U.S. policy on immigration is a tragic joke


By Lou Dobbs, Arizona Republic, August 28, 2005

There is a common front in our illegal-alien crisis, the war on drugs and the global war on terror. That front line is easily defined as our nation's borders, airports and seaports. And Arizonans know only too well the pain and problems of living and working on the front line of our border with Mexico.

South of that border is a corrupt and ineffective government run by President Vicente Fox, who has no apparent incentive to control the flow of drugs being shipped from Mexico into the United States and every incentive to continue the exportation of illegal aliens into this country. This year, in fact, remittances back to Mexico from the estimated 20 million Mexican citizens living in the United States, most of them illegally, surpassed oil as Mexico's No. 1 source of foreign revenue.

In the United States, an obscene alliance of corporate supremacists, desperate labor unions, certain ethnocentric Latino activist organizations and a majority of our elected officials in Washington works diligently to keep our borders open, wages suppressed and the American people all but helpless to resist the crushing financial and economic burden created by the millions of illegal aliens who crash our borders each year.

They work just as hard to deny the truth to the American public. That's why almost every evening on my CNN broadcast we report on this country's "Broken Borders." The truth is that U.S. immigration policy is a tragic joke at the expense of hard-working middle-class Americans.

...The American people want our borders secure, want our immigration laws enforced and want those who hire illegal aliens both punished and held liable for the economic and social costs of breaking our laws.

...we are first a nation of laws, and upholding those laws and our national values makes this great country of ours possible....

Reform begins with the truth. And our elected officials must begin to recognize the reality that a war on terror and war on drugs can be won only by securing our borders and that any reform of our immigration policies must begin first at the front line of the crisis: our border with Mexico.

Anything less is just another sad joke, and we know at whose expense.

Read the complete article.