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Tuesday, June 10, 2014

The Greatest Threat to Our National Security

"If a nation expects to be ignorant — and free — in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, 1816

With so much media coverage being given to the swap of five top ranking Taliban terrorist leaders for an army deserter there has not been much national coverage or dialogue on our greatest threat to our culture, economy, and national security. That threat is the illegal and uncontrolled immigration from south of our border.

Last year, according to ICE figures some 75,000 illegals came over the border and were dumped into our state. The estimates for this year surpasses 200,000 to 300,000 and possibly more. Most of these illegals are children from Central America. They are being dumped on the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas without permission of the governments of those states. It will be up to the us taxpayers to pay for these illegals.

If a child is lost in a shopping center he or she is not evicted and sent out into the greater population. They are returned to their parents or family. Not the case with these illegal immigrant children. They are warehoused and given food, clothing, medical attention, and education. They are dumped into overburdened public school systems where their education will cost more than that of legal citizens due to their lack of elementary education and inability to speak English.

Recently, the Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson made Border Patrol “a level-four condition of readiness” because of the number of children crossing the border alone. According to The New York Times, the number of unaccompanied children coming into the United States from as far away as Honduras has risen from 4,000 youths in 2011 to 21,000 in 2013. The number of children that already crossed the border exceeded the projected 60,000 Border Patrol estimated for the whole year. “We have to discourage parents from sending or sending for their children to cross the Southwest border because of the risks involved,” Johnson said. “A South Texas processing center is no place for a child.” When the federal government’s policies reward the illegal immigration of children, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Nanny State.

The spike of unaccompanied children crossing the border is cracking the defenses along the border to the breaking point. According to Theillegal_aliens_nogales Washington Times, the Border Patrol has diverted much of its energy to dealing with the waves of youth, leaving drug smugglers and their ilk to operate more freely. A Border Patrol memo obtained by the Times found, “The large quantity of DHS interdiction, intelligence, investigation, processing, detention and removal resources currently being dedicated to address [Unaccompanied Alien Children] is compromising DHS capabilities to address other trans-border criminal areas, such as human smuggling and trafficking and illicit drug, weapons, commercial and financial operations.” The memo continued to say the diversion of resources will hamstring law enforcement immediately and possibly well into the future. This is what happens when Obama creates a culture of open, unquestioning acceptance towards illegal immigration.

According to a June 3rd report by McAllen, Texas’ Channel 5 ABC News illegal immigrants reports that in Central America they are encouraged to trek north:

“Central Americans say news reports in their countries are encouraging them to make the journey north to the United States.

A mother and child told CHANNEL 5 NEWS that the message being disseminated in their country is, "go to America with your child, you won't be turned away."

The woman, Nora Griselda Bercian Diaz, from Guatemala, said she endured threats from the Zetas and extortion from corrupt Mexican police. She eventually crossed the Rio Grande with her 6-year-old Delmi Griselda Paul Bercian by her side.

The woman said she wants a U.S. education for her daughter.

"I want to study," said the girl who hopes to one day become a doctor.

A CHANNEL 5 NEWS crew met the mother and daughter three hours after they crossed the border illegally. They were lost and searching for Border Patrol agents.

"I was planning to go to McAllen then call a friend for her to send me money on the bus," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said she has no family in the United States. Her hope of staying here relies on her little girl. She said the message in her country is that America's borders are open to all families.

News reports in Guatemala say mothers and small children are getting bus tickets, Bercian Diaz said.

"I said, ‘I need to act right now, because this will end and my girl won't have a future,'" Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said she has a haunting past. She was deported a year ago. Her fear is that the deportation will break up her family.

"I'm afraid," the woman said crying.

"I'm afraid of being sent back to my country. I don't have any family in the United States, I just have friends," she said.

Bercian Diaz worked in California restaurants until she got caught. She would send money back to help her daughter.

The signs of malnourishment are evident on the young girl.

"I brought her here because I know this is a better future for her," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said they endured harassment in Tampico. She said members of the Zetas drug cartel tried to kidnap them.

"They chased us to kidnap us to request for ransom," Bercian Diaz said.

