This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Illegal Immigrants

  • Signs of the times

    alleuropeans

    John Hawkins at Right Wing News posts the twelve worst signs he’s seen from the pro-illegal immigration rallies in Arizona.

    It appears to me to be about the most ridiculous and intellectually vacant debate of our times. How can Europeans be illegal aliens when they came here before there were laws? If we can’t agree that illegal aliens are criminals under the current law, there’s nothing to discuss.

    Arizona is faltering under the weight of allowing millions of criminals with no accountability into their homes and the Federal government can’t summon the testicular fortitude to deal with the problem like it’s actually a problem. Arizona had no choice but to prod the feds along.

  • What else were we supposed to do?

    Some of you know that I am an Arizona resident and have been attending Arizona State since I left the Marine Corps last year. Over the last week, my state has been at the top of the news because of SB 1070, which as most of you probably know is a new law designed to combat illegal immigration by giving local law enforcement the ability to question somebody’s immigration status during “lawful contact” (i.e. traffic stop, arrests for crimes like drunken and disorderly, etc.).

    I’ll be honest: I don’t think this is a perfect bill and I think it is going to get voided in federal court (since it will probably be challenged in the 9th Circuit which is the most liberal court in the country).  However, this state is facing a mountain of problems as a result of illegal immigration and the federal government’s inability to formulate an effective immigration policy.

    (more…)

  • Minutemen shut doors

    The Washington Times reports this morning that the organization known as the Minuteman Project has decided they’ll shut their doors in the wake of an increasingly vitriolic climate;

    “The mental attitude of many Americans is turning meaner … and we are concerned that this could cause problems,” MCDC President Carmen Mercer told The Washington Times on Monday. “You see aggression surfacing even at the tea party marches. We just did not want to deal with the liability anymore.

    “We have to protect the ranchers as well as the volunteers,” Ms. Mercer said, noting the killing on Saturday of Robert Krentz, a prominent Douglas, Ariz., rancher who was shot along with his dog on his ranch by a suspected illegal immigrant who fled into Mexico and remains a fugitive.

    A link to the story of that rancher, Rob Krentz, who was shot.

    “One time,” Rob said “You know, we’ve personally been broke in once. And they took about $700 worth of stuff. And you know, if they come in and ask for water, I’ll still give them water. I – you know, that’s just my nature.”

    I could speculate about the cause of a less civil discourse in the nation, but that would be a worthless discussion. It’s just sad that American citizens who tried to work within the limits of the law to enforce those laws have to terminate that endeavor because lawlessness and hyperbole have won the day.

  • Jon Soltz: enslave the brown people

    Just like everything else that VoteVets supports that doesn’t have anything to do with the military, Jon Soltz, veteran of three months in Kuwait hearing the Iraq War in the distance, has decided that *surprise* another Democrat vote-buy supported by the MoveOn crowd is related to the military. Immigration.

    Let’s read to his plan to enslave the brown people from south of our border to do our bidding in the war against terror;

    We don’t know exactly how many potential troops we’re robbing our military of, as it fights dangerous enemies around the world, by continuing an immigration policy that leads far too many undocumented immigrants to stay in the shadows. What we do know, however, is that the current system keeps many of them from the benefits military service offers in terms of education, a living wage, health care, and pensions, which many would find generous enough to consider service. According to Senator Dick Durbin, tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants could become recruits.

    By opening up the path to citizenship, and adding tens of thousands of new service members, those currently in our Armed Forces can get some much-needed relief. A young man from Oklahoma who is away from his wife and kids because of his fifth tour in Afghanistan might get rotated out and given a much needed rest on the home-front, if we allow immigrants to come out the shadows and serve.

    OK, so maybe he didn’t say “enslave” the brown people, but just like the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell debate, we’re expected to believe that by passing all of this legislation, gays and illegals are just lined up around the corner of every recruiting station in the country waiting for the opportunity to join the military. I don’t see it.

    I make all these points, first and foremost, because I love our military, and care about the people serving right now.

