On Crossing Boundaries

Today there are confirmed reports that a Mexican Helicopter crossed the border into Arizona and fired upon US border guards. Now, if you look closely at satellite images of the region, you can clearly see there is a road running parallel to the border, making it obvious to anybody where that border is.

In other words, this was not a "mistake".

But, hey, let's give them the benefit of the doubt.

Let's pretend that they had NO CLUE where they were, or how they got there. Or, as with the case of Sgt. Andrew Tahmoressi, helicopter traffic in the region was funneled north in such a way that there was no possible opportunity for them to turn back from the border, so, unlike our marine, they chose to fire off their weapons in panic as soon as the …erm…skyway opened up.

Yeh, that's the ticket.

Yeh.

This is not the first time people in official Mexican uniforms have made forays across our mutual border and fired at our law enforcement officers. Maybe some of them were accidental, but as more and more of this sort of thing is happening, and as officials in Mexico seem to be as enthusiastic as Obama in encouraging people to send gang members into our border states among the disease-ridden children, it's about time a few people in Congress start taking threats seriously.

And, why not start by suggesting that, as a gesture of good faith, since we've sent their "accidental crossers" back right away, since we've practically apologized to them for their stupidity/cupidity for years, maybe they can start truly atoning for their errors by (a) returning our hostage marine, and (b) getting their cops to stop taking more hostages hapless people into custody for making a simple mistake. And, maybe they can continue by actually defending the border correctly – that is to say, they stop people from coming in from their south and crossing the entire of their country unchecked as they make their way into our lands.

But I guess that's too much to ask. After all, our own government doesn't seem to give a tinker's damn about our border security, either, let alone care about the safety of those who are tasked with said border security, or those who live near the border, or those who have to pay taxes to support the agencies which offer "free" public aid to every last illegal border crosser who asks for it, even as the same government denies support to the veterans who made life so cushy for the people in that government…

I'm sorry. I fear I may have created a run-on sentence. But that's far less troubling than a runaway government supporting runs on our border.

Waukegan city officials decide to enforce laws

I was beginning to abandon all hope that Illinois could come up with rational responses to the problem of illegal immigration and further crimes committed by illegal aliens. But one Chicago suburb is reviving my faith in sensible local governments.

The city has decided it's okay to hand over illegal alien criminals, to the Feds, for deportation. They're not going to become a criminal sanctuary city. I wish I'd lived in Waukegan, back in the day. They seem nicely non-leftwitty.

Of course, somebody's going to tell me that Waukegan is nothing but imperialists and fascists who came here illegally long ago, and now they want to stop anybody else from having the same privileges ... o'course, they're ignoring the part where the deportation is for those convicted of crimes other than border crossing without papers.... like, y'know, rape, murder, robbery, and all that kinda stuff that, apparently, the opponents of this measure would have us believe every illegal has committed, or they wouldn't be getting deported, now, would they?

Feh. A government group did something right, this week. I'm going to take that as a good sign.

One more problem with Damnesty

I've seen a number of fairly practical, pragmatic reasons for blocking the latest Damnesty plan, not the least of which being the tilting of the scales of justice against the law-abiding citizens and toward the cheaters, plus the threats to the nation's safety due to terrorism, gang violence, and such, the burden on the taxpayers for schools, hospital bills, social programs, and that risk to our health from diseases we had eradicated locally but are making a comeback (see: tuberculosis).

One argument quite a few have in favor of open-borders policy is the old "they do work American's won't." For example, the Swift meat packing plants suffered a raid right before Christmas, last year, including one in Marshalltown IA, where they swept up six busloads of illegal immigrants. Apparently, nobody likes to work in a place where they kill hogs & make ham. Except that, he next day, there was a line out the door and around the block, of unemployed local citizens seeking those newly-vacated jobs. So much for that theory.

Okay, that's the obvious set of complaints with this damnesty plan -- or any other such damnesty for those who cheat the system. But a less obvious one comes out when you hear one big complaint from folks like Linda Chavez, a citizen whose family has been here almost as long as my father's (well, maybe slightly less. She traces hers back about 3 centuries. Some of Dad's go back about to the landbridge -- and possibly to the days of the atlatl, if his extreme liking for tools is any indication). Linda's complaint is that some people assume that, because her name is Spanish, she's one of those people -- you know, the ones who crossed the border in the middle of the night sometime just before the Reagan damnesty. Everybody with a Latin-sounding name must come from recent illegal immigrants, right?

Well, part of the reason "stupid, racist" people make that assumption is that, statistically, they stand a pretty good chance of being correct. There do seem to be a whole lot of people arriving here with no direct family ties to the land before, say, 2003. According to Wikipedia (and we don't necessarily cite them as an unbiased source, but they do have good links), there are between 7 and 20 million illegal immigrants in this country right now, and "According to the Pew Hispanic Center somewhat more than half of the illegal immigrant population entered the country illegally rather than overstay their visas."

Now, let us look at the actual Hispanic/Latino numbers in the US according to the 2000 census. Just over 35 million people who live in America say they are of H/L background. So, if the Pew Hispanic Center's numbers are correct, in that 57 per cent of the illegal immigrants are from Mexico, and another 24 percent coming from other Latin American countries, that would put the estimates at... let's see... my math isn't all that impressive, but doesn't it come out to between 5.6 and 16.0 million Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants... therefore Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants make up between 12 and 48 percent of all Hispanic/Latino people living here?

