweek fell by nearly two hours to 33.7 hours, and average household real net worth more than doubled to $431,000. That is the creative and restorative side of the churn.
You hear the claim that illegal immigration from Mexico will slow due to faster economic growth in Mexico. But that claim is false! Contrary to claims made by economists and free trade advocates in the early 1990s NAFTA did not set Mexicon on a path toward closing the living standards gap. The gap has continued to widen. I see these results as a consequence of the increasing economic premium on higher IQ. Therefore I predict that the living standards gap between higher and lower IQ countries is going to widen and with it the incentive for immigration from low to high IQ countries.
Given that the IQ premium will continue to grow the living standards gap between low and high IQ countries will continue to grow as well. Therefore the need to erect higher barriers to legal and illegal immigration of low IQ workers will increase. If the United States continues to let in lower IQ immigrants then the gap between the US and Mexico will eventually shrink as as less able American workforce cuts into competency of American businesses, research labs, and government agencies. Since IQ is inversely correlated with corruption a rise in corruption will further cut into the efficiency of the US economy.
June 6, 2006 — The Texas government is installing hundreds of cameras along the Mexican border and enlisting Americans who use the Internet to monitor illegal activity.
Within 30 days, the Texas Department of Homeland Security will enable citizens and law enforcement officials to watch alleged crimes through the Internet as they occur, using surveillance cameras along the 1,200-mile border with Mexico. Texas officials expect the cameras to capture images of drug trafficking, trespassing, theft, rape and kidnapping, all common to border areas.
If anyone has a good source for exactly how many cameras they are installing with the distance between cameras please post in the comments. I'd like to get an idea of how much it would cost to install cameras along the entire border.
I can imagine a software system where cameras with few people watching them can be identified so that volunteers can know which cameras to watch. Also, motion detectors could alert to the need for humans to watch particular cameras. Though wind blowing bushes and trees as well as animals would generate a lot of alerts.
The cameras will have night vision capacity and activity can be reported at a toll free number.
Texans, as well as those in other states, will be able to watch real-time video streams on the Internet to monitor the borders. The cameras will run 24 hours a day and will have night-vision capabilities.
If these border watchers see something suspicious taking place, they can call an 800 number that will be routed to the appropriate law-enforcement agency.
SAN ANTONIO – Gov. Rick Perry joined his fellow Texas Republicans in railing against illegal immigration Friday, telling the GOP faithful the Bush administration has failed to control a "porous and unsecured border."
"There is no homeland security without border security," Mr. Perry told thousands of delegates to the party's state convention.
The delegates cheered, but the party was at the same time striking a defiant tone against the policies of its leadership in Washington and, in some cases, Mr. Perry himself.
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In addition, the delegates object to a state law allowing in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, a bill that Mr. Perry signed into law. Republicans also want federal funds withdrawn from colleges that provide such tuition discounts.
Perry might be in the process of shifting toward a more restrictionist position due to popular anger over illegal immigration.
The Border Patrol chief spoke Spanish as he answered questions about the cameras.
Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar, talking to reporters Wednesday in Mission, suggested the state camera plan was devised separately from the federal camera network.
“It’s important that we take the opportunity to align our forces,” Aguilar said in Spanish. “Regarding the proposal by Governor Perry, we are looking forward to the opportunity to sit down and discuss it with him to ensure that whatever is done will be aligned with the efforts of the Border Patrol.”
Luis Figueroa, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, warned that the cameras could lead to racial profiling and vigilanteism.
“This leaves the door open to anyone who has a vindictive state of mind or a racial motive,” Figueroa said. “Anyone down there could easily be mistaken and falsely accused of something they didn’t do.”
MALDEF wants Americans to pay for even more Hispanic immigrants. Me, I don't want to take on the "white man's burden" "To seek another's profit, And work another's gain." and I deeply resent the desire of our elites to make me do so.
A Border Patrol union president does not think the Border Patrol has enough agents to respond to all the calls that will come in.
And T.J. Bonner, president of the union that represents nearly all Border Patrol agents, said the plan could further strain the overworked agency.
“At first blush, it sounds like just another crazy idea that is going to overwhelm the capabilities of the federal government to be able to respond to the number of calls coming in and to the number of reports,” Bonner said. “But there is a silver lining: It might just make legislators aware.”
Bonner said it won’t take smugglers long to figure out where the cameras are.
But cameras placed densely along the entire border and watched by people at home could eliminate the need for patrols. The Border Patrol could spend all their time just responding to calls to go exactly to where illegals are crossing. More funds for local law enforcement to do border enforcement could provide the people needed to catch the illegal crossers.
The border is only 2000 miles long and there's 5280 feet to a mile. So how many feet (or meters if you prefer) between cameras would be acceptable to get good coverage?
Combine the cameras with a barrier layer of fences and walls along the entire length and the number of illegal crossers to even report would go down by orders of magnitude.
Governor Perry is acting like a politician who wants to get reelected.
"A stronger border is what Americans want and it's what our security demands and that is what Texas is going to deliver," Mr Perry said.
The cameras will cost $5m (£2.7m) to install and will be trained on sections of the 1,000-mile (1,600km) border known to be favoured by illegal immigrants.
Web users who spot an apparently illegal crossing will be able to alert the authorities by telephoning a number free of charge.
Mr Perry, a Republican, is running for re-election in November.
I like the idea of states operating the cameras rather than the federal government. The states can move more quickly without federal regulations and without federal level lobbyist organizations trying to torpedo immigration enforcement initiatives.
Governor Perry's Virtual Border Watch Program is part of a larger initiative to put more local law enforcement officers along the border.
Drug smuggling and general crime will also go down as a result of a system of cameras combined with many more officers available to catch crossers.
When El Presidente Jorge W. Bush advocates for the Reconquista consider what sort of society we will become. Proponents of Open Borders with Mexico advance the argument that the huge Hispanic immigrant influx is stabilizing Mexico. That means it needs stabilization. Half the people in Mexico think Mexico is on the brink of chaos with drug lords and revolutionaries threatening government sovereignty.
A poll published Friday in Excelsior newspaper found 50 percent of respondents feared the government was on the brink of losing control. The polling company Parametria conducted face-to-face interviews at 1,000 homes across Mexico. The poll had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
The conflicts are "a warning sign," said Yamel Nares, Parametria's research director.
