Politicians play hide and seek on illegal immigration issue
June 15, 2010

by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor

Politicians in many cities like San Francisco and Seattle have been playing a kid’s game of hide and seek on illegal immigration.

Most readers will remember the game. Anyone who didn’t reach the goal could be tagged out. Well, the way the politicians play it these days, they make their whole cities into the goal by declaring them sanctuary cities. So, if you are an illegal immigrant—someone who broke the rules and the law on entering the US—you can hide anywhere in the US until you get to a sanctuary city where you become safe and can do anything you want.

Some might think the illegal immigration issue and gun control have nothing to do with each other, but they’d be wrong. They are related, as a Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms bumper sticker said: “Border Control Not Gun Control.”

There were a lot of reasons the two issues were linked by CCRKBA about five years ago, including the high incidence of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens.
But on May 20, while speaking before an unusual joint session of the US Congress, Mexican President Felipe Calderon linked them again.

Calderon, from a country where prohibitive gun laws prevent good people from having firearms for protection against criminals, urged Congress to reinstate the 1994 federal “assault weapon” ban which sunset in 2004, and attacked Arizona’s new pioneering law against illegal immigration.

With a warning seemingly designed to appeal to those who believe that speaking out against the Obama Administration’s policies are one step short of sedition or worse, Calderon said, “[I]f you do not regulate the sale of these weapons in the right way, nothing guarantees that criminals here in the United States with access to the same power of weapons will not decide to challenge American authorities and civilians.”

At the same time, Calderon attacked the new Arizona law that requires people to have verifiable identify papers. Of course, Mexico already requires anyone entering its country to have identity papers, but Calderon claims that Arizona’s requirement will lead to racial profiling.

Mexico’s call for gun control in the US while promoting an open border for its citizens to find a better life north of that border is the height of hypocrisy.

During his trip to the US, Calderón received a lot of attention from the media and many politicians for falsely claiming that Arizona’s new immigration law uses “racial profiling.” Immigration wasn’t his only topic. He spent over four minutes of his address lecturing Americans and calling on them to renew the federal ban on so-called assault weapons.

Just as Mexican drug cartels are able to bring drugs into their country, they are also able to bring in really powerful weapons from around the world to defend both their valuable drugs as well their turf against competing drug dealers. Machineguns, grenades and rocket launchers are not available for sale in the US and come from countries such as South Korea, Israel, and Spain—or the Mexican military. Two thousand two hundred thirty nine grenades were seized by the Mexican government from 2007 to 2009. Similarly, machineguns in Mexico originate from China, Israel, and South Africa, according to Fox News.

Just as the message about guns was flawed, so was that about the Arizona law.

The actual Arizona law requires police to question people about their immigration status if there’s reason to suspect they’re in the country illegally, and it makes it a state crime to be in the US illegally. People may be questioned about their status if they’ve been stopped by police who are in the process of enforcing another law (my emphasis).

The law will take effect July 29 unless possible legal challenges from the federal government, other states or interested organizations are successful. The boycotts of Arizona by cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston don’t seem to be working from reports Gun Week has received. Planes to Arizona seem to be full.

What is interesting is that while politicians on both sides of the border are decrying the Arizona law, a strong majority of Americans support Arizona’s new immigration law and would back similar laws in their own states, according to three new polls released on May 12.

— Sixty-one percent of Americans—and 64% of registered voters—said they favored the law in a survey of 1,016 adults conducted May 6-9 by the McClatchy-Ipsos poll.

— Some 73% of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said they approved of the provision that requires people to provide proof of their legal status, compared with 23% who disapproved. A further 67% were in favor of allowing police to detain anyone unable to verify their legal status, while 62% supported police having the power to question anyone they believed may in the country illegally.


— An NBC/WSJ poll found 64% favor this law, while 34% oppose it.

Despite the sentiments of many Democrat politicians, the McClatchy-Ipsos poll found nearly half of Democrats like the law. While the Democratic Party generally is regarded as more sympathetic to illegal immigrants’ plights, 46% of Democrats said they favored the law for Arizona and 49% said they’d favor the law’s passage in their own states.

More than 8 in 10 Republicans and 54% of independents favor the law.

These results speak to the political land mines that immigration policy presents for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. The poll results also illustrate the uphill battle that immigrant-rights activists face in pushing Congress to pass legislation that would pair tougher border enforcement—which is universally popular—with a path to citizenship for immigrants who are here now illegally.

Even in Massachusetts, 70% of voters favor a proposal to stop illegal immigrants from receiving public benefits, a sentiment that flies in the face of their state legislature’s recent rejection of such a plan.

With the public solidly behind the Arizona concept at present, legislators and political candidates from Georgia to Colorado, from Pennsylvania to Texas, have introduced bills or plan to introduce similar.

“With the federal government currently AWOL in fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities to protect American lives, property and jobs against the clear and present dangers of illegal-alien invaders, state lawmakers … are left with no choice but to take individual action to address this critical economic and national security epidemic,” said Republican Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe.

Similar efforts are under way in Minnesota, Maryland, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Missouri, Nebraska and Idaho.

Ann Morse, who monitors immigration legislation for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said most attempts to pass legislation modeled on the Arizona statute probably will have to wait till next year, since it is too late for most state legislatures. Most are already out of session, she told The Washington Times.

Perhaps throwing a bit of gasoline on a flaming issue, Mexico warned its citizens living in or traveling to Arizona that they could be “harassed” there because of the new immigration law.

By the way, if you haven’t visited your doctor lately, you may not know that the receptionist will ask you for picture ID along with your health insurance information. I was told that this is a new rule imposed by the federal government.

So if the government can require your doctor to confirm your identity, why can’t it require similar photo ID for people who could be in this country illegally.

Other countries do it. Even Mexico!
Return to Archive Index