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| The opinions expressed in guest columns posted on this site do not necessarily reflect the opinions of AmericanPatrol.com. Visit the Alamance Independent to read Mark Andrew Dwyer's weekly column posted every Sunday. |
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| The opinions expressed in guest columns posted on this site do not necessarily reflect the opinions of AmericanPatrol.com. Visit the Alamance Independent to read Mark Andrew Dwyer's weekly column posted every Sunday. |
Originally published in the November 2, 2003 issue of the Alamance Independent
FIRES, IMMIGRATION, AND POPULATION GROWTH
November 3, 2003As of Halloween 2003 night, major California fires had burned 739,906 acres, killed 20 people and destroyed 3,398 homes. This tragic disaster that ruined lives of so many could have been largely avoided should the authorities do their job rather than bureaucratically following wishful thinking policies that had been established against common sense and expectations of the majority of Americans. I couldn't help noticing the striking similarity between the fires and mass, mostly illegal, immigration caused by a lack of enforcement of the America's border and her immigration laws. Both were overwhelming, both were devastating, and both were preventable. There is a difference, though. One can hope that the burned homes will be rebuilt, but the damage caused to this nation by out of control migration of millions of unskilled and unassimilating aliens is irreparable.
Although some blame years of neglect in fire prevention for the magnitude of the wildfires and the speed they spread, there is an element of bureaucratic recklessness that appears to be at the root of the problem here. Per Associated Press (see [1] below), the most catastrophic of all, Cedar Fire, was reported early by a chopper pilot who flew over the area and called for an air tanker to drop water on the burning forest, "but state firefighters rejected his request because it came minutes after such flights had been grounded for the night." The pilot said that "a well-placed drop from the air tanker might have extinguished the flames". This would have put the fire off before it went out of hands. Unfortunately, the rule established to protect air tanker crew's lives took precedence over the safety of those whom the tanker was supposed to serve and protect in first place. All this despite the fact that firefighters, due to demanding character of their job and grave risks associated with it belong to state's best paid employees, with some of them making well over $200,000 a year with overtime (see [2]).
What followed was mostly ineffectual, not withstanding heroic efforts of hundreds of firefighters, struggle to contain the fires when it was already too late to take them under control. One can speculate that if the fire fighting did not take place at all, the damages would have been about the same, except that, perhaps, they would have progressed faster. The fires themselves were extinguished mostly by the forces of nature (rain, snow), leaving us all with this burning question: what was the actual benefit of all this costly investment in fire fighting equipment and generous firefighters' salaries in this case? Was it that one live that was not put on the line so that many other lives were lost, never mind billion-dollar property damage that followed?
Sounds familiar? To me, it does, because that's exactly what the federal government and various federal and local law enforcement agencies are doing (or not doing) to protect American public from another grave danger: foreign invasion. We have the mightiest and the most expensive (to taxpayers) army of the world that can protect and seal the borders of any nation on planet Earth, except for our own; some obscure, and - most likely - misinterpreted, law ostensibly prohibits the Feds from using military personnel to enforce the American border. We spend astronomic amount of public funds for hiring more and more of really well paid police officers and sheriff deputies only to learn that they will ignore violations of our immigration laws, ostensibly because enforcing these laws is a federal and not a state or local concern. How nicely does it fit the picture with the costly fire fighting equipment that in hour of grave danger was not used in order to avoid putting the pilot's live at risk (or they say so). As a result of this kind of attitude, more than (estimated) 11 millions of illegal aliens settled America's shores, and millions more are coming against this nation's will. They slowly but consistently are taking over America, demanding more and more privileges and "free" benefits for their rapidly growing but unassimilating populations. Taking them under control seems as difficult, it at all possible, as putting off the California fires.
There appears to be another interesting relationship between the fires and out of control "immigration". As some million of "migrants" illegally cross the American border each year with no admission criteria they would have to adhere to, not even a criminal background check, they fuel an explosion of population that inevitably makes us all more vulnerable to human caused fires, be it by arson, by recklessness, or by an accident. As easy to catch a spark as many Southern California areas are, they - one might think - should become an issue of major concern for those who have a power and duty to control whom do they let to cross the border, and whom they let to stay here undisturbed. Unfortunately, the authorities don't seem to have this nation's protection very high on their priority list. As a result, about everybody who has guts to jump the border is de facto allowed to doing so by the Feds, and local law enforcement agencies will pretend they don't notice millions of illegal aliens, many of them gang members and criminal offenders, and look the other way when they catch one. It doesn't appear to our narrowly minded reckless "leaders" that each of these illegals is a disaster waiting to happen as all it takes for this barrel of powder to explode is an arsonist or an unimaginative fool with a box of matches.
Something went terribly wrong with our government's lack of accountability when it comes to protecting American citizens, be it from wild fires or illegal "immigration". Despite having all the prerequisites in hand to offer us effectual and full protection, they recklessly neglect their most fundamental duty with very little concern of what damage their negligence may bring on our heads. Like in the case of the refusal to send an air tanker, they seem to have a double standard in this respect (see [3]), as they appear to value the lives and property of theirs more than the lives and the property of regular American citizens. Having secured for themselves almost 100% safety, what they offer to us is laughable, like the $110,000 award for a help to find the arsonist of the fire on Old Waterman Canyon Road (a.k.a. "Old Fire"), or a recent statement by the proponents of the so-called guest worker program that this stealth amnesty "will boost homeland security because officials would have a record of most of the estimated 8 million to 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States" (see [4]). I wonder why the politicians who have guts to sell this kind of bull don't content themselves with issuing numbers or badges to the visitors in federal buildings (so that they would have a record of who's visiting) but they force everyone who wants to enter THEIR offices to undergo draconian airport-type security screening, instead.
National security is too serious a matter to be entrusted to hands of government bureaucrats. Like wild fires like illegal immigration, they will wreck this country if the citizens like you and I just sit back and do nothing. So, if you don't want to find yourself and your family without a home or without a country one day, let your elected officials (and everybody else) know how will you vote next time if they don't show a dramatic improvement in protecting this nation from preventable disasters like the ones mentioned above.
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