PUERTO RICO HERALD: Hispanic Immigration Threatens U.S. Values

March 24, 2002
Copyright © 2002 THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC. All Rights Reserved.

Two years ago, while campaigning in Arizona, I drove south from Tucson to Douglas, the border town of 18,000 that had become a major avenue of invasion of the United States. In March 1999, the Border Patrol had apprehended 27,000 Mexicans crossing illegally.

While in Douglas, I visited Theresa Murray, an 82-year-old widow living in the Arizona desert she grew up in. Her ranch house was enveloped by a chain link fence topped with coils of razor wire. Every door and window had bars and was wired to an alarm. As she had been burglarized 30 times, Theresa slept with a pistol on her bed table. Her guard dogs were dead - bled to death when someone tossed meat with chopped glass in it over her fence.

This American lady was living out her years in a maximum-security prison in her own home because her government lacked the fortitude to defend the borders of the United States. And still does.

If America is about anything, it is freedom. But as Theresa Murray told a reporter: "I can't ever leave the house unless I have somebody watch it. . . . It used to be fun to live here. Now, it's hell. It's plain old hell. . . . I've lost my freedom."

And as Murray lived unfree in a hellish existence on the U.S. border, U.S. soldiers defended the borders of Kuwait, Korea and Kosovo. Yet, nothing is at risk there to compare with what is at risk on our border with Mexico, over which pass the armies of the night as they trudge endlessly north to the great cities of America.

Our country is being invaded, and a morally and politically paralyzed White House refuses to halt that invasion. Each year, the Border Patrol turns back 1.5 million illegal aliens breaking into our country, but an estimated 500,000 succeed.

Comes the angry retort: "What are you, a nativist? Immigrants from Mexico are just like your Irish and Scots-Irish ancestors of a century ago. They come to do the jobs Americans refuse to do."

First, it is huge. From 2 million Hispanics in 1960, the United States is now home to 36 million.

Second, much of it is illegal. By one estimate, there are 11 million illegal aliens in the United States, a number equal to the total population of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined.

Third, it is concentrated in one region, the Southwest. So overwhelming is that presence that "Anglos" are now a minority in California and will be a minority in Texas in three years. Native-born Americans are fleeing California at the rate of 100,000 a year.

Fourth, unlike the Irish who came here to become Americans, millions of Mexicans consider themselves patriots of Mexico. Many have no desire to assimilate and are determined to maintain their culture and language as a separate people, a nation within a nation. Moreover, they are coming to an America whose melting pot is broken, whose elites preach not assimilation but multiculturalism, a society that is breaking down on racial and ethnic lines as the integrationist ethos of the 1960s gives way to a separatist ethos.

Much of this Mexican population is hostile to the host country. A third of the early arrests of criminals who pillaged and burned Los Angeles in 1992 were illegal aliens. Illegal aliens have twice the crime rate of Americans. In the U.S.-Mexico soccer game in the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1998, 90,000 Mexicans booed the U.S. national anthem, tore down our flag and showered debris and garbage on the U.S. fans and U.S. team.

In the Texas town of El Cenizo, Spanish has been declared the official language, and any city official who helps the Immigration and Naturalization Service run down illegal aliens is fired.

At Berkeley, conservative students who objected to a Latino student organization, MEChA, calling them "gringos," were threatened with death and saw their student newspaper edition seized and destroyed.

"The American Southwest seems to be slowly returning to the jurisdiction of Mexico without firing a shot," exulted Excelsior, Mexico's national newspaper.

"Even though I am saying this part serious, part joking, I believe we are practicing La Reconquista in California," said Mexican consul Jose Pescador Osuna in 1998.

Now President Bush has persuaded the House to grant amnesty to a million Mexican illegal aliens, putting them on the fast track to U.S. citizenship. Said Sen. Robert Byrd: This is "lunacy."

On Sept. 11, we Americans found that our open borders had been exploited by crazed killers who slaughtered 3,000 members of our family. We must wake up. This is our home. If we allow it to become an international flophouse and crash pad for any who want to come here, we will prove the unworthy heirs of those who died to make America the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Patrick J. Buchanan, Reform Party candidate for president in 2000, is author of The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC

Hispanic Immigration Threatens U.S. Values

BY Patrick J. Buchanan