We Are Packing Our Burros and Moving to Los Estados Unidos

K Marsala

Recently the Pew Hispanic Center conducted surveys in Mexico. One survey presented confirmed that about four of every ten adults in the Mexican population would migrate to the United States if they had the resources and opportunity and that two of every ten were willing to reside and work here without legal authorization. The proclivity to migrate, even illegally, is apparent in all sectors of Mexican society. This willingness consists of the middle class and the well-educated as well as those who are poor and who have only completed low-levels of schooling. The citizens of Mexico realize that with a better education in hand, there is more money to be made in the land of the free, even if they do it illegally.

New Mexico’s Governor Bill Richardson and Arizona’s Governor Janet Napolitano recently declared a border situation of emergency. Most of the United States citizens concur with Richardson and Napolitano that individual states need to take matters into their own hands since our Federal Government cannot seem to control crime and violence related to illegal immigration. However, will tossing more money towards security improvements and bulldozing a Mexican border town popular with smugglers of humans and drugs really solve our homeland emergency?

Gov. Richardson plans to spend about $50,000 to fence the stockyards at the Columbus Port of Entry, but has no other plans for fencing along the 180-mile New Mexico-Mexico border. According to the Albuquerque Journal, Richardson is not favor of closing the border, and he does not favor the volunteer civilian boarder guards either. Richardson’s plans look to increase law enforcement as well to knock back illegal activity.

According to the Associated Press when Gov. Napolitano followed Richardson’s lead she declared Arizona’s counties Cochise, Pima, Santa Cruz and Yuma as border situation emergency area.

Together both governors’ actions have freed up $3 million combined in state emergency dollars to pay for law enforcement overtime, repair border fences, and costs related to illegal immigrants’ deaths. How will this combined $3 million help stop illegal immigration, drug running, murder, robbery and mayhem?

I have traveled many times through the counties declared as border emergencies. I have seen the “fences,” observed the border patrol vehicles driving through the miles of desert dunes, and witnessed illegal aliens slipping through, jumping and climbing over our border fences. All the sporadically strewn barbed wire fences and border patrol vehicles chasing up and down throughout our southern region has not solved an emergency that has been intensifying steadily for over twenty years.

We can take our $ 3 million dollars and compensate our overworked border patrol, but those who pour in here illegally daily still out number them. We can take our $ 3 million dollars and repair our border fences, but it only takes a pair of pliers to cut through the wire and a boost from a friend to leap over a wall. We can take our $ 3 million dollars and help offset the cost of related illegal immigrant’s deaths, but they will keep coming and they will keep dying in the scorching heat of the desert.
Shortly after Richardson and Napolitano made their declaration of border emergency according to an AP report, Mexico’s President, Vicente Fox stated, “that in place of signals we make proposals, instead of each working for his side that we work together” Fox believes that both sides need to bear the responsibility for lawlessness taking place on both sides of the border. President Fox wonders, “What is it that is being done on that side?”

However why is President Fox feigning surprise or hurt over Richardson and Napolitano declaring border emergency, when it was his government that has been producing pamphlets to help tell people how to enter illegally into the United States?

As citizens on both sides of the border, we can plainly see this is a multi-layered problem. Not only are we dealing with illegal aliens coming into the United States to work, we are dealing with terrorist slipping through alongside those seeking employment, and we are dealing with an enormous drug problem.

According to Capitol Media Services, Rep. Russell Pearce is constructing a measure he would like voters to give voice upon next year. His proposal is to erect, wherever possible along the 341 miles of Arizona/Mexico border, a climb-proof fence. The design is to be similar in structure to the fence raised by federal officials near San Diego. Arizona cannot build a fence exactly along the border, because it is federal land, but already there are ranchers speaking up and agreeing to let a fence be established on their property. Pearce believes a fence will provide a more permanent solution than the $ 1.5 million cash infusion to four border counties for law enforcement following Gov. Napolitano’s declaration of a border emergency.

Perhaps Rep. Pearce has a plausible idea here that many of Arizona citizens will agree with and be willing to help fund. Any deterrent may help reduce the amount of illegal aliens flowing into our country.

Still, as a tax paying citizen of these United States and a resident living in an area plagued by illegal entries I emphatically state that all the fixed fences, non climbable walls, volunteer militia men, proposals of new laws and an increase in law enforcement will not slow, or stop this problem. Nothing will impede the problem we are faced with until our government steps up and starts enforcing the laws that we already have established. Politicians can continue to try to dress up this problem and make it look like they are the saviors of illegal immigration and all that comes with it. However, nothing will change until those associated with the crossing, running, selling, buying, hiring and harboring illegal aliens are prosecuted fully under our laws we currently have on our books.

This is the bottom line and there is no way any politician or activist can defend or excuse the cost to this country daily:

We as Americans pay an estimated $8 billion annually for educating the children of illegal aliens.

The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington has estimated that illegal aliens have cost U.S. workers $133 billion in job loses.

Food stamps and medical benefits for undocumented immigrants cost Americans some $65 billion annually. Illegals have been running up a tab of $2.5 billion annually for Medicaid alone.

The American Hospital Association has said the cost of uncompensated care for patients, many of them illegal aliens, amounted to more than $21 billion in a recent year.

More than 75 percent of the illegal drugs in the U.S. come across our porous borders, according to experts.

More than one-quarter of the inmates in federal prisons are illegals – costing taxpayers $900 million a year to feed and house them. (Newsmax)

President Fox you need stop worrying about us and start taking care of your own country’s problems. Your citizens who want to enter our country illegally are doing so because your country lacks something and perhaps that is where you need to be looking… not at us. Do not point the blame our way. Your citizens reasons for going to such great lengths, some even willing to die for a better promise and a brighter future for themselves and their loved ones, must mean something.

For too long the United States Government and the Government of Mexico have turned a blind eye and now we are faced with a crisis that may be beyond fixing.

For our own national security and safety of our future, the United States must enforce what is already law, whether Mexico wants to do her part or not. Building “The Great Wall of the United States” will not solve this problem, only the action of discipline will put an end to the endless dangers we are letting occur each day to our nation.

It is time to stop the illegally packed burros, and coyote runners before they ever set hoof, or paw over our borders and it is time to make our state and federal officials listen to its citizens- WE DEMAND that you uphold our laws!




http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/381099nm08-16-05.htm?splashtop

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/08/17/mexico.drug.war.reut/index.html

http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=52