Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

America’s Udder

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

July 29, 2014

The reason we have an immigration problem is not because we are welcoming people to America, but rather what kind of America we are welcoming them to. This in turn has an effect on what kind of people seek to be welcomed here, which then provokes the wrong kind of reaction on our part, and which results in a series of actions and reactions not unlike a child’s party balloon that was not tied off yet but was over-inflated, and then let go.

We have two presenting issues on our southern border. One is the border security itself, and the other is all the stuff we are doing that creates the need for border security in the first place. What we are doing wrong would include, but not be limited to, anchor babies, food stamps, other forms of welfare, free education, and so on. You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you don’t. There are very few things quite as destructive as American good intentions. If we then add to the mix the problems caused by American bad intentions, everything gets really complicated. What would happen to the drug cartels if Americans quit snorting their happy powder? And, incidentally, that problem is not going to be solved by a federal “war on drugs,” what a joke, but rather by Americans doing what previous generations of Christians used to quaintly call “repenting.” A whole host of our “political” problems have no political solution.

Here is my proposed campaign slogan — Open Borders, But No Freebies. If any politician wants to use it, he can have his staff contact my people.

Back to immigration. In the current set-up, conservatives have a point when they say that we need to get control of the border first, and then talk about what to do with the millions of ille . . . oops, almost did a bad thing . . . undocumented ali . . . oops . . . what a klutz I am being this morning . . . undocumented personages. Ah, for the halcyon days when folks could just say wetbacks and nobody minded!

Let me take a brief moment to explain that I was not using the word wetback there, but rather was observing that there was a time back in Eisenhower’s day when other people did that kind of thing, and what I did was all in the third person, and so I would suggest, with all appropriate modesty, that I should not be arrested for merely reporting on these facts. Yes, someone might reply, but you were being simultaneously provocative and coy, and we are on to your tricks. You were really making a point that was plainly critical of the current diktats of our most revered speech police, and therein lies your real crime. Well, yes, I guess I was doing that. That is my real crime. I do confess it.

Back to the politics. The problem lies in how conservatives want to get control of the border — thousands of miles of fence, and so on. We are already dealing with the monstrosity of the Border Patrol setting up random check points inside the borders of the United States, with American citizens being asked to provide “their papers please” because they decided they needed to hit Home Depot after the Piggly Wiggly, with Home Depot being on the other side of the local check point. The Border Patrol is already authorized to set up random check points one hundred miles inside the border, and that happens to be where most Americans live their previously free lives. You really want to solve our problems on this issue by giving those guys more money? Billions more?

If we create a sugar daddy state, we cannot complain when we find ourselves with a long line of applicants who would like to have a sugar daddy. Every culture has its deadbeats, and if we create a system that attracts them, then that is our problem, not theirs.

Any “conservative” who wants to give the Border Patrol billions in order to control the people on the other side of the border, and who serenely expects at the same time to have untrammelled freedom on this side of the border, enabling them to keep on rocking in the free world, is being insufficiently cynical. And by insufficiently cynical, I mean that they are being blockheads, moonbeams, ninnyhammers, pinheads, tomfools, and so on down the line, in alphabetical order.

In years past, I have said that fences along borders make me nervous because anything tough enough and tall enough to keep “them all” out is also capable, when the circumstances change, of keeping “us all” in. Have you not noticed that when our government is “tough on terrorists,” you are the one who has to stand in long lines at airports in order to shuffle through their risible security theater? Have you not noticed that they have a tendency to “protect your freedoms” by taking them away?

I am suggesting that all the money we are spending on this problem is what is actually causing it. If we want to fix it, we should walk over to where the hose connects to the faucet, there on the side of the house, and turn that thing all the way to the right. It is in that sense that my proposed solution should be considered to be “of the right.” No mas. Here is my proposed campaign slogan — Open Borders, But No Freebies. If any politician wants to use it, he can have his staff contact my people.

If the Canadian government started giving out free heroin, would it be reasonable for them to draw conclusions about all Americans because of the caliber of people they now saw coming across their border for their daily treat? Would this not be a Canadian problem, and not an American one?

