Mexico, Bloody Mexico

By Alan Caruba

It is increasingly obvious that the Obama administration is more interested in protecting Mexicans than Americans.

Case in point; Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has eleven suspects accused of murdering law enforcement officers in his maximum security county jail in downtown Phoenix. As reported in the August 18 Washington Post, “Justice Department officials in Washington have issued a rare threat to sue (Arpaio) if he does not cooperate with their investigation of whether he discriminates against Hispanics.”

“The standoff comes just weeks after the Justice Department sued Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer because of the state’s new immigration law,” the Post noted. The latest word from Americans for Legal Immigration is that twenty-two States now have lawmakers developing versions of Arizona’s illegal immigration crackdown bill SB 1070.

So nearly half the States are aligning themselves with Arizona. Why?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that, according to Mexican figures released recently, the toll of the drug wars was said to be 28,000. It includes growing numbers of “civilian victims” ranging from toddlers caught in the cross fire to students massacred at parties. Mexico’s disintegration as a civil society is so severe its government is considering legalizing drugs to reduce the intercine battles between the cartels.

Little wonder that Mexicans are fleeing their war-torn nation to the safety of the United States. Earlier this year at least thirty residents of El Porvenir, located about four miles from the Texas border town of Fort Hancock, crossed into the U.S. and asked for political asylum, telling authorities they fear for their lives. The chief deputy sheriff of Hudspeth County reported that a cartel had threatened to kill children in schools across the border unless the parents paid $5,000 pesos.

Mexico has a slim hold on anything resembling a civil society where the law enforcement authorities can stem the violence or journalists can report it.

Support for building a Mexican border fence is up to 68% according to Rasmussen Reports in late July. Other surveys indicate that 56% of voters nationwide oppose the Justice Department’s decision to challenge the Arizona law and 61% favor passage of a law like Arizona’s in their own State.

Why would anyone would consider vacationing in Mexico when, according to State Department figures, 79 U.S. citizens were killed there in 2009, up from 35 in 2007. In Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, 23 Americans were killed in 2009, compared with two in 2007. Earlier this year, in April, three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Ciudad Juarez were ambushed and murdered. As many as half of the 2,660 killings in that city are attributed to paid assassins from the Barrio Azteca gang.

The most widely reported murder was that of Robert Krentz on his southern Arizona ranch in March. An illegal alien is the primary suspect in the killing. Meanwhile, La Raza (the “Race”) an immigration advocacy group in the U.S. is supporting driver’s licenses and in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens. They are, of course, opposed to a secure fence and cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state, and federal authorities.

The worst of all this data is the further fact that Congress continues to progress toward “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, another way of saying mass amnesty for illegal aliens. In 2007, as a Senator, Obama voted to double legal immigration from 1.2 million annually to 2.4 million.

The costs to the United States, already experiencing the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression, are extraordinary. With millions of unemployed Americans, two new studies of the impact on the U.S. labor force revealed that, of the jobs we’re told Americans won’t take, the majority of job-holders are in fact native-born. This includes maids and housekeepers, taxi drivers, meat processors, grounds maintenance workers, construction laborers, porters, bellhops and concierges, and janitors.

Beyond the labor market, U.S. taxpayers are spending $52 billion annually to educate the children of illegal aliens with local governments taking the biggest hit of nearly $50 billion.

The pressures on the U.S. healthcare system and on the law enforcement system are comparable and the irony is that the U.S. has spent billions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of nation building, but is doing little comparatively here at home to cope with the flood of illegal immigration.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Justice is doing whatever it can to punish States like Arizona for taking even the most minimal steps to protect Americans. As for the Department of Homeland Security, its preference is to ignore the problem. We are being ill-served by the Obama administration and are likely to be stabbed in the back by a lame-duck Congress.

© Alan Caruba, 2010