Craven de Kere wrote:Foxfyre wrote:Are you sure they are being granted citizenship Deecups? My understanding is they would be issued work permits with the possibility of at some time in the future (years) having opportunity to apply for citizenship.
Your understanding is correct and Deecups is incorrect. In fact, many Mexicans view it as a measure to help deny citizenship because the notmalization of the workers will better enable law enforecement to track them.
This is true, and something that seems to be widely unknown. And I believe it's the reason the Bush plan will be a good one. If they photograph and fingerprint everyone who comes across the border, and absolutely shut down the border everywhere but the ports of entry, then we will know who's coming into our country. And when their time is up, we can go looking for them. There won't be any charges of racial profiling if the police have the person's picture and fingerprint to identify him. It's not an amnesty program.
Phyllis Schlafly is correct in many of the statements she makes. The people living on ranches at the Arizona border have some horrible problems, and they have found notebooks with Arabic writing in them. Our Arizona car theft rate is indeed the highest in the country. And they have found several houses in Phoenix full of illegals. One of the houses was discovered because two rival coyotes were having a gun battle over the illegals inside, and some of the illegals ran next door asking for help.
Hundreds of illegals die in the Arizona desert heat every year, trying to make it to civilization. The coyotes take them into the desert, point out a direction, and then go back to Mexico. Several misguided individuals have provided watering stations in the Arizona desert, which probably encourages more illegals to try to cross.
The coyotes themselves must be horrible people. They compete with each other to make more money from the illegals. When they get to Phoenix, illegals are often held until they can come up with additional money. If they can't pay, their hands are tied behind them with whatever is close at hand, they are put into a car, and driven to the desert. Once there, they are taken out of the car, walked to the side of the road, and shot in the back of the head. The Sheriff's Office found 8 of them in a desert area west of Phoenix, and a couple more in a different desert area after they started keeping an eye on the first area. And there was an instance where a (suspected) coyote fired shots at a large van containing an American family driving down the freeway south of Phoenix. It was thought that the coyote believed the van was a rival coyote smuggling immigrants.
Several years ago, a carload of illegals ambushed a Phonix Police officer and shot him dead. The only reason they didn't escape was that a heroic security guard happened by and emptied his pistol into the car. He didn't hit any of them, but they ran from the car and were captured later. There are many other instances of illegal aliens and crime, but that's the one that tops my list.
The new I.C.E. (used to be INS) has a huge operation going on the Arizona-Mexico border right now, continuing until the end of the year. They're supposed to have the border pretty well shut down, I guess. There are things they can do that the local police can't, so when the agencies cooperate they realize a huge benefit. One example of that is that if a policeman stops a suspected (or confirmed) illegal alien here, usually there's nothing he can do, because he's prohibited from enforcing federal laws, and there usually aren't enough Border Patrol agents around to take them into custody. But with I.C.E. showing a huge presence here, now there's someone to turn them over to.
My personal opinion is that we need a Great Wall of Arizona all along the Mexican border. It needs to be patrolled regularly and it must allow absolutely no one to cross. We can't keep letting people die while trying to cross our desert. And we can't keep allowing them to be killed by coyotes when they can't pay the ransom. And we can't take the chance of letting Al Qaeda operatives into our country. So it would be first a humanitarian measure, and second a security measure.
And that's the story from Arizona, one of the battle fronts in the war on illegal immigration.
