By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
My wife was born in Mexico, but she does not like what she is seeing in today's America. Her parents immigrated here in the mid-sixties. Papi told me his decision to go through the process of immigrating to the United States was so that he could give his children a better life. Mexico "is not good," he once told me. "More chance for education and better life in America."
He rejects the term "Mexican-American." He would say, "If I wanted to be Mexican, I would have stayed in Mexico. I came here to be American."
From the stories I've been told, the first thing he did when he came to the United States was to enroll in English language classes. He picked fruit, but worked hard to improve himself, eventually becoming a welder, and he enjoyed a long career as a welder until retiring a few years ago.
When I first married his eldest of seven daughters in 1984, my relationship with Papi was a good one. First, he was happy to finally have a son. Second, he yearned to learn more about being American. He was like a sponge when we talked, soaking in as much as he could, from me. We talked about government, politics, the U.S. Constitution, American Football, and Major League Baseball - mostly.
I suppose it is safe to say that my wife is her father's daughter. When Donald J. Trump first emerged on the political scene, the moment the word "wall" came out of his mouth, referring to the southern border with Mexico, my wife said, "That's my guy."
Years before that, during the 2006 Day without an Immigrant protest, her sisters called up my wife to ask if she wanted to go with them to Los Angeles for the immigration protests. "Why?" asked my wife.
Her sisters largely blame me for her refusal to be "sympathetic" the the plight of Mexicans, of which my wife responds, "What plight? We all have great jobs, great homes, and good lives." My wife is very conservative on the topic of immigration not because of me, but because as an immigrant who went through a long process to naturalize (of which none of her American-born sisters needed to do) she sees illegal immigration as a slap in her face, and a slap in the face of all immigrants who went through the process legally, and came here to be a part of the American experience.
In response to my wife's negative questioning about their decision to run to Los Angeles for the "Day without an Immigrant" protests, one of her sisters said, "So that you can stand with your people."
"My people?" asked my wife. "If they were my people, they would have come here legally in the first place."
Papi, and Mrs. Pistachio both state that the kind of folks crossing the border illegally today are nothing like the Mexicans who participated in the worker's programs back in the fifties and sixties. Papi crossed the border legally with many other Mexicans to help out in the fields. He worked at farms and fruit picking facilities, mostly. Blacks, who used to work the fields, were no longer performing those duties anymore because of the gifts from the treasury in the form of welfare, therefore, more Mexicans were needed to fill the jobs the Americans were no longer willing to do because of the emergence of the New Deal (1930s) and Great Society programs, largely during the late sixties.
"We were respectful, and mindful of the local laws," Papi told me. "Polite and humble. Now, the people who come here are arrogant, rude, and want to force America to become Mexico. Do they not understand that if America becomes Mexico, the opportunities will go away?"
In today's political atmosphere, the Democrats are calling for an erasure of the national border. Liberal left States and cities are pursuing "sanctuary status" to protect illegal aliens from the federal government's attempt to execute perfectly constitutional immigration laws that are on the books. In California we are even seeing the emergence of "Sanctuary Schools."
I get it. The United States is a wonderful place to live. This is the land of opportunity. That's why everyone is trying to get in, and very few leave. If I lived elsewhere, I would want to come here, too. But, our success as a country has nothing to do with race, ethnicity or resources, and everything to do with our political system of limited government. Venezuela is resource rich, and used to be a very prosperous country, but now the people are starving and rioting under a political system that is closer to socialism, than to the free market freedoms enjoyed in countries like the United States. In Africa, while most of the continent is steeped in poverty and starvation under Marxist and Islamic regimes, the English/Saxon system of limited government has been maintained in South Africa and Botswana, and as a result, those two countries continue to be the two largest economies on the continent. We've watched as Europe has moved steadily away from limited government, and has pursued socialism, and the result has been catastrophic. In the Middle East, the only country to pursue a system of government not plagued by totalitarianism and heavy government control is Israel, and as a result, Israel is the most prosperous country in the region.
America is great because America is godly, and because America has a political system based on the Saxon system of limited government and free market economics. However, we are beginning to get ourselves into trouble because of more than a century of work by the Democrats to move us away from capitalism, and away from the laissez faire principles of the United States Constitution.