Security is the top concern for Mexicans, and Fox has struggled to reform Mexico's notoriously corrupt police. Meanwhile, drug-related bloodshed has accelerated, with some cities seeing killings almost daily.
In April, suspected drug lords posted the heads of two police officers on a wall outside a government building where four drug traffickers died in a Jan. 27 shootout with officers in the Pacific resort of Acapulco.
A sign nearby read: "So that you learn to respect."
This is nature's way of telling us we need to build a big buffer that will protect ourselves from the political events in Mexico. We've let in tens of millions of Mexicans who send tens of billions of dollars per year south of the border. But this has not bought stability in Mexico. We can not control the events in Mexico. Instead we should protect ourselves from those events.
The argument that we need stability in Mexico seems wrong to me. We can isolate ourselves from the political events if we build a sufficiently formidable border barrier. Our biggest risk would be a potential cut off of oil production if revolution erupted. But in Nigeria the challenge to the central authorities so far has cut production only 20%. The offshore oil fields of Mexico could probably continue to operate even if part of the country erupted in fighting.
SAN SALVADOR ATENCO, Mexico - It started as a dispute between eight flower vendors and local police over where they could sell their goods. By the next day, it had escalated into a massive raid by 3,000 state and federal police officers that left one dead and 200 arrested.
Now, more than a week later, the events of May 4 in the farming town of San Salvador Atenco 15 miles northeast of Mexico City are sending waves across the country's political system, highlighting the tension Mexicans feel just weeks before they select a new president July 2.
Police say the raid was necessary to quell danger when supporters of the flower vendors seized as many as nine local officers and severely beat and slashed two with machetes.
But there's a bigger context for these events. In 2002 in this same town a rebel group ousted the local government and took over.
For many, the town of 10,000 was already a flash point even before this month's police raid. In 2002, a peasant revolt led by a rebel group known as the Community Front in Defense of the Land stopped a plan pushed by Fox to build an international airport on their farmland. The Community Front also organized the defense of the flower vendors.
After the farmers' 2002 victory, Community Front leader Ignacio del Valle took over the town and ousted the municipal government, much in the manner of the 1994 Zapatista uprising Subcomandante Marcos led in Chiapas.
Imagine rebel groups overthrowing governments in towns in the United States.
A barrier on the US border with Mexico might increase the power of the Mexican central government by cutting back on the power of the drug smugglers. The money the drug lords make from smuggling finances their private armies and bribery of local and national police and politicians. Take away a big chunk of that revenue and they'd become weaker vis a vis the Mexican government.
Yankee dollars corrupt Mexico because the amounts of money Mexicans can make in illegal activities across the border are so much larger than what they can make legally within their country. They basically do not have the culture, political system, and character to handle the side effects of living next to such a wealthier society.
US House Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA) says if Bush follows through on rumours and announces deployment of National Guard along the US border with Mexico then unless the number of soldiers deployed are adequate to do the job (at least 36,000 needed) the policy will just be spin.
But will the proposal be real, or just spin?
The truth will lie in the proposed numbers, and whether the plan is for a short-term demonstration project or a long-term strategy for truly securing our southern border.
A real plan has already been proposed, with full details and research data included in last year's Immigration Reform Caucus special report, "Results and Implications of the Minutemen Project."
Under that plan, the southern border can be virtually closed except at legal points of entry within a one-month period -- at the longest. The flood of illegal immigration that has plagued America since the last amnesty plan in 1986 will be over.
It will initially take 36,000 troops. At the start, they should be National Guard personnel drawn nationally. There isn't enough National Guard in the border states alone to do the job without hindering combat readiness, so the forces will need to be pulled from other states as well under current National Guard Bureau assistance regulations.
The 36,000 troops will provide an average of three two-man teams per border mile for the entire 1,951-mile border with Mexico, working eight-hour shifts. Once in place on the ground, the deployment will need to be increased to 48,000 troops, to provide necessary manpower for time-off, sick leave, and long-term support services.
Most likely Bush might try to placate his (former) conservative base with a token deployment of troops. I do not expect him to sign up for a deployment of 48,00 troops to stop the illegal influx while a wall gets built. I also do not expect him to commence serious interior enforcement of immigration laws.
Troops could be used to secure the border while a border barrier gets built. Then the barrier fence or wall could make crossing harder and slower. Attempts to cross would trigger electronic alarms and get caught on video cameras and infrared cameras. Then the Border Patrol could dispatch personnel to catch crossers while they are still in the barrier zone.
Based on the evidence gathered from the Minuteman Project; U.S. Border Patrol; Cochise County Sheriff’s Department; Bisbee, Arizona Police Department; National Park Service; U.S. Army; multiple media sources; and individual testimonies, the Caucus Team reports the following findings on the Results and Implications of the Minuteman Project.
- Reasonable Manpower Increases Will Immediately Curtail Rampant Illegal Immigration. An average six additional personnel on station per border mile proved effective in dramatically reducing illegal crossings.
- Reinforcements Can Be Oriented and Deployed in Days. In contrast to the Border Patrol position of two-year training time for new officers, the Minutemen demonstrated that auxiliary personnel can be trained and deployed in three days. The lesser duties of supporting higher-trained Border Patrol and other state and federal law enforcement agencies does not require the full legal skills of Border Patrol agents.
- 36,000 Reinforcements Would Likely Seal Our Southern Border. However, unlike the Minutemen’s 12-hour shifts, to maintain six personnel on station 24/7 on a permanent basis would require adequate personnel for at least three shifts, or 18 auxiliaries per mile. The 2000-mile southern border would therefore require a minimum 36,000 total additional personnel, with 48,000 likely for a long-term deployment requiring substantial support personnel.
- Reinforcements Are Available From Existing Reserves. Troops should be drawn from all 50 states, or the border states and their neighbors at minimum. Mobilizing troops from just the border states would exhaust their manpower reserves, eliminate the warfighting capability of Guard members in those states, and would be unsustainable. Drawing 36,000 National Guard and State Defense Force personnel from the border states and their immediate neighbors would require 41% of available forces in the respective states. If drawn from National Guard forces nationwide, the border reinforcements would total 11% of available forces. As a long-term solution, one-half of the 70,000 federal troops returning from overseas could be permanently assigned the mission as part of the BRAC process currently underway.