    Then why don’t you carry your incompetent ass over to the Middle East and put in a few months for someone right now, Jon?

    I don’t have anything against immigrants serving – I remember the story in the early months of the Iraq War when a platoon of Salvadorans were ambushed by al Qaeda. Armed only with machetes, the Salvadorans charged into the withering gunfire and hacked their attackers to tiny pieces. That’s the kind of people I want on my side.

    But Soltz misses the point, in his usual manner. These illegals broke the law to get into this country – do we really want felons forgiven and serving alongside people who obey the law? And doesn’t their willingness to break our laws, and the laws of their own countries, by the way, kind of cast a pall over ALL immigrants, even the ones who obeyed the laws and came here legally?

    Of course, Soltz muddles the whole argument by quoting patriotic legal immigrants to justify forgiveness for the illegals.

    In fact, one immigrant in the military once said, “I’m a Cuban refugee who came to this country when I was 10 years old and flunked the sixth grade because I couldn’t speak English.” That immigrant was Army Brigadier General Bernardo Negrete, who was a special operations officer with four tours of duty….

    Yeah, Soltz, you dumbass, we’re not discussing racism here, we discussing law breakers, and your quote completely misses the target. My wife is a legal Spanish-accented immigrant, and she hates the way she’s treated like a criminal because of the actions of others – how she has to prove her innocence every time she applies for a job or credit.

    If you really care about the troops in uniform currently serving, you’d be against immigration reform as currently supported by Democrats in Congress.

  • Immigration policy bass-ackwards

    Earlier this week, President Obama said that if we want to give health care to illegal immigrants, we should have a policy in place to make them all legal, according to the Washington Times;

    President Obama said this week that his health care plan won’t cover illegal immigrants, but argued that’s all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage.

    He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered – a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.

    Yeah, that’s fine – but my 32 years experience of dealing with US immigration laws and immigration officers tells me that the government is more concerned with immigrants who shouldn’t be here than they are with immigrants who have a legal and moral right to be here. For example, another story in the Washington Times about a military widow who is having problems staying here;

    Hotaru Ferschke just wants to raise her 8-month-old son in his grandparents’ Tennessee home, surrounded by photos and memories of the father he’ll never meet, a Marine who died in combat a month after marrying her from thousands of miles away.

    Sgt. Michael Ferschke was killed in Iraq in 2008, leaving his widow and infant son, both Japanese citizens, in immigration limbo: A 1950s legal standard meant to curb marriage fraud means U.S. authorities do not recognize the marriage, even though the U.S. military does.

    It seems to me that the government would go out of it’s way to help a mother and child who, in their short lives have sacrificed more than most citizens will ever sacrifice in their entire lives. But, just like security procedures at airports are designed more to harass average passengers than actually catch potential terrorists, our immigration officers are more focused on harassing potentially legal immigrants than halting the influx of illegal immigrants.

  • Potok; If you believe in the law, you’re a racist

    TSO sent me an email from the Southern Poverty Law Center which linked to this little beauty of an “Intelligence Report” from the Director of Intelligence – obviously not the kind of intelligence we’d like the SPLC to have more of – Mark Potok. See if you can tell which group is currently worthy of Potok’s alarm;

    [They] are regularly harassed, taunted, and pelted with objects hurled from cars. They are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles, and many report being beaten with baseball bats and other objects. Others have been shot with BB guns or pepper-sprayed. Most will not walk alone after dark; parents often refuse to let their children play outside. A few have been the targets of arson attacks and worse.

    Ya know, every single one of those thinks, except the BB gun thing and the arson thing, happened to me when I lived in Northeast DC. But Potok isn’t interested in white folks living in Black neighborhoods. No, the SOUTHERN Poverty Law Center Intelligence Director (ironic title isn’t it?) is writing about illegal immigrants in Suffolk County, NY. The email was a total joke, by the way – it had to be. I asked TSO if it didn’t come from the Onion.

    The truly frightening thing about the Lucero case is that it could have happened anywhere. The high school students…weren’t members of hate groups. Instead, they were average kids who had been inundated with dehumanizing, poisonous messages about “illegal” immigrants from pundits and politicians. You know the kind of rhetoric I’m talking about. You hear it on the radio and television all the time.

