Real Independence Means Secure Borders

As we celebrate our nation's independence, it is worth keeping in mind that real independence depends on having secure borders. A nation that cannot or will not protect itself from a massive and intentional invasion for the purpose of changing its population and politics is a nation that will not exist very long.

The world's elites, the jetsetters, the United Nations types who keep babbling about being citizens of the world and scoff at notions of national sovereignty, who deride a requirement to speak the language of the nation, and talk of multiculturalism when clearly not all cultures are equal or should be, are a minority. The rest of us live in a specific town or city, in a specific State, in what we proudly call the United States of America.

There are many issues the forthcoming national election will address, but if illegal immigration, a broken immigration system, and the deliberate invasion of America by Mexico with the aim of changing our population and policies, is not among our priorities in 2008, then our independence, and our sovereignty, are imperiled.

Real independence means secure borders. We don't have them. What we have is a porous excuse for borders, a federal government that has not and still does not take our national security seriously enough to fix our immigration system, and a lack of will by Congress to call a moratorium on the influx of both legal and illegal immigration.

In his new book, "The New Case Against Immigration", Mark Kirkorian presents a cogent, moderate case for the necessity to assert control over legal and illegal immigration. President Lyndon Johnson said it best in the 1960s, "The days of unlimited immigration are past." The problem is that, in reality, unlimited immigration is the order of the day in America today!

The problem is a Congress hell-bent on extending yet another amnesty to the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, most Mexican, in America, thus opening the floodgates, as with the previous amnesty, for the arrival of their entire families, despite the fact that most lack the most fundamental skills required of any legal immigrant seeking citizenship.

In a nation with more than 300 million citizens in a world hurtling toward a population of 7 billion, the failure to get control of our borders can so transform America that it can disappear. As Kirkorian says, "Modern America has outgrown mass immigration."

At the heart of the immigration debate that has been raging nationwide has been the huge influx of illegal aliens from Mexico. "Mexicans now account for some 31 percent of the total immigrant population-legal and illegal, naturalized and non-citizen-and accounted for fully 43 percent of the growth of the total immigrant population in the 1990s."

Mexico, a nation still angry over the loss of its former territories, California and the southwestern States, has hit upon a plan to reclaim them and, through the sheer power of demographics, population and birthrates, lay claim to the whole of the nation. This plan is so deliberate that just one statistic is enough to demonstrate it. "Mexico's network of consulates in the United States is without parallel in the world: fifty-six consulates and consular agencies (or honorary consuls, who perform consular services on a part-time basis) in twenty-six states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, (is) the largest network anywhere."

By contrast, "The United States...has only nine consulates, plus thirteen consular agencies, in Mexico." This network has evolved into an advocacy and educational role that is specifically forbidden by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the international treaty that governs such matters. Specifically, it forbids any interference "in the internal affairs of the (host) state."

Despite the prohibition, this network of consulates distributes textbooks to American schools, supports lobbying by various Mexican-American organizations to challenge and change our immigration laws, and purports to speak for all Hispanics seeking to enter the United States or to remain here despite having overstayed their visas or simply entered illegally.

Many States, unable to get the federal government to perform its duty with regard to the protection of our borders and the deportation of illegal aliens using our schools, our hospitals, and other social service benefits, have passed resolutions to limit or deny such services and have been overwhelmingly supported by voters, many of whom are Mexican-American citizens.

The other side of the illegal immigration issue is the way our existing immigration services are totally overwhelmed when it comes to actually performing the security function of stopping visitors or immigrants before they ever get on a plane or other means of getting here. "In 2005," Kirkorian notes, "about 800 visa officers issued about six million visas to foreigners, an average of 7,500 visas per officers, roughly one every fifteen minutes."

Kirkorian is the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The data on which he relies is some of the best offered by any organization concerned about the effect of out of control immigration into the United States. A panoply of such organizations now exists to get Washington, D.C. to address the issues.

The failure to stem the tide of immigration into America, not just from Mexico but from around the world, will ultimately undermine our national values, culture, and laws. It will ultimately steal America from the generations who came to a very different nation at a time when they were needed, who fought to protect it, and from present-day Americans and their descendents who still cherish it.