She said they barely escaped.

Bercian Diaz said they found corruption in the Mexican government.

"They were asking for 500 pesos, 600 pesos. The federals took that money from us," she said.

She said the Mexican federal police and immigration officers asked for money to "turn the other way."

"The immigration officers took 1,500 pesos," Bercian Diaz said.

She said the threat of rape and kidnapping haunted them every day.

"We were hiding with people in small houses on our way. They were trying to hide from the federal police. I was afraid for my little girl. They can do whatever to me, but not to my little girl," Bercian Diaz said.

The young girl wept as they waited for Border Patrol agents.

"I'm afraid of being separated," the girl said.

"She doesn't want to be away from me," Bercian Diaz said.

Bercian Diaz said the fear of cartels and corruption was replaced by fear of what's to come.

Agents eventually arrived and ushered the mother and daughter into a van. The agents didn't have time to turn around before another group came walking up the same road.”

This is similar to the story these illegals tell over and over again. They are escaping the threats of the drug cartels. It is no doubt a story they have been told to tell by the smugglers. It is a story relating to political refuge.

About 700 unaccompanied minors mostly from Central America were sleeping on plastic boards at a Border Patrol warehouse in Nogales, Arizona, this weekend, the vast majority flown from South Texas. It is the latest illustration of how a wave of immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala has overwhelmed U.S. border authorities. President Barack Obama called the surge a crisis last week and appointed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to lead the government’s response. Here are some questions and answers according to a June 9th report by CBS Houston:

WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM?

Illegal border crossings soared for several years in South Texas, which recently surpassed Arizona as the busiest corridor. The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector made 148,017 arrests from Oct. 1 to May 17, far higher than the 62,876 caught in Tucson, Arizona, which is the second-busiest crossing point.

The dramatic shift is taxing U.S. authorities because Hondurans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans make up about 75 percent of those caught in South Texas, the traditional entry point for Central Americans. For decades, the vast majority of people who crossed the border illegally were from neighboring Mexico and could be deported the same day on a short bus ride to the nearest crossing. Central Americans are sent home on U.S. government flights, a more daunting challenge.

An unusually large number of those crossing in South Texas are unaccompanied children, many seeking to join parents who are already in the U.S. illegally. Authorities arrested 47,017 unaccompanied children on the border from October through May, up 92 percent from the same period a year earlier. A draft Border Patrol memorandum estimates that number could reach 90,000 in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up from a previous government estimate of 60,000.

WHY NOW?

Rampant crime and poverty across Central America is a big reason. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, with 90.4 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The World Bank says nearly 60 percent of Honduras’ 8 million people live in poverty.

Some Republican lawmakers and administration critics say lax enforcement practices encourage children to make the perilous journey. They cite an opinion by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, in December that blasted authorities for releasing a Salvadoran girl to her mother, who hired a smuggler to transport her daughter and was in the country illegally.

“(The government) has simply chosen not to enforce the United States’ border security laws,” the judge wrote.

The government has released some immigrants but refused to say how many. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency says it will make “appropriate custody determinations.”

WHAT’S BEING DONE?

The Obama administration has asked Congress for $1.4 billion to help house, feed and transport children and plans to temporarily house more than 1,000 at military bases in Ventura, California; San Antonio, Texas; and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Immigration officials, by policy, do not keep children in detention. They are transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement to be housed in shelters until they can be reunited with parents or guardians.

A Homeland Security official said Health and Human Services turned to the Border Patrol to house children temporarily at the Nogales warehouse starting May 31 because they were overwhelmed. About 2,000 vinyl-covered mattresses were ordered, and the official expected the population there to double to 1,400.

On Sunday, about 60 children arrived at the Nogales shelter and the same number left after they were moved to other locations, said the official, who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Carlos de Leon, Guatemala’s vice consul in Phoenix, said portable showers arrived Friday and a contractor was brought in to serve hot meals Sunday.

“It’s not a shelter, but the conditions are getting better,” said de Leon, who visited Sunday and reported there were 280 Guatemalan children.

