What if you had an evil twin? And what if every evil act committed by your evil twin was blamed on you. What would your life be like?
Such evil twins now number in the millions; they are called illegal aliens. One American citizen, Audra Schmierer, has at least eighty-one nasty twins in 17 states. That’s how many people were using her Social Security number illegally. Evidence derived from tax documents and criminal investigations strongly suggested that most of these people were illegal border crashers. They used Audra’s Social Security number from Florida to Washington State to obtain employment at fast food joints, construction sites and major high-tech companies. They used her number to open bank accounts. Most of these people worked for more than one employer in the same year.
Ms. Schmierer has obtained more than two hundred W-2 and 1099 tax documents that include her Social Security number – but different names. She even went so far as to file a police report naming a man who used her personal data to secure illegal employment with companies near Haltom City, Texas. When found, the man told officers he had purchased a fake Social Security card at a flea market. The cops let him go free; he was not arrested. Ms. Schmierer lamented that “They knew what was happening but wouldn’t do anything. One name, one number, why can’t they just match it up?”
Good question. They could just “match it up,” but bureaucrats have no incentive to protect American citizens. The Internal Revenue Service sometimes fines an employer a mere 50 bucks when it discovers a duplicate Social Security number. That’s all. The fine is so small that companies dismiss it as a cost of doing business. Employers are not required to verify Social Security numbers or any documentation offered by job seekers. As the law now stands, if the IRS or the Social Security Service discovers several people using the same Social Security number, these agencies are empowered to send letters to employers informing them of possible errors. Social Security spokesman Lowell Kepke tells us that “Sending letters is the limit to what can be done. We expect that will be able to fix any records that are incorrect.” Rarely do the Social Security bureaucrats share any information about mismatched names and numbers with law enforcement agencies.
Meanwhile, Audra Schmierer received a letter from the IRS demanding $15,813 in back taxes. This was news to Audra who hadn’t been employed outside her home since her son was born five years earlier. It didn’t bother the IRS that a housewife who lived in a San Francisco suburb owed taxes on employment in Texas. Things got worst for Audra when she was denied employment because a woman in Texas had used Audra’s number two years earlier. “How do you prove who you are,” she asked. “It’s like you are guilty until proven innocent.”
Worse yet, immigration officers detained Audra for four hours in a Dallas airport when she returned from a trip to Mexico with her husband. Why? Because one of her evil twins was wanted for the commission of a felony. No American citizen is immune from Audra’s ordeals. It is common practice for document counterfeiters to select numbers at random. One of these crooks might randomly choose your number at any moment.
The Problem with Mr. Bush
When George W. Bush became America’s chief executive officer he assumed control of an Immigration and Naturalization Service that was so incompetent that it couldn’t tell to the nearest million how many illegal aliens were freely roaming our country. An educated guess would be about eight million, though informed guesses go as high as eleven million. At least 125,000 illegal aliens from the Middle East were somewhere in America on September 11th, 2001. Most of them are still unaccounted for. Not only has Mr. Bush done nothing to remedy this dangerous situation; his administration has exerted itself to disassociate illegal immigration from discussions of terrorism. Mr. Bush’s personal deference to big agriculture and the meat packers and other enthusiasts of cheap labor has disposed him to ignore his constitutionally mandated obligation to enforce all the laws, not just those laws that will not inconvenience his political contributors. If a beat cop behaved this way we would say he had been bribed. Mr. Bush also proposed an amnesty program for Mexican sneak-ins shortly before the 2004 election as a way of enhancing his curb appeal to Hispanics. That’s called pandering. Mr. Bush is choosing which laws to enforce based on polling numbers.
What sort of president permits illegal aliens to compete with his country’s legal residents and citizens? Certainly not presidents named Vicente Fox or Felipe Calderon. Just try roaming about Mexico without proper immigration papers. You won’t make it past the first well-armed road block.
After the 2004 election George Bush gave his State of the Union address, during which he made the nonsensical assertion that his proposed amnesty plan for illegal sneak-ins was not an amnesty plan. The truth is that any plan that does not require illegal aliens to return to their homelands and apply for legal entry into the United States is an amnesty plan. The border crashers don’t want to be citizens; they want lots of Yankee dollars. They are content with any plan that permits them to remain inside America’s borders. That works for Mexico’s president as well: the gushing river of cash that Mexican citizens are sending home to Mexico is Mexico’s second largest source of income. Only Pemex, Mexico’s nationalized oil industry pumps more money into Mexico’s mismanaged economy. The bunglers who rule socialist Mexico are eager to export the impoverished victims of Mexican socialism to the United States because the wealth they earn in capitalist America props up their failing economy. By playing along with Vicente Fox our president also propped up ruinous Mexican socialism.
Is President Bush really so stupid as to believe that his plan isn’t an amnesty? Does he really believe that bestowing “guest-worker” status on eight million counter-jumping hustlers will magically cure America’s border problems? Or does he believe that we are stupid enough to believe such nonsense? Either the man is a dolt or he does not respect our intelligence.
