Osama Bin Laden is not merely intent on killing Westerners. He is also happy to exploit mass civilian casualties in Muslim countries. His latest audiotape message rails against the prospect of a Western-backed peacekeeping force in the Sudanese territory of Darfur, where tens of thousands of Muslim villagers have been killed and hundreds of mosques have been desecrated. In the absence of a robust outside force, this mayhem has lasted for three years and has recently spread across the border into Chad; the point of a peacekeeping deployment, combining African troops with more mobile and sophisticated forces from NATO member states, would be to stop it. But al Qaeda's leader doesn't care that thousands of Muslim lives are at stake. He denounces the alleged U.S. plan "to send crusader troops to occupy the region and steal its oil" under the guise of preserving security.
Osama bin Laden advances the novel theory that the United States fomented the violence in Darfur, having earlier sponsored Sudan's secessionist southern rebellion. The truth is that the Bush administration played a decisive role in brokering a north-south peace, thereby saving countless lives, while the Darfur conflict was begun by two obscure rebel groups with no American connections. Indeed, if there is an invisible hand behind the rebellion, it is that of Hassan al-Turabi, the former speaker of Sudan's parliament. Far from being an American stooge, Mr. Turabi is a radical Islamic cleric who has often referred to Osama bin Laden as a hero.
The al Qaeda leader's delusional theories create a test for mainstream Arab governments. Until now, they, too, have resisted the idea of a Western-backed deployment in Darfur, pandering to their citizens' resentment of occupying armies while offering no alternative for saving lives there. Now that this cynical policy has been embraced by Osama bin Laden, might these governments be shamed into rethinking it? Or are they content to sound the same as a terrorist?
#1
His latest audiotape message rails against the prospect of a Western-backed peacekeeping force in the Sudanese territory of Darfur, where tens of thousands of Muslim villagers have been killed and hundreds of mosques have been desecrated.
For once, I agree with Senor Pigsh*t. Arm and train the non-muslims. F* the rest.
WASHINGTON - Everyone is saying that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfelds days are numbered, thanks in part to increasing calls by some former generals for Rumsfelds resignation. But Rumsfeld was hired by George W. Bush to do precisely what he has done to the consternation of the generals who are now coming out to complain about him.
When President Bush brought Rumsfeld back to the Pentagon, the president told him to shake up the Pentagon, to transform it from the Cold War structure and culture that it was stuck in to a new force with strategies that could respond to the post-Cold War world. Months before Sept. 11, as Rumsfeld began the transformation of the Pentagon, he ran into contumacious obstructionism from the army and its then-Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. Shinseki dug his heels in and refused to change much of anything about the Army. Shinseki went as far as to go behind Rumsfelds back to the Senate where his political mentor (and long-time family friend, Sen. Dan Inouye of Hawaii) and others backed his play.
But for the political cover Sen. Inouye gave Shinseki, he might have been fired then and there. Civilian control of the military means people such as Shinseki cannot be allowed to play the back-channel political games he played again and again. Shinseki stayed, and the Army went on to spend billions on the Stryker armored vehicle, a Cold War style peacekeeping vehicle that is too big and too heavy to be moved by a C-130 tactical airlifter without being partially disassembled.
And then came Sept. 11. The Secretary of Defense became the secretary of war and the transformation he had brought to the Pentagon had to be continued under fire. Still, the Army resisted.
Shinseki balked at striking at the Taliban. For the record, our forces slashed into the Taliban around Oct. 5, 2001, less than a month after Sept 11. But aside from Rangers and Army Special Forces the Army stayed home. Shinseki wanted at least six months to assemble and move an enormous Soviet-like force into Afghanistan and the president wasnt having any of it. This is why Shinseki retired in 2003 with a festering grudge against Rumsfeld.
And then Rumsfeld did the unthinkable. Instead of replacing Shinseki with one of his like-minded underlings, Rumsfeld looked for someone who would fight. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, a Special Forces vet, was brought out of retirement to transform the Army in the middle of a war. And he did it. But in the process Rumsfeld, Schoomaker and his team shook up a lot of people.
