With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered
sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens,
half a million of whom now reside there.

Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its
constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to
enforce America’s immigration laws.

“We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to
act,” said Gov. Jan Brewer. “But decades of inaction and misguided
policy have created an unacceptable situation.”

We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in
Washington.

What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it
that federal laws are faithfully executed?

He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic
lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this
invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he
attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in
law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.

He has denounced Arizona as “misguided.” He has called on the Justice
Department to ensure that Arizona’s sheriffs and police do not violate
anyone’s civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the
people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of
thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How’s that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?

Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.

Undeniably, making it a state as well as a federal crime to be in this
country illegally, and requiring police to check the immigration
status of anyone they have a “reasonable suspicion” is here illegally,
is tough and burdensome. But what choice did Arizona have?

The state has a fiscal crisis caused in part by the burden of
providing schooling and social welfare for illegals and their
families, who consume far more in services than they pay in taxes and
who continue to pour in. Even John McCain is now calling for 3,000
troops on the border.

Police officers and a prominent rancher have been murdered. There have
been kidnappings believed to be tied to the Mexican drug cartels.
There are nightly high-speed chases through the barrios where innocent
people are constantly at risk.

If Arizona does not get control of the border and stop the invasion,
U.S. citizens will stop coming to Arizona and will begin to depart, as
they are already fleeing California.

What we are talking about here is the Balkanization and breakup of a
nation into ethnic enclaves. A country that cannot control its borders
isn’t really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan reminded us.

The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that
belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border
Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.

Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds’ role because the feds
won’t do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on
the desk of the president of the United States.

Why is Obama paralyzed? Why does he not enforce the law, even if he
dislikes it, by punishing the businessmen who hire illegals and by
sending the 12 million to 20 million illegals back home? President
Eisenhower did it. Why won’t he?

Because he is politically correct. Because he owes a big debt to the
Hispanic lobby that helped deliver two-thirds of that vote in 2008.
Though most citizens of Hispanic descent in Arizona want the border
protected and the laws enforced, the Hispanic lobby demands that the
law be changed.

Fair enough. But the nation rose up as one to reject the “path-to-
citizenship” — i.e., amnesty — that the 2007 plan of George W. Bush,
McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama envisioned.

Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets
against the new Arizona law. Let him go.

Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the
8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them
or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are
themselves paying the heaviest price.

Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the
U.S. government — Bush and Obama both — issued 1,131,000 green cards
to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a
flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.

What are we doing to our own people?

Whose country is this, anyway?

America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the
immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of
those laws.

Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to
deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.

This is not an option. It is an obligation.

Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?

http://buchanan.org/blog/whose-country-is-this-3955


The Arizona Uproar

Listening to the national uproar, you'd be forgiven for thinking that
Arizona has marched into the civil rights apocalypse with its new
state law cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Last Friday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed SB1070, making it a
crime to be in the state illegally and requiring cops, where
"reasonable suspicion" exists, to determine a person's legal status.

Rev. Al Sharpton is promising to come to Arizona to march, the New
York Times says that the state has gone "off the deep end," and the
Nazi references are flying. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony likened
SB1070 to "German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques."

Riding the noise for political advantage, President Obama is summoning
his Justice Department to look into the matter, saying that the law
would "undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as
Americans."

But 70 percent of Arizona residents support the law, according to
Rasmussen.

What's going on here? Do we know something the rest of the country
doesn't?

Actually, we do. Context is everything, and it'd be nice if the
national media provided some, rather than simply slamming Arizona as a
redneck haven filled with nativists and bubbas with a hankering for
racial profiling.

An estimated 500,000 illegal aliens live in Arizona, and many are
decent folks, to be sure. But the border is still wide open, and many
more are coming. Last year in Border Patrol's 262-mile-wide Tucson
Sector, agents arrested 241,000 illegal aliens, a drop of more than
130,000 from 2007.

It sounds great until you understand that gotaways outnumber arrests
by three to one.