But . . . what about . . .? It is a commonplace among conservatives that the left is trying to flood our southern states with immigrants, legal and the other kind, as a not so subtle way of turning Texas blue. This brings us back to our first point, which is the kind of America we are welcoming them to. What is the nature of the incentive? If we create a sugar daddy state, we cannot complain when we find ourselves with a long line of applicants who would like to have a sugar daddy. Every culture has its deadbeats, and if we create a system that attracts them, then that is our problem, not theirs.

If the Canadian government started giving out free heroin, would it be reasonable for them to draw conclusions about all Americans because of the caliber of people they now saw coming across their border for their daily treat? Would this not be a Canadian problem, and not an American one?

If we get our house in order, the message we should have for immigrants, as George Will recently put it, is simply “welcome to America.” If we had a culture that rewarded hard work, risk-taking, entrepreneurship, then the more immigrants the merrier. In other words, immigrants will only turn a state blue if that state is already building a bunch of blue attractions. If the liberals succeed in turning Texas into America’s udder, then we shouldn’t pretend to be surprised at the results. Neither should we think the problem was caused by those who come for what we offer.

In short, we will get the kind of immigrants we deserve. And so it is a not whether, but which problem. It is not whether we will get immigrants, but rather which immigrants we will get. And if we get a problem, it was our own stupidfault, not a typo, one word.

One last thing. For those soft bigots who believe that the problem is that Mexicans don’t have a work ethic, I would invite them to get a summer job in a Wenatchee apple orchard, trying hard to keep up.

Letter From Australia (About Truth Being Drowned)

Truth Founders in a Sea of Bias

Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
February 03, 2014

YOU’D think the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (“ABC”) would cheer. In six weeks, not one boat of “asylum seekers” has turned up and not one boat person drowned. 
 
Not in six years – since Labor scrapped our tough border laws and lured more than 1000 boat people to their deaths – has there been such a pause. Think what this means. Lives have been saved. Hundreds of millions of dollars won’t be wasted. Real refugees won’t be pushed out of the queues here by fakes. 

Yet here is what’s so damning of the ABC, which takes $1.2 billion a year from taxpayers under an agreement not to be biased.  Never has the ABC campaigned so furiously against our border policies as now, when the Abbott Government has shut the gate by turning back boats and sending every arrival to Nauru or Papua New Guinea. Same with the Greens and many Fairfax commentators.

When the first scores of boat people drowned under Labor, most in the Left turned a blind eye. Later, they pretended Labor’s weak laws weren’t to blame.  “Tragedies happen, accidents happen,” Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young said.
  Finally, when the death toll grew too horrific to ignore, they argued the Coalition’s plan to “turn back the boats” would never work anyway.  Said Hanson-Young: “Turning boats around … will not deter desperate people from making dangerous journeys by boat. It never has and it never will.”

Prime Minister Julia Gillard, likewise, predicted those Coalition policies “can’t and won’t work”.  In fact, many in the Left simply don’t want them to work. Jack Waterford, of Fairfax’s Canberra Times, wrote: “There are many people, including me, who want to see our shameful policies fail.”  ABC host Jonathan Green even gloated last November they’d failed already: “Stop The Boats. Turn Them Back When Safe To Do So. Tossed aside now for the best and most practical of reasons.”

How desperate the Left now is not to be proved wrong, which is why this Government gets no thanks.  Instead, now that Tony Abbott’s policies are indeed working, the media Left invents horror stories about them, with one Guardian writer even suggesting our navy was “shooting at boats full of refugees”.

Or take the ABC. Its campaign against these laws started with reports exaggerating how angry Indonesia was with them.  Its website also began a daily count of boat arrivals – something the ABC never did under Labor, even when three a day were turning up.  ABC presenters chose as their go-to Indonesian spokesman an MP who had a strident anti-Australian agenda, even though he was just a backbencher. Next, the ABC trumpeted secrets of our spying on Indonesia with apparent glee at the damage this would do to Indonesian co-operation.

For months, ABC presenters also demanded the Government reveal details of its interception operations, even though the head of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lt Gen. Angus Campbell, warned this would give “advantage to people smugglers”.  On it went. The ABC painted the Government heartless by presenting as fact a falsehood that “an asylum seeker being held in detention on Nauru is expecting twins”.