Of the six who have called for Rumsfelds firing, all came to rank and prestige in the Clinton days, what some Pentagon wags now call the Great Period of Neglect. It was the era of Blackhawk Down, of Shinseki ordering the army to wear black berets and buying them from China and of Gen. Anthony Zinni, then commander of CENTCOM, becoming addicted to stability in the Middle East, entranced by the Arab leaders hed come to know well. Stability meant leaving Saddam alone, so Zinni spoke often against the Iraq war before it began. Stability now means leaving Iran to pursue its nuclear weapons program undisturbed.
President Bush has made it clear that Rumsfeld has his confidence and that, in his judgment, its best for America that Rumsfeld stays. This will only result, sooner rather than later, in another political exercise and thats all the generals revolt is to remove him. Mr. Bushs opponents see Rumsfeld as vulnerable. They cant rid themselves of George W. Bush, but they can damage him by damaging Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld is the Big Dog, and those whose feathers he has ruffled in the Pentagon, the press and Congress are the poodles who chase after him. They should follow the principle one Southern gent often reminds me of: If you cant run with the big dog, youd better go sit on the porch.
Jed Babbin is a former deputy under-secretary of defense and the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe are Worse than You Think and (with Edward Timperlake) Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States. He is also a contributing editor at FamilySecurityMatters.org.
Examiner
Posted by: Steve ||
04/25/2006 11:30 ||
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We often talk about the illegal-immigration crisis as an "invasion."
Some surely consider that hyperbole.
Invasion? Isn't an invasion part of an act of war?
That's right. And we not only have the evidence of the invasion in the form of 12 million or 20 million illegal aliens in this country. We also have the rhetorical evidence of actual declarations of hostilities against the United States by some of the organizers of this invasion.
You may have read some of these declarations of war elsewhere. I took the trouble of finding original recordings or original citations for each and every one. So you can be sure of the accuracy of these quotations. You can send this column to your friends, your loved ones, other Americans who need to be awakened to the threat facing them and their country.
Here is the naked agenda behind those massive illegal-alien street protests you've seen recently:
Augustin Cebeda
"Go back to Boston! Go back to Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims! Get out! We are the future. You are old and tired. Go on. We have beaten you. Leave like beaten rats. You old white people. It is your duty to die ... Through love of having children, we are going to take over."
Augustin Cebeda, of the Brown Berets, at a rally in Los Angeles July 4, 2000, captured on videotape.
"We have an aging white America. They are dying. They are sh----- in their pants with fear! I love it! We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to the worst, we have got to kill him!"
Jose Angel Gutierrez
Jose Angel Gutierrez, political science professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, captured on videotape.
"Because our numbers are growing ... [some are] afraid that we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They are right, we will take them over, and we are not going to go away we are here to stay, and we are saying 'ya basta' (enough!)."
Richard Alatorre, former Los Angeles city councilman at a September 1996 Latino summit conference in Los Angeles opposing California Proposition 209 ending affirmative action, captured on videotape.
The American Southwest "... seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a single shot."
Carlos Loret de Mola, July 20, 1982, the Mexican newspaper Excelsior.
Art Torres
"Que viva la causa! It is an honor to be with the new leadership of the Americas, here meeting at UC Riverside. So with 187 on the ballot, what is it going to take for our people to vote to see us walking into the gas ovens? It is electoral power that is going to make the determination of where we go as a community. And power is not given to you you have to take it. Remember: 187 is the last gasp of white America in California. Understand that. And people say to me on the Senate floor when I was in the Senate, 'Why do you fight so hard for affirmative action programs?' And I tell my white colleagues, 'because you're going to need them.'"
Art Torres, former California state senator and chairman of the California Democratic Party, January 1995, captured on videotape.
"California is going to be a Hispanic state and anyone who doesn't like it should leave."
Mario Obledo
Mario Obledo, co-founder of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, or MALDEF, in a radio interview on KIEV in Los Angeles, June 16, 1998.
"We are practicing La Reconquista in California."
Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexican consul-general, at Southwestern University School of Law, Feb. 6, 1998.
There are many, many more shocking, revelatory quotations that show the true nature of the invasion literally, the declarations of hostilities that have been issued over and over again. But this sampling should dispel all notions that this movement is about assimilation, about U.S. citizenship, about equality, about diversity.