Does the country realize this, or have the people bought Janet
Napolitano's political fairy tale that border security has been
"transformed" from where we were in 2007?

As Obama lectures Arizona, citizens here await his decision on an
urgent request to send three thousand National Guard troops to the
border. Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl recently asked for soldiers,
as did Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, to bring some
security to American citizens being hammered by cross-border smugglers
and thugs.

Here's an important bit of context: This isn't your father's illegal
immigration, when polite farm workers offered to do chores in return
for some water and a sandwich as they walked north. Today, the drug
cartels have taken over the people-smuggling business. They own the
trails into the country and dominate the land, the same way urban
gangs control neighborhoods

Any group wanting in has to deal with them, and the going rate is
$2,500 per person. If you don't have the cash, the cartel coyote will
offer to bring you in for free if you carry his dope. As Cochise
County Sheriff Larry Dever testified to the Senate Homeland Security
Committee last week, most of the groups coming up now have a gun
behind them.

Along the Chiricahua Corridor smuggling route north and east of
Douglas, Arizona, residents have been screaming for some time about
break-ins, threats, intimidation, vandalism, and home invasions. But
the feds did nothing to keep citizens safe. Instead, they talked
amnesty. Then the inevitable happened.

On March 27, Cochise County rancher Rob Krentz was murdered on his
land, presumably by a drug smuggler. The death occurred on a well-
known drug trail, and trackers followed the killer's prints back into
Mexico. He is still at large.

Now, I can't argue with those who say that SB1070 has some provisions
that smack of desperation -- such as making it a crime to stop your
car to pick up a day laborer or to enter a stopped car to get
temporary work. That sounds impossible to enforce.

But critics also say that it will have no impact on besieged residents
of southern Arizona, and I disagree. It could help.

We have a huge problem with crooks coming up from Mexico to our cities
and towns, committing crimes, and bolting back south of the border.
Not long ago, I wrote a story that backtracked the records of two of
these border coyotes and found that between them, they'd been arrested
and released by either law enforcement or the courts a total of 35
times.

One was let go after a traffic stop, and the other had worked
construction in Phoenix for years. If this law had been in effect, the
police might've been able to get them off the street before they were
able to lead more groups into southern Arizona, break into homes, and
frighten citizens.

Civil rights? What about the civil right of American citizens to drive
up to their homes at night and have some reasonable assurance that no
one is inside?

On March 31, four hundred people gathered outside the one-room Apache
School to tell their elected reps what it's like to live in smuggler-
occupied territory. The meeting was held there, in the cold, open air,
in part because the nearest place to host a group that size inside was
seventy round-trip miles away, and these folks didn't feel comfortable
leaving their homes for that length of time.

They live by a rule of thumb: If you leave your house empty, it will
be occupied by illegals or drug smugglers. We're not talking just
about homes five miles from the international line. We're talking
about homes up to sixty miles north of the border.

Racial profiling doesn't matter much when you're in a fight to
preserve your way of life and keep your family and property safe. Let
me give you a different perspective on racial profiling. Now, when
Border Patrol chases down and arrests illegals south of I-10,
everybody says, "Atta boy. Good police work."

But if these crossers put a toe north of I-10, they're home free.
Except for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, nobody is looking for
them, and if you do, it's racial profiling.

The farther you get from the line, the more people want to make this
problem about race. It's the ground the left wants to fight on because
it's so effective. Political correctness shuts people up and keeps the
border open.

Arizona has had enough and seen enough. This bill, admittedly flawed,
motivated in part by anger and frustration, is an effort to step in
and do something about a serious national problem on our southern
border that grows more dangerous all the time.

But the national media largely ignore it because it offers up the
wrong victims and the wrong politics. They don't send reporters out to
Arizona get the story, to walk the smuggling trails, to sit with
beleaguered Americans at their kitchen tables and understand the
torment their lives have become.

Instead, they adopt the preening pose of the self-righteous, screaming
from a safe distance about the bubbas. All 70 percent of them.

It's more fun than context.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/...na_uproar.html