It is Not Just Liberals Who Oppose Immigration Reform

When in November, 2010 the citizens of Arizona passed SB 1070 by an overwhelming majority in a state wide referendum, there were many who proclaimed it a turning point in the nation’s consciousness about illegal immigration.   After all, a measure which sought to crack down on rampant border crossings by forcing suspected illegal aliens to confirm their  status, would seem a natural reaction for any polity seeking to reinforce key concepts of citizenship.

And indeed the expectation that States would finally take action in the spirit of  SB 1070 was quickly reinforced with over 20 states vowing, in one way or another, to follow Arizona’s lead.  Most particularly, initiatives sprung forth in Utah, Indiana, Kentucky and Georgia.  The anti-illegal immigrant sentiment had gained momentum from a sense among ordinary citizens that their own taxes are being used to support those whose loyalties do not attach to this country and who saw the federal government as helpless in preventing the crime and dependency that has come with the flood of Central Americans streaming across our borders.

Yet the measures introduced by many of the conservatives who swept to power in state wide elections in 2010 are failing.  They have come up against not so much Federal opposition ( SB 1070 is headed for review  in the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few months) but against businesses, police and community activists who have banded together in an odd coalition to stymie reform of a broken system.

Why, one might ask, has Georgia’s House Bill 87, which seeks to crack down on illegal immigration and has squeaked through the state House of Representatives, failed to win the endorsement of the same Republican governor who promised his support for exactly such a measure during the 2010 election?  Why has Utah watered down its own anti-illegal immigration law which now only requires immigration checks of people arrested for felonies and serious misdemeanors and has passed a ” guest worker” ID program which looks suspiciously to many like amnesty?

The answer is that Americans, wherever, they live, have grown too comfortable and complacent with the cheap labor that comes from the ready supply from an illegal immigrant work force.  After decades of delegating the menial urban tasks of our society  - including house cleaning, gardening and handiwork- to outsiders and our rural jobs such as harvesting, many Americans, including our small business owners, have forgotten that if the bedrock of our labor force is not American but foreign, we run the risk of future civil unrest which might one day rival the slave revolts of Rome or the current welfare dilemmas of Europe where huge populations of  Muslim illegal immigrants demand the same rights of housing, health and education as their legal compatriots.

The problem is not simply America’s but one growing without control in almost every Western country.  White guilt at the the range of luxury we enjoy combines with greed and complacency to set up a terrifying problem for future generations.  It is a mark of potential societal collapse when a country’s citizens fail to attach any value to their own concept and view of that citizenship.

The failure of our political leadership at all levels of government in this country to stand behind a distinctive form of American identity poses as one of our most disquieting internal problems.  Let’s pray for candidates in the 2012 elections who offer a clear sighted view  of the immigration problems we have created for ourselves and a firm grasp of the draconian measures, such as the people of Arizona were forced to adopt,  that now need to be taken to address them.

The Mexican War of Survival

Will Mexico cease to exist as a self governing nation state?

That is a question that we might all be asking ourselves considering recent developments in that country and a growing likelihood of the outbreak of some kind of civil war.

Not a day goes by without a news item revealing yet another outrage perpetrated against a judge, a prosecutor, a political leader or a major business figure.  Kidnappings and killings have reached into such formerly safe enclaves as Acapulco, Cancun and Monterrey.

Today’s Los Angeles Times reveals how even the country’s most important national enterprise, PEMEX – a natural gas exploration and refining giant, has been cowed and intimidated by the drug lords.   Tracy Wilkinson reports that 30 employees of the corporation have gone missing for a month, with no word from them or their supposed kidnappers.  No one wants to talk about the abductions – not the familys’ relatives, not the government investigators and not even the government itself.  Why?   For fear of reprisals from the drug cartels who seem to have penetrated and intimidated every echelon in Mexican society.

Wilkinson reports this frightening reality:

“The capacity of the traffickers to exert influence over a company as mighty as Pemex only solidifies the widely held perception that the cartels are growing in size and strength despite the government’s crackdown.” “How is it,” asked a relative of a kidnapped worker, “that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?”

Despite the capture of the drug kingpin  ‘Le Barbie’ last week,  the view that the country is slowly falling apart due to increasing fear and an ensuing collaboration by ordinary citizens with criminal elements is gaining increasing currency.

That is because the public  trust that should exist in police and government forces are actually working to protect Mexican society rather than collaborating with the  Cartels, has substantially eroded.  Last month it was discovered the murdererers of the popular mayor of Monterrey were actually city policemen and included his own bodyguards.  It sent a sobering message of what has happened to Mexican society – you can’t trust anyone, any time.  Its everyone for themselves in a Mexican War  of Survial.

The increasing opinion of Mexican editorialists is that President Calderon’s  four year  struggle with the Cartels is not succeeding and as Wilkinson reports, may be leading to a growing assumption that the country is headed towards break up.  Feuding cartels will  battle it out over huge swathes of territory, making local elected government an anachronism.

The consequences of a potential Mexican collapse for the United States are underplayed and simply underreported in this country.   Such an eventuality would produce a refugee crisis that would make the South Asian crisis of the late 70s look like a family picnic.  It would cause untold hardship and violence in our own border towns and it would create a humanitarian crisis of unparalleled duration.