It's about power. It's about payback. It's about a takeover. It's about an invasion. It's about war.
#1
Invasion? Isn't an invasion part of an act of war?
Ummmmm, No
"Armed Invasion" is an act of War.
"Unarmed Invasion is closer to "Fleeing Refugees" than any War act.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
04/25/2006 8:28 Comments ||
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#2
I have the sneaking suspicion that the commie/ANSWER involvement in all this is just another episode of diversion in an attempt to take our eyes off the ball in the War on Islamofascism, just like Chavez in Venezuela. Build the damn wall already and get on with the war. March has come and gone and Iran is still industriously pursuing its heinous objectives while we fiddle. I certainly hope the President and his advisors are a lot smarter than I am and are playing a winning hand because I see no upside in delay.
Posted by: DanNY ||
04/25/2006 8:39 Comments ||
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#3
It more like the Gothic invasion of Rome. First it was the permission by the state to resettle in the frontier regions. Then it was employment to cover shortages in manpower. Then it was surrendering power and influence. Finally, it was the Goths who were in and became Rome.
However, unlike Rome, where the power derived from Caesar, in America, power derives from the people still. A lot of those people are feed up with their 'representatives'. There is going to be changes before this goes too much further. It can be done quietly and peacefully, or it can be pushed by those who think they rule us rather than serve us, to a point of some very unhappy events.
Why no special prosecutor for the latest CIA leak case?
By Christopher Hitchens
If Mary O. McCarthy should ever be so desperate as to need a character witness, or to require one so badly that she must stoop to my level, I declare in advance that I shall step forward pro bono. I am quite willing to accept that whatever she did or did not do or say about the surreptitious incarceration of al-Qaida suspects overseas (and let's not prejudge this), she did it from the most exalted motives.
I accept this because, however much of her hard-earned money she threw away on making a donation to the John Kerry presidential campaign, she is obviously more than a mere partisan. Back in 1998, she wrote a formal memo to President Clinton about his decision to bomb the Al-Shifa factory outside Sudan's capital of Khartoum. I wrote a slew of articles at the time to prove that this wild Clintonian action was wag-the-doggery, pure and simple. (You can look it up if you like in my book No One Left To Lie To.) At that time, I interviewed a number of CIA people, both on and off the record, and came to the conclusion that it was the wrong factory in the wrong place and had been blitzed mainly because of Clinton's difficulties with Monica Lewinsky. The clincher was the direct plagiarism of his own hysterical speech of justification from the glib speech delivered by Michael Douglas, trying to de-knicker Annette Bening in the mediocre film The American President. If George Bush had even tried to pull anything like this, he would have been impeached by now, or so I hope.
Several senior CIA officials, and people in other departments, also let their dissent be known. I might instance Jack Downing, head of the agency's directorate of operations as well as the chief of the Africa bureau, and also Milton Bearden, veteran of many a covert op in Africa, who agreed to be interviewed by me for the record. On Oct. 27, 1999, the New York Times got around to publishing an article by James Risen in which it was made plain that Madeleine Albright had suppressed a report from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research casting grave doubt on the Al-Shifa intelligence. The only person who still maintains that the factory was Osama Bin Laden's place for mixing Saddam Hussein's chemicals is Richard Clarke, who has been rather quiet on that subject lately. (He could well have been right at that, but not about this particular factory: See my Slate article on Clarke's Sudan contradictions.)
That was an exceptionally rich harvest of high-level disagreement overridden by a sitting president. And it strengthened the case for, to put it no higher, more "transparency" in the famously overpaid and underperforming CIA. This case has become no weaker, to say the least, in the years of George Tenet and other Clinton holdovers who left us under open skies on Sept. 11, 2001.
But now, instead of being rewarded for her probity, Mary McCarthy has been given the sack. And the New York Times rushes to her aid, with a three-hankie story on April 23, moistly titled "Colleagues Say Fired CIA Analyst Played by the Rules." This is only strictly true if she confined her disagreement to official channels, as she did when she wrote to Clinton in 1998. Sadly enough, the same article concedes that McCarthy may have lied and then eventually told the truth about having unauthorized contact with members of the press.
