Don Feder
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
January 10, 2005
For decades now, our bad neighbor to the south has aided and abetted its impoverished citizens in their efforts to enter the United States illegally – a process that pays handsome dividends to Mexico, but results in massive trauma and social upheaval for the gringos.
The latest attack on our sovereignty is a 32-page color comic book published by Mexico’s foreign ministry and designed as a self-help manual for illegal aliens.
The publication (which should be titled "Juan and Miguel Join Mexico’s National Synchronized Swimming Team") contains helpful advice on crossing the Rio Grande (wear light clothing), traversing the desert (carry salt tablets as well as water) and preventing repatriation once the illegal arrives in the U.S. (avoid bar brawls, domestic disturbances, drunk driving, and other behavior likely to attract the attention of authorities).
"This guide is intended to give you some practical advice that could be of use if you have made the difficult decision to seek new work opportunities outside your country," the handbook explains. (Emphasis added.) More than 1.5 million copies have already been distributed, inside a popular cowboy comic book – indicative of the level of literacy in Old Mexico.
To cries of outrage on this side of the border, the Mexican government responds that it isn’t encouraging illegal immigration (Why, they wouldn’t dream of it!) but is merely trying to protect its itinerant citizens.
"Last year, over 300 Mexicans died in their attempt to enter the United States (illegally-DF) in search of a job, and the government has the obligation to avoid that," says Geronimo Gutierrez, undersecretary of North American Affairs for Mexico’s foreign ministry.
Well, if Gutierrez and the government of Vincente Fox (who calls border-jumpers "heroes") is really interested in preventing the deaths of Juan and Miguel, it has only to describe, in graphic detail, what it’s like to die of dehydration in the desert – illustrated with appropriate photographs – instead of facilitating their criminality.
Or, it could tell its citizens how to apply for a visa. (Wouldn’t that be a novelty: Mexicans who enter the U.S. legally.) Instead, it encourages its citizens to break our laws and undermine our national identity.
Even the friends of a porous border understand that the move is a PR disaster.
A January 5th editorial in the pro-immigration Arizona Republic observes that the comic book will make it harder for the Bush administration and its congressional allies – in this case, including Edward Kennedy – to sell another amnesty or a "guest-worker" program to the American people.
"Mexico’s booklet on how to sneak into the United States…raises serious doubts about whether Mexico will ever help curb illegal migration – even if the United States creates a legal mechanism for large numbers of workers to obtain temporary work visas," the editorial warns.
Let any lingering doubts be dispelled! Short to stationing troops on the border to provide cover fire for infiltrators, the Mexican government will do everything in its power to facilitate illegal immigration.
The heirs of Montezuma and Cortez have a continent to gain and nothing to lose.
Once in the U.S., the "migrant" goes from wages of $5 per day, to $60 a day for manual labor.
Mexico gets to export its surplus population. And the nation receives $15 billion annually in remittances. This exceeds its combined income from tourism and foreign investments, and is second only to oil exports as a source of national wealth.
Mexicans here constitute a growing constituency for whatever Mexico City wants from Washington -- due to the latest fashion in political pandering: courting the Hispanic vote – and a fifth column which could eventually wrest California, Texas and the Southwest away from America (La Reconquista).
And there’s never a penalty. After wiping the spittle from our face, we continue to shower benefits (like NAFTA) on those who mock our laws and undermine our sovereignty, Mexico City’s modern-day Pancho Villas.
Within days of his re-election, the president dispatched Secretary of State Colin Powell to Mexico to re-start talks on the size and scope of the latest proposed amnesty (which, of course, isn’t being called an amnesty) and guest-worker program.
Illegal immigration doesn’t work quite as well for the importing nation as it does for the exporters, despite the pleading of Fortune 500 Republicans about the "jobs Americans won’t take." In reality, illegal immigration artificially depresses the wages of certain jobs, making them unattractive to Americans.
Cheap immigrant labor is really quite dear. According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, illegal aliens cost the state of California $10.5 billion annually, or almost $1,200 per year for every native-born family.
Included in that cost is $7.7 billion to educate the children of illegal aliens (who now constitute 15 percent of the state’s K-12 enrollment), $1.4 billion for health care for illegals and their families and the same amount to incarcerate alien lawbreakers.
In 1980, fewer than 9,000 criminal aliens were held in our state or federal prisons. That number grew to more than 68,000 in 1999. In Orange County, California alone, there are 275 street gangs, with 17,000 members – 98 percent Mexican or Asian. Not only do our uninvited guests get to rob, rape, murder, and deal drugs, but we get to pay for the incarceration of those who are caught.
Restaurants, landscapers, contractors and meatpacking plants get labor at below-market prices.
The taxpayer gets the bill. As Milton Friedman admonishes us, there is no such thing as a free lunch, especially when it comes to immigration.
But that’s not the worst of it.
Besides crime, poverty and increased social costs, those who make the difficult decision to seek new work opportunities in the Golden Pinata – 300,000 a year, net – bring with them language fragmentation, alienation, and a loss of national identity.
The number of Spanish-speakers in the U.S. is doubling every decade. We now have bilingual education, bilingual ballots, and bilingual tests for drivers’ licenses.
Almost anywhere in the country, when you pull up to a drive-through ATM, you’re given the option of proceeding in English or Spanish. Airport signs in both languages are common. (Can bilingual street signs be far behind?) Language-pandering has become a growth industry. Government, education and business all do their part to promote language ghetto-ization – to make it easy for Spanish-speakers to avoid learning English, and still make a living, get an education, raise a family and enjoy the rights of citizenship here.