Most absurdly, it last week claimed it had a video which “appears to back up the claims” of boat people who said the navy had tortured them by forcing their hands against their boat’s red-hot engines.  The men’s story was always implausible, and two later admitted they’d actually fallen into the engines. Their chief spokesman concedes all but one of the alleged victims now say they “were not deliberately forced to touch the hot engine”. Yet the ABC, rather than apologise, reported yet another preposterous allegation by one of the very same people: “that Australian sailors mistreated them” by briefly blinding one with a spray.  “Mistreated”? In fact, our sailors allegedly used pepper spray against one man during what another called a “fight” around their boats’ engines.

No wonder Abbott accuses the ABC of appearing “to take everyone’s side but our own”. Indeed, such reporting seems driven by an ideological assumption that conservatives are brutal and our institutions racist, and neither should be trusted against the word of asylum seekers of another “race”. 

This is just one strand in the weave of bias at the ABC, which has people of the Left hosting every one of its main current affairs shows, but it is almost certainly the bloodiest.  How many boat people drowned before the ABC would link Labor’s policies to that disaster? How many more will drown if ABC activists now smash the policies which work?
 

Letter From America (About a Paper Constitution)

The Simulacrum of Self-Government

We might as well put the Constitution out of its misery.

By  Mark Steyn 

June 28, 2013 4:30 PM

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

Wednesday, June 26, 2013 — just another day in a constitutional republic of limited government by citizen representatives:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside” program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans. For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie.

Later in the day, Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota and alleged author of the Corker-Hoeven amendment to the immigration bill, went on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show and, in a remarkable interview, revealed to the world that he had absolutely no idea what was in the legislation he “wrote.” Rachel Jeantel, the endearingly disastrous star witness at the George Zimmerman trial, excused her inability to comprehend the letter she’d supposedly written to Trayvon Martin’s parents on the grounds that “I don’t read cursive.” Senator Hoeven doesn’t read legislative. For example, Section 5(b)(1):

Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall establish a strategy, to be known as the ‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’ . . .

On the other hand, Section 5(b)(5):

Notwithstanding paragraph (1), nothing in this subsection shall require the Secretary to install fencing . . .

Asked to reconcile these two paragraphs, Senator Hoeven explained that, “when I read through that with my lawyer,” the guy said relax, don’t worry about it. (I paraphrase, but barely.)

So Senator Hoeven and 67 other senators went ahead the following day and approved the usual bazillion-page we-have-to-pass-it-to-find-out-what’s-in-it omnibus bill, cooked up in the backrooms, released late on a Friday afternoon and passed in nothing flat after Harry Reid decreed there’s no need for further debate — not that anything recognizable to any genuine legislature as “debate” ever occurs in “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”

Say what you like about George III, but the Tea Act was about tea. The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any more momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people’s elected representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law. That’s how they did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, etc. But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the legislative class to attempt “comprehensive marriage reform,” complete with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen’s au pairs and the hiring of 20,000 new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from disparate-impact groups. So instead it fell to five out of nine judges, which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he’s the guy who swings both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide the issue for 300 million people.

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben so famously says in every remake, with great power comes great responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal institution that predates the United States by thousands of years, Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the semblance of a legal argument. Instead, he struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated by an “improper animus” against a “politically unpopular group” they wished to “disparage,” “demean,” and “humiliate” as “unworthy.” What stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton.

It’s good to have President Clinton’s animus against gays finally exposed by Anthony Kennedy. There’s a famous photograph of him taken round the time he signed DOMA, at a big fundraiser wearing that black-tie-and-wing-collar combo that always made him look like the maître d’ at a 19th-century bordello. He’s receiving greetings from celebrity couple Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, who’d come out as gay the week before and, in the first flush of romance, can’t keep their hands off each other even with President Happy Pants trying to get a piece of the action. For a man motivated only by a hateful need to harm gays, he’s doing a grand job of covering it up, looking like the guy who decided to splash out for the two-girl special on the last night of the sales convention. Nevertheless, reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision, President Clinton professed himself delighted to have been struck down as a homophobe.

