The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) applauds the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) new initiative to crack down on the increasing violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. Deadly violence, perpetrated by Mexican organized crime rings, has been spilling across the border threatening the security of the United States.

The increased focus on securing the Southwest border should not come at the expense of other enforcement efforts. Controlling the violence is urgent, but the problem extends well into the interior of the U.S. The Mexican drug cartels which have turned the southwest border into a virtual war zone now operate in 230 cities across America, bringing murder, kidnappings and other criminal activities to every corner of this country. Without a strong interior enforcement component, the administration’s strategy will be doomed to failure.

In announcing the new initiative, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano noted that the $126.8 million the department is committing to the border security initiative will be “revenue neutral, funded by realigning from less urgent activities.” Previous statements by the secretary seem to indicate that enforcement efforts aimed at violent felons will come at the expense of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency’s other duties.

When criticized for trying to take on too many difficult tasks, President Obama has repeatedly replied that he and his administration are capable of multi-tasking. Stopping the criminal gangs operating along the border is vital, and we fully support the administration’s initiative, but enforcing other immigration laws – especially interior worksite enforcement - is essential to any strategy to end the mayhem along the border.

The long-term failure of the nation to enforce its immigration laws is responsible for creating the chaos along the border now being exploited by criminal organizations. The long-term failure to carry out interior enforcement operations has provided cover for the same criminal gangs to establish footholds all across the ....United States.....

The plan announced by the administration, we all hope, will address some of the symptoms of policy failures that occurred long before President Obama took office. But, as the president has noted in formulating economic recovery policies, we must also address the underlying causes of the violence that plagues our Southwest border. Those causes cannot be remedied by a strategy that abandons other immigration enforcement efforts, including worksite enforcement, cooperation with state and local police, and the elimination of non-essential benefits and services to people who are in the country illegally.

The violent criminal gangs are taking advantage of the conditions created by unenforced immigration policies. Until those policies are enforced, and order is restored, the criminal gangs will continue to flourish both at the border and in cities and towns all across America.

The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, New York Times and hundreds of U.S. newspapers frequently publish stories on legal and illegal migrants struggling to make a new home in America. Those pieces, filled with sob stories enough to empty a box of Kleenex at a 'chick flick'--provide fodder for a never ending flood of immigrants seeking a better life.

But they never talk about the other side of the coin as those immigrants impact American citizens. Those newspapers never talk about jobs taken from American citizens by legal and illegal immigrants. They fail to talk about 28 million Americans living on food stamps or 14 million Americans unemployed because immigrants take millions of jobs annually. They fail to tell readers that taxpayers pay for the plane flights, resettlement costs, food, medical, education and housing for immigrants.

I've traveled in Nepal and Bhutan. Their cultures feature water buffalo for tractors and no electricity in their rural areas. They walk everywhere along with their donkeys they use for transport of goods. Melanie Asmar, RMN journalist, reported that Som Baral from Bhutan, a teacher, now bags groceries at King Soopers in Denver. His wages and taxes cannot come close to paying for the costs of his daughter's education in our schools. He and his family suffer with culture shock that few of us can understand. Let's say you found yourself thrust from Denver metro onto a farm in Bhutan. How would you like to drink out of a stream, plant crops by hand and use an outhouse 100 percent of the time, and no more TV or electricity? You would never see another movie. You'd go nuts in a week! Think how they feel changing from a farm, third world culture, different language and family—to Denver!

Worse, we displaced a teacher out of Bhutan that impoverishes that country far more by taking an educated man away from his culture. Thus, both brain drain and leadership skills flit away into America where Baral stands at the bottom of the intellectual and economic rung. America creates a brain drain all over the world that impoverishes all those countries—leaving them with bankrupted educational systems and economies. In other words, we steal their best and brightest.

Asmar reported Colombian Josefina Castro said, "I like it here, but I want to go back to Columbia." Her federal aid runs out next year. She's 80 so she hasn't worked or given a dime in taxes. That happens to our country by the millions of refugee immigrants—cost us untold billions of dollars.

Whether they come from Somalia, Burma or Ethiopia, they find themselves ripped out of their cultures, languages and family connections. They arrive in the USA without any skills that benefit America. They cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in resettlement costs. They become cab drivers, grocery baggers, lawn mowing laborers and other jobs that require no skills other than showing up. At the same time, they take jobs away from American teens, working poor and other Americans—who now stand in unemployment lines, soup kitchens and living on welfare.

In order to save all the suffering people of the world, the U.S. would have to immigrate 18 million people annually that starve to death worldwide. That's eight million adults and 10 million children that die of starvation or related diseases annually! Can we save all of them? No! How about saving them in their own countries? How about helping them with water purification, farming techniques and family planning?

