Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2001 8:11 AM
Subject: Border Situation: the Flood of UDA's Continues
Dear Governor Hull:
The following letter was sent the Ad Hoc Committee on Immigration representing the State Senate and House who recently held hearings on the border problems in Arizona. I attended the hearings in Douglas and in Tucson and agree with the writers sentiments and clearly see the effects of UDA's in Arizona. Testimony of those who appeared from within the governmental administration, law enforcement, Border Patrol and from the general public described the invasion and its effects clearly.
After the hearings, news of a rancher capturing 56 UDA's came to me while at a GOP Precinct Committee meeting in Green Valley. More than half of the 56 people were Mideastern! As we are in a state of emergency due to terrorism, logic demands we address the flood of illegals entering our country with a military presence along the entire border. UDA get aways often exceed 100,000 per month just in Cochise County! Our state budget is now in the red and much of the bleeding comes from the cost of UDA's!
Governor Hull, why after more than two months after the 9/11 attack are our flanks are still wide open? You have it within your state constitutional power to declare an emergency and put the National Guard in place. Please do your job.
J C
Tucson, Arizona
To the members of the Arizona Ad Hoc Immigration Committee:Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you in Douglas last October 30th. Due to the 5 minute time limit on each speaker, I was unable to express my views on a number of subjects that I feel are of importance to the objective of your committee.
First and foremost is the obvious fact that illegal immigration is doing a great deal of harm to Cochise County in terms of medical costs, law enforcement expenditures, environmental issues and a host of others, as well as creating increased crime, health issues, public safety concerns and an overall degradation of the peace of mind of our citizens.
Of equal, if not greater, importance is what this virtually unchecked horde of mostly poor, unskilled, uneducated and illegal (let's not forget that factor) trespassers is doing to the quality of education, not only in Cochise County, but in all of Arizona. No one can deny that almost all of our schools are horribly overcrowded, resulting in packed classrooms with far too few teachers and educational materials. Add to that the fact that many of the students, especially the younger ones, cannot speak English and, as a result, hold back the rest of the students.
It is a matter of public record that the educational standards of Arizona's public schools are deplorable, the end results shameful and damaging to our entire nation. In spite of the above facts our schools harbor untold tens of thousands of students who are not legally allowed to be in this country, much less in our schools, whose very numbers are creating much of the problem. Yet when they apply for admission, the schools are not even allowed to ask them their nationality!
My two daughters are being schooled at home. I really love the fact that Governor Hull and Senator Elaine Richardson (D) are taking my tax money out of the state coffers to pay for the health care of people who are not even supposed to be here; people who, if their whereabouts were known to the proper officials, are required to be, by law, returned to their country of origin. Many of these people are women who have sneaked into my country for no other reason than to give birth, so that their offspring will automatically be a U.S. citizen.
I know a young woman who lives in a remote village in the Mexican State of Chihuahua who makes a very good living making and selling pottery. Her annual income exceeds mine, I can assure you. Twice in the past three years she has illegally entered the United States, lived with her uncle, who illegally works on a ranch north of Santa Rosa, NM, until she gives birth. She now has two beautiful daughters, both of whom are American citizens, with all the benefits that go with that designation. While she waits for her babies to be born, she collects welfare, food stamps and a housing allotment. I greatly resent the fact that we American citizens are paying for all of that.
And then there is this nonsense that the illegals are doing jobs that none of our citizens will do. Who filled the jobs in this country before the illegal invasion of cheap labor began? Did not we grow and prosper greatly for the fifty years after the Great Depression? Those years were without this glut of cheap foreign labor and the jobs that were making the U.S. more powerful and prosperous were being performed by American citizens.
The only people who say that we can't get Americans to work are those who are turning a much greater profit by hiring cheap labor and to Hell with the welfare of the common working man and the sovereignty of this nation.
And I think I will be sick the next time I hear that we are a nation of immigrants. What the Hell does that have to do with anything?
Please tell me what country in the world, with the possible exception of Africa, is not a nation of immigrants!
When is enough, enough?
So.......We recognize that illegal immigration is doing great harm to Cochise County in a myriad of ways and we hear, from the elected leaders who are pledged to protect the citizens of this country and NO ONE ELSE, that the problem is a complex one. I don't see it as being complex at all.
Stop illegal immigration. End of problem.
No more harm being done by illegal immigrants because there would be no illegal immigrants. Our laws, the fabric of our society and the bond of our nation, dictate that we stop illegal immigration, that we protect our borders.
Why are these laws not being enforced?
