Immigration Greater Threat Than Terrorism

By CHARLEY REESE

A friend of mine sent me an excerpt from the Mexican Constitution. It makes for good reading while illegal aliens are demonstrating and demanding a say in our politics.

In Chapter 3, Article 33, the Mexican Constitution states: "The Executive of the Union has the exclusive right to expel from the national territory, immediately and without necessity of judicial proceedings, all foreigners whose stay it judges inconvenient. Foreigners may not, in any manner, involve themselves in the political affairs of the country."

There are, some say, 11 million illegal immigrants in our country. They are not citizens. They have broken our laws. The present penalty for such a breach is deportation.

Yet the yellow-bellies in Congress and the president are scheming to grant them amnesty, by legalizing their presence and offering them citizenship. This will send a loud and clear message to all the people suffering from bad government and poor resources to our south to come across our borders in even larger numbers. The present hordes are a direct result of previous amnesty. The Mexican government, which ruthlessly expels its illegal immigrants, encourages Mexican citizens to violate our laws. Mexican government officials even harass our Border Patrol.

What the yellow-bellies in the House and the Senate and that scoundrel in White House are doing, of course, is catering to the corporations, businesses and individuals who love cheap labor. Cheap labor is more seductive than most drugs and even sex. How nice it is to have an employee who cannot complain about poor pay and bad working conditions.

You may say that most of the illegals are nice people. I won't argue with that, though certainly some of them are a long way from nice. You may say that they work hard, and I would agree with that.

But nevertheless, we are either a nation of laws or we're not. How can any nation on Earth claim to be a sovereign power if it cannot control its own borders? Drugs, terrorists and common criminals cross those borders, and the U.S. government has been criminally negligent in enforcing our immigration laws.

After all, illegal immigrants are not hard to find. All the federal government has to do is locate them and levy stiff, stiff fines against those who employ them. If we have to build a wall and man it with soldiers, so be it. Hadrian did that in Roman Britain to keep the Scots out.

As I often said, if you don't think uncontrolled immigration will cause you to lose your country, ask an Apache or a Sioux. This is a more serious problem facing America than terrorism, and it should be Americans, not illegal immigrants, who are pouring into the streets and demanding that the federal government do its duty.

God knows that the federal government in imperial Washington likes to stick its nose into all of our lives, but as far as doing its legitimate duty, it is absent without leave.

There are literally millions of people to our south who live in countries that, because of bad and corrupt governments and a scarcity of resources, cannot support them.

If I lived in those hellish conditions, I would cross the border, too. And, if Americans showed themselves to be too timid and too saturated by entertainment to defend their country, then I and my compatriots would take it away from them, exactly as our ancestors took this land away from the Native Americans — and, I should add, from Mexico.

Don't kid yourself for one minute that there is any affection for the gringo south of the border. We have done much harm, but no favors, to the Mexican people, and if we have forgotten our own history, I assure you they have not. Finally, amnesty under any guise for illegals is a slap in the face to the legal immigrants who often wait years in order to obey our laws.

© 2006 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.