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Posted: August 11, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Two weeks ago, at a McAllen, Texas, airport, U.S. agents stopped a woman boarding a flight for New York and asked for her visa.
She had none. Farida Goolam Mohamed Ahmed was traveling on a South African passport with several pages torn out. She had flown from Johannesburg to Dubai and the United Arab Emirates, on to London and, six days later, to Mexico City. Inside her bag were wet and muddy pant
Farida Ahmed admitted to having crossed the Rio Grande. More interesting, her name turned up on a terrorist watch list.
As columnist Michelle Malkin writes, when George W. Bush says, "Family values do not stop at the Rio Grande," he might add, "neither do the Islamofascists."
Yet, it is not only terrorists who are illegally crossing our borders. So, too, are sexual predators. According to reporter Jerry Seper of the Washington Times, three convicted child molesters who had been deported were caught in the Tucson, Ariz., sector last week, trying to sneak back into the United States.
All were Mexicans. Since October, he writes, Border Patrol agents have "arrested 9,559 illegal aliens with criminal records, 143 of which were for sexually related charges."
Moreover, as Seper reported in a recent series in the Times, only 18 squads of immigration agents are "seeking to arrest 80,000 criminal aliens – including killers, rapists, drug dealers and child molesters – and at least 320,000 'absconders,' foreign nationals who were ordered deported but disappeared [inside the United States]."
When the open-borders lobby celebrates the societal benefits of unrestricted immigration, it should be made to look at the other side of the ledger, the horrors perpetrated by criminal aliens and the heartaches visited upon the families of their victims. Seper gives us a glimpse at that side:
In Los Angeles ... more than 90 percent of all outstanding homicide warrants are for illegal aliens, and about 65 percent of the fugitive felony warrants involve illegals. In Phoenix, alien smuggling operations last year resulted in a huge surge in home invasions and alien-related violent crimes. ...
Nationwide, the Justice Department says about 40,000 illegal aliens are being held in the federal prison system, about 25 percent of the prison population. They are the fastest-growing segment. ...
Even if the higher estimates of the number of illegal aliens here are correct, 14 million, that is less than 5 percent of U.S. population. Yet, illegal aliens are 25 percent of the federal prison population. Clearly, from these numbers, criminals are hugely over-represented among the 8 million to 14 million illegals in the United States and the hundreds of thousands who breach our southern border every year.
In the past year, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been conducting "Operation Predator," running down sex criminals who have come to America to prey on children. Some 3,200 foreign nationals and lawful permanent U.S. residents were arrested as suspected child molesters. Of these, fully one-half were illegal aliens.
As related by columnist Sam Francis on VDare.com, other alarming facts are emerging about the poor and soaring Hispanic population in the United States. Francis cites Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute, who writes in City Journal on "The Immigrant Gang Plague."
Hispanic youths, whether recent arrivals or birthright American citizens, are developing an underclass culture ... Hispanic school dropout rates and teen birthrates are now the highest in the nation. Gang crime is exploding nationally – rising 50 percent from 1999 to 2002 – driven by the march of Hispanic immigration east and north across the country. Most worrisome, underclass indicators like crime and single parenthood do not improve over successive generations of Hispanics – they worsen.
Writes MacDonald, "An immigration agent reports that in the middle-class suburbs of southwest Miami, second- and third-generation Hispanic youths are perpetrating home invasions, robberies, battery, drug sales and rape."
An invasion that Congress and the president refuse to repel, in dereliction of their constitutional duty, has put America at risk. And while the GOP, following the Karl Rove script, remains silent, Kerry Democrats try to out-pander Bush Republicans with even more generous offers of amnesty to illegal aliens.
But at least somebody is doing something.
In California, popular talk-show hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou – enraged over Homeland Security's refusal to back up Border Patrol agents who were arresting and deporting illegals – have decided to select one GOP congressman in the Los Angeles area and urge voters to go to the polls and throw him out – to teach the national GOP a lesson.
Anybody got a better idea?