- The Defense Authorization Act of 2005 provides specific legal authority for the Governors and the Secretary of Defense to immediately implement this plan with full federal funding. Section 512 of HR 4200, the Defense Authorization Act of 2005, passed by the 108th Congress, amends Title 32 Section 9 of U.S. Code to allow Governors to call forth their National Guard for homeland security duties within their state in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, and receive full federal funding for the mission, with no action required by Congress or the President.
- Long-Term Solutions: Border Security should remain a federal responsibility. The U.S. Border Patrol must be increased to somewhere between 25-50,000 officers to adequately guard our southern border, with the final size determination dependent on proven field effectiveness of new technology and infrastructure such as fencing, lighting, UAVs, sensors, etc. Until the Border Patrol is fully staffed and equipped, military support will remain a necessity. One-half or more of the 70,000 federal troops returning from overseas should be assigned the mission as part of the BRAC process currently underway, to relieve our National Guard and State forces as soon as practicable. Federal troops should in turn be relieved by a strengthened Border Patrol, but only when such reinforcements are fully in place.
I do not expect honest proposals from Jorge W. Bush. It isn't in his character to mean what he says. He wants to pursue policies that will turn the United States of America into Latin America. His goal at this point is to pursue his policies in a way that allows him to placate Americans across the political spectrum who want immigration reduction. I hope the American people are not gullible enough to be fooled by his next attempt at deception. They do not agree with him: Majority Of American Public Are Immigration Restrictionists.
The White House formally insisted that no decision has been made and that Bush was still considering options yesterday. But aides left little doubt that the president intends to call for an expanded Guard deployment at the border involving several thousand troops, a significant increase from the 200 or so now there.
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Tonight's speech is aimed at assuaging House Republicans who have insisted on tougher enforcement measures against workers illegally in the country. If the House contingent feels action is being taken, White House officials hope they may yet sign off on some version of Bush's guest-worker proposal, which would provide a way for undocumented immigrants to stay here legally if they pay back taxes and penalties.
If you want to understand why Jorge Bush's proposal will make the problem with the Hispanic influx even worse see my post Thinking About Bush's Less Than Half-Baked Worker Permit Proposal. I explain the stupidity of this plan in consideable detail.
I have a simple question for Bush and his fellow traitors in the US Senate: When Mexicans here under their worker permit plan show up with their family members at a US hospital's emergency ward who is going to pay for their medical care? If they break the law who will pay for their public defender, their trial costs, and their prison costs? Who will pay for the schooling of their kids?
Oh the nail-biting suspense! What will the president say in his illegal-immigration speech Monday night? Will he huff and puff and deliver his tried and tested, transparently insincere, self-evidently unbelievable, pro-forma statement that he intends to enforce the law ... or will he recognize the trouble he is in, reach deep within himself, and come up with ... a slightly less transparently insincere statement that he intends to enforce the law?
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In other words, Hewitt is upset at the thought that the president is going to make a border-security proposal that is transparently insincere. For Hewitt, everything depends on the president’s making a border-security proposal that is only translucently insincere.
As Larry has pointed out, some Bush apologists are at least partial immigration restrictionists who support an end to illegal immigration while avoiding taking a position about legal immigration and while avoiding addressing Bush's role in keeping the Hispanic influx at a high rate.
Larry Auster also passes along a very interesting analysis of Bush by Howard Sutherland (which you ought to click through to and read in full):
Bush is also a born-and-bred establishment liberal. For all the Texas accent, he belongs (patrician Greenwich family; Andover; Yale; Harvard) to a bipartisan Northeastern liberal elite. That set may have been wrong about most things in the end, but during his schooldays they were quite sure they were right. With the possible exception of abortion, he does not question fundamental liberal assumptions. His foreign policy is nothing but armed liberalism, and his domestic policies are those of Lyndon Johnson, only worse. Bush used that Texas accent and phrases like “compassionate conservatism” to fool the Republican rubes. Other people may see him as dumb; I think Bush sees himself as smart, successful and in charge. I don’t put much stock in his being in some sort of psychological contest with his father. Any feelings of inferiority he might have had on that score would have vanished when he beat the old man’s record by winning re-election.
...
But why Mexico? Throughout his life, Bush has been exposed to nice Mexicans. At the lower end, there were probably nice maids and ranch hands who helped out around the place and, in their way, helped raise him. For all I know, the Mexican maids were nicer to him than his mother, who is a formidable woman. At the upper end, there were the elegant, erudite, fun and mind-bogglingly rich Mexican oligarchs with whom his father did business and politics, and whose playboy children would have been some of Bush’s playmates in his partying days. He just likes Mexicans. I think he likes them better than Americans. The Mexican functionaries he meets are a lot more like the people he goes hunting with in Texas (some are the same people) than any of his geek Washington advisers. Like many people I know in Texas, he is very comfortable with Mexican culture seen through a tex-mex lens. I like it myself, and I am a sworn enemy of the Mexican government. Bush probably has better memories overall of relations with Mexicans throughout his life than he does with Americans. I would bet that while his personal experiences of his fellow Americans have been good and bad, his experiences of Mexicans have been almost all good from his point of view. He won’t see the bad in Mexico; he hasn’t experienced it and, anyway, to criticize Mexico on social or cultural grounds would be racist. Not gonna happen…
Maybe Bush hates Americans because they aren't as subservient toward him as Mexicans are.
Jerry Seper reports on Mexican soldiers crossing the US border helping drug smugglers.
The U.S. Border Patrol has warned agents in Arizona of incursions into the United States by Mexican soldiers "trained to escape, evade and counterambush" if detected -- a scenario Mexico denied yesterday.
The warning to Border Patrol agents in Tucson, Ariz., comes after increased sightings of what authorities described as heavily armed Mexican military units on the U.S. side of the border. The warning asks the agents to report the size, activity, location, time and equipment of any units observed.
It also cautions agents to keep "a low profile," to use "cover and concealment" in approaching the Mexican units, to employ "shadows and camouflage" to conceal themselves and to "stay as quiet as possible."
The bad President in the White House and the elite club of fools in the US Senate do not care about this sort thing.
