SPENCER: Newt, as a historian I am sure you understand the importance of historic perspective. On April 4, 1997, responding to our new immigration law that you passed, the president of Mexico said as follows: "We will not tolerate foreign forces dictating and enacting laws on Mexicans." That was on April 4. On April 3rd the L.A. Times reported that a debate on our immigration laws in the Mexican congress bordered on a declaration of war on the United States.

SEE FULL TEXT and hear audio
clips to backup Spencer's statements
View post-show e-mails

MEET THE PRESS, Sunday, June 17, 2001
Tim Russert:"The Hartford Current said a source familiar with ongoing talks said that [Bush was being pressured] to withdraw from Vieques in part as a political move to draw support from Latinos."

Listen

We Get E-Mail

Safe and orderly migration?

Last night I witnessed, while watching Tucson T.V., a group of high-ranking Border Patrol agents admit to a gross dereliction of duty on the part of their agency. -- Chief of Border Patrol Gus de la Vina, Regional Director of the Western Region Johnny Williams, Chief of the Tucson Sector David Aguilar each took their turn disclosing how they have made the protection of our borders a secondary mission. -- According to them, the resources of Border Patrol are now to be focused on ensuring the safety of those who are deliberately breaking the law by illegally sneaking into our country. -- A few weeks ago Border Patrol agent Gloria Chavez publicly stated "Our mission is to prevent deaths".

Pontiac, MI

Hispanics finding a slice of home

Walk up Dixie Highway, past the meat market selling pig's feet and cow's tongue. Or listen to the nighttime sounds of Spanish prayer spilling out from the doors of St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church. In Pontiac, the signs came before the statistics. During the past decade, the growing Hispanic community has made a statement in schools, at church and citywide. Census figures released earlier this year prove what residents have known -- that the Hispanic population has boomed, helping to replace a declining white population. And that doesn't even include the 3,000 Hispanics estimated by city leaders to have gone uncounted for various reasons, such as the language barrier and lack of legal residency.

Letter to the Arizona Daily Star

Marijuana has positive economic impact on Tucson

While people bemoan the fact that border crossers come through our city and we are the largest illegal drug transfer center in America, why is it no one examines the positive impact these two factors have on our local economy? -- I have interviewed some local small business owners who admit that without the easy access to a cushion of marijuana-related cash and artificially depressed wages caused by undocumented construction laborers, many Tucson businesses would never make it.

Christian Science Monitor

Amid cactuses, a park's war on smuggling

Dale Thompson bounces along the desert terrain in his Dodge SUV, moving past the park's signature Roman- column cactuses. As he approaches the southern edge of the park, which borders Mexico, he suddenly stops and looks at a footprint in the sand. Later, he pulls over to inspect a freshly rutted path. "Haven't seen that one before," he says, climbing back into his truck, resigned. While rangers at most national parks spend their time checking campgrounds and the latest tourist-animal encounter, many of the green- uniformed workers here are on the lookout for smuggling routes.

Alexandria, VA

Day Laborer coalition seeks nonprofit status

Officials with the Shirlington Day Laborer Coalition, created to organize day laborers who gather in Shirlington and other areas, are seeking to make the coalition a nonprofit entity to operate the Shirlington Employment and Education Center as the facility grows. The mission of the center on South Nelson Street is to prevent exploitation of day laborers and reduce the number of mostly Latino males who congregate in the area each morning to solicit work from local contractors. The center also aids blacks and women, according to Walter Tejada, director of the day laborer coalition.

Scott McConnell

Stemming the Flow

Spent the weekend in Washington with the board of the Center for Immigration Studies, the most staid and cautious (and perhaps therefore the most influential) of the various groups which hope to reduce immigration rates from current record levels. -- Informal chat at such gatherings typically concerns whether there is indeed light at the end of the tunnel, or whether the tiny glimmers one sees are only phantasms. If they are only that, the lives of our grandchildren and great- grandchildren will play out on a crowded country of a billion or so souls with no common language or culture, whose politics are driven by ethnic and linguistic divisions. A globalist post-nation.

Sonoyta, Mexico

Border crossers in Sonoyta: A town on edge

Sonoyta, a tiny border town of 15,000 just south of Lukeville, was a bustling smuggling hub about a year ago. But since the deaths last month of 13 migrants and a guide who met in Sonoyta and brokered a trip to United States, the Border Patrol has caught 47 percent fewer migrants trying to cross through this desert wasteland. As a result, Arelio Soberane and his companions [would- be illegals] are becoming an increasingly rare commodity. The recent high-profile deaths have turned into a public relations nightmare for Sonoyta, a frequent stop on Mexico 8 route, which leads to the popular beach town of Rocky Point. Smuggling has become a cottage industry for Sonoyta...

Dan Stein

We can end border tragedies

Our policy of increased enforcement in easily accessible areas of the border, particularly near major urban centers of San Diego and El Paso, has been blamed for "forcing" migrants to make a more hazardous journey through the deserts. -- The real culpability of U.S. policy is not that we are protecting the most vulnerable points along the border, but that the policy is not backed up with a viable interior enforcement strategy. -- Our role in the tragedy is that we are sending a mixed message to people on the other side of the border. We have made it more difficult to get across the border illegally, while at the same time our complete lack of interior enforcement sends the opposite message.

El Paso Times

Blockade on immigrants [illegals] is too much

Since 1998, more than 1,000 immigrants have died trying to enter the United States across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to the U.S. Border Patrol. Nothing suggests the number of casualties will decrease, which brings up the question, "Who declared this war?" The U.S. policy of sealing the U.S.-Mexican border, while leaving the U.S.-Canadian border relatively open, is receiving the kind of scrutiny lawmakers failed to give it when it first began as Operation Blockade (later called Operation Hold the Line). The term "blockade" truly reflects what its architects intended, to keep out undocumented immigrants.

