printHere’s an excerpt from my new WorldNetDaily column for Friday, April 4:
“[T]he Department of Homeland Security [has] proceeded to waive certain environmental laws for various project areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so as to begin completing, this time apparently in earnest, the 700 miles of fencing mandated by the ‘Secure Fence Act.’”
“The Act was forced on the ruling class in 2006 by a passionately non-partisan American public, sick and tired of the farce on the southwest front. Naturally, after the primping and preening that accompanies the signing of a bill into law just prior to midterm elections, the politicians promptly side-stepped the popular will…”
“That the government has used its discretionary waiver authority to temporarily suspend a few of its countless ‘land management’ laws, never vetted by voters, is no tragedy. In fact, government should waive more superfluous regulations if this means fulfilling its one constitutionally mandated function: defending the nation’s borders…”
Read “In Defense of The Fence” here (or on WND, where we lead the Commentary Page).
Update: In reply to some of the hysterical yelps of “tear down this wall”:
“If you really want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs, mention a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. … Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the ‘barbarians’ out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in.”
A fence is the quintessential non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest, or otherwise molest undesirables, you keep them at bay, away. This is why it’s so dishonest of libertarians to protest the fence. Other than utopian solutions that’ll never come to pass, there is no other option. Libertarians are not that stupid. They know this, which makes their position all the more callous. Even sicker do such people make me when they protest Israel’s security fence. It has cut by over 80 percent the number of Israelis maimed and murdered by suicide bombers.
“Other barriers that fail to move the ‘tear-down-this-wall’ humanitarians to do their St. Vitus Dance are those separating India and Pakistan, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyztan, Thailand and Malaysia, and Turkey and Syria (this one is mined).” And, as Joseph Farah points out in his latest column, Egypt is erecting a fence to keep the bad-tempered Gazans from hurting Egyptians.
I suspect that the kind of person screaming bloody murder about a barrier would change his tune if his property was being traipsed by trespassers day-in-and-out. Here’s the left-liberal Time magazine on the ordeal:
“When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.”
Or if his beloved fell pray to a member of a group so well-represented among the criminal class:
“Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.” In 2000 nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegal aliens. In 1995, already 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California was illegal. In the Mecklenburg County, where the sheriff recently broke with the country and began to enforce immigration law, “1,200 foreign-born people have been arrested since April, on charges ranging from traffic violations and trespassing to sex crimes, and nearly 600 have been found to be here illegally.”
Great piece, Ma’am — as usual! I nominate you as the next Secretary of DHS!
As a citizen who cares about our future as a nation, I have to say that this is about time! If it is purely for political purposes, that’s fine, we just have to keep agitating until the lawyers in D.C. realize they have to do it. One of the primary ways of deciding the “reasonable nature” of a principle in science is to use its extremes to test it. On this basis, the environmentalists are shown to be ridiculous. The extremes are easy, if we have too many people on earth, the only right number would be the extreme of zero. If a man’s life is “right”, the extreme is also easy, there is no tree, shrub or moss that should be saved at the expense of a man’s life. This is not to say the environment is of no value, but that all our actions much be taken with the consideration of what it will mean to “the people”. There were never extreme wild fires in California while the ranchers were leasing National land. They burned the accumulated detritus each year as they backed down the high parts as winter proceded. In so doing, there was never a build up of brush and burnables. It is because the ranchers were stopped, because cows change the landscape, that there is no one to burn out the waste, and it now accumulates sufficiently to cause hundreds of wild fires each year.
Ilana’s article correctly fingers the “environmental lobby” for its hypocrisy when it comes to the environmental damage done by illegal border crossers into the U. S.. If “greens” refuse to be consistent in addressing the causes of environmental damage, they should not be listened to, at all. That includes “Christian environmentalists” such as Pastor Rick Warren, who, to my knowledge, has never made a statement regarding damage to the U. S. environment caused by illegal border crossers.
I enjoyed the article. I also was tickled by what ILana said about McCain being a “new convert to conservatism”. Isn’t that the truth! I have said before, so I will say it once more: the USA has little hope on this “homeland security” when two border patrol agents are rotting away in federal prison for doing their job, and the drug trafficker is currently suing the US even though he is an illegal alien!
Martin Berrow
Well, so much for “the world’s only unfortified frontier”.*) The times really are a-changing.
*) Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom, p. 248
Excellent column, Ms. Mercer. It came at just the right time. An hour ago, I returned home from a shopping foray, shaking with anger. A new store, whose opening I had looked forward to, has gone politically correct. We stopped to read the store layout and in letters as large of the English equivelant, was the Spanish translation. I guess it will continue to gall me as long as I live that this once-proud nation has bowed down to a third world country by the astonishing act of their just walking in and taking over. What has happened that we have allowed it? I heard very few conversations in passing that were in English. I felt as though I’d wandered into a foreign country and this is just what we’ve been prepared for by our leaders to welcome the NAU.
I have been a bit surprised for some time by the percentage of libertarians who think that countries should have open borders. There are usually two reasons quoted for this attitude. First, that the right to move unimpeded from country to country should be regarded as a natural right and second that open trade in both material and people is economically sound policy. I simply disagree with the first cited reason, as countries are by nature political entities and not clearly related to natural rights. The second might be true if the situation responsible for migrations wasn’t simply the clear result of enormously asymmetric political and economic policies.
I’m confident that you’ve written on the topic in the past, and would welcome any pointers to your previous writings.
[The arguments I’ve rehashed over and over again all in the Immigration Archive.—IM]
If the international border of a country is considered the “common” property of its citizens, then I see no libertarian objection to the right to control immigration. And if the citizens choose to allow immigration, then why not limit new citizenship to those who have been assimilated, such as the children (or grandchildren) and later descendants of new immigrants?
[Actually, if assimilation is your criterion, then fewer and fewer immigrants ought to be allowed in to the US: the policy in schools—primary, secondary, and tertiary—is NOT to assimilate. The melting pot is no longer. Welcome to official multiculturalism.—IM]