The US needs a real plan to fix immigration crisis
MAD AS HELL: Demonstrators in Indianapolis hold signs from an overpass during a protest Friday against people who immigrate illegally.
By Steve Wilson | Mississippi Watchdog
Back in 1994, the United States dealt with a different immigration crisis. Instability in Haiti led to thousands riding on everything that would float to head north.
I was a youngster, fresh out of high school, on a Coast Guard cutter loaded with hundreds of migrants we’d rescued from a primitive sailing vessel that barely managed to stay afloat in a light chop.
The administration of Bill Clinton dithered on deciding whether the migrants should be taken to Miami or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Our 270-foot cutter sailed in endless circles waiting for the political calculations to be finally computed. In the end, we dropped them off at Gitmo so they could be repatriated back to Haiti.
The endless circles of our cutter burning diesel fuel is a rough analogue for our present immigration issue.
In the arguments about the diaspora pouring out of Central America and over our southern border, one group is lost in the maelstrom.
Legal immigrants.
They’re your friends and neighbors. They took the oath of citizenship and passed a test, the culmination of a confusing, expensive, multi-year process just to be accepted. They didn’t take a shortcut across the southern border.
MOORING UP: The United States Coast Guard medium endurance cutter USCGC Thetis pulls into Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to take on fuel, stores and conduct training evolutions.
We can pity the underage illegal immigrants and their sad journey north, with some of them even dying, but nothing can change their first act upon entering our country was one of defiance of our laws.
Now here, they can reside while waiting for a hearing that could take years to schedule. Is it fair to those who did it the right way? Not at all.
This is a product of our political class, both Republicans and Democrats. To the Republicans and their big business allies, the flood tide of illegals represent a massive source of cheap workers. To the Democrats, they represent a turning of the tide electorally.
Who loses? We all do. Some of these “children” are gang members seeking a life of crime north of the border. Some bring Third World diseases that need to be quarantined until they received treatment. That was Ellis Island’s purpose.
And who else is sneaking under the fence? Terrorists?
Can we really afford to be a nation with open borders and a welfare state? Our cities and counties are already fiscally tapped out. The federal government is facing a debt crisis our pampered perpetual political class does nothing to fix. Yet President Obama wants to spend several billion to feed, educate and clothe these unfortunates. How long? Days? Months? Years?
A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We can’t provide a home and a warm bed for every starving child of the Third World.
Like those Haitians several decades ago, a lifeboat too crowded will always sink. And if we don’t come up with a logical immigration policy, we’re headed for the same fate with no Coast Guard to throw us a lifeline.
