Border Security, not Border Bigotry

The United States is often maligned by other nations, and by its own liberals, for the way it deals with illegal aliens, whom it is said to mistreat and oppress.

But deporting law-breakers is neither mistreatment nor oppression.  Much less is paying for their schooling, their food, their housing, or their medical bills, which is what we often do for illegal aliens, a policy that has helped generate the financial tsunami overwhelming California at this moment.

We are said also to be xenophobic, as if we are opposed to Mexicans rather than to the endangerment of America and to the trampling underfoot of her laws.

But this is not an issue of bigotry.  This is not about Mexicans -- or Guatemalans, or Latvians, or Italians, or Swiss, or Tongans, or Koreans, or Tibetans, or South Africans, or any other nationality in the world.  It's about border security, which is one of the few obligations explicitly required of the federal government in the Constitution -- an obligation at which the current administration is now failing miserably.

No one objects to folks who enter America through the proper legal channels.  God bless them all.  May their number increase.  America is made from them.  But criminals don’t make America.  They unmake it, and America is not interested in being unmade and undermined.  Legal immigrants are welcome in America.   Illegal aliens are not.  Illegal aliens are law-breakers.  They are criminals.

By merely being deported rather than imprisoned, illegal aliens are being let off easily, so easily in fact that they often repeat their crime multiple times.  That is not mistreatment or oppression by America.  It’s alien recidivism.

Let everyone who wishes to come to America legally do so.  Let those who are unwilling to keep the law be sent home.  By the way, the latest figures show that more than 10% of those who enter America illegally from the south are adherents of militant Islam.  Because the total number of illegal aliens is now in the tens of millions, you can begin to calculate how much more danger we are in because of the illegal influx of those who want us dead or destroyed.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, 30,147 illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico were apprehended in 2003; 44,614 were caught in 2004; 165,178 were nabbed in 2005; and 108,025 were detaied in 2006.  The great majority of them were apprehended along the U.S. Southwest border.  They came from 35 countries known to harbor Islamic terrorists.  Many were caught carrying terrorist literature, such as bomb-making guidebooks.

In other words, our border policy is about security, not bigotry.

In the theological circles where I move, Christian liberals go the accusation one better by throwing in passages from the Bible, like Exodus 22: 21:  "Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt."  But in this context that reference is misunderstood and misapplied.  That’s not what the current situation is all about.  If you want to find out what Exodus says about our current situation, you'll have to look up passages on the proper punishment of criminals.