The Looming Immigration Showdown, Part 2

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article describing Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law and why most opposition to it is misled or misleading in its criticism.

Now, some weeks later, both opposition and support for the law have spread across the country and even down into Mexico, with Mexican president Felipe Calderon calling the law “backward” and issuing travel warnings for Mexicans traveling to the state of Arizona. Uhh, excuse me, Presidente Felipe, what exactly are you criticizing? Did you forget the tenets of your own country’s immigration laws and policies?

Did you conveniently forget that Mexico mandates that all levels of law enforcement (which includes the Mexican military) must enforce the national immigration laws? Is Calderon ignoring the fact those laws are in many ways tougher on both legal and illegal immigration than are immigration laws in the United States? Being in Mexico illegally is a felony which will put the offender in jail for at least two years. All potential immigrants must be able to contribute positively to the Mexican economy, society, and the general well-being of Mexico. Those who aid in illegal immigration and those foreign visitors who violate their visas or enter Mexico under false pretenses are either imprisoned or deported, or both.

So Mexico clearly has no issues with enforcing tough, sensible immigration laws. Why, then, is President Calderon hating on Arizona? Mexican politics may be rife with corruption, but this is hypocrisy of the highest order from our southern neighbor.

The most glaring aspect of this criticism from the Mexican president is the way in which he implies that Arizona’s law is racist and/or promotes racial profiling; it is a way of expressing racial solidarity with his people, the Mexicans and Chicanos, against those pesky white Arizonans who dare to enforce America’s immigration laws. Why else would Calderon make such statements, considering his country’s own immigration policies? Mexico’s laws are very harsh on other Central American immigrants who come to Mexico illegally. The Arizona law isn’t explicitly aimed at Mexican immigrants, no matter what the law’s opponents claim. In this way, President Calderon of Mexico acknowledges that he has done nothing to close the spigot of illegal immigrants flowing north out of his country into the United States. He accepts the fact that Mexican immigrants are the most numerous of immigrants in the southwestern United States, and despite the crackdowns on illegal immigrants in his own country, Calderon cannot stand by while his people (many of whom are fleeing the violence and corruption of his country) may be forced to endure the enforcement of American immigration laws, which are not nearly as harsh as his own.

President Obama is set to meet with Felipe Calderon soon, and immigration is sure to be high on the agenda. Seeing as how both presidents have similar opinions on Arizona’s law, the outcome of such a meeting is worrisome at best. The fact that the American president agrees with the Mexican president’s opinion on a harsh American immigration enforcement bill in a state on the Mexican border belies where Obama’s allegiances lie.

This is not to say that Obama is in league with Mexico in some sinister way. But I can guarantee if one of Mexico’s Central American neighbors lodged a similar complaint to Felipe Calderon about Mexico’s immigration policies, Calderon would tell that country exactly where they could shove their complaint.

Arizona passed this law allowing its state and local law enforcement branches to enforce federal immigration laws because the federal government has largely failed at their task. The murder of rancher Robert Krentz is only one of a multitude of murders in Arizona by illegal immigrants. Arizona also now boasts one of the kidnapping capitals of the country, thanks to illegal immigration and the crime that comes with it. When people say that our southern borders are broken, many politicians laugh it off, like President Obama did in a speech shortly following the signing of Arizona’s law. I guess it’s easy to laugh about broken borders when one resides in Washington DC or Chicago. For Arizonans, though, broken borders are no laughing matter.

A country that cannot adequately control its borders is not sovereign. Border security and immigration enforcement are tasks that the federal government legitimately must undertake, since the national borders outline several different states. If the federal government fails in their task or outright refuses to secure the border, as has been the case now for decades, then it must be the state’s imperative to enforce those laws themselves. All the whining and gnashing of teeth over Arizona’s new law ignores the fact that the federal government is not and does not want to secure the borders without comprehensive amnesty to the tens of millions of illegal immigrants currently residing in the US.

Many opponents of Arizona’s law claim that it is solely the responsibility of the federal government to enforce immigration policies and secure the border. I’d be willing to bet that most of those opponents also believe the responsibilities of health care and saving the environment lie with the federal government, too. Time and time again, the federal government has proven that, as its responsibilities, mandates, and subsidies grow, so do its incompetency and inefficiency (not to mention its outstanding debt). Combine that with an unwillingness to secure the border or enforce immigration policy, and we have disastrous situations like that in Arizona which require state and local action to help regain control of the problem.
I was somewhat surprised by cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle calling for all-out boycotts of Arizona. Granted, those cities are Democratic hotbeds of leftist politics, but rarely does one state or locality call for a boycott of another over state policy. This demonstrates the growing political divide in the United States. There will be a showdown, political or otherwise; I can promise you that. It is merely a question of when, where, and in which manner the showdown takes place.

This showdown will not necessarily be between Republicans and Democrats, or even between conservatives and liberals. Some conservatives opposed Arizona’s law, and I’m sure there exist some liberals who agree with it. A clash between Obama’s supporters and supporters of the Tea Party movement might be more accurate, but even that is a shaky description of what may be on the horizon.

The movie trailer that appeared in the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez film Grindhouse for the fake movie “Machete” has been recently redone in light of the signing of Arizona’s immigration law. The new trailer features actor Danny Trejo giving a warning to Arizona, followed by a trailer describing a movie in which Mexicans in the United States wage violent war against Americans who want to enforce US immigration policy and secure the borders. I’m sure there’s more to the plot than that, but politically, that’s what the movie was about.

Is Robert Rodriguez secretly organizing a race war between Chicanos and European-Americans? I doubt it. It’s just entertainment at the end of the day. But if the plot of the movie were reversed, with some white American protagonist waging war against criminal illegal immigrants, would that even make any airtime? How quick and strong would the condemnations come from every news network in America? Couple this new trailer for “you-fucked-with-the-wrong-Mexican” “Machete” with the calls for boycotts of Arizona and with Los Angeles high school teacher Ron Gochez’s call for revolutionary action to his Latino students, and we can see the political divide growing further.

I do not claim to know what lays beyond the horizon, folks. I leave such predictions to people like Gerald Celente and his Trends Research Institute (which, by the way, anyone looking for chillingly accurate predictions of national and global trends should check out). What I and many others can see, however, is a growing, bubbling, frothing, volatile dissatisfaction with the direction of American government. Each side of the political divide is blaming the other side for radicalizing and drifting towards the fringe. The result is gridlock in Congress and polemics by almost everyone in Washington DC. This happens often in times of economic turmoil. The recent senate primary wins, which include Rand Paul of Kentucky, show that the political status quo in Washington DC will not last much longer.

The American political scene has always hovered mostly around the center-right position, no matter who’s in the White House. Under Obama, however, American government has drifted to the center left, and have certainly increased the statism championed by George W. Bush; Obama’s supporters have backed him almost every step of the way. The so-called “radicalization” of the political right is merely a desire for true conservative principles of limited government, balanced budgets, and state sovereignty rather than the usual GOP appease-and-compromise strategy that has left no distinction between Democrats and Republicans.

So does something wicked this way come? Only time will tell. As the new Arizona law illustrates, however, if the federal government cannot do its job when it comes to the border and immigration, those who are affected the most and have the most to lose from government inaction will do the job instead.

While Presidents Obama and Calderon are meeting in DC bemoaning the “racism” of Arizona’s immigration law with their fingers crossed behind their backs, Arizonans will be securing their state and doing what should have been done in all states a long time ago.