Rafael Laveaga of the Mexican embassy in Washington DC would like us to believe that drug smugglers are just dressing up to look like Mexican soldiers. The head of the Border Patrol union thinks this claim is ridiculous.
Laveaga said some drug smugglers headed "both north and south" wear uniforms and drive military-type vehicles, and might have "confused" U.S. authorities.
"Give me a break," said T.J. Bonner, a 27-year Border Patrol veteran who heads the National Border Patrol Council. "Intrusions by the Mexican military to protect drug loads happen all the time and represent a significant threat to the agents.
The FBI acknowledged a recent border stand-off.
SIERRA BLANCA, Texas – Men dressed as Mexican Army soldiers, apparent drug suspects and Texas law enforcement officers faced off on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, an FBI spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Andrea Simmons, an agency spokeswoman in El Paso, told The Associated Press that Texas Department of Public Safety troopers chased three SUVs, believing they were carrying drugs, to the banks of the Rio Grande during Monday's incident.
Men dressed in Mexican military uniforms or camouflage were on the U.S. side of the border in Texas, she said.
The statement by Andrea Simmons of the FBI confirms claims by local officlals of a stand-off with Mexican soldiers and civilian smugglers.
Mexican soldiers and civilian smugglers had an armed standoff with nearly 30 U.S. law enforcement officials on the Rio Grande in Texas Monday afternoon, according to Texas police and the FBI.
Mexican military Humvees were towing what appeared to be thousands of pounds of marijuana across the border into the United States, said Chief Deputy Mike Doyal, of the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department.
Mexican Army troops had several mounted machine guns on the ground more than 200 yards inside the U.S. border -- near Neely's Crossing, about 50 miles east of El Paso -- when Border Patrol agents called for backup. Hudspeth County deputies and Texas Highway patrol officers arrived shortly afterward, Doyal said.
"It's been so bred into everyone not to start an international incident with Mexico that it's been going on for years," Doyal said. "When you're up against mounted machine guns, what can you do? Who wants to pull the trigger first? Certainly not us."
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed the incident happened at 2:15 p.m. Pacific Time.
US federal officials will avoid saying that elements of the Mexican military are crossing over into the United States to smuggle drugs. While it is obvious this is happening do not expect the Bush Administration to send US soldiers down to the border to shoot the border crossing corrupt Mexican soldiers.
Congressman Rick Renzi wants the US to protest diplomatically.
WASHINGTON -- An Arizona congressman yesterday demanded the State Department take "immediate diplomatic action" to stop Mexican military incursions into the United States, saying U.S. Border Patrol agents face a continuing threat of being killed by rogue soldiers protecting drug smugglers.
Two-term Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said reports of Mexican military units providing armed escorts to drug and alien smuggling operations represent "narco-terrorism in its purest form."
"Our borders are under attack by sophisticated organizations that have no qualms about firing on our Border Patrol units," Mr. Renzi said. "As we get tougher and more committed, so do the organizations committed to smuggling death and terror across our borders."
I think a border wall and some battle-hardened US military veterans brought home from Iraq and sent out to shoot at Mexican Army drug smugglers on US territory would be a better response.
The Minutemen say they have a video of an earlier Mexican military incursion from 2004.
The Minuteman Civil Defense Corps said the 2004 video is an example of the incursions made by the Mexican military during the past 10 years, first reported in the Daily Bulletin on Jan. 15.
"(Minuteman co-founder) Chris Simcox and others were in that area watching for people illegally crossing when they stumbled upon these Mexican soldiers on our side of the border," said Connie Hair, a spokeswoman for the group.
In the video, at least three men in military-style uniforms run from the border fence with automatic weapons toward a Humvee on the Mexican side of the border.
Hair said the incident happened at the border near the San Pedro River in Arizona.
The Bush Administration is morally decadent because they let this nonsense go on. Their protestations of being good Christians count for nothing with me. Their actions and inactions speak louder than their prayers.
The US Border Patrol is getting attacked much more often this year.
At least 687 assaults against agents were reported during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up from the previous year's total of 354 and the highest since the agency began tracking assaults across the Southwest border in the late 1990s, according to Border Patrol officials.
If the United States built a border barrier along the entire length of the border that was far more substantial then fewer would try to cross and the violence would decline. Half-way measures will be contested. Effective measures would intimidate the bulk of the smugglers out of trying to cross at all.
Gunshot incidents are rising rapidly.
In Tucson and San Diego, the most violent sectors, agents reported being shot at 43 times — up from 18 the previous year. No agents were killed, but three were shot in the leg. At least 20 more were hospitalized, many with head injuries from rocks.
Officials interviewed by the LA Times reporter claim the violence is a response to tougher border enforcement.
"They're feeling they have to fight their way through now," said Agent Jim Hawkins, a spokesman for the agency's Tucson sector. "We're taking their livelihood away from them, so they're getting angry and desperate."
A border barrier along the entire US-Mexico border would solve this problem. Using Israel's West Bank barrier as a guide the cost would be between $2 bilion and $8 billion.
Serving with his Texas Army National Guard in Iraq Allan Wall argues for use of National Guard units to secure the US border with Mexico and stop the illegal alien influx.
I think it's a great idea. An excellent idea. An idea whose time has come. Many of the tasks necessary to secure the U.S. border are the same tasks we are already performing here in Iraq. They could be carried out just as easily (and less expensively) on our own borders. Here in Iraq, National Guardsmen are patrolling 24/7, logging thousands of miles in armored humvees. Why can't they do the same on our own borders?
In Iraq, Guardsmen secure defensive perimeters, they man guard towers, they operate UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). They do surveillance in the dark with night-vision equipment. Why can't they do the same on the borders of their own country?
Currently, Guard units are being called up on 18-month deployments to Iraq and other places. Why can't they be deployed the same length of time to guard the border? When a Guard unit is not deployed, guardsmen train a total of about 40 days a year, one weekend a month and a two-week "annual training" period. Why not rotate National Guard units in and out of border duty for their yearly "training" period?
A unilaterial withdrawal of US troops from Iraq would free up all those soldiers to do border control for the United States. All that equipment deployed in Iraq could then get shifted to the US southern border. While those soldiers were deployed along the Mexican border the US government could fund construction of a border barrier that would gradually reduce the need for troops.