Tony Banegas, Honduras’ honorary consul in Phoenix, said the first toothbrushes and toothpaste were expected Monday. Children who had not bathed in days were rotating through four showers. He said there were 236 Honduran children there on Saturday, including an 8-year-old.

The government has also been flying families from South Texas to Arizona and El Paso, Texas, and releasing them at bus stations. ICE has only one detention facility for families — an 85-bed center in Pennsylvania.”

Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government, instituting a totalitarian system that in theory would forcibly restructure society to promote “fairness” and give all those government dependents what they “deserve.” (In practice, of course, what you actually get is an iron-fisted dictatorship that cooks up reports to make itself look good, or simply tells the unhappy citizens to shut up and obey when things deteriorate to the point that no volume of phony reports can paper over the problems – say, when the glorious worker’s paradise of Venezuela runs out of tap water.)

Cloward and Piven were specifically interested in replacing welfare programs with a government-guaranteed annual income for everyone — an idea that still emerges from the more absurd quarters of the Progressive Left occasionally — but the basic idea of overloading the republican system and replacing it with centrally-planned tyranny can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at the humanitarian crisis on the southern border. It has since burst onto the front pages with some astonishing stories, including leaked photos of illegal alien children — many of them 12 years old and younger — “warehoused” in overcrowded facilities, where there are growing concerns about sanitation and disease. CBS News in Houston writes of unaccompanied minors sleeping on plastic boards in a Nogales, Arizona warehouse after being flown in from south Texas. According to some estimates, there are nearly a thousand children in that warehouse now.

There’s nothing complicated about what is happening here. Barack Obama invited these people to send their children to the United States as refugees20140607_094843_asdfa_500. He’s already made illegal use of executive orders to gut the immigration system; he’s talking about doing it again, and the people of South and Central America can hear him just fine. There have been anecdotal reports of a message being spread throughout Central American countries, by everything from word-of-mouth gossip to news media: “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.” (It will come as no surprise to learn that the Mexican government is not doing much to halt the train of amnesty-seekers headed for American soil. On the contrary, corrupt Mexican officials are trying to get a cut of the profits from the refugee-smuggling trade.)

And it’s not just the President sending those signals, since there’s a vibrant bipartisan amnesty chorus in Congress. Obama will only seize power to rewrite the laws if Congress doesn’t do it fast enough for his taste, or if he sees electoral advantage in taking matters into his own hands.

Young illegals are particularly cherished by the American ruling class, which has dubbed them “Dreamers” and frankly describes them as superior in motivation and potential to native-born young people. There is every reason for families who live in South America to think their children will be given citizenship, plus special perks (such as access to discounted college tuition rates) if they can get them to the U.S. border. The Obama Administration is even talking about providing the young illegals with attorneys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has become involved at President Obama’s direction.

“We’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement announcing the plan.

“How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings — many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking — goes to the core of who we are as a nation,” he said.

This tidal wave of illegals is not an accident, and not entirely a result of conditions in Central America (which have deteriorated lately, but were already bad enough to inspire any sane person to seek a new life elsewhere.) These people were summoned. And now that they’re here, the system is collapsing beneath their weight. In addition to the refugees flown to Arizona in the CBS News story above, the El Paso Times reports two planeloads of illegals arriving for processing. ”The vast majority of individuals transferred were family units from Central America and Mexico with children,” according to an El Paso official.

Contrary to popular mythology about President Obama being some sort of deportation hard-liner, the truth is that most of his “deportations” were actually catch-and-release scenarios played out at the border — people who were essentially repulsed rather than caught and deported. Such people were not counted as “deportations” in the past — this is about the government cooking the books to make itself look better? Well, catch-and-release only works when the illegal aliens in question come from Mexico. There’s no practical method for sending the wave of families and unaccompanied minors surging in from Central America back to their homes. They’re most likely here to stay. And even though the Obama Administration had every reason to know they were coming, the immigration system was curiously unprepared to deal with them. Cloward-Piven tactics work even better when the system is hollowed out and made ready for speedy collapse.