Beyond the sob stories and the human misery, those reporters never talk about the horrific impact of adding 2.4 million immigrants to the USA annually. Each one causes a 12.6 'ecological footprint' whereby 12.6 acres of land must be destroyed to support that person. The average immigrant causes an immediate 10 times more negative impact to as high as 30 times more impact on our delicate environment. Each immigrant overloads our water supplies, energy availability and carrying capacity. Those people represent a growing hyper-population load on the United States that cannot be tolerated as we head into the "Post Oil Era" whereby we cannot support 306 million U.S. citizens and growing toward 400 million in 30 years.

I invite all U.S. newspapers to write about what America faces when our "unending growth" causes our water to run out, the energy declines and what we face when California adds its projected 30 million people, Florida adds 18 million, Texas 12 million, Arizona five million and every state adds millions more—primarily by immigration. Those immigrants create the exact same disaster in our country from the one they fled in their on nations!

Ironically, the world grows by 77 million desperately poor and starving each year. We cannot save them by bringing them to our country! We face mega planetary consequences that explode beyond most readers' comprehension. The more we bring to America, the worse it gets for all of us—faster! If you think I'm fooling, I recommend reading "The Long Emergency" By Kunstler and "Peak Everything" by Heinberg or my forthcoming book "Nation on the Brink: The Next Added 100 Million Americans."

Since the American female averages a sustainable 2.03 children on average, everything we face stems from hyper-population loading caused by legal and illegal immigration. Sixty years from now, if not stopped, future journalists will write stories about desperate Americans scratching out a living in a country gasping for its life under the load of 600 million people. We can no longer afford mass immigration into America if we expect a viable and sustainable civilization. As it stands today, we face enormous problems beyond most peoples' comprehension.

© 2008 Frosty Wooldridge - All Rights Reserved

Earlier this month, Congress and President Bush committed $700 billion of our children's and grandchildren's money in a desperate effort to stave off a financial meltdown. Judging from the reaction of the markets, that sum may only be a small down payment on the real cost of decades of criminally irresponsible policies promulgated in Washington and on Wall Street.

Even from our vantage point in the midst of an unfolding catastrophe, its causes are easily identifiable: Greed and reckless expediency on Wall Street and greed and reckless irresponsibility in Washington. On Wall Street, the masters of this nation's financial system enriched themselves by dreaming up ever more complex schemes to buy and sell debt, knowing all the while that the sustainability of these schemes depended on perpetually rising real estate values. In Washington, the people who were supposed to be the public's watchdogs were greedily feeding at corporate troughs and, in many cases, pressuring financial markets to act even more irresponsibly to satisfy certain constituencies.

At the intersection of Greed and Recklessness & Greed and Recklessness stands U.S. immigration policy. Immigrants are not to blame for the nation's economic crisis, but immigration policy as it has been implemented (or ignored) over the past several decades is both emblematic of and a major contributing factor to the circumstances that landed our nation in the current mess.

Immigration policies have flooded the American labor market with tens of millions of workers we neither need, nor could really afford. The net effect of decades of mass immigration was a heavily subsidized labor force that was sustainable only as long as the industries that employed them could pass the costs off to the public sector, and government could get away with borrowing vast sums of money.

As the number of immigrants grew, they, and self-anointed ethnic advocacy networks, became a political force to be reckoned with. Under extreme pressure from groups like the National Council of La Raza to increase minority home "ownership," politicians from both parties leaned on the financial industry to make irresponsible mortgage loans, even if it meant waiving sound lending practices.

Given the mess we're in, continued mass immigration and a massive amnesty for current illegal aliens (which both Barack Obama and John McCain support) are special interest perks that this nation can no longer afford.

An illegal alien amnesty must be taken off the table.

The bad economy coupled with a belated enforcement effort by the Bush Administration have resulted in modest declines in the number of illegal aliens, but there are still in excess of 11 million living here. The economic and social costs of implementing any sort of legalization program - staggering under the best of circumstances - would be unsustainable in light of current realities.

Amnesty would further devastate workers.

While it's true that millions of people who would be eligible for amnesty are already in the labor market, the impact is concentrated in a few sectors. Amnesty would instantly affect the entire labor market, as millions of newly legalized workers would be able to compete for jobs even in sectors that had previously refrained from hiring them because of their immigration status.

The federal bureaucracy could not manage an amnesty.

