I guess Mexico ‘s President Calderon forgot to mention what happens to illegal immigrants on his southern border when he came to Congress to scold us for “discriminatory” treatment in Arizona.
They are summarily raped or killed and commonly stripped of every meager possession they carry by soldiers and policemen. Arizona ‘s new law is downright humane compared to Mexico ‘s brutal treatment of illegal immigrants and his false indignation was the height of hypocrisy.
Neither he nor Mr. Obama nor a lot of other holier-than-thou liberals ever want to talk about the central issue–we’re having a hard enough time paying for our own schools, healthcare, roads, and law enforcement without having to pick up the tab for millions of people here illegally.
Yes, President Calderon, the good people of Arizona got so tired waiting for our national government to do its job, they took it on themselves. Yes, they have decided to discriminate– between tax paying citizens and illegal beneficiaries of our own hard work and tax dollars. They decided that the rule of law, ignored by our federal government, would be enforced by state and local government.
I don’t begrudge illegal immigrants doing what they have to do to take care of their families but I have a family, too, and immigration laws are supposed to protect us from unrestricted access to the infrastructure that comes out of my family’s pocket. Social costs, jobs, security of our borders against criminals and terrorists and the rule of law are all at stake here. Every citizen knows that a primary responsibility of our government is to protect and secure our borders for all these reasons. The concern by the public in Arizona and elsewhere is entirely legitimate but, as usual, the response from Washington is anything but.
The real problem, studiously avoided by most of our leaders as well as Mr. Calderon, is economic. Our border with Mexico separates the greatest economic difference between nations in the world. Nowhere else in the world do people earn so much less than those in a neighboring country and the powerful magnet this reality creates will never be solved with the usual “surrender solution”–a massive new amnesty every 25 years or so.
To address the economic forces that pull mostly good, hard working people, as well as vicious criminals, across our borders we must talk more about money.
You won’t hear Senor Calderon talking about his country’s failure to create a viable middle class in Mexico because that might mean sacrifice by the wealthy class there. Instead, Mexico has built factories on their side of the US/Mexico border to steal away American businesses and attract more Mexicans from the interior to our border.
Criminal and civil penalties on American employers who knowingly hire low-cost immigrant labor have, as usual, not been effectively enforced and are actively undermined in some American cities. And like recent federal treatment of enemy combatants, Washington would rather talk about how our citizen’s Constitutional rights are not being afforded to non-citizens here illegally.
That cities like Austin , Texas and San Diego , California are now boycotting Arizona is one more example of the political class selling out their own citizens. Both states will soon ask for far more from taxpayers to support social service, law enforcement and education budgets that can’t keep up with legal and illegal beneficiaries. Somehow being asked for your driver’s license in Austin is OK but Arizona should not ask whether you reside in the United States legally. Get real.
More to the central point could be our broken and corrupted national tax system, which already needs fixing for a hundred reasons unrelated to illegal immigration but which could do more to protect our borders, if fixed, than any other solution.
The FairTax is a national retail consumption tax to replace all federal taxes on income. It comes with a monthly “prebate” check which wipes out or offsets the new tax on the necessities of life. Millions of illegal immigrants become taxpayers, overnight, under the FairTax as consumers but won’t get the monthly prebate. That means that if you come here illegally you can expect to spend 23% more than anyone else on your daily purchases. For an American family of four this prebate allows more than $29,000 a year of federal tax free spending–but illegal immigrants get no such break.
How long would our illegal population stay in the United States if, overnight, being here cost a “surcharge” of 23% on every retail purchases of new goods and services? Not long. Those who did stay illegally would at least be paying for the federal services they use.
But to solve illegal immigration, bring trillions of dollars of projected foreign investment into the nation (getting Americans back to work) and end the lucrative corruption of the tax code by lobbyists and Members of Congress, the political class in Washington , D.C. would have to give up that corruption. That does not profit Washington insiders directly so Washington has little interest in a fundamentally reformed tax code no matter how much it benefits the nation.
To make illegal immigration to the United States far more costly Congress should enact the FairTax. To date, they won’t even hold a hearing although the pending legislation has millions of supporters and 66 Congressional co-sponsors. Only the American people acting together and demanding, first, a fair hearing and then enactment are powerful enough to trump Washington insiders who are fiddling their own dance tune while the nation burns.
The self-serving American aristocracy that now populates our political system at the expense of the “little people” the nation was originally designed to faithfully serve must be brought to heel or illegal immigration, a corrupted tax system and growing and unsolvable national debt will doom the United States to a second-rate future and a dark legacy for our children.