Whose Country Is This?
By Patrick J. Buchanan
"With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has
ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal
aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.
Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its
constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to
enforce America's immigration laws.
"We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to
act," said Gov. Jan Brewer. "But decades of inaction and misguided
policy have created an unacceptable situation."
We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in
Washington.
What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it
that federal laws are faithfully executed?
He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic
lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this
invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he
attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in
law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.
He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice
Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate
anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the
people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of
thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.
How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?
Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.
Undeniably, making it a state as well as a federal crime to be in this
country illegally, and requiring police to check the immigration
status of anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" is here illegally,
is tough and burdensome. But what choice did Arizona have?
The state has a fiscal crisis caused in part by the burden of
providing schooling and social welfare for illegals and their
families, who consume far more in services than they pay in taxes and
who continue to pour in. Even John McCain is now calling for 3,000
troops on the border.
Police officers and a prominent rancher have been murdered. There have
been kidnappings believed to be tied to the Mexican drug cartels.
There are nightly high-speed chases through the barrios where innocent
people are constantly at risk.
If Arizona does not get control of the border and stop the invasion,
U.S. citizens will stop coming to Arizona and will begin to depart, as
they are already fleeing California.
What we are talking about here is the Balkanization and breakup of a
nation into ethnic enclaves. A country that cannot control its borders
isn't really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan reminded us.
The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that
belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border
Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.
Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds
won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on
the desk of the president of the United States.
Why is Obama paralyzed? Why does he not enforce the law, even if he
dislikes it, by punishing the businessmen who hire illegals and by
sending the 12 million to 20 million illegals back home? President
Eisenhower did it. Why won't he?
Because he is politically correct. Because he owes a big debt to the
Hispanic lobby that helped deliver two-thirds of that vote in 2008.
Though most citizens of Hispanic descent in Arizona want the border
protected and the laws enforced, the Hispanic lobby demands that the
law be changed.
Fair enough. But the nation rose up as one to reject the "path-to-
citizenship"—i.e., amnesty—that the 2007 plan of George W. Bush,
McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama envisioned.
Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets
against the new Arizona law. Let him go.
Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the
8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them
or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are
themselves paying the heaviest price.
Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the
U.S. government—Bush and Obama both—issued 1,131,000 green cards to
legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood
of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.
What are we doing to our own people?
Whose country is this, anyway?
America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the
immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of
those laws.
Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to
deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.
This is not an option. It is an obligation.
Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?"
http://www.vdare.com/buchanan/100426_whose_country.htm