Stein Report

Fed report puts mass immigration
boosters on defensive

Pro-mass immigration boosters like CATO Institute economist Steven Moore spent the weekend trying to debunk a Federal Reserve report that highlighted the way the last 10 years of immigration have torpedoed U.S. productivity. "Any time I see candor out of the financial community, I am shocked," FAIR Executive Director Dan Stein told the Washington Times on Sunday.

Rewarding Criminals

Texas Gov. signs law giving in-state tuition to illegals

Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed a law that will save immigrant students thousands of dollars a year in college tuition and, lawmakers hope, boost Texas' economic future. The measure will allow students who attended Texas high schools for three years and graduated to qualify for residential tuition rates at state- supported colleges, regardless of their citizenship status.

Meddling Mexicans

U.S., Mexican officials disagree on how to create a 'safe and orderly' border

Before the influx of agents, "We were apprehending thousands and thousands of people," says Williams. "The only thing that capped that is we couldn't physically accept any more in our hands. "Now it is expected to be calm," he adds. "We're seeing the deterrent effect." His response to criticism that the strategy has merely shifted illegal crossings is that the initiative is still "a work in progress." He notes that apprehensions for the first eight months of this fiscal year have dropped 24% over last year -- a trend he hopes continues. [Mexicans, particularly Fox, don't like this.]

Washington

America lagging as refugee haven

The United Nations will sponsor World Refugee Day Wednesday. It marks the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Refugee Convention, which defined the right to flee one's native country out of a "well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality (or) membership in a particular social group of political opinion." It is a right that the United States has recognized since the end of World War II, after having scandalously turned away Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany before and during that war while professing not to know about the Holocaust that claimed an estimated 6 million lives.

Sacramento

The census missed a few, state contends

In an unprecedented step, California has factored into its latest population estimates an unofficial undercount of residents missed by the 2000 census -- despite the U.S. Census Bureau's position that these adjusted numbers remain unproven. The move is sure to provoke controversy, say population experts from outside the state. "They're playing a card they do not hold," said David Murray, a statistician based in Washington, D.C., and a congressional appointee to the U.S. Census Monitoring Board. "On what basis does California think it knows better than the Census Bureau?" "I'm very intrigued," said Barry Edmondston of the Population Research Center in Portland, Ore.

Norwich, CT

Number Of Illegal Immigrants Seen On Rise In State

Federal immigration officials are taking a closer look at the rising number of illegal newcomers in eastern CT. The number of illegal immigrants in the region is not known, but local officials are increasingly concerned that many immigrants are not receiving necessary health care and social services. An estimated 29,000 illegal aliens lived in CT in 1996. The state is No. 19 in the nation, according to the most recent statistics from the INS. Gary Cote, director of the INS office in Hartford, said federal officials "continually look" for criminal violations such as the manufacture and transaction of fake documents and smuggling of illegal aliens.

Beijing

'More illegals if China joins WTO'

China's expected entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) could mean an increase in illegal migration out of the world's most populous country, European Union (EU) officials have said. WTO membership and the ongoing reform of China's inefficient state sector is likely to throw large numbers of Chinese out of work, causing some to flee to the prosperous economies of the West, they said. 'The trends are quite worrying,' Mr Philippe van Amersfoort, first secretary at the EU's representation in Beijing, told journalists on Friday.

Austin, TX

Texas illegals won't get driver's licenses

A bill that would have allowed illegal immigrants to drive legally and another that would have required health maintenance organizations to pay doctors promptly were vetoed Sunday by Gov. Rick Perry. Perry also killed a bill that would have shifted the state's Medicaid program from the Texas Department of Health to the state Health and Human Services Commission. The bill included a pilot program that would have sought federal funds to expand women's health care services.

Farmingdale, NY

What's Next In Fight Over Day Laborers?

Farmingdale residents won their fight last week to shut down a hiring site for day laborers. Now some critics of the shutdown are asking: What's next? As the conflict enters its second week today, some day laborers say they will be back on the streets protesting. Others say they will be back on corners looking for work- the same problem that led to the creation of the hiring site 14 months ago. Farmingdale Mayor Joseph Trudden said yesterday he doesn't have any clear answers to the problem. He said there's no suitable hiring site for the laborers in Farmingdale and suggested one be found outside the village. [See SQL Org. website]

New York

Protesters: INS Detainment Unfair

Clutching a board pasted with pictures of her family, Rose Marie Sherry spent her Father's Day protesting in the rain, hoping for her father's freedom. "He has been stripped of his basic human right-his family," Sherry said. About 50 people gathered at the INS Detention Center on Varick Street yesterday to protest the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which requires the deportation and detainment of legal residents who have been convicted of a wide range of crimes, including some misdemeanors and violations.

Family Values?

One in three Mexican fathers don't know how many children they have

One-third of Mexican men do not know how many children they have, according to National Statistics Institute and National Population Council studies published Sunday by the press. According to the research organizations' reports, only 20 percent of children born in Mexico are recognized by both parents, and one father in five takes no responsibility for his children at all. Only one vasectomy is performed for every 14 women who opt for sterilization, while one in three married men never cook and 60% do not wash or iron clothes.

Mexico City

Mexico Plans A Tighter Grip On Its Border To the South

The Mexican government plans to sharply increase the presence of soldiers, police officers, naval patrols and immigration checkpoints near its porous southern border. The plan, which has not yet been made public, is an unprecedented effort to choke off flows of illegal immigrants, drugs and guns entering the country from Central America. Most of the illicit human and drug traffic coming into Mexico is heading to the United States, and Washington has long urged Mexico to control its border with Guatemala and Belize more tightly.