A massive bureaucracy would be required to administer an amnesty program. The cost and manpower necessary to process millions of applications, screen out fraud, and carry out meaningful background checks, would likely costs tens of billions of dollars. In fact, symptomatic of the culture of irresponsibility that has gripped Washington, no amnesty proponent has ever bothered to even estimate the costs.

State and local governments are even less able to manage the costs of amnesty.

Most of the costs for an illegal alien amnesty would be borne by cash-strapped state and local governments. At a time when revenues are way down as a result of declining real estate values and rising unemployment, and social costs are rising because more people are using benefits and services, amnesty could bankrupt many states and localities. Nobody knows how many (because nobody has bothered to ask), but amnesty would inevitably result in millions of new kids crowding into public schools and millions of new medically uninsured relying on public health care. Because of the educational level and job skills of most illegal aliens, they would remain heavily subsidized even after they are brought "out of the shadows."

Government mandated immigration must also be reduced.

Insanely, even as our economy has been shedding jobs at an alarming rate (some 750,000 so far this year), not only isn't Washington adjusting legally mandated immigration downward, they are pushing for increases. Even as the economy was collapsing around them, the House Immigration Subcommittee approved a measure to "recapture" some 570,000 unissued green cards going back to 1992, while in the Senate Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) single-handedly prevented reauthorization of the E-Verify system in order to force the issuance of these new green cards. Instead of adding 570,000 new immigrants - on top of the million or so we are already admitting legally - at a time when our economy and labor market are contracting, the numbers should be reduced to reflect the harsh new economic realities.

The common denominator among all the factors that have led to this national (and probably global) crisis is the complete abandonment by financial institutions and the government of any sense that they have any responsibility beyond the next quarter's profit sheet or the next election. Immigration is a prime example to the sort of self-interested policies that helped create the current situation, and which must be changed if we are ever to find our way out of this morass.

Nothing illustrates the all-consuming desire of the segment of the political left that seeks to transform America through immigration than the reaction, of lack thereof, to the murder of Jamiel Shaw Jr. While people like Rodney King and Tawana Brawley have had their moments in the national spotlight for being victims of real and imagined crimes, few outside of Jamiel's hometown of Los Angeles have ever heard of him.

One reason most people have never heard of Jamiel is that they never got the chance. Jamiel was murdered on March 2 at age 17. He was a young man with a very promising future. A star running back on his high school football team, Jamiel was also a good enough student to be recruited to play college ball at Stanford, one of the elite universities in the nation. Jamiel's mother, Army Sergeant Anita Shaw, was on active duty serving her country in Iraq at the time of her son's murder.

The suspect who allegedly gunned Jamiel down near his home in the Arlington Heights section of Los Angeles is Pedro Espinosa, a known member of the notorious 18th Street Gang and an illegal alien. Only a day before Jamiel's murder, Espinosa had been released from custody after having been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. Because of policies that deliberately bar police in Los Angeles and many other cities from investigating the immigration status of people they arrest, Espinosa was turned back out onto the streets, rather than remanded to federal immigration authorities.

One more fact that shouldn't really matter, but does in a political environment consumed by issues of race and ethnicity: Jamiel Shaw Jr. was black.

Under other circumstances the senseless and brutal murder of a young black man would have sparked howls of righteous indignation from the self-anointed black leadership in America. People like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, who can organize angry protests on a moment's notice, would have been out on the streets demanding justice for Jamiel and demanding investigations into the circumstances that allowed a violent criminal like Espinosa back into the community.

That has not happened, anymore than it happened last summer when an illegal alien gang member who had also been released from police custody murdered three black college students in Newark, New Jersey, and critically wounded a fourth. Nor have we heard so much as a peep from the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, or any other established black leadership organization – all of whom are ideologically committed to granting amnesty to illegal aliens and still higher levels of immigration to the U.S.

City authorities in Los Angeles, however, have been quick to react. Shortly after Jamiel's murder, the Los Angeles City Council by an 11-1 vote approved a resolution opposing a bipartisan congressional bill that would substantially improve enforcement against illegal immigration, declaring it "mean-spirited and intentionally divisive." The council's resolution was followed by a letter from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in which he pleaded for an end to federal enforcement raids against Los Angeles businesses that hire illegal aliens. The mayor expressed his consternation about the impact these enforcement measures are having on business owners in Los Angeles and on the psyches of folks living illegally in his city.

When the grieving Shaw family was finally given the opportunity to address the Los Angeles City Council to implore city leaders to at least allow police to look into the immigration status of criminals they arrest, they were essentially told that however tragic their son's murder, the politics of immigration and the concerns of illegal immigrants come first in Los Angeles.