While the National Guard can not (according to Allan) act like police and pick up illegal aliens the Guard could do all the patrolling and spotting so that the Border Patrolmen themselves could just go from place to place using the directions of Guardsmen.
Enforcement of the US southern border would greatly reduce the illegal alien influx and therefore save taxpayers lots of money and improve the quality of life in the United States. Effective border enforcement would reduce the illegal drug flow. One beneficial side effect would be a slowing and possibly even a reversal of the slide of Mexico into a corrupt lawless narco-state. That would provide security and quality of governance benefits for both the United States and Mexico.
The problems with massive illegal immigration can no longer be ignored.
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano declared an emergency Monday in four border counties because of problems related to lax border enforcement and moved to provide local governments in those counties with up to $1.5 million in state funding.
Napolitano's order directly released $200,000 from the state's emergency fund for disasters while her emergency council released an additional $1.3 million, spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer said.
$1.5 million is chicken feed for a multi-billion dollar problem. I see her move as window dressing, similar to the recent move by New Mexico Democratic Governor Bill Richardson to put up $1.75 million for border security. But these moves are very important politically because they make it harder for politicians in Washington to pretend that the border and immigration problems are minor. Two elected Democratic governors have now gone on record with declarations of emergency stating that border security and illegal immigration are major problems.
The US Ambassador to Mexico is defending the moves by these US governors.
Tony Garza, the US ambassador to Mexico and a friend of President George W. Bush, responded on Tuesday night that violence “from Matamoros to Tijuana” was “destroying the social and economic fabric of our border communities”.
“The longer that violence continues, the tougher it becomes for many Americans to talk about Mexicans as our trusted partners with mutual interests,” he said in a speech in Denver.
One argument put forth by some members of the Open Borders crowd is that we have to keep the border open to keep Mexico stable. Well, Nuevo Laredo Mexico has degenerated into lawlessness because of the open border. This argument for open borders gets it exactly backwards. Closed borders will take the incentives away from organized crime to corrupt Mexican politics for the purpose of supporting illegal narcotics production and smuggling. Also, Mexico's problems are causing lots of crime in the United States and therefore victimizing lots of Americans. We need protection against what Mexico is right now.
Governor Napolitano wants to get reelected next year.
"Both federal governments let us down. There doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency,'' said Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, a Democrat seeking re-election next year, in a telephone interview Tuesday, a day after declaring a state of emergency in four border counties. Napolitano said "ranchers are at their wits' end'' over smuggled immigrants who damage their property and livestock.
...
In July, Arizona's Napolitano met with about 100 law enforcement supervisors to discuss border smuggling and violence. Last week, she wrote to Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, saying she was ``increasingly disappointed by red tape'' and complaining that her efforts to have 12 state police officers work alongside federal border and immigration agents had been turned down.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., toured the border Monday and said Richardson was right to declare an emergency and he hoped it would call attention to the needs of the region.
The state Republican Party also commended the governor in a news release issued Monday.
Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, is crafting a measure to ask voters next year to spend the money to erect a climb-proof fence wherever possible from Yuma to east of Douglas.
Pearce acknowledged Tuesday he doesn't have a price tag. A similar fence erected by federal officials near San Diego cost about $1.7 million a mile; the Arizona border stretches for 341 miles.
For less than $1 billion all of Arizon'a border with Mexico could be closed to illegal movements of people and a great deal of the drug trafficking could be stopped. For less than $10 billion we could build a barrier across the entire length of the US-Mexico border. We should start building the barrier immediately.
Governor Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) has declard a state of emergency in 4 counties on the Mexican border in large part due to the failure of the US federal government to stop the lawlessness.
The executive order, issued after Richardson toured the area around Columbus, makes $750,000 immediately available to Dona Ana, Luna, Grant and Hidalgo counties. He pledged an additional $1 million.
The money will aid state and area law enforcement efforts, fund a field office for the state Office of Homeland Security and help build a fence to protect a Columbus-area livestock yard where a number of cattle have been killed or stolen.
Illegal aliens are a big contributing factor.
"As Governor I have a responsibility to protect our citizens, property, and communities," said Governor Richardson. "Recent developments have convinced me this action is necessary- including violence directed at law enforcement, damage to property and livestock, increased evidence of drug smuggling, and an increase in the number of undocumented immigrants."
The damage to property and livestock is mostly committed by illegals passing through the border areas.
The violence against law enforcement includes AWOL Mexican Zeta Commandos aiming to kill US Border Patrol agents.
Richardson says the US government does not devote enough resources to border security.
"The situation is out of hand," Richardson said Friday night on CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight," noting that one 54-mile stretch is particularly bad.
...
In announcing the state of emergency, Richardson -- a Democrat who served in President Clinton's Cabinet -- criticized the "total inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and Congress" in helping protect his state's residents along the border.
"There's very little response from the Border Patrol," he said on CNN. "They're doing a good job, but they don't have the resources."
The governor of Arizona might follow Richardson's lead.
"I'm taking these serious steps because of the urgency of the situation and, unfortunately, because of the total inaction and lack of resources from the federal government and Congress," Richardson said. "We will continue to work with the federal government in an attempt to get their assistance, but something had to be done immediately."
The Arizona Republic reported Saturday that Gov. Janet Napolitano, D-Ariz., might also declare a state of emergency this week because of border concerns.
George W. Bush has other priorities. He wants Hispanic votes and he wants to cater to business interests that want cheap labor. Lots of US Senators see immigration through the same prism as Bush. These politicians are worse than worthless.
Update: Can Democratic Governor Bill Richardson be trusted to take a hard line against illegal immigration? Of course not. John Fund of the Wall Street Journal (which is "Open Borders" central in the American press) says Richardson only pretends to take a hard line against illegal immigration.
Further evidence of the governor's zigzag policy on immigration came in April when he vetoed a "No Fear" bill, which would have prohibited state and local law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal authorities to detect or apprehend people based solely on immigration status. But then he quietly issued an executive order that had much the same effect. Earlier this year, he also signed legislation giving some illegal aliens the right to in-state tuition rates at public universities.
"The governor is all puff and no cigar," says David Pfeffer, a Santa Fe city councilman who abandoned the Democratic Party this past March when he concluded its members "were closer to Michael Moore than to me." He expects the governor "to run for national office while saying one thing while he does something else back home."
