Border blowback

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., is one of the few politicians in Washington, D.C., with the courage to speak out openly about America’s dangerously flawed immigration policies and practices. The weekly publication Human Events selected a terse statement by Tancredo as its “Quote of the Week”: “The U.S. can bomb Afghanistan to dust but terrorism will remain. In some bizarre thought process understood only in Washington, D.C., the possibility of tightening up immigration laws paralyzes most politicians.”

America is being seriously damaged and endangered by uncontrolled immigration. But our elected officials studiously avoid facing the issue.

Although it is generally considered most insensitive to bring up such matters, Steven A. Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, reports that the poverty rate for immigrants, defined as foreign-born U.S. residents, is 50 percent higher than that of natives. They and their U.S. born children account for 22 percent of all persons in the U.S. living in poverty.

When politicians deplore the number of people without health insurance, they conveniently neglect to mention that immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years and their U.S.-born children account for 60 percent of the increase in the size of the uninsured population.

When journalists and edu-crats discuss the problems of education in America – class size, high school dropouts, poor performance and costs – rarely do they explain that immigration accounts for essentially all the growth in the public school population over the past 20 years, and that currently there are about 9 million children from immigrant families in public schools. Nor do they mention that almost one-third of the immigrants arriving in America do not have a high school diploma – three times the rate for natives.

One powerful and courageous voice speaking for English as America’s official language is that of John H. Tanton, M.D., founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and co-founder of ProEnglish. He reports that new data released by the U.S. Census Department show that the number of Americans who do not speak English has soared in the past 10 years. The number who do not speak English at all or speak it poorly has increased by 60 percent since 1990. Nearly 20 percent of Americans do not speak English in their own homes. Neither, of course, do their children.

Such reports are viewed as evidence of success in many quarters. In a Hoover Institution essay entitled “Bilingual Education: A Critique,” Peter Duignan describes a growing problem: “Mexican American activists reject assimilation, insist on bilingualism and multiculturalism, and lay claim to Southwest America as belonging to Mexico! … Their message is not pushing assimilation but rather the protection of the Spanish language and culture … ”

One sadly remembers the words of John Jay, recorded in the Federalist Papers: “Providence has been pleased to give us this one connected country, to one united people, speaking the same language.”

The United States has no operative immigration policy. The evidence is clear. For example, of the 8 million to 10 million illegal aliens who live in the United States, between 250,000 to 300,000 of them have been brought to court and sentenced to deportation by federal judges. After their court hearings, these illegal aliens simply walked away and disappeared. The Immigration and Naturalization Service does not know where they are or what they are doing and has no plans to round them up and see that they leave the country.

Seventy percent of the cocaine smuggled into America comes across the Mexican border. Most of it comes from Colombia, home of the Marxist terrorist organization, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, known as FARC.

According to a report from Reuters news agency, several weeks after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., FARC leader Jorge Briceno threatened to hit American targets “wherever they may be, until we get to their own territory, to make them feel the pain which they have inflicted on other peoples.”

FARC has the means to move tons of cocaine across our borders. Who can say they would not use such means to move instruments of mass destruction into our cities?

It is time to face the reality that, according to no particular plan, America is being degraded, disunited and endangered by a powerful flow, wave after wave, legal and illegal, of poor, unskilled and uneducated people into our country, many of whom have no interest in becoming Americans or learning the English language. Unable to join the American mainstream, they will fester in ethnic ghettos, work for sub-standard wages, reproduce, vote the straight Democrat ticket and provide cover for terrorists.

As they say down Mexico way, “loco, completamente loco!”