TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: (letter from a border agent)
Dave Stoddard is a 29 year border agent, now retired and living within a stone's throw of the border near Naco, Arizona. The letter was forwarded by NAFBPO, where you will get the BEST information on Mexico & the border.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
Since the Clinton Administration dismantled interior immigration
enforcement, thereby unleashing a flood of illegal aliens and crime across
our borders, we in Cochise County have collectively begged for relief. We
formed groups so our politicians would better hear us. We were labeled
racists, nativists, xenophobes, crackpots and vigilantes. We met with
Attorney General Terry Goddard, Representatives Jeff Flake, Jim Kolbe,
Sensenbrenner, Shadegg and Jim Hayworth. We met with representatives of the
Border Patrol and the Sheriff's Office. We wrote President Clinton, Senator
Jon Kyl, John McCain and we begged for Federal action to relieve our
circumstance. We suffered burglaries, vandalism, threats, thefts of our
vehicles, assaults and our children were sexually propositioned at school
bus stops. We had home invasions and vacant homes used as stash houses and
subsequently trashed. We testified before various Congressional committees.
We wrote articles. We were interviewed by newspaper journalists and by
radio personalities. We appeared on T.V. programs, including Telemundo and
Azteca T.V. Our pastures were set on fire and our livestock killed. Our
dogs were poisoned. We were sued by ethnic identity groups and threatened
by our own government for violations of the civil rights of illegal alien
thugs.
Then we were crushed by President Bush's "Good hearted Folks" speech and his
attempt to legalize the very thugs who made our lives so miserable. We met
with Mexican Senator Jeffrey Jones from the State of Chihuahua hoping for
some help from South of the border. Our pleas were unanswered when Jones went
to Mexico City and reported to Mexican Presidente Vicente Fox that we want to shoot Mexicans.
We gave Representative Tom Tancredo (God Bless him) a tour of the border and
met with him over the course of several days praying for some kind of action
from the Federal Government to secure our borders. We gave border tours to
Pat Buchannan, Bay Buchannan, Ken Hamblin, Sean Hannity, Representative
Steve King and countless foreign journalists.
We participated in films and documentaries showing the debris and
destruction wrought by illegal alien smugglers and drug traffickers. We
secured our homes with burglar bars and barbed wire. We were afraid to
venture out at night or leave our homes unprotected. The local highways at
night were a nightmare of speeding vehicles running without lights loaded
with drugs and people.
Finally, the Border Patrol was beefed up and what passes for a fence was
built. Illegal aliens and drugs continue to pour across our border. A drug
war has erupted south of our border. Thousands have died. We look
anxiously to the south expecting more carnage and lawlessness.
And now, President Obama is pushing for an amnesty to legalize the thugs who
recognize no law that curtails their activities. DHS Secretary Napalitano is
dismantling interior immigration enforcement which will unleash yet another
tidal wave of humanity coming North to await Obama's expected amnesty.
For over 12 years we have fought, bled, spent our money, begged, sacrificed
and cried.
Now we have a freshman Congressman coming to hear the pleas we raised over a
decade and a half ago. We still have vandalism, drug smuggling, violence
and lawlessness. We are still ignored by the government whose charge it is
to protect us. We still have politicians seeking to reward those who have
victimized us. Ethnic identity groups are still threatening us.
Somebody please tell me. What have we accomplished and where is the relief
we deserve?
Dave Stoddard
AN EDITORIAL BY NAFBPO
AN EDITORIAL
March 30, 2009
Our Leaders Betray Us – Immigration and Jobs
Let us begin by stating a first principle.
As something becomes more available, it becomes cheaper, and vice versa. This is the law of supply and demand. It is a fundamental, irrefutable law of economics, so well-proven that it needs no discussion. What must be pointed out here, though, is that sweat is a quantity covered by the law of supply and demand. As sweat becomes more available, it becomes cheaper.
One purpose of immigration laws is to regulate the amount of sweat in the country, that is, the size of the labor pool. Immigration adds workers to the labor pool; that diminishes the value of all labor, because as supply goes up, price (that is, wages) goes down – there’s more of it, so it’s cheaper. Immigrants, legal or illegal, don’t depress wages because they are Latino or Filipino or African and want to work cheap. It happens because, in their millions, they form a pool of additional sweat that becomes cheap because of its sheer volume. This seems to be such a simple connection that Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and all our politicians should be able to understand it.
It seems they do not, though – or perhaps they do, and just don’t care. Or maybe they are responding to their vision of a higher calling than the good of the American public. Whatever their motives, though, make no mistake: when they call for “bringing workers out of the shadows,” they are not talking about helping the legal workers of America, and when they say we should have “Immigration Reform” they are proposing laws that will benefit foreigners, not our own workers. For their own, political reasons, they are willing to damage individual Americans to benefit foreigners.