Hillary Clinton's tough talk on immigration is similarly unbelievable. See my post "Hillary Clinton Not Serious About Border Security". The way forward for anti-immigration activists is at the state level. Lots of states have ballot initiative processes and direct appeals to voters through ballot initiatives can fix many of our border control and immigration problems. The California Border Police Initiative shows the way. A similar initiative in Arizona and state-level funding for border barriers in the border states could close the border. All other states - either through legislative action or ballot initiatives - could instruct their police to start rounding up illegals for deportation.
Drudge has an excerpt of a new Time magazine report on the rapidly growing influx on illegal aliens on the US border with Mexico. (Update: Here is the full article: Who Left the Door Open?)
The U.S.’s borders, rather than become more secure since 9/11, have grown even more porous and the trend has accelerated in the past year. Based on a TIME investigation, it’s fair to estimate that the number of illegal aliens flooding into the U.S. this year will total 3 million, enough to fill 22,000 Boeing 737-700 airliners, or 60 flights every day. It will be the largest wave since 2001 and roughly triple the number of immigrants who will come to America by legal means, TIME reports in its cover story , "Who Left the Door Open?" (on newsstands Monday, Sept. 13th).
The category "Other Than Mexicans" or "OTMs" is rapidly growing.
From Oct. 1 of last year until Aug. 25, the border patrol estimates, it apprehended along the southwest border 55,890 people who fall into the category described officially as other than Mexicans, or OTMS. With five weeks remaining in the fiscal year, the number is nearly double the 28,048 apprehended in all of 2002. But that’s just how many were caught.
Based on longtime government formulas for calculating how many elude capture, TIME estimates that as many as 190,000 illegals from countries other than Mexico have melted into the U.S. population so far this year. The border patrol, which is run by the Department of Homeland Security, refuses to break down OTMS by country. But local law officers, ranchers and others who daily confront the issue tell TIME they have encountered not only a wide variety of Latin Americans (from Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Nicaragua and Venezuela) but also intruders from Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Russia and China, as well as people who said they were from Egypt, Iran and Iraq.
Any guesses out there on whether Al Qaeda operatives know that the US border with Mexico is an easy route for sneaking into the United States? Some of those people sneaking in from Middle Eastern countries are probably coming for higher salaries. But if the poor immigrants looking for higher paying work know about our undefended southern border then surely Al Qaeda's intelligence gatherers have figured this out as well. So do not be surprised if the next terrorist attack in the United States is carried out by people who crossed the border from Mexico.
Keep in mind that if the political will existed to do so then immigration law could be enforced and One Year Of Illegal Alien Health Care Costs Would Pay For Border Barrier with Mexico.
Time also has an excerpt for non-subscribers.
Update: Here is the full article: Who Left the Door Open?
Fake marriages are becoming very widely used to stay in the UK.
Up to a fifth of wedding ceremonies in London could be bogus, a senior registrar warned today.
Officials fear the government's drive on immigration has triggered a surge in fake marriages.
Mark Rimmer, service director for registrations of births, deaths and marriages, believes rising numbers of foreigners are organising the ceremonies in a desperate bid to stay in the UK.
Rimmer sounds fairly confident the number is high.
"You are looking at one in five marriages in London being bogus.
The marriages are being made by non-EU citizens to citizens of various European Union countries. (Daily Telegraph free registration required)
Fake marriages typically involve a partner from the European Union, usually a "bride" from Portugal, France or Holland, and someone from outside, primarily North Africa or Turkey.
Registrars say that they regularly see cases in which couples sit refusing to face each other and flinch when they kiss. In one case when a bride was asked the name of the man she wanted to marry she had to first read it out of the passport.
This comes on the heels of the claims of another government official that immigration may be far higher than the official numbers indicate. (Daily Telegraph free registration required)
Immigration could be running at six times higher than official figures, a Home Office official told a court yesterday.
Robert Owen said he could not even "guesstimate" the true number of foreign nationals living in Britain.
The Manchester Chinese community is 6 times larger than official estimates.
Called to the trial to give an overview of the situation he claimed that up to 1,000 people a day were at one time arriving at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 claiming asylum.
He also claimed that the Chinese community in Manchester put the true number of people from China living in the city at up to 50,000 more than six times official estimates.
Britain is fortunate in one respect as compared to the United States: The British elites feel so pressured by an angry populace that the government's official position now is that immigration has to be reduced. America's elite continues to defy the wishes of the majority and to work toward increasing the immigrant flow into the United States. An example of this is the AgJobs amnesty which now has 62 sponsors in the US Senate.
The United States needs a new political party. In Britain the UK Independence Party shows signs of becoming a contender that can threaten the existing status quo. Given that the Republican leaders have decided to be just as traitorous as the Democrats we desperately need a new political party.
With Canada as the notable exception in almost all Western countries the majority sees immigration in a negative light.
In the United States and in the European countries polled - Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain - people were more likely to say they had negative views of the influence of immigrants, according to AP-Ipsos polls. That comes at a time of high concern over unemployment and worries about terrorism.
When asked "What influence do you think immigrants have on the way thing are going in your country" the combined percentage for very good/somewhat good versus very bad/somewhat bad broke down for the United States as as 42% positive/47% negative, for Canada 73% positive/20% negative, for Japan 44% positive/44% negative, and for Europe as a whole 37% positive/54% negative.
The more important question from a policy standpoint is what level of immigration is best? An earlier 2000 poll showed that in spite of a overall positive view of immigration about half of Canadians think current immigration is too high.
They are also split about the number of immigrants coming to Canada (45% "too high", 45% "about right"), and whether Canadians as a whole should be encouraged "to try to accept minority groups and their customs and languages" (46%) versus 50 percent who say that Canada should “encourage minority groups to change to be more like Canadians".
The latest poll does not ask whether current immigration levels are too high. But the section of the poll on whether immigration is a good or bad influence is probably a proxy that underestimates the percentage of the respondents that would support a decrease in immigration levels. For polls on American attitudes toward levels of immigration see my previous posts Elite Populace Gap On Immigration Issues and Most Americans Want Halt To Illegal Immigration.
