October 4, 2006

Wall’s Up? Good, Now We Can Talk

If it takes an election season to get Congress to do good things, such as outing horny and predatory legislators, building walls on the Mexican border, and – well, OK, that’s pretty much it – it would seem that we ought to have one of these elections every few months. After spending years attempting to come up with a formula to please people who can’t vote and the government of Mexico, Congress finally approved the building of a fence covering roughly a third of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now that some sort of tangible step has been taken to curb the influx of illegal aliens into our country, we can start talking about the comprehensive bill that President Bush is looking for. And by “start talking” I don’t mean “start the amnesty process”. I mean some of us Americans now have an ounce of respect for Congress, just enough to let them sit at our table and discuss the issue. Congress has done the essential, absolute and bare minimum; now we move on to what’s merely fairly obvious and necessary.

The fact of the matter is, the wall still comes short of covering the entire border, the number of Border Patrol agents at work is insulting to any American’s perception of security, and the “catch and release” policy on the Southern border remains dominant. Local governments’ policies extending freedoms to illegals continue to increase, only serving to exacerbate the problematic reality.

And we now have a rising problem that we haven’t so far factored in all that much. The government of Mexico is becoming louder and increasingly critical of our efforts to secure the border. While at first a mild annoyance, the Mexican government’s self-righteous assertion of some right to export their poor northward, and without obstacle at that, is indeed becoming quite aggravating. We need to put those voices in their place.

We must first remind them that we are only forced to expend money and effort on securing the border because Mexico fails to do so. Mexico City’s corruption and oligopoly of wealth continues to result in a society made up of the overwhelmingly poor and underprivileged. We have taken on the burden of hosting millions of their poorest, most desperate, and often criminally inclined citizens, who end up sending their earnings back to Mexico.

For the Mexican government, it’s a win-win situation. Your poor are not only taken off your back, but now they are sending you their money. It’s like magic! Mexico City is not about to let go of this miraculous phenomenon, hence the criticism of U.S. efforts to protect the border.

President Vicente Fox’s spokesman insisted that the most recent bill authorizing the wall “hurts bilateral relations, goes against the spirit of cooperation needed to guarantee security on the common border, creates a climate of tension in border communities.” Cooperation? Mexico’s idea of cooperation is their promise to stop sending illegals north the minute they run out of people to send. For some reason my sense is that the “climate of tension” somehow already existed, what with the dozen or so million of illegal Mexicans running around.

The Mexicans should also find themselves in an uncomfortable position when discussing their people’s rights to pretend they never lost the American southwest. While U.S. law enforcement, in the unlikely event of capturing illegal aliens, treats them quite well, often releasing them back on American soil, the Mexicans are not so kind at their own southern border. State Department and other studies show that Mexican authorities, along with organized gangs, commit extortions, robberies and killings when dealing with illegal immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

The Mexican government has the nerve to expect us to welcome their society’s destitute class while treating Central American aliens in a way that would make Guantanamo look like a day spa. Mexican citizens expect to receive an array of benefits from the U.S. government as a reward for evading its Border Patrol, but don’t appear to be as insistent on getting their own government’s respect while still in their homeland.

Thankfully, our leadership has partially overcome the temptation of succumbing to irrational Mexican demands. Now that the wall is up, it is inevitable that critical voices will rise again from Mexicans both within our borders and south of them. As we move forward in our far-from-complete efforts to secure the border, the President and Congress will inevitably have to choose between the Mexican government and illegals on the one hand, and Americans and legal Mexican-Americans (both current and future) on the other. Let’s just hope they remember who casts the ballots every November.