In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.” Indeed. With this judgment, America’s constitutional court demeans and humiliates only its own. Of all the local variations through which same-sex marriage has been legalized in the last decade, mostly legislative (France, Iceland) but occasionally judicial (Canada, South Africa), the United States is unique in its inability to jump on the Western world’s bandwagon du jour without first declaring its current vice president, president pro tem of the Senate, majority leader, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, and prospective first First Gentleman raging gay-bashers. . . . 

 

There is something deeply weird, not to say grubby and dishonest, about this. In its imputation of motive to those who disagree with it, this opinion is more disreputable than Roe v. Wade — and with potentially unbounded application. To return to the immigration bill, and all its assurances that those amnestied will “go to the end of the line” and have to wait longer for full-blown green cards and longer still for citizenship, do you seriously think any of that hooey will survive its first encounter with a federal judge? In much of the Southwest, you’d have jurisdictions with a majority of Hispanic residents living under an elderly, disproportionately white voting roll. You can cut-and-paste Kennedy’s guff about “improper animus” toward “a group of people” straight into the first immigration appeal, and a thousand more. And that’s supposing the administrative agencies pay any attention to the “safeguards” in the first place.

As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Letter From Australia (About Economic Refugees)

Gullibility Without End

There are two kinds of refugees in the world: those fleeing from tyrants and murderers and those looking for a better socio-economic life.  The latter are called “economic refugees”.  Whilst their aspirations and ambitions are understandable they give the former kind of refugee a bad name.

Economic refugees all too often attempt to game the system by masquerading as genuine refugees.  Australia, for the last five years, has deliberately refused to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic refugees.  As a consequence it is now regarded as a soft-destination for economic refugees.  The boats keep coming.  Paul Sheeha, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald exposes the defalcation of the Australian government on this matter. Any government which loses control of its borders has ceded sovereignty. Worse, it has meant the government is complicit in self-deceit and in lying to the people. Paul Sheehan believes it is a key reason the Gillard Government is despised by the electorate.

>Be Warned, New Zealand

>Australia Risking a Human Tsunami

The Sydney Morning Herald, on balance, is habitually more favourable toward left-wing, progressive political ideologies.  Consequently, it tends to be a cheer-leader for the Australian Labour Party.  So, when its senior correspondents start to give a good old fashioned shellacking to a Labour Prime Minister, you have to know that things are pretty bad. 

Here is how a recent column was headlined:

A diminished Gillard caught in a storm of her own making

 The article, by Paul Sheehan (columnist and editorial writer for The Sydney Morning Herald, where he has has been Day Editor and Washington correspondent) begins by described Gillard’s bumbling in the top job:

The most surprising aspect of Julia Gillard’s first day of facing parliamentary questioning as the newly elected Prime Minister was her demeanour. Gone was the woman who had made an art of confidence, even mockery, during question time. On this day, September 29, she was pale and nervous. She even said the government’s home insulation program ”was beset by problems. It became a mess”.

But the focus of the article is not upon the ineffectualness of the Prime Minister, but upon the tragic failure of Australia to control its own borders from illegal immigration.  It is faced not with a swarm of refugees, but with people migrating illegally to Australia for lifestyle reasons.

Three months on from her near-death experience, Gillard has still not grown into her new role. Never did this seem more evident than in the aftermath of the tragedy at Christmas Island with asylum seekers dying in the surf. What did she do in this moment of crisis? She called for a committee.

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It is impossible to exaggerate the failure of Gillard and her government in their policies towards boat people. She was the principle author of a policy paper, Protecting Australia, Protecting the Australian Way, which became Labor policy. This policy has managed to create the worst of both worlds: cruel yet ineffective. And ludicrously expensive, like almost everything else this government does.

The detention centres are bulging. More are sprouting up. A detention centre has been set up in a Brisbane hotel. Another in Darwin. Another in Melbourne. Another at a remote air force base in Western Australia. Another at a second remote air force base in north Queensland. A defence housing site in the Adelaide Hills has been turned into yet another detention centre, to the consternation of the locals. . As for Christmas Island, it became saturated a year ago.
The vast majority of those arriving by boat are being granted residency. The approval rate is roughly twice that of applicants processed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This is a green light to the people-smuggling trade.

The High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that large numbers claiming asylum status in Australia are not refugees. The government has been slow to handle legitimate refugee claims. It has been slow to handle illegitimate claims. Detention centres have seen riots, demonstrations, hunger strikes, self-harm and suicide by asylum seekers.