Given the message we hear in favor of more immigation from Hispanic activists in the United States and from the Mexican government it is quite ironic that the latest poll shows 24% of Mexicans see immigration as a very bad influence, 29% see it as somewhat bad, only 28% see it as somewhat good, and a mere 8% see it as very good. Also, when Mexicans were asked whether it was important for all people to share the same culture and traditions 42% strongly agreed and 29% somewhat agreed. So 71% of Mexicans think multiculturalism is a bad idea.
The full survey results can be downloaded in PDF format.
Canada's National Post has managed to get access to a recent report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) which claims terrorists see Canada as an appealing base from which to raise funds and engage in other activities to support terrorist networks.
In a 22-page assessment of the security threats facing the nation, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said international terrorists are still using the country as a base for waging worldwide political and religious violence.
"Terrorism of foreign origin continues to be a major concern in regard to the safety of Canadians at home and abroad," says the Oct. 10, 2003, report, titled "Threats to Canada's National Security." "Canada is viewed by some terrorist groups as a place to try to seek refuge, raise funds, procure materials and/or conduct other support activities. ... Virtually all of the most notorious international terrorist organizations are known to maintain a network presence in Canada."
The report follows on the heels of the October 2003 US Library of Congress report Nations Hospitable To Organized Crime And Terrorism (PDF format) which lists Canada as a nation hospitable to terrorists.
According to a 2001 report by the U.S. Department of State, “Overall anti-terrorism cooperation with Canada is excellent, and stands as a model of how the United States and other nations can work together on terrorism issues.”580 Canada has assisted and cooperated with the United States on all fronts of the current war against terrorism. It has, for example, frozen the assets of suspected terrorists and is working closely with the United States to improve security along their common borders. Canadian and U.S. customs and immigration agencies, police forces, and intelligence agencies have a long history of cooperation on border security. This coordination has been strengthened in recent years through formal arrangements such as the U.S.-Canadian Bilateral Consultative Group on Counterterrorism Cooperation (BCG) and the Smart Border Action Plan.581
According to numerous intelligence and law enforcement reports, however, terrorists and international organized crime groups increasingly are using Canada as an operational base and transit country en route to the United States. A generous social-welfare system, lax immigration laws, infrequent prosecutions, light sentencing, and long borders and coastlines offer many points and methods of entry that facilitate movement to and from various countries, particularly to the United States. These factors combine to make Canada a favored destination for terrorists and international organized crime groups.
The report dwells at length on how Canadian immigration policy plays such a major role in making Canada a hospitable environment for terrorist operations.
Third, particular systemic and institutional characteristics make Canada hospitable to international terrorists and criminals. David Griffin, Executive Officer of the Canadian Police Association, explained:
Our proximity to the United States of America makes Canada extremely vulnerable, however it is our lax immigration policy, open borders, weak laws, archaic justice system, an even weaker corrections system and under enforcement that make us extremely attractive to the sophisticated criminal.584
In a 1999 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report entitled “Exploitation of Canada’s Immigration System: An Overview of Security Intelligence Concerns,” CSIS Director Ward Elcock is quoted as saying that “in most cases, [terrorists] appear to use Canadian residence as a safe haven, a means to raise funds, to plan or support overseas activities or as a way to obtain Canadian travel documents which make global travel easier.” According to the report, more than 50 terrorist groups are believed to be operating in Canada, including the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Tamil Tigers, Sikh extremists, the Kurdistan Workers Party, Hizballah, and extremist Irish groups.585 According to a 1999 report by Canada’s Special Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence,
Illegal migration into Canada—primarily through the refugee determination system— persists as a concern from two perspectives. First, it is a means by which terrorists may circumvent Canada’s vetting process abroad and enter in search of a temporary or permanent haven. Once in Canada, they may conduct fundraising or other activities or, in a very few cases, organize acts of violence in Canada or against other countries. Second, large volumes of illegal migrants provide the stream in which a few terrorists can ultimately gain entry to the United States by circumventing Canadian and United States border controls.586
Canada has arguably the most generous asylum system of any country in the world. Aliens have a substantially higher chance of gaining asylum in Canada than in the United States. In 1999, Canada granted asylum to 54 percent of applicants, compared with 35 percent in the United States. This condition, combined with easy entry into the United States from Canada, explains why Canada is a primary transition point for smuggled aliens.587
Perhaps until recently, there has also not been widespread concern that Canada could be the victim of a terrorist attack. Sensitivity to civil liberties combined with this low threat perception has made both the adoption and the enforcement of tougher immigration laws and strong counter terrorism measures more difficult. The fact that the 2002 bill designed to make Canada’s immigration laws less favorable to terrorists and international criminals is entitled the “Immigration and Refugee Protection Act” serves as an indication of the prevailing concern for or priority placed upon civil liberties in Canada.
Crimes committed in Canada are not considered relevant to asylum requests unless they would bring more than ten years of imprisonment. 588 This provision means that most of the criminal means by which terrorists raise funds—such as fraud, theft, and counterfeiting—would not disqualify them for asylum, even if they are found guilty. The same can be said for a portion of the illegal activities engaged in by international organized criminal groups.
Upon arriving at a Canadian port of entry, an individual claiming refugee status normally is released, with no provision for monitoring, rather than being detained pending investigation, as is the practice in Great Britain and the United States.589 As their claim is under consideration, such claimants can receive work permits, welfare payments, and housing and health care from the government.590 Deportation orders seldom are carried out for those whose refugee claims are denied.591
As of April 2003, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board had a backlog of 53,000 asylum cases. A 2003 report by Canada’s Auditor-General said Canada has lost track of 36,000 people who have been ordered to leave the country over the past six years. The report also notes
I hope it does not take a terrorist attack on the United States launched from Canada to bring enough pressure to bear to fix the problems with lax Canadian immigration policies that make it so easy for Islamic terrorists to find their way to Canada. But my guess is that, yes, it will take an attack traceable at least in part to Canada to get the Canadian government to make a big change in their immigration policies. But even then Canada may not really attack the problem if the US government response to date is any indication of what we can expect from the Canadian government. Given the unwillingness of the US government to make large immigration enforcement changes to reduce the threat of terrorism this inadequate Canadian response to the terrorist threat should not be too surprising.
