More Fundamental Change From Our President

Four years ago I flew to Tucson, Arizona, rented a Jeep, and drove down to the Mexican border at Nogales. I wanted to see for myself what was going on down there. I turned right just before the Mexican crossing and drove west along International Street on the US side of our primitive border fence. There, I encountered several modified, four-door, white and green, Dodge pickup trucks scurrying around in a futile effort to stop the flood of illegals constantly sneaking over, under, and through the flimsy international “barrier.” 

International Street in Nogales

The first agent I was able to speak with was, lucky for me, from Maine. He talked freely at first, telling me they arrested over 57,000 illegals just in Nogales during the previous year, down from over 100,000 two years previously, but he indicated that many more than that got through. Somewhere between twelve and twenty million are in the US illegally. Many are on welfare, including thousands in Maine. When I told the agent I was a columnist (wish I’d never done that), he clammed up and referred me to “public information officers” back at headquarters in Nogales who gave me the runaround, erased pictures from my camera, and escorted me off the base. The Border Patrol hierarchy under the Obama Administration wanted to keep a lid on information back then, and it’s only gotten worse since.

Border in Nogales

Illegal aliens are coming across our southern border because they can. Life on our side is better than it is where they come from, whether they want to work under the table or just go on the dole. Neither Democrats nor establishment Republicans want to stop them, but ordinary Americans do. Why? Because while life improves for the illegals, their presence here makes life more difficult for working-class Americans. According to a study last month from the Center for Immigration Studies and reported at National Review Online: “Net employment growth in the United States since 2000 has gone entirely to immigrants, legal and illegal.” Taxes have risen dramatically in many US states and cities to pay for education, healthcare, housing, food, and jails for illegals and their children. Hospitals and schools are overwhelmed in border states, and wages are driven down for blue-collar workers here, especially blacks.

Now President Obama is expected to grant amnesty to five million of them by Executive Order. Tea Party Republicans in the House are threatening impeachment if he does. The Christian Science Monitor quotes senior White House Advisor Dan Pfeiffer saying: “The president acting on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that [Republicans] would contemplate impeachment at some point.” Ironically, Obama seems to relish that prospect, perhaps because it will encourage more Democrat voters to go to the polls in November, trying to keep control of the Senate.

Obama wants almost $4 billion for judges, lawyers to process hundreds of thousands of illegal “children” who are unlikely to even show up for their hearings. He’s flying them all over the country and releasing them wherever he can. He claims he must abide by a law passed at the end of the Bush Administration mandating court hearings for OTM, or “Other Than Mexican” illegals who come here from non-contiguous countries. The law was passed to fight sex trafficking, not for what Obama is doing, but Democrats refuse to modify the law. Obama is using it as a fig leaf and doesn’t want to change it. He’s obeying that law while refusing to enforce virtually every other immigration law on the books. He sued Arizona when it tried to enforce them at the state level.

Senior Border Patrol officials are still muzzling agents about what’s really going on down there. Like the one I met, they won’t talk. Cameras are banned and even congressmen aren’t allowed into facilities. Are they afraid pictures of “children” with facial and neck tattoos will circulate? They only want us to see pictures of cute little kids, though according to the Lieutenant Governor of Texas last week last week: “unaccompanied children represent some 12%-20% [of recent illegal immigrants]. We're focused on that [other 80 or 85%] of which a quarter, according to the border patrol, have a criminal record.”

Retired Border Patrol Agents claim the Obama Administration has manufactured the present crisis to put political pressure on Congress to pass amnesty. When the president blames the current flood of immigrants on violence and gang activity in Central America, he’s lying. By issuing his unconstitutional executive order DACA - Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals - he choreographed it.

Former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy agrees, writing last week that: “The January 2014 solicitation published by DHS’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement foretells (a) the arrival of 65,000 ‘unaccompanied alien children, and, tellingly, (b) the administration’s intention to transfer them to ‘Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shelters located throughout the continental United States.’”

Obama is lying - again - when he claims he’s going to deport them. They’re staying, as still another way to fundamentally change America.