 According to Sheehan, the whole situation is an unholy mess.  It is rapidly escalating out of control.

The courts are clotted with immigration appeals. The law itself has been rendered uncertain. The refugee intake quota has stayed set at 13,500, which means boat people are significantly displacing those awaiting processing by the UNHCR. This is the ”queue” that refugee advocates pretend does not exist. It is another green light for people-smuggling.

The government has failed to prosecute those who blew up an asylum boat in 2009, killing five and injuring 40. It capitulated to demands from people with zero leverage during a standoff with Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking.

Almost 200 boatloads have arrived since Labor came to government. The people-smuggling trade is thriving. The budget for handling the refugee intake has blown out. Expensive charter flights are shuffling asylum seekers around the country. Children have drowned. Families have been separated.

 We wish to make two general observations.  First, see here the achilles heel of all progressive ideologies.  The liberal progressivism of the West is built upon sentiments of grossly misplaced pity and guilt.  “Wanting to help folks” translates into government rules, regulations, laws, and vast, vast bureaucracies to manage all affairs of life so that no-one goes without.  Two factors combine to smash this idolatry.  The first is that eventually progressive governments run out of other people’s money.  They collapse under the dead weight of their own debt.  The second is that they are unable to police their borders–for sentimental mawkishness cannot be restricted to one’s own citizens.  The secular humanism of the West means that it inevitably extends pity and guilt to international refugees of all types wanting “in”.  The more they let in, the more line up to come. The host society eventually implodes, culturally and fiscally.

Labour turned its guilty-and-pity meter up full in Australia, portraying previous Prime Minister, John Howard as cruel, heartless, and inhuman for his staunch, firm stand against boatpeople.  Now, in government,  it is being swamped with life-style “refugees”.  We would not minimise the hardship or tragic experiences of those seeking to migrate and make a better life for themselves.  But governments have no legitimate responsibility nor competence in trying to save the world, redeeming it from all hardship or tragedy.  Recognizing lawful limitations and the limits of government’s legitimacy and competence is not hard-heartedness.  It is humility. But it is a humility which is intolerable to the Western progressive secular-humanist mind.  “We can do this (through government)” is the undoubted faith of the day. 

The second major observation is this: it is only a matter of time before New Zealand has boatloads of people turning up on our shores.  They would have been here much earlier, were not geography in our favour.  We expect that our government will quickly find itself in the same maudlin mess–because our established religion is the same as that of Australia.  We in New Zealand are also comprehensively dominated by the politics and regimen of lugubrious pity and guilt. 

Our “feelings and emotions”, our humanist sympathies and empathies, our hubris in wanting to “put things right” will all lead us down the path of porous borders.  It is only a matter of time.  Sooner or later the first boatload of lifestyle refugees will arrive.  The Government will not have the “heart” to turn them away, fearing the public outcry and indignation at the inhumanity such an action would reflect.  Word will quickly spread through the people-smuggling networks, and within a short space of time an armada will be on its way.  Checkmate.

Well, it will not be the first time.  There was the Maori migration, then the British/European.  In the grander scheme of history, the boatload migration may well be the third.  It is not as remote or unlikely as many may think.  Progressive humanist idolatries will cheer it on. 

>A Failed State

>Porous Borders

The United Nations has an appellation for countries that are so broken down that they can no longer maintain law-and-order and their citizens are subject to marauding thugs and gangs. The UN calls them “failed states”. Haiti is a failed state. Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Chad are also listed.

Whatever the criteria employed to identify a state as failed, we would argue that inability to control and protect state borders has to be right up there as one of the leading indicators of becoming a failed state. The inability of the US to protect its borders–in particular, to seal its southern border to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants–bespeaks “failed state”.

Now, of course, the US has the wealth and technological capability to seal the border, so that only legitimate immigrants and appropriately documented people enter the country from the south. But it lacks the will to do so. This lack of will–this lack of nation-wide conviction that controlling one’s borders is a fundamental, essential duty of government–is symptomatic of a serious malaise.