Does the amnesty chorus recoil from this humanitarian crisis in shame and ask, “My God, what have we done?” Do they accept this stunning proof of a point often raised by amnesty critics: lax border security and indulgence of illegal immigration causes the flood of illegal aliens — rational people who respond to incentives — to intensify? Of course not. They’re using the horror they have created as leverage to get amnesty moving even faster. Here’s GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor talking with the White House over the weekend about making a deal, from the Daily Caller:

“I have told the president, there are some things we can work on together,” he said in the WTVR interview.

“We can work on the border security bill together, we can work on something like the kids,” he said referring to his proposal to offer some undetermined variety of amnesty to the children and youths of millions of parents who entered the country illegally.

“So far, the president has just insisted that it’s all or nothing, [it is] my way or the highway,” Cantor complained. “That’s not going to happen,” he added.

But President Barack Obama is willing to make a deal, says one White House advisor, Rev. Richard Ryscavage.

Ryscavage is a Jesuit priest, a sociology and anthropology professor at Fairfield University, the director of the university’s Center for Faith and Public Life, and a member of a new White House panel on immigration.

A compromise is “what they’re preparing for, that’s what they think is going to happen, so they’re[publicly] asking for a lot of stuff that privately they don’t think they’re going to get” in a final deal, he told The Daily Caller June 6.”

Soon we’ll have millions of new citizens placing heavy demands on our maternal government, with hundreds of thousands more streaming in every year, eager to claim the prizes that have been offered to them. The governments that mismanage the nations from which these poor souls are fleeing will feel even less pressure to make things better — they’re happy to use the United States as a dumping ground for excess population. The Cloward-Piven effect will spread inward from the border, and outward into every aspect of our centralized system. If you think the bleating about “income inequality” is bad now, wait until you hear what it sounds like after a few years of tidal-wave migration — especially if it’s combined with minimum-wage hikes that make it difficult to hire the new arrivals, and a regulatory morass that makes it hard to launch or expand businesses that might hire them. And you won’t have to wait long for ObamaCare’s planned collapse into ruin, paving the way for single-payer health care.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) had it exactly right, in an interview he granted to Breitbart Texas:

“We need a president who is willing to uphold the law,” Cruz said. “On issue after issue the Obama Administration has openly ignored, defied, and unilaterally tried to change the law. With respect to securing the border, the Obama Administration has handcuffed the courageous men and women who serve in Border Patrol. Morale in ICE is at an all-time low because the political operatives leading this Administration are preventing them from doing their job and upholding the law.”

He continued,

“Just a few months before the last election the president illegally and unconstitutionally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people illegally. If the president wants to change federal immigration laws, the Constitution lays out a way to do so–you go and make your case to Congress and you convince Congress to change the laws…unfortunately for President Obama, following the Constitutional structure is apparently too cumbersome. One of the consequences were seeing on the border is a humanitarian crisis that is a direct consequence of Obama’s lawlessness.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer responded angrily to these Cloward-Piven tactics, as the feds begin dumping illegal immigrants from Texas into her state without warning her first. When she complained, the feds said they have no intention of stopping.

According to Fox News federal officials told Brewer Friday that the practice will continue for the foreseeable future, and this weekend more than 1,000 illegal immigrant children will be “dumped” in Arizona. Adults and family units will also arrive, though Brewer was not told how many, her office said.”

What’s happening on our southern border right now is horrifying, but it’s not unexpected. The people who caused it will never feel an instant of remorse for what they’ve done. And they’ll grow increasingly less interested in what the legal citizens of the United States have to say about immigration policy.

This situation has been dropped in our laps as a done deal, a fait accompli. They’re here, they can’t be deported, there’s nothing we can do except give the amnesty chorus at least part of what it wants. Turning this into a deliberate humanitarian crisis was a political power play. Imagine the tenor of our “national conversation” on immigration if the Administration had forthrightly informed the American people that hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors were being flung at the border, obliging the government to spend millions preparing to receive them and it was largely happening because their parents had every reason to believe they would be well-received.

“This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure — now apparently intentionally — while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable,” said Brewer. Exactly, Governor. Just wait until you’re told you must comply with various Washington directives in order to receive federal assistance for the man-made humanitarian crisis that just got dumped in Arizona’s lap.

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