And the more folks come racing across the border without permission, the more natural it will be for the ignorant bigots to automatically assume the Chavez family came here wedged in the back of a van in 1986.

So, if Linda Chavez is going to get upset every time somebody looks at her as though questioning her legal status as an immigrant/citizen, she may want to take it up with the masses who are making it so easy for the rest of the country to jump to conclusions.

And she may want to work on controlling that bristliness. If Mom's family can get over their having been accused of being German spies and Nazi sympathizers (a couple of them spent time in prison for it, even though evidence and inclination were markedly absent) during the two world wars -- simply because they had a "kraut" last name and funny accents -- and have figured out a way to find it funny, maybe Chavez could try it, too.

Final query: why is she upset to be taken for one of the newbies? Can it be that, deep down, she recognizes there's a problem, even though she's trying hard to deny it? Or is she just a snob about family lineage, the Latina version of FFV?

Is Paris Hilton an Illegal Immigrant?

By the amount of sympathy both are getting in the press, this year, for having broken the law, I'm beginning to think either Paris Hilton is an illegal or the illegals are all, somehow, blood relatives to her and the rest of America's so-called elite.

How is it that this country has gone so far away from its original principles of Thomas Paine, when he stated, "The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights"? In that same article, the Dissertation on the First Principles of Government, Paine continues:

When we speak of right we ought always to unite with it the idea of duties; rights become duties by reciprocity.

So far, it looks as though the only people who understand duty to law and reciprocity are the greater public (aka "middle America"), who are becoming increasingly angered over the Shamnesty bill and over the way Hollywood's elite cast aside public safety laws (such as those against drunk driving) as trivial things to be ignored.

This country was built upon laws. For the media to celebrate and members of Congress to encourage scofflaws indicates their serious disconnect from the true fundamentals of our society.

O'Reilly/Geraldo fight. News at 7. Nap at 7:05.

Gads! I thought once the morning newsy show was over, the discussion over Geraldo and his FoxNews compatriot Bill O'Reilly would die down a bit. After all, they were both concerned about the safety of American citizens.

It's just that each of them thought there was only one real issue at hand, in the case they were discussing: Geraldo says it's exclusively about drunk driving, and O'Reilly says it's about illegal immigration and border controls.

Guess what, fellers? It's about both. If the drunk who killed the two teens in Virginia had been deported when he had been first arrested many moons ago, the teens would likely still be alive. Yeah, that's about scofflaw illegal immigrants. And it's about drinking and driving (personally, I've lost too many who were near and dear to me to have much forbearance for the asswipe who drinks and then gets behind the wheel of a vehicle).

And, as a reminder, it's not the first or last time a drunk illegal immigrant has cost somebody's life.

There is no need to come to blows over which issue is greater, here. They're both huge.

And, there's really no news in these guys having shouted over the airwaves, any more than there is news when my seester and I debate. It's not the first stone falling from the edifice of Fox News, for crying out loud. That station will be around a long while, yet, unless the Left manages to outlaw free speech.

Flashback!

John also shared an embedded video of the old Wendy's ad, featuring the old "Parts is parts" line. And seeing the ad again (it took a while to load it, with my slow connection) brought back memories of the book, Pigs is Pigs, by E.P. Butler. Mom & Dad probably read it to me at bedtime a few dozen times, when I was little. I had to dig it out of the parents' library, just now, & sit down to re-read it.

The book is a century old, now, and is available for free, in plain text, at Project Gutenberg, as well (so you don't have to borrow my folks' first-edition copy).

The story is of a man who has ordered a pair of guinea pigs, as pets for his kid. The railroad station manager informs him that, since the guinea pigs are pigs, they are livestock, and therefore the handling fee is five cents more per animal than the fee for pets. The man refuses to pay the extra dime for the pair, goes home, and starts writing letters to the various offices, in an attempt to straighten things out. Meanwhile, the fecund guinea pigs are still at the station, together in a single box...

All in all, the happy memories are just another reason I want to go back to Wendy's for supper tonight.

Wendy's obeys law, gets sued for it

Wendy's restaurants are in a pickle. They obeyed the immigration laws, and fired some of their immigrant employees whose status was not legal, and now those employees are suing them for it all.

[Former Cafe Express employee Daniel] Olivares said he was risking deportation to speak up for himself and his former co-workers. He said he has not looked for other work because he's afraid of being caught by the authorities.

"I'm not safe anymore," said Olivares, who has been in the country 14 years.

Well, boo hoo. Did we miss the ESL class where they taught the word "illegal" in the first place? What the hell makes you think that you should have the same rights as those of lawful residents, if you crashed the gate in the first place? Why should you go to the head of the line, why should you get paid extra, when there are others who came here honestly who have been shipped home because the paperwork was slow? (Scroll down to the link.)

Go back home, wait your damned turn, and come back the legal way -- the right way.


To be fair, Olivares had paid $25 per weekly paycheck to pay for legal fees, to further the process so that he might become a legal resident, and the legal firm which screwed up his paperwork owes him all that cash back, but now, let's talk about Wendy's degree of liability... If a company can get sued for actually obeying the law, then there's something seriously wrong, here.

I think Wendy's could use our support. I'm heading out to Galesburg to give them my "Huzzah!" and to get me a Frosty.