Well! In that case the remedy is clear. A special counsel must be appointed forthwith, to discover whether the CIA has been manipulating the media. All civil servants and all reporters with knowledge must be urged to comply, and to produce their notes or see the inside of a jail. No effort must be spared to discover the leaker. This is, after all, the line sternly proposed by the New York Times and many other media outlets in the matter of the blessed Joseph Wilson and his martyred CIA spouse, Valerie Plame.
I have a sense that this is not the media line that will be taken in the case of McCarthy, any more than it was the line taken when James Risen and others disclosed the domestic wiretapping being conducted by the NSA. Risen's story is also the object of an investigation into unlawful disclosure. One can argue that national security is damaged by unauthorized leaks, or one can argue that democracy is enhanced by them. But one cannot argue, in the case of a man who says that his CIA wife did not send him to Niger, that the proof that his wife did send him to Niger must remain a state secret. If one concerned official can brief the press off the record, then so can another.
It has long been pretty obvious to me that the official-secrecy faction within the state machinery has received a gigantic fillip from the press witch hunt against Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. What bureaucrat could believe the luck of an editorial campaign to uncover and punish leaking? A campaign that furthermore invokes the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? It was obvious from the first that the press, in taking Wilson and Plame at their own estimation, was fashioning a rod for its own back. I await the squeals that will follow when this rod is applied, which it will be again and again.
Joseph Wilson update: In my article last week on Wilson's utter failure to notice the visit of Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear diplomat to Niger, I mentioned his substitution of another Iraqi nameMohammed Saeed al-Sahafas having just possibly approached some Niger businessmen and officials at an OAU summit in Algeria in 1999. Sahaf is now better known to us as the risible figure of "Baghdad Bob," which allowed Wilson to make mock of the whole thing. It is almost irrelevant when set beside the visit of Wissam al-Zahawie to Niger itself the same year, but at the time he attended the Algiers meeting, "Baghdad Bob" wasas I ought to have known and have since found outSaddam Hussein's foreign minister. This fact is not mentioned in Wilson's terrible book, either. And Sahaf still had time to meet with some people from a tiny African state known only for its uranium!
Yale is set to ditch Taliban Man and may hire a notorious anti-Israel professor.
Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi's luck is running out. Eight weeks ago the Taliban diplomat turned special Yale student made a media splash on the cover of the New York Times magazine in which he proclaimed: "In some ways I'm the luckiest person in the world, I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale."
But the continued outrage over the news that an unrepentant former official of a criminal regime whose remnants are still killing U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is part of the Ivy League is catching up with him. Yale is about to establish tougher standards for the program under which he is applying to become a degree-status sophomore next fall, and the consensus is that Mr. Hashemi won't measure up.
Taliban Man's days as a Bulldog look to be numbered. But Yale may be about to stir up new controversy as it appears to be on the verge of offering a notorious anti-Israel academic a faculty position.
For now give Mr. Hashemi and his financial backers at the Wyoming-based International Education Foundation (www.intedfoundation.org) credit for persistence. Ignoring hints that he should "study abroad" next year, Mr. Hashemi and the foundation are forcing Yale officials to rule on whether or not their former prize "diversity" catch still belongs at the university. "He's doing all he can to come back," Mike Hoover, the CBS producer/cameraman who is one of the founders of the IEF, told the Yale Daily News last week. "For him to be a real shaker, it would be great [for him] to have graduated with a degree."
Yale's Special Student Program consists of two parts. The first, under which Mr. Hashemi was admitted last year, allows "nontraditional" students to attend classes for credit they can use at other colleges, but it doesn't lead to a Yale degree. The second, named after Yale alumnus and cotton-gin inventor Eli Whitney, serves older students who are seeking a Yale degree. Mr. Hashemi has applied for admission in the fall under the Whitney program.
Now Yale is rethinking the standards for both parts of the program--standards they once described as difficult to meet. A Feb. 24 article in the Yale Herald announcing Mr. Hashemi's presence as a special student reported that "the bar for admission is set high so that potential part-time Yalies must be as qualified as their full-schedule counterparts." Yale College dean Peter Salovey told the Herald that "The [special students programs] are very selective."