A great many of us here in southern Arizona would like to know why. We think we know the answer(s) but they are so sordid, treasonous and self-serving that we have a hard time accepting the fact that we could have elected into office individuals who care so little for the people whom they have pledged to serve and protect; who put the dollar, votes and self-gratification before any semblance of patriotism.
Governor Hull is on record as saying, just last year, that our border with Mexico is just an imaginary line. That being the case, I guess we should just forget about it, as she obviously has done.
Shall we also forget about the many thousands of brave Americans who, ever since the Revolutionary War, have given their lives to protect our borders? Has our governor forgotten them, as well?
We agree that illegal immigration is doing tremendous harm to Cochise County, the State of Arizona and the United States of America. Then why don't we stop it?
By far the best way to do that would be to seriously enforce our Employer Sanction laws, so that no one would dare to hire anyone who was not in this country legally. If they can't find work, they will quit coming and the ones already here would go home. If that were done, in a serious manner, there would be no need for a large force of patrolmen on our border, except those necessary for drug interdiction. However, until those laws are enforced, there is only one other answer:
I have repeatedly asked Governor Hull, Representative Kolbe and Senator McCain to put our National Guard on the border to assist the Border Patrol and I have always gotten the same three answers:
They are not trained properly, the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits it and doing so would offend Mexico.
Well, in spite of our military being trained only to kill, Jane Dee saw it fit to put the Guard to work patrolling our airports. Don't get me wrong; I have no problem with that, they may do some good. However, after learning that they are trained only to kill, I will admit to some misgivings when I drop my wife and daughters off at Tucson International Airport to catch a flight to L.A.
I covered this topic in Douglas by reading you a letter from Bill King, a retired Border Patrol supervisor who once was the head of their training academy. He pointed out that he had received his training, before Border Patrol, as had the majority of the agents he worked with, in the military and he thought that they did a pretty good job.
As to the Posse Comitatus Act, a simple Congressional meeting could take care of it (Hull is ignoring it anyway) and let's not forget that, when we had leaders with some guts, well after the Posse Comitatus Act was in effect, we used our Army to patrol our borders against illegal aliens for many years, in a number of locations. It's not as if it were a new idea. If it was a good idea then, why not now?
It seems that Hull, Kolbe and McCain (as well as Bobby Lugo, by the way) are locked into the concept of our military on the border meaning tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbling through the streets of Douglas, Naco and Nogales, with rifle-toting, totalitarian, black-booted soldiers at every intersection, demanding to see the identification papers of anyone who looked Hispanic, while machine-gun bristling helicopters roared overhead.
The reality of using our military to assist Border Patrol would be just the opposite. They would not be in our towns at all, but spread along the remote stretches of border between our towns, being seen by few people except the would-be illegal aliens who would be unlucky enough to be seen by them and turned back into Mexico. What kind of training does it take to see someone trying to cross from Mexico into the U.S. and letting them know that they can't do that?
As for offending Mexico, well, they just gotta be kidding! Mexico knows full well the number of illegals crossing from their country into ours. Mexico welcomes the fact that she is ridding herself of millions of people who, because they are poor, uneducated and unskilled, are a huge drain on Mexico's economy. Mexico also loves the fact that those undesirables, once they have settled in and obtained jobs here in America, send billions (yes, billions) of dollars yearly back into Mexico, which certainly doesn't hurt Mexico's elite in their quest to steal even more money from the poor people of Mexico, which is the only reason Mexico is a poor country.
Actually, Mexico is not a poor country at all; only the vast majority of its citizens are poor, due to the graft and corruptness of it 'leaders'. (That's just my way of saying that Mexico would not be poor if it weren't for its leaders, whom we are worried about offending, keeping it poor, by pocketing all of its money, as has been done ever since Mexico was discovered by Spain).
It should be noted that much of the money sent back into Mexico is then spent paying smugglers to sneak in more illegals. So, any offense shown by Mexico as a result of our insuring that the flow of illegals was stopped would be pure posturing.
I imagine Mexico is amazed (and chuckling) that we have allowed this insane policy of open borders to happen at all.
This may be an aside, but think about the fact that if a Mexican job-seeker can sneak into our country undetected as a result of our not having anyone on the border to stop him, Osama bin Laden could just as easily do so.
So really, my message is simply this: Illegal immigration is harmful. Will you show the resolve to help the citizens of this once great nation stop it? Don't expect to find a feel-good solution to this national emergency; there is none. But, if we are to maintain a strong, sovereign nation, where we, the citizens of the United States of America, not some foreign power, dictate what our country is to be, if we are going to leave a great, beautiful AMERICA for our children, we must have the resolve to protect it, feel good or not.
R H,
Elfrida, AZ