At War with Mexico

It’s an issue that will dominate the elections in 2008. It is illegal immigration, but there was scarce attention paid during the debates leading up to the Iowa caucuses. The candidate that promises to put a stop to it will be the candidate that wins. The party that temporizes will be the party that fails.

The conflict in Iraq has siphoned the energy to pay attention to Mexico, but as that battlefront recedes, the eyes of voters will be on our southern border. A war is being fought there. Some may argue that no such war has been authorized or declared, but a full-scale invasion has been taking place for years, resulting in an estimated one tenth of all Mexicans presently living in the United States.

They are not pilgrims. They are parasites.

The drain on our economy is something that, while well documented, has not received sufficient attention from the mainstream media. After all, we are “neighbors” with Mexico, so how could they hardly be considered an invading horde costing Americans billions of dollars every year?

Good neighbors don’t do that kind of thing, but Mexico is not a good neighbor.

Mexico is working very hard to provide the seaports for goods shipped more cheaply there than to American ports. They would then be transported via a super highway from the Texas-Mexico border to a Mexico owned and operated customs port in Kansas. Presently, some 40% of all imported goods arrive in the U.S. via the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Putting American dockworkers in the unemployment lines and harming our trucking industry is of little concern to our “neighbor” to the south.

Perhaps, however, the real war receiving scant attention is the one being conducted by Mexican drug lords and their cartels. At present most of the war is being fought in Mexico and, as Terence Jeffrey, the editor-in-chief of CNSnews, recently pointed out, one episode was fought in Cananea. Where’s that? “It is almost in Arizona.” Cananea is about 20 miles south of the U.S. border in Mexico. “The nearest town of any size is Nogales, Arizona and the nearest big city is Tucson. Cananea is a war zone.

How long before that shooting war takes place in the streets of American cities? Not long at all. In June 2007, World Net Daily reported that, “The ultra-violent, U.S.-trained elite, Mexican paramilitary commandos known as the ‘Zetas’, responsible for hundreds of murders along the border this year, have expanded their enforcement efforts on behalf of a drug cartel by setting up trafficking routes in six U.S. states.” Texas law enforcement officials report that the Zetas “have been active in the Dallas area since 2003.”

The war is all about the provision of huge amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the U.S. market. While the illegal aliens send back an estimated $25 billion U.S. dollars to Mexico, the drug market represents an estimated $40 billion. The lifeblood of America is being poisoned while money that would have been legitimately earned by Americans is drained off to become an essential element of the Mexican economy.

Millions must be deployed to capture and imprison the illegals who are here to commit crimes. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, “In 1980, our federal and state prisons housed fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens. By the end of 1999, these same prisons housed over 68,000 criminal aliens. Today, criminal aliens account for over 29 percent of prisoners in Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities and a higher share of all federal prison inmates.” The figures are staggering. “Among the alien federal prisoners, over half (55%) were illegally in the United States at the time of their conviction.”

By way of just one example, on November 30, 2007, border patrol agents in Yuma, Arizona captured six Mexican career criminals. They had a combined total of 80 previous arrests in the United States, but that pales in comparison with news in mid-December that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested almost twice as many “criminal aliens” and “immigration fugitives” in fiscal year 2007 than the previous year. The year ended September 30 and the total was 30,408 individuals.

As of October 1, 2007, ICE had a case backlog of 595,000 fugitive aliens!

It’s not like these criminal aliens are deported when they finish their sentences. In March 2000, Congress revealed Department of Justice statistics that the former Immigration and Naturalization Service had released more than 35,000 criminal aliens back into the U.S. population. It gets worse. More than 11,000 went on to commit serious crimes that included more than 1,800 violent ones that involved 98 homicides, 142 sexual assaults, and 44 kidnappings. A 2001 Supreme Court decision required INS (later changed to ICE) to release more than 3,000 criminal aliens.

In November 2007, commentator Jim Kouri broke the news that some 1,000 ICE agents had been reassigned to work as U.S. Customs officers. This is part of the Bush Administration’s efforts to keep the southern border as open as possible and explains why two border control agents are still in jail for having shot at a Mexican drug smuggler who has since been re-arrested. The message to the Border Patrol officers is clear.

This has been occurring at a time when Americans had to mount a major effort to thwart an effort by the White House and Congress to extent amnesty to the millions of illegals in America, including of course, the criminals among them.

Despite highly publicized joint programs between the U.S. and Mexico to spend billions to thwart the Mexican drug gangs, the enormity of the amount of money generated by drugs and the thorough corruption of the Mexican government, its military and police, will render the effort a meaningless charade. Public officials and ordinary Mexicans are understandably thorough intimidated.

The violence across the 2,000-mile border from America is already here. The crime statistics in the six states that are home to an estimated sixty percent of all illegal immigrants-California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey-are testimony to the greater war that will soon explode in these and other states nationwide as local gangs, including illegal aliens, will fight to protect their market for drugs.

Meanwhile, Americans in just those six states are forced to spend an estimated $27 billion annually for the education, health care, and incarceration of the illegal and criminal aliens in their midst. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), more than three-fifths of all the states have seen their illegal alien population more than double since 2000.

The drug wars between the army and the cartels in Mexico have left more than 2,000 dead in 2007 and the Bush Administration’s answer has been to propose giving the government of Felipe Calderon $500 million worth of military equipment and training, including Bell 412 helicopters and surveillance aircraft among the hardware to be transferred, but in too many cases, the problem is members of the army moonlighting for the drug lords.

The last Mexican-American War was an armed military conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas. The new Mexican-American War is being waged by the demographic shift of Mexican citizens to the U.S. At risk is both the sovereignty and economy of the United States of America.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/. His blog is at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/.

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