Yale law professor Amy Chua, author of World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, argues that democracy is unleashing inter-ethnic conflicts around the world, including in Iraq.
When sudden democratisation gives voice to this previously silenced majority, opportunistic demagogues can swiftly marshal animosity into powerful ethno-nationalist movements that can subvert both markets and democracy. That is what happened in Indonesia, Zimbabwe, and most recently Bolivia, where weeks of majority-supported, Amerindian-led protests resulted in the resignation of the pro-US, pro-free-market "gringo" President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. In another variation, recent confiscations by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, of the assets of the "oligarchs" Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky - all well-known in Russia to be Jewish - were facilitated by pervasive anti-semitic resentment among the Russian majority.
Iraq is the next tinderbox. The Sunni minority, particularly the Ba'aths, have a large head start in education, capital and economic expertise. The Shiites, although far from homogeneous, represent a long-oppressed majority of 60-70%, with every reason to exploit their numerical power. Liberation has already unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements which, needless to say, are intensely anti-secular and anti-western. Iraq's 20% Kurdish minority in the north, mistrustful of Arab rule, creates another source of profound instability. Finally, Iraq's oil could prove a curse, leading to massive corruption and a destructive battle between groups to capture the nation's oil wealth.
Chua points out that the government of Indonesia, once it became democratic, nationalized $58 billion dollars worth of assets formerly owned by Indonesian Chinese. The result is stagnation of Indonesia's economy with high unemployment, poverty, and the rise of extremist movements. Will similar calamities befall Iraq? Since I favor placing empirical evidence ahead of ideological beliefs when setting policy I think the rational response to the situation in Iraq is to split the country up into 3 countries where there is a single dominant overwhelming majority in each country with more trust of its own members. More arguments for that approach here.
Chua is unwilling to build on her observations to either explain why there are market dominant minorities or to explain what ought to be done about preventing the development of the conflicts that inevitably come from having market dominant minorities. Paul Craig Roberts argues that Chua misses obvious conclusions about US immigration polices and about US foreign policy that can be drawn from her observations.
Certainly the U.S. government and the IMF should take care not to export policies that worsen ethnic conflicts, but the more powerful conclusion to be drawn from Chua’s material—a conclusion that Chua studiously avoids—is that the U.S., Europe, the U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand should immediately cease and desist from reconstructing themselves as multi-ethnic societies. Accentuating ethnic conflict abroad is stupid, even criminal, but it is insane to import unassimiliable ethnic groups into Western countries, thus replicating in the West the Third World conflicts that Chua so terrifyingly describes.
In his analysis of Chua's work Steve Sailer points out that property rights and one man-one vote do not always mix and that this is bad news for the future of the United States.
That property rights and one man-one vote democracy don't always mix well would not have surprised Aristotle, Edmund Burke, or Alexander Hamilton. Yet many Americans who call themselves conservatives have forgotten this.
One reason: we are one of the fairly small number of lucky countries with "market dominant majorities." We can have our cake (capitalism) and eat it too (democracy) because our majority group is economically quite competent.
America's perpetual trouble has been a less-productive black minority. Black-white economic inequality is not a problem that America is going to be able to solve any time soon. But, due to our market-dominant majority, our country is rich enough to live with it.
In contrast, if our current mass immigration system is allowed to continue, America will become just another country with a market dominant minority. Through government policy, we will have inflicted upon ourselves the kind of ugly society seen in most of the rest of the world.
Also see Vinod on Amy Chua's work.
Proclaiming that all ethnic and racial groups should all be equally economically successful will not make it happen. Less successful groups will inevitably resent more successful groups and will therefore act politically, whether at the ballot box or by other means, to express their resentments. Any society whose most successful groups become a smaller fraction of the population is one that is going to have more strife, more crime, more use of government to seize assets from the most successful groups, less civility, and less trust. The debate over this problem and its implications for and foreign policy - especially for immigration policy - has now reached the leftish mainstream in the UK with David Goodhart's Prospect article about Great Britain becoming too diverse being republished in the Guardian. Anthony Browne, Environment Editor of the London Times, has also played a role in bringing a skeptical look at immigration into the mainstream of British political debate. But that debate is still taboo in The New York Times and other legitimizers of elite liberal-left discourse in America. This taboo also has the effect of making US foreign policy in places like Iraq dangerously naive as the assertion of unversalist beliefs about how we can all just get along in democratic capitalistic utopians obscures the much uglier truths about why the world's problems are so much less tractable.
The Mexican government continues to busily lobby American local, state and federal government officials for acceptance of the matricula consular ID card granted by Mexican consulates to Mexican illegal aliens (and even to some Guatemalan illegals) in the US. At the very same time that the Mexican government wants US government agencies to treat illegal aliens more like legal aliens in Mexico 5 million people are ineligble to vote, get a bank account, or go to school because they have no birth certificate.
Isabel Lopez Torres, a shy-eyed 11-year-old, can't write her own name because she's never been to school. Like thousands of other children in Mexico, she's been barred from public schools because of a bureaucratic barrier: She has no birth certificate.
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The government estimates that more than 5 million Mexicans lack birth certificates. For poor people in rural areas, getting a birth certificate can mean walking hours or even days to the nearest municipal office. For many, especially in the poorest indigenous communities, the $5 or $10 processing fee represents the family's food budget for a week.
Effectively these Mexicans who do not have birth certificates are not even being treated as full citizens in their own country. This is happening even while the hypocritical Mexican government is pushing to have US government agencies to treat Mexican illegal immigrants as de facto US citizens.
Mexico is broken and needs to be fixed. But the ease with which Mexicans can cross over the border into the United States reduces the internal pressure in Mexico to make substantial reforms. In fact, as Allan Wall reports from Mexico, many illegal alien men who travel from Mexico to live and work in the United States abandon their families in the process of doing so.
Sara and her five children were abandoned by her husband in 1985.
This deadbeat dad is believed to live in Texas. Since his emigration, he has not sent one cent to his family!
Señora Garcia related to the reporter, Angel Amador Sanchez, that many other women were in her situation. In a town like Jerez, where emigration is a part of the culture, that’s not surprising, and as Sara puts it, “...these men abandon their wives and children as if it were nothing.”
The United States can not fix Mexico by letting tens of millions of Mexi