That was back in February. Last week, Yale's president, Richard Levin, issued a statement saying that a review he had ordered "raised questions whether the admissions practices of the non-degree Special Student Program have been consistent with the published criteria, let alone the standard that should prevail." He noted that "in recent years, while fewer than 10% of the applicants to the regular undergraduate program have received offers of admission, more than 75% of the applicants to the non-degree program have been admitted."
Mr. Levin's conclusion was that both the nondegree and Whitney special programs "suffer from lack of clarity about mission, purpose, and standards." He ordered they undergo a full review to define "admissions criteria consistent with the high standards and moral purposes of a leading institution of higher learning." The Yale Daily News reported that in an interview Mr. Levin made clear that Mr. Hashemi's pending application in the Whitney program will be held to the same standard as that of a regular applicant.
Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who became so frustrated at their alma mater's refusal to answer questions about its Taliban Man that they launched a protest called NailYale, say they are encouraged. "The notion that there are 'moral purposes' to an institution of higher learning is a refutation of the culture of nihilism that led Yale to welcome Hashemi in the first place," Mr. Taylor told me. "Without admitting or confronting the full error of its decision, I think Yale is laying the groundwork to reject him, without looking like they were pressured into it." Ms. Bookstaber agrees, and notes that if Yale now admits Mr. Hashemi as a full-degree seeking student it will be inviting a fresh firestorm of outrage from the 19,300 students who applied to Yale's 2010 undergraduate class but were rejected last month.
Meanwhile, Yale faces a new challenge. In the next few days the university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies.
Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories.
In justifying all the time he spends on his blog, Mr. Cole told the Yale Herald that "when you become a public intellectual, it has the effect of dragging you into a lot of mud." Mr. Cole has done his share of splattering. He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East." That ties in with his recurring theme that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee effectively controls Congress and much of U.S. foreign policy. In an article titled "Dual Loyalties," he wrote, "I simply think that we deserve to have American public servants who are centrally commited [sic] to the interests of the United States, rather than to the interests of a foreign political party," namely Israel's right-wing Likud, which was the ruling party until Ariel Sharon formed the centrist Kadima Party. Mr. Cole claims that "pro-Likud intellectuals" routinely "use the Pentagon as Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv."
Last January, Mr. Cole participated in a "teach-in" at Yale that could have been an audition for his possible hiring. According to the Yale Daily News, he told students that U.S. efforts "in helping create a constitution for the 'new Iraq' have increased factionalism." He concluded that "this is a recipe for continued social turmoil and continued global war."
Mr. Cole says that he is often unfairly attacked for being anti-Semitic, when in reality he claims he is only critical of Israeli policy. But Michael Oren, a visiting fellow at Yale, notes that in February 2003 Mr. Cole wrote on his blog that "Apparently [President Bush] has fallen for a line from the neo-cons in his administration that they can deliver the Jewish vote to him in 2004 if only he kisses Sharon's ass." Mr. Oren says "clearly that's anti-Semitism; that's not a criticism of Israeli policy." (Exit polls showed that 74% of the Jewish vote went to John Kerry.)
Mr. Cole appears to be the only prominent academic in America to have embraced "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," a highly controversial paper by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard. Mr. Cole told the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday that the paper argues the "virtually axiomatic" point held by the rest of the world that a "powerful pro-Israel lobby exists." The result is that "U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been dangerously skewed."
But the paper has been roundly attacked for sloppy generalizations. The two authors claim that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel." Even Noam Chomsky, a far-left critic of Israel, wrote that we "have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion." But Mr. Cole praises the two professors for seeking "to end the taboo [on discussions of the "Israel lobby"], enforced by knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism."
Mr. Cole wants to enforce his own taboos on free expression. In February, he told the Detroit Metro Times that the federal government should close the leading cable news channel. "I think it is outrageous that Fox Cable News is allowed to run that operation the way it runs it," he said in summarizing his view that Fox "is polluting the information environment." He went on to claim that "in the 1960s the FCC would have closed it down. It's an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become, that the FCC lets this go on."