Councilman Bill Rosendahl condescendingly explained that the reasons for city policies that shield illegal immigrants – even those who commit crimes – were far too complex for them to grasp and that further discussion needs to be put off for another time. Councilman Richard Alarcon angrily accused outsiders of trying to exploit Jamiel's murder to divide communities in Los Angeles.

Sadly, not much is likely to change as a result of Jamiel Shaw's murder. For those committed to transforming America through immigration, he is nothing more than collateral damage in their ideological battle.

The story is a familiar one. An illegal alien who had previously been apprehended or stopped by a local police officer is released back onto the streets of this country because local policies prohibit cops from acting on suspicion that the individual is here illegally. That illegal alien then goes on to kill or maim some innocent member of the community, while the people who instituted the sanctuary policies in the first place point the finger of blame at someone else.

On the night of August 4, the crime, allegedly committed by an illegal alien who had previously been in police custody, was so brutal that even the most fervent protectors of illegal aliens were forced to reconsider their sanctuary policies.

On that summer evening, four college students were gunned down in cold blood in Newark, New Jersey, killing three of them and leaving the fourth in critical condition. The community's anger and grief turned to outrage when it was revealed a few days later that the chief suspect in the murders was an illegal alien who had previously been arrested for other heinous crimes, including the sexual abuse of a five-year-old.

Jose Carranza, the prime suspect, is an illegal alien from Peru, who at the time of the murders was facing other serious felony charges, but had been released on bail because no one in the Newark Police Department, or in the Essex County prosecutor's office, had bothered to look into his immigration status. A second suspect was later revealed to also be an illegal alien.

Newark is a sanctuary city, having formally adopted policies that bar local police from seeking information about a suspect's immigration status, or reporting illegal aliens to federal authorities. In all likelihood, had Carranza's immigration status been known, he would have been denied bail as a flight risk, and Terrance Aeriel, Dashon Harvey and Iofemi Hightower would all be alive, and Natasha Aeriel would not be fighting for her life.

The Newark murders also coincided with efforts by state officials to make illegal aliens feel more welcome in New Jersey. In early August, Gov. Jon Corzine announced the formation of a blue ribbon commission tasked with finding ways to help guide illegal aliens on their pathway to citizenship.

As the facts of the case came to light, public anger boiled over as people learned that these crimes could easily have been prevented, but that their local governments had adopted policies that placed the protection of illegal aliens ahead of the protection of law-abiding citizens. That public outrage finally forced local officials to take action. On August 22, state Attorney General Anne Milgram issued a law enforcement directive setting down new guidelines for police in New Jersey.

Under Milgram's directive, whenever a law enforcement officer "makes an arrest for any indictable crime, or for driving while intoxicated, the arresting officer, or a designated officer, as part of the booking process, shall inquire about the arrestee's citizenship, nationality and immigration status." The change in policy, unfortunately, comes too late for the Aeriel, Harvey and Hightower families, but if such policies are adopted and carried out nationwide, other families will be spared the grief that those New Jersey families have been forced to endure.

FAIR has fought vigorously against formal and de facto local policies that grant sanctuary to illegal aliens. In addition to creating an additional magnet for illegal immigration, these policies threaten the safety and security of ordinary citizens. Local police, in the course of carrying out their normal duties, who come across individuals whom they reasonably suspect are in the country illegal aliens, have an obligation to act on that suspicion, just as they would if they came across an individual who was sought by another police department. FAIR's field staff has worked extensively with local immigration reform activist groups who are seeking to have their communities participate in the 287(g) program, under which local police can receive federal training to help them identify and detain suspected illegal aliens.

In light of the senseless and preventable murders in Newark, all local sanctuary and non-cooperation policies must be repealed. Knowing the danger that these policies pose to innocent citizens, politicians and police chiefs who institute them must be held accountable when they result in avoidable tragedies such as the ones that took place in Newark.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the average worker at a meatpacking plant earns 35 percent less an hour than they did 30 years ago. And some labor experts say immigration is a factor in these declining wages. "Wage depression" is a term being used to describe the effect of companies artificially keeping wages down by employing illegal immigrants willing to work for a lower wage.

In a federal lawsuit in Cactus, Texas, former American workers accused a Swift meatpacking plant of doing just that. The workers claim their loss of income and declining standard of living is a direct result of the plant's illegal hiring practices. The owner of the country's second largest meatpacking plant, has stated the accusations to be false.

Last year, federal immigration agents raided several plants across the country, arresting more than a thousand illegal immigrants. With loss of wages and identity theft being key concerns, immigration groups are advocating for heavier sanctions against employers who break the law.

Click on the following link for a video on this report:  http://media.medialink.com/WebNR.aspx?story=33804