    Yeah, I’m probably a racist just for criticizing the SPLC for trying to protect criminals in this country. Even though my wife is a legal Latin American immigrant and my four children, of course, are of Latin heritage. But none of us have any sympathy for illegal immigrants. If someone steals your getaway car while you’re robbing a bank, do you expect the police to drop what they’re doing to find it for you?

    Did you know that 10% of the entire population of El Salvador live in the DC Metro area according to the Salvadoran Embassy? Did you know that most of the violent crimes committed against them are by other Salvadorans?

    Do I condone violence against illegal immigrants? Nope, not at all. What I don’t condone is the fact that Potok and his minions put the word “illegal” in parenthesis when talking about criminals who cross our borders contrary to the law – and accuse average Americans who believe in the rule of law of being racist and nativists.

  • Felon among illegals suing landowner

    The other day, I wrote about 16 illegal immigrants who were suing an Arizona landowner for violating their civil rights in not allowing them to cross his land and holding them at gun point until authorities arrived. Today the Washington Times writes that one of those illegals, Gerardo Gonzalez is a felon convicted in the US for drug smuggling and deported in the ’90s;

    Gonzalez, whose illegal re-entry after removal under U.S. law would be another felony, is among five women and 11 men detained by Roger Barnett, owner of the Cross Rail Ranch near Douglas, Ariz.

    […]

    Asked about Gonzalez, [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)] spokeswoman Laura Rodriguez in Los Angeles said Thursday night that a gag order had been issued in the case and she could not comment.

    MALDEF had sought Jan. 6 to preclude questioning, testimony or evidence regarding Gonzalez´s drug conviction and his removal from the U.S., saying it was “irrelevant to the factual and legal issues at hand and extremely prejudicial.”

    Attorney Victor A. Rodriquez also sought to exclude at trial the numerous photographs and a videotape depicting vandalism and the transportation of illegal drugs through the Barnetts´ ranch. He said the photos and video did not involve any of the plaintiffs in this case.

    On Jan. 8, Judge Roll denied both motions.

    Well, other than letting this specious case go forward, the judge is at least appearing to be fair. They ought to put a homing device on Gonzalez, though, so they know where he is to throw his ass back over the fence when the trial ends.

    I wonder what the jury will look like in this trial.

  • 16 illegals sue landowner

    Rurik sends an article from the Washington Times about 16 illegal aliens who have chutzpah to sue an Arizona landowner for protecting his own land. Some highlights;

    Trial continues Monday in the federal lawsuit, which seeks $32 million in actual and punitive damages for civil rights violations, the infliction of emotional distress and other crimes.
    […]
    In the lawsuit, [Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)] said Mr. Barnett approached the group as the immigrants moved through his property, and that he was carrying a pistol and threatening them in English and Spanish. At one point, it said, Mr. Barnett’s dog barked at several of the women and he yelled at them in Spanish, “My dog is hungry and he’s hungry for buttocks.”

    The lawsuit said he then called his wife and two Border Patrol agents arrived at the site. It also said Mr. Barnett acknowledged that he had turned over 12,000 illegal immigrants to the Border Patrol since 1998.
    […]
    Mr. Barnett told The Washington Times in a 2002 interview that he began rounding up illegal immigrants after they started to vandalize his property, northeast of Douglas along Arizona Highway 80. He said the immigrants tore up water pumps, killed calves, destroyed fences and gates, stole trucks and broke into his home.

    Some of his cattle died from ingesting the plastic bottles left behind by the immigrants, he said, adding that he installed a faucet on an 8,000-gallon water tank so the immigrants would stop damaging the tank to get water.

    I wonder if anyone has bothered to point out to these people that if they hadn’t broke the law in the first place, they wouldn’t have been on Mr. Barnett’s land so he could do that to them (if it even happened). Do I have proof? Yes – I didn’t break the law that day and I didn’t meet Mr. Barnett.