Appointing someone as hotheaded and intolerant as Mr. Cole to a prestigious appointment at Yale wouldn't seem to make any sense. The drive to hire him can be explained in part by the same impulses that prompted Yale to admit Mr. Hashemi. "Perhaps the folks who still want to let Taliban Man into the degree program are also thinking Cole would make a great faculty advisor for him," jokes Mr. Taylor, the alumnus leading the NailYale protest.
But that might not be a joke. Many Yale faculty members are deadly serious about wanting Mr. Cole to become their newest colleague, and their views hold great sway. Unlike at Harvard, the university president at Yale has no power to veto the faculty's hiring choice. So even if the admissions department rejects Mr. Hashemi's application for the fall semester, Yale may jump out of the Taliban frying pan and into the Cole fire.
While pro-immigrant rallies get most of the attention from the mainstream press, many law-abiding American citizens are fed up with the reality of tens of thousands of foreign nationals every few weeks continuing to enter this country illegally through our porous borders, added to the more than 11 million illegal aliens who are already here. Americans are bearing a grossly disproportionate share of the security risks and economic costs associated with such migration, which makes it a national problem for Americans to solve through their elected representatives and through voluntary groups like the Minuteman Project.
Citizens are demanding that their government ensure effective protection at the borders against more illegal entrants, who at the very least will become tax burdens on the American people and could pose a much more serious security threat. Congress and the President must decide what to do about this mounting problem, consistent with the tenets of the U.S. Constitution. Our democratic institutions can and must handle this situation without any outside interference.
The United Nations sees the matter differently. Its bureaucrats envision a borderless world where immigration is treated as an international human rights issue and used as a global development tool to encourage free movement of the developing countries poor to developed nations. This philosophy underlies their preparations for the United Nations High Level Dialogue concerning international migration and development, scheduled to take place in conjunction with the fall 2006 General Assembly session. They want the agenda for this Dialogue to center on the relationship between international migration and the economic and social development of the poorer countries in the world.
The UN bureaucrats aggressive push into the immigration debate fits in with their dogmatic belief that international treaties should trump national sovereignty prerogatives in this case, a UN treaty that codifies the internationalization of immigration policy called the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families. This Convention was adopted by the General Assembly in 1990 but went into effect in 2003 after the twentieth signing country formally ratified it. It is heavily biased against countries like the United States which receive the lions share of illegal aliens.
Indeed, the Convention goes so far as to use the term irregular as a euphemism for illegal aliens and would require their destination countries to provide them with an array of benefits and justiciable rights. This explains why the ratifying countries are the ones who are effectively exporting their economic problems to the United States and other destination countries, and why the destination countries in turn have not signed on.
The United Nations wants to change all that by seeking to position the right to freely migrate from poor to richer lands as a fundamental human right deserving of universal recognition. Indeed, they view internationally managed migration as an effective means to socially engineer the end of wealth disparities existing between the worlds most developed countries and the worlds developing countries. Migration must become an integral part of global development strategies, said a report prepared last fall by the Global Commission on International Migration set up with Kofi Annans assistance to help prepare the way for this falls United Nations High Level Dialogue. Using the euphemism irregular migration to refer to illegal aliens, the Commission warned that restrictive national policies are neither desirable nor feasible, and may jeopardize the rights of migrants and refugees.
To the UN experts who advocate using migration as a global development tool, the unemployed poor should become the economic charges of their destination countries. For those migrants who do manage to find jobs in their destination countries, they would be expected to send money back to their families still residing in their countries of origin. These remittances, as they are called, are seen by the UNs migration development advocates as an indirect form of aid generated from the economies of the host countries and adding significantly to the gross national product of the migrants countries of origin. If transfers that went through informal channels were added to the official statistics, remittances could be as high as $300 billion. They are larger than official development assistance (ODA) and more than foreign direct investment (FDI).
