Wow! This thread has got me fuming. I live LITERALLY half a mile from the Texas/Mexico border, and with all due respect, most of the posts I have read thus far are completely ignorant to the real problems that exist down here. How does illegal immigration affect me personally? Let’s see, drug dealers using my property as drop off zones for people on this side of the border to pick up payloads. Just three weeks ago we found 300 lbs. of marijuana not 30 yards from my back yard. How about “coyotes” (human smugglers) poisening your dogs so they won’t alert people to the pressence of tresspassers. High speed chases between border patrol, sherriffs, coyotes, and drug runners barraling down the road in front of your house. Just last week the sheriffs department put out a warning to US citizens on our border that mexican drug gangs are going to start kidnapping american citizens who “squeal” or otherwise disrupt their business, take them to mexico and execute them. The sheriff in the county near me has set up check points on the american side of the bridge to ensure that all passengers in vehicles traveling into mexico are going of their own free will. What else, oh people coming to your house at all hours of the day and night asking for rides when their smuggler didn’t come to get them. Trash littering your property in the form of discarded clothes, shoes, plastic bags, etc. Oh, and have I mentioned the discrimination that I have personally experienced my whole life? I have been called everything in the book from the time I was a child. Since I grew up here I speak fluent spanish and it’s a good thing because if you don’t speak spanish you will not find a job anywhere in this area. Your probably asking yourself “why doesn’t she just move?” I would love to, but my family farms and you can’t take the land with you. So we have no choice but to deal with it. I homeschool my kids because the area schools are so bad they would not be safe. I mean it, that is not an exageration. We might as well live in another part of the world. Nothing around here resembles anything most of you take for granted as citizens of the US interior. The worst part of it is that no one seems to care about what is going on down here. No one cares about what we live with. It’s not that I want the borders to be shut down and never alow people to immigrate. But shutting down the border to illegals sneaking across is paramount to our safety and theirs. Do any of you know what happens to many of the people who are smuggled in here? Young women are often raped by the coyotes, they hang their panties on mesquite bushes as trophies of their crime. Some are put in brothels to work off the cost of getting here. Children are bought and sold to child porn rings in the US and smuggled here to be forever lost to the underworld of the child sex trade. I haven’t even mentioned the terrorist issue. Even the FBI now says that mexican drug cartels are providing identification, spanish names, transport across the border and even teaching terrorists to speak spanish so if they are caught illegaly in the US and show that they are mexican nationals(through forged documents) they are merely released and given a future court date to which they will never show up to. Yes, the church says that wealthy nations have an obligation to help the plight of the poor immigrant, but the church also says that nations should have laws that protect the common good of that nation. The US cannot be the liferaft to all of the developing nations of the world. What the US should do is demand that the corrupt politicians and leaders of these developing countries give their people the freedom to better their lives in there own countries. Also, immigration should be fair to all people from all countries and cultures. If 80% of people coming in to this country are from one cultural background and language, that ultimately leads to the replacement of the culture and language of the new country with that of the country of origin. In this senario the “melting pot” isn’t allowed to work. If, however, there is an equal amount of immigrants from all countries (ie a quota system) then no one incoming language or culture begins to dominate. Everyone must find common ground with which to deal with one another. They must learn a common language, form common ethics and moral standards. That is how things have worked since this nation’s beginning. That is not what is happening now. I respect the opinion of anything that comes from the Vatican, but, I follow the teaching of the church and the church says that nations have the right to sovereinty and to protection of that sovereignty for the common good of the nation.