In 1999, the town of El Cenizo, Texas, (south of Laredo) declared Spanish its official language and put out the welcome mat for illegal aliens, promising to protect them from the INS.
Mexico’s total population is around 100 million. There are now 25.5 million post-1963 Mexican immigrants and their descendants in the United States. They constitute a nation within a nation: two-thirds the population of our largest state, belligerent and growing.
Mexico has 54 consular offices in the United States, more than one for each state. They serve as support units for the alien invasion and brazenly interfere in American politics, from lobbying against official English measures (a few years ago, the consul general in Atlanta called the reform "racist"; this from the representative of a nation whose Congress is whiter than the Newport Yacht Club) to campaigning for new amnesties.
To encourage Mexican nationals here to maintain their old identity and still influence our politics, Mexico has adopted a dual citizenship law.
There’s hardly a public school in California that doesn’t have a Cinquo De Mayo essay contest. (Students in the state’s school system know more about a holiday celebrating one of Mexico’s rare military victories than the Fourth of July or Thanksgiving.) The birthday of labor agitator Cesar Chavez (March 31st) is a California state holiday.
The militant, separatist Chicano Student Movement of Atzlan (MEChA) has chapters at college and high school campuses across California and the Southwest. Its symbol is an eagle clutching a machete in one claw and a stick of dynamite in the other. It’s motto: "Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada." (For the Race, everything. For those outside the race, nothing.) It is radical, racist, anti-Semitic, and works toward regional secession and the expulsion of non-Chicanos from the future nation of Atzlan. How do you say "Nazi" in Spanish?
Antonio Villaraigosa the former Speaker of the California State Assembly who came close to being elected mayor of Los Angeles in 2001, and is running again this year, headed the UCLA chapter of MEChA in his college days. As a candidate in 2001, Villaraigosa not only refused to disassociate himself from this brown fascist ideology, but said he was proud of the group.
California Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante is another MEChA alumnus (Fresno State). As a candidate for governor in last year’s recall election, Bustamante supported then-Governor Gray Davis’ bill for driver’s licenses for illegal aliens and wanted to give illegals in-state tuition at California colleges and universities. When it comes to public benefits, Bustamante said no distinction should be made between those here legally and illegally.
In a 1997 speech to the National Council of La Raza, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said he "proudly affirmed that the Mexican nation extends beyond the territory enclosed by its borders and that Mexican migrants are an important – a very important – part of this." In case you missed it, the Mexican government is saying its sovereignty extends to wherever Mexicans reside.
Speaking in Nogales, in 2001, Mexican President Fox hailed illegal alien in these words: "We want to salute these heroes, these kids leaving their homes, their communities, leaving with tears in their eyes, saying goodbye to their families, to set out on a difficult, sometimes painful search for a job, an opportunity they can’t find at home." Americans, too, have tears in their eyes when they survey the devastation Fox’s brave opportunity-seekers have wrought.
Back in 1982, when the deluge was still a trickle, the Mexican newspaper Excelsior commented, "The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."
Speaking at a symposium on the 150th anniversary of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago (which ended the Mexican-American War and transferred California and the Southwest to the United States), Jose Angel Pescador Osuna – then Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles – remarked, "Even though I am saying this part serious and part joking, I think we are practicing la Reconquista in California." No kidding!
Here are a few more choice quotes from Reconquistadors: "Remember, 187 (the proposition denying public benefits to illegal aliens) was the last gasp of white power in California" (Art Torres, chairman of the Democratic Party in California), "California is going to be a Hispanic state. Anyone who doesn’t like it should leave" (Mario Obledo, California Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under Jerry Brown, awarded the Presidential Freedom Medal by Bill Clinton), "We are politicizing every single one of these new citizens that are becoming citizens of this country….I gotta tell you that a lot of people are saying, ‘I’m going to go out there and vote, because I want to pay them back.’" Have you guessed who "they" are, and how these new voters intend to pay us back, gringo?
David Kennedy, who is the Donald J. McLauchlan Professor of American History at Stanford University. warns, "The possibility looms that in the next generation or so, we will see a kind of Chicano Quebec take shape in the American Southwest."
Antonio Navarro, a professor at the University of California at Riverside and prominent Chicano activist, exults, "If in the next 50 years our people are subordinated, powerless, exploited and impoverished, then I will say to you that there are all kinds of possibilities for movements to develop like the ones that we’ve witnessed in the last few years all over the world, from Yugoslavia to Chechnya." Would that include open guerrilla warfare and Chicano suicide bombers?
Are you scared yet? Do you now understand that Mexico’s comic book/handbook for illegals is one more salvo in its undeclared war on America? (Call it the Mexican-American War, Round 2.)
All of which is not to say that Mexican-Americans (not those who call themselves Chicanos, but Americans of Mexican ancestry) can’t be good citizens. There are Mexican-Americans whose families have been here for generations. More than 30 percent of Mexican-American voters in California supported Proposition 187. Mexican-Americans have bled for our flag and died defending our borders.
Still, immigration from Mexico poses a special problem. Roughly one million better-job-seekers cross the rivers and deserts along the 2,000-mile Mexican-American border each year.
Between January 4 and October 1 of last year, the number of infiltrators apprehended jumped 13 percent (to 194,576). "This is clearly tied in with President Bush’s call after his re-election to revive the guest-worker program," observes T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, representing 10,000 Border Patrol agents. "Migrants are rushing over the border to take advantage of that."
Build it, and they will come.
From Washington to Sacramento, we’re building it – with amnesties, welfare benefits, drivers licenses for illegals, lax immigration enforcement and language pandering). And they are coming – a hungry, ravaging, grudge-bearing alien horde. If it continues, and our national house is still standing a few decades hence, it will be a miracle.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
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