At the same time, these same UN experts want to discourage the movement of those skilled educated workers from a developing country who seek better economic opportunities for themselves and their families where their skills will bring them more reward. With regard to those skilled workers who do migrate, the UN experts expect the prosperous destination countries of these skilled workers to compensate the less developed countries of origin for the so-called brain drain. Of course, nothing is said about requiring compensation from the countries of origin for the educational and monetary benefits the destination countries are paying to assist their poor nationals who cross the border illegally.
In short, if the UN advocates of open borders have their way, the developing countries would get to transfer their economic underclass without any cost to the destination countries, which would be expected to subsidize them. The developing countries would also receive compensation from the destination countries where their skilled nationals have migrated in order to find gainful employment that is not available back home.
In support of such an approach, UNESCO recently completed a research project paid for, in part, by American taxpayers - entitled Migration without Borders. The project investigated the implications of an internationally managed regime of freedom of movement for the worlds migrants, including the impact on economic and social development. The chief of UNESCOs International Migration Section referred to this project when he advocated that (A)ll initiatives taken to address the challenges of migration should above all consider the priority of the human rights of migrants. (International Migration and Development: Key Aspects for the High-Level Dialogue 2006.) He had in mind, no doubt, the poor uneducated persons who leave their impoverished countries, often ruled by corrupt governments that have failed their people. These migrants carry their problems to an economically prosperous country which they enter without permission and the skills or wherewithal to support themselves and their families. The host country is supposed to welcome all migrants desiring entry across an open border and take care of them. Why? Because the United Nations bureaucrats want us to believe that migrants human rights must take precedence above all else, including concerns about securing national borders.
As they say in Texas, that dog wont hunt. The United Nations is an interloper, putting its nose in our countrys business when it comes to deciding how we are to treat illegal aliens, irregulars, undocumented immigrants or whatever other label one wishes to attach to those individuals who do not abide by our laws when entering our country.
Whatever compromise is ultimately reached in Congress regarding the treatment of illegal aliens already in this country, there is a broad consensus that our borders must be tightly secured to stem the follow of more illegal aliens. As one petition to President Bush being circulated on the Internet for signatures lays out, American citizens expect migrants who attempt to cross our borders without permission to be (a) detected, (b) apprehended and (c) either removed from this country or detained for appropriate punishment under the law". I would add that we cut off all U.S. funding for any United Nations projects or forums promoting the inane idea that migration without borders is a universal human right or seeking to push international migration as a global wealth transfer development tool.
*Go after employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens (a felony) and compete illegally and unfairly against the honest employer, take away state licenses.
*Put the National Guard and assign DPS to work the border area and cooperate and assist the federal government.
*Eliminate Public Benefits for those here illegally. Require proof of eligibility applicants on ALL public benefits before citizens tax dollars are given away.
Until the day I die, I will insist that 'illegal' is 'illegal'."
Illegal Aliens cost taxpayers $69 Billion annually (just in social services) in federal programs in 2002. Studies estimate that amnesty would increase that three fold.
Perhaps as high as 80% of the violent crime in Phoenix area involves illegal aliens (according to Phoenix Chief Hurt and Mesa police violent crimes response team)
Over 4000 homicide warrants issued by the border states to suspects who are believed to have fled south of the border into Mexico.
$311 Billion in uncollected taxes (Barron's study).
$200 Billion annually in-lost American wages. Native-born American men lost an average of
$1700 in wages in 2000 due to US immigration policy (Harvard University).
#1
I still insist on prioritizing the solution. All too often, a hundred solutions are proposed simultaneously, with the intent that *none* of them will be carried out. The idea is to muddy the water so much that it mollifies the public, who don't like complex issues.
Build the wall. Just build the wall. Accept no excuses, alternatives or additions. Not some jive "electronic wall", either. A real, physical wall.
If you do that, many of the other problems take care of themselves. It is a singular solution that we should concentrate on.
It is a solution acceptable to most Americans. It is not racist, it is national. Even most Mexicans living here are at least accepting of the idea.
Ironically, the first thing we will have to do once it is built is to set up a guest worker regime 10 times larger than the one we already have. Legal workers who can unionize, demand and receive all other fair labor benefits, etc., unlike illegal workers who are often used as near slaves.
If they are legal, there is no incentive to hiring them if Americans want the job. But if no American is willing, then they are there.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