For years I have called for United States intervention in the mess that is Mexico – a devotion of our resources to destroying the cartels.  We MUST pay more attention if we are going to prevent this war from spilling into our southern cities and border towns and becoming not only Mexico’s War for Survival, but something of our own.

Cinco de Mayo As Symbol of Hispanic Separatism

My organization, the American  Freedom Alliance, shares an executive suite with several other organizations, law firms and accountants. The residents of the suite all hail from different nationalities and observe different religious practices.    We all get along pretty well, and there is general acceptance of a range of  holidays and respect for individual traditions.  Therefore each late December both Christmas and Channukah will be respected, with  a Christmas tree sharing a wall along side the Channukiah, the traditional candelabrum that Jews light on each of the eight nights of their festival.   Other national events, such as Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Thanksgiving are almost always marked by their own tokens of remembrance.

I was therefore not at all offended  when, on May 5, the office receptionists brought a dozen sombreros to the office and  went around the suite offering to take a photograph of anyone who chose to don one.  They generously supplied a large bowl of guacamole, salsa and tortilla chips in the luncheon room, displaying great pride in celebrating their Hispanic origins and culture.

That’s all fitting and well within the bounds of respectable multicultural sentiment.

But what happens when white Americans begin regarding Cinco de Mayo as a cultural icon that they insist all Americans must be forced to respect as a symbol of Mexican national pride?

That is exactly what happened this week at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hills, California when administrators at the high school sent five students home on Wednesday after they refused to remove their American flag T-shirts and bandannas — garments the school officials deemed “incendiary” on Cinco de Mayo.

The five teens were sitting at a table outside the school on Wednesday morning when Assistant Principal Miguel Rodriguez asked two of them to remove their American flag bandannas.  The boys complied, but were asked to accompany Rodriguez to the principal’s office.  There it was explained to the students that wearing such clothes might be considered offensive to students of Mexican extraction.  When the boys protested that to be forced  to turn their own t-shirts inside out would itself be offensive, they were given the option of going home. They chose to go home.

While the school’s dress code policy allows the school ” to request that any student dressing inappropriately for school will change into other clothes, be sent home to change, and/or be subject to disciplinary action,” one has to wonder how the expression of such patriotism attracts the ire of the school dress watchdogs, on a day when more than 100 students were spotted wearing the colors of the Mexican flag — red, white and green — as they left school, including some who had the flag painted on their faces or arms.

Not many today  realize how peculiarly an American event the celebration  Cinco De Mayo has become.  It has its origins  in a Mexican army  victory over the French on May 5, 1862, at the city of Puebla, Mexico.   The French, Spanish and English had invaded to enforce debt payments that the Mexican government had repudiated.   At that point in history, the French army had not been defeated anywhere for over 50 years.  No country in the Americas has been invaded since that date  by a European military force.

The victory, however, was only a minor setback for the French.  Within a few months its expeditionary force had recovered from its defeat and occupied Mexico City, where they installed Maximillien II as king.

Cinco de Mayo began to be celebrated in California in 1863 and, to a more limited extent, in Puebla itself.  But for the most part, it is ignored in Mexico – and in even in most of the United States.

The problem with the celebration today is that it often hoists Mexican nationalism above American patriotism and in recent years has seen immigrant riots, the veneration of  Mexican nationality and even flying the American flag upside down.   For instance, in response to proposed federal legislation regulating illegal immigration, students at Montebello High School on March 27, 2006  in California staged a protest at which the Mexican flag was raised , the American flag raised upside down beneath it and the California flag stolen. Other incidents, most particularly in California, once owned and ruled by Mexico, have indicated that there is a restive minority in the country’s largest state who do not subscribe to assimilationist ideals but cling tenaciously to their Mexican national identity.

The school system is particularly prone to this kind of inverted thinking.  Four years ago, a parent at a school in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles told me that she was shocked to arrive at a parent-teacher meeting which she found being conducted wholly in Spanish, with translations  made available to English speaking parents only through headphones.   Another parent told me of a high school in Florida where a giant mural celebrates true “American” heroes – Fidel Castro, Che Gueverra and Simon Bolivar.

As Victor Davis Hanson has argued in his powerful book Mexifornia:  A State of Becoming, ” if America once invaded Mexico and hurt its pride, Mexico has now quietly  invaded America – not with thousands, but with millions, and as an occupying force that plans to stay.”   The Republic of Mexico, according to Hanson, is secretly supportive of illegal immigration seeing that the yanquis and gringos once invaded their land, rigged the border to permanently harm the Mexican people and oppress their southern neighbors.  They therefore surrepetitiously  support their illegal brethren to the north in a covert attempt to “reclaim” California.

It is time we start recognizing that California is a society under siege  from those who insist on such ethnic chauvinism, bilingualism and Hispanic separatism.  This cultural assault  is being abetted by multiculturalists who use Cinco de Mayo, Mexican Independence Day ( September 16) and November’s Day of the Dead to reinforce the notion that the State of California is eternally Mexican, and will one day, inevitably, return to the fold.

Celebrating Cinco de Mayo may therefore be pleasant enough, but not if it gives a leg up to rampant disrespect for American nationalism and fealty to another nation.