In justification of their calls for liberal immigration laws, they say that Americans won’t do “that kind of work,” whatever kind that is. What a contemptible statement! What an expression of disdain for their fellow Americans. Any politician who believes that of his constituents has a very poor opinion of them – but then, he knows them best; maybe they are lazy sluggards. He should not dare to speak for other Americans, though, who have done every job in this country, and do them still. They do them despite wages held down by the actions and inactions of the very people making those scandalous statements – our elected representatives
Now, we are in a crisis. Good, working Americans who have played by the rules are losing their homes as they lose their jobs. They cannot buy shoes for the kids, much less pay next semester’s tuition. They will work. Millions of them will take any job that will keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and clothes on their family. But the jobs have to be there.
A tragic aspect of this failure of national will is that the very people who most need low-end jobs, our own undereducated, under skilled workers, are the ones most often displaced by illegal aliens. The American Dream is being moved farther and farther from their reach by the presence of foreign workers who take jobs our own people ought to have and depress the wages that are paid.
President Obama claims repeatedly that he will create new millions of jobs, that he will fix the problem with public works and stimulus packages that will pay for “shovel-ready” projects that will put people to work. He, and his cheerleaders in Congress, ignore the more obvious solution in favor one that requires spending on an unimaginable scale. Millions of jobs are still out there, but they are filled by illegal aliens who ought not to have them at all, much less at the expense of an American worker. We note with amazement that, apparently, there will be no extra effort made when those Obama-generated stimulus jobs are filled to screen out illegal aliens.
What the Administration and Congress should do is this: vigorously enforce existing immigration laws, and pass new ones that make it inconvenient to impossible for illegal aliens to stay here. The Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, is impeding interior enforcement of our immigration laws; in fact, she has nearly brought it to a complete halt. As a matter of official policy, she is deliberately protecting illegal aliens with jobs from detection and removal. She should stop that immediately and begin carrying out at least one aspect of her duty, that is, to protect the American people’s jobs from illegal foreign competition.
An editorial does not offer the space to set forth the volumes of evidence that exist showing that illegal aliens have created a labor surplus that depresses wages, and that Americans will take jobs vacated when illegal aliens leave. Here, we offer only one recent example. In the spring of 2008 ICE conducted a series of enforcement operations at Swift meatpacking plants in several locations across the country. ICE arrested hundreds of illegal aliens, and caused hundreds more to leave. In every case, the jobs opened were filled within days by legal workers, and in nearly every case, at wages higher than were being paid before. Slaughterhouse work is among the jobs that, supposedly, American workers won’t do. We can see that they will.
For further discussion and evidence of this proposition, visit the website of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers at http://www.nafbpo.org/ and click the button American Jobs for American Workers. There, we offer evidence and the outline of a solution to this problem.
In closing, we call for the administration and Congress to live up to their duty to see that American workers are protected, not sacrificed to foreign interests, and that the laws be faithfully executed. So far, they have failed miserably. We hope they can change. If they do not, we will surely change them.
Kent Lundgren
Chairman
National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF FORMER BORDER PATROL OFFICERS
Visit our website: http://www.nafbpo.org
Foreign News Report
THIS IS A MUST READ DAILY!
Monday 3/30/09
El Imparcial (Hermosillo, Sonora) 3/29/09
In Reynosa, Tamaulipas state, based on data from an informant, 30 masked Mexican soldiers burst through the door of a house with boarded windows and found 55 terrified immigrant hostages, victims of the Gulf Cartel. In the midst of screams and the odor of urine and sweat, the soldiers found a room spattered with blood and a piece of wood encrusted with nails that the kidnappers used to beat their captives in order to demand money from their families: three thousand dollars each. Five of the alleged kidnappers, among them the supposed leader — the son of a local police agent — were taken into custody.Tamaulipas state borders the southern tip of Texas and the city of Reynosa is across the river from McAllen. The area, a base of the Gulf cartel, is one critical to the operations of organized crime and is patrolled by federal forces waging the war against narcotraffic. The struggle is complicated by the deep-seated corruption of the local and state police. Some of the police officers work double duty as spies and assassins in the pay of the cartels. “Here we cannot talk to the police because they are in collusion with the narcos,” said an Army Captain.
In the raid in Reynosa, soldiers freed nine women dressed only in their underwear who were held in a small room. They also freed 46 men crowded into two small rooms, some of them for as long as a month, with scant food and water. The torture room had a mattress on the floor and the walls were blood-stained and had posters of semi-nude women.
The soldiers handcuffed the leader of the gang and covered his head. Then they took him to a bathroom and made him kneel in front of a bathtub next to a bucket of water. The door was then closed. The suspect emerged wet and ready to reveal the addresses of another two houses used for groups of immigrants, although a search of them had no results.
The Mexican National Commission of Human Rights last week reported that complaints against the Army have increased, including illegal breaking and entering and mistreatment of detainees. President Calderon defends the use of the Army, citing the reduction in crime in areas under military control. Everywhere in Tamaulipas there are signs that the leaders of the drug cartels are ready to resume business as soon as the soldiers depart. This gives rise to a large narco spy network that communicates via portable radios and is protected by some sectors of the public who have lost confidence in all government security.