Now, to be sure, we hold the view that the US, along with every other country in the world, has the resources and capability to support a much larger population than it does presently. Controlling the borders is not the same as reducing or stopping immigration–but it means that whatever immigration or guest-worker programme is the declared policy of the day, the federal and governmental authorities can and do apply the policy. The government must keep the laws it makes and ensure that the law is enforced justly and fairly.

At the moment, the US has a stated immigration policy which it is unwilling to apply. The law is a farcical joke, at least on the southern border. The porous line of demarcation between the US and Mexico means that drugs can enter the US without effective interdiction; Mexican criminal gangs operate freely on both sides of the border; and standover and extortion tactics are able to be used effectively against vulnerable human beings who are in the country illegally.

The fact that the US will not control its own borders increasingly makes it a laughing stock. It risks being seen as a vacillating, weak, inept, and internally riven country. Its enemies are emboldened.

President Obama has emphatically insisted upon the power of linkages in global perceptions. He, for example, has propagated the idea that the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay arouses such hostility amongst Muslims that it provokes terrorism against the US. Close Guantanamo, and terrorist acts will subside. Maybe so. However, it is not difficult to make another linkage: the porous southern border is a large flashing sign of US indecision, cowardice, and weakness.

There are intelligence reports that Islamic terrorist sleepers have identified the southern border as the entry point of choice. For them, it is a no-brainer.

>That "Danged" Fence

>A Shameful Paper Tiger

Phoenix, Arizona has become the kidnapping capital of the United States–second only in the world to Bogota, Columbia! Phoenix suffers under a crime wave of kidnapping, drug trafficking, murder and mayhem–because of illegal immigration from Mexico. For over thirty years, successive US federal governments have failed to secure the US southern border: the respective administrations of Clinton, Bush, and Obama have been derelict in what is a fundamental duty of civil government.

As Ronald Reagan observed a nation that is unable to secure its borders is not a nation in any meaningful sense of the term. The US is showing all the signs a failed nation-state. Arizona recently passed a carefully crafted law requiring its own state police to identify illegal immigrants and hand them over to Federal authorities for prosecution. This has created a political storm-in-a-teacup, with President Obama right on down to auntie Sophie weighing in. Obama has been duplicitous in his criticisms–disappointingly so. Consider carefully this response from the Governor of Arizona:

An irony in all of this is that Arizona’s new state law replicates almost exactly the language of a Federal statute empowering the Federal government to investigate and catch illegal immigrants–a law the Feds have never applied. So, threatened legal action against Arizona’s new law will prove far too much, if upheld. We believe legal action against the law is stupid.

We have a bit of free advice for the politicos in Arizona–not that they need it. We recommend that every illegal alien they find in Arizona be handed over to the Federal authorities under the following protocol: they should be put in a secure bus and transported to Washington DC, then formally handed over to the Boarder Guard-in-Chief, President Obama by handcuffing them to the White House fence, and giving the keys to the local cops. That should bring the problem home to Washington elites.

Why can’t the US secure its border? Well, it’s such a long border, say the cavillers. It’s impossible to police. Under Bush, the federal authorities started to build a fence: this has now been stopped. The argument against a fence? It’s alleged that it is ineffectual in stopping illegals. No matter how high the fence, you can always get a higher ladder.

Now, we may be a bit simple, but it occurs to us that ancient civilizations were able to build walls to keep out undesirables (even those with ladders). There was a chap called Hadrian that built a few walls in his time, and we understand that they were very effective in securing borders. And then there is something called the Great Wall of China–a rather trifling undertaking, but very effective nevertheless. The point is this: if ancient nations and civilizations could marshall the technology, political will, and funding to build walls to protect borders, why cannot the allegedly most powerful and wealthy nation in human history  do the same?

The inability of the United States to protect its borders makes it a laughing stock, holding it up to global derision. While all to often it presents itself as a lecturing, pontificating bully on the world stage, constantly hectoring other nations about what they ought or ought not to be doing, and it cannot even secure its own borders! What a paper tiger.

In fact, it is only a lack of political will that has made the United States so pathetic–there is no longer fire in the belly, nor steel in the bones. This is effete, bleeding heart liberalism at its worst. The Federal Government is no longer a defender of its people, and so it must wear the shameful mantle of a failed state. Full marks, however, to the people of Arizona. We salute and respect you. Time to consider secession, guys.