When immigration policy allows anyone and everyone to come into the country, that is who will come. With no obstacles that would normally exist in a healthily functioning immigration structure, criminals, rapists, pedophiles, and other violent members of the Mexican Society (and other cultures who have used our southern border as a gateway into the United States) will (and do) flood into this country. The American immigration system has always been geared towards protecting the receiving population by having in place protocols that require checking the immigrants for criminal histories, disease, and other things that may not be what we want in our country. Also, fees are attached, which also adds another deterrent to the kind of folks we really don't want integrating into our society.
When something costs something, the riffraff tends not to apply, and those who receive the paid for item treat it as something with value.
During my Constitution Classes I hand out pocket constitutions for free. At large events, where the crowd may be a mixture of political ideologies, I charge $1. I don't charge a buck because I am trying to make a dollar off of the people, per pocket constitution, but because if someone is willing to pay a dollar for the booklet, it will hold value to them, and they will appreciate it more, and treat it with more respect than they might if they received it for free.
Immigration is the same. Give it away freely and you will attract everyone, including those who won't appreciate it, and are in the game to get what they can, while not offering what they can give back to the society.
As a result of the Democrat Party's open border, "can't we just let them all in" policies, we are getting the worst of the worst, and it has not been a good thing for our receiving population. Disease has risen, violent crimes among newcomers into this country has risen, and the number of people sucking the life out of our social programs has risen. And, the truth is, it is not sustainable.
Just recently, because of the immigration policies of the last eight years, a DUI suspect in a hit-run crash that left a boy, 6, badly hurt, it turns out, was deported 15 times - and yet, there he was, drunk and driving on our streets!
Then, there is the Kate Steinle case, where the young woman was shot to death in 2015 by an illegal alien enjoying the sanctuary city status of San Francisco. He had recently been released from jail for repeat felonies, and had been deported five times, before brutally killing the 32 woman as she walked on a San Francisco pier. Just recently, the family was told by a judge they can't sue San Francisco over its sanctuary policy.
In the federal wrongful death lawsuit, Steinle's parents had argued that San Francisco and its former sheriff were partly to blame, because officials never notified Immigration and Customs Enforcement when Lopez-Sanchez was released from a local jail in April 2015.
"Kate's death was both foreseeable and preventable had the law enforcement agencies, officials and/or officers involved simply followed the laws, regulations and/or procedures which they swore to uphold," the lawsuit said.
The liberal left judge replied in the ruling of the case that the law didn't require local officials to notify ICE.
The hell it didn't. Immigration laws, and federal agencies to execute immigration law, are constitutional. Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the authority to write legislation to prohibit persons from migrating into the country. Article VI, in the Supremacy Clause, disallows States (which includes cities, counties, school districts, and so forth) from having laws contrary to laws of the United States made pursuant of the United States Constitution. Therefore, the San Francisco sanctuary law was illegal in the first place, and local law enforcement was then required to obey federal requirements regarding illegal aliens, as a result.
The activist judge wrote otherwise.
"No law required the Sheriff's Department to share Lopez-Sanchez's release date with ICE, nor did any law forbid Mirkarimi establishing a policy against such cooperation," Judge Spero wrote.
The magistrate also dismissed the family's claim against ICE.
Death. Lawlessness. Destruction. Disorder. All because we have refused to enforce constitutional immigration laws. In short, despite the "good intentions" of the bleeding hearts of liberal left Democrats, abandoning the rule of law, and failing to follow our perfectly constitutional immigration laws that are on the books, the United States is allowing illegal alien criminals to kill our beloved Blessings of Liberty, and liberal left policies regarding immigration, and welfare programs, are systematically dismantling the prosperity the United States of America has achieved. If we continue down this road, as unlikely as it may seem to the liberal left socialist progressive statist utopian commies of the Democrat Party, Detroit's failures, and the horrendous conditions of socialist systems falling apart worldwide, will become a nationwide phenomenon right here in the United States.
Our only chance to stop the coming devastation is to seal the border, enforce immigration laws currently on the books, and steer the federal government back towards operating within the authorities granted by the U.S. Constitution.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
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