In November of 2004 Mr. Bush tried to coax Congress to adopt a few of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations. A few conservatives insisted that the legislation include denying driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; sadly there were actually enough congressmen who wanted illegal aliens to have access to this gateway document to get this provision dropped from the legislation. Just to remind you: the nineteen Muslim fanatics who collapsed two skyscrapers onto thousands of American citizens were in possession of sixty-three driver’s licenses when they hopped their flights on September 11th, 2001. Sometime after the World Trade Center had been reduced to ruins a postman delivered Mohammad Atta’s spanking new student visa to the Muslim martyr’s address. I guess they don’t follow the news at the State Department.
So that’s our present condition: our nation’s chief law enforcement officer is not serious about policing our nation’s borders and Congress is not serious about restricting access to legitimizing documentation, such as driver’s licenses, by millions of foreigners, many of whom have arrived from nations that sponsor terrorist murder. Let’s call this behavior by its real name: aiding and abetting. Our elected officials have chosen to become accessories after the fact to millions of criminal break-ins at our nation’s borders.
The Fake ID Marketplace
Authentic-looking driver’s licenses and Social Security cards can be bought for as little as $150 in MacArthur Park. This Los Angeles public park is a marketplace for hawkers of false IDs who act as front men for complex counterfeiting networks.
Some of those who come seeking fake ID are teenagers who want to socialize at bars. Some are felons whose criminal histories make working or voting under their true identities difficult. Most of those who patronize the counterfeiters are illegal aliens who wouldn’t need bogus documents if they had entered America honorably.
The ID vendors in MacArthur Park transact sales openly, but never carry the bogus documents with them. The sidewalk vendors negotiate the price of the fake documents and then direct the purchaser to a more secluded spot blocks away from the park. At that place the purchaser’s photograph is taken and the customer hands over his cash. A package deal that includes a driver’s license, a Social Security card and a green card might go for $300, tops.
Maria Zuniga, a self-identified illegal alien from Honduras who traffics in counterfeit documents, justified her criminal enterprise this way: “This is the government’s fault. They won’t even give us a number to work or a driver’s license.” It never occurred to Ms. Zuniga that no government on this planet rolls out the red carpet for sneak-ins who don’t respect their laws.
“We are not trying to do anything bad,” said Mexican border crasher Sergio Guitierrez, who also traffics in counterfeit documents. “Immigrants just need to work.” Well, the traffickers may not be trying to harm American citizens, but they are harming them all the same. If millions of alien invaders need many millions of counterfeit documents, then millions of American citizens are at risk of having their Social Security numbers, their identities and their good reputations pilfered by foreigners who “just need to work.” No person who respects the laws of America ever needs counterfeit documents. It should also be noted that none of these border crashers is fleeing from famine. They all look well fed, if not obese. Their lives do not depend upon securing employment in the United States; these folks are just attempting to make more money, which is not reason enough to thumb their noses at our national sovereignty.
The Counterfeiters
The fake document trade ain’t what it used to be. In bygone years law enforcement officers could bust a counterfeiting gang by raiding a “document mill” where passports, driver’s licenses and Social Security cards would be drying beside a ponderous printing press. Those days are long gone. Today the counterfeiters use light-weight printers, illegal software and portable laptop computers.
The Pelcastre brothers demonstrated just how portable counterfeiting can be. When New Jersey state troopers entered the guestroom at the Holiday Inn in North Bergen the Pelcastre brothers, Angel and Jorge, were busy cranking out fake documents with a computer and printer. From receipts found in the room the cops surmised that the brothers traveled around the country selling fraudulent ID, including driver’s licenses from all fifty states. The police seized an estimated $500,000 worth of bogus paper, including Social Security cards and passports. The brothers, who were traveling with their families under the pretense of a family vacation, were arrested and charged with conspiring to sell fraudulent documents.
The quality of their work was very good. “With this documentation you’d really be able to do anything in the United States – travel, apply for a job, apply for a credit card – all while hiding your true identity,” remarked State Police Captain Al Della Fave.
A search of their cars and storage locker turned up 500 Social Security cards that cops believe were about to be sold to a broker for $6000 and resident alien cards. Also found were laminating materials bearing the security markings used on U.S. passports.
The Pelcastres had a court appearance on July 20, 2006 and were transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement which is trying to figure out their country of origin. Angel and Jorge provided the State Police with phony identification. They face a maximum stretch of 14 years.
After the customers in MacArthur Park have their photos taken, their cash changes hands a few times before it reaches the apartment where a laptop, a printer and a laminating machine will crank out the bogus IDs. A runner will deliver the fakes to the buyer back at the park. One anonymous forger who claims to have made over 400 fake driver’s licenses told the New York Times that “If you know how to use Photoshop and a simple Epson printer, you can print ID’s in your dorm room.” As the Times explained:
“Gone are the days of the art major down the hall who was a wizard with an X-Acto knife, a stencil and some super glue. Using Internet resources and sophisticated computer graphics software, college students are forging drivers’ licenses of startlingly good quality, complete with shimmering holograms, special inks and data encoding that can fool police and even occasionally the latest generation of scanners. To hear law enforcement officers tell it, in the fake-ID arms race the kids are winning.”
According to Steven Ernst, the San Diego administrator of the California Alcohol Beverage Control Department, “In terms of color, the typeset and the hologram they’re real, real good. Most can’t be picked out by the naked eye.” There are on-line chat rooms that are dedicated to the topic of the manufacture of fraudulent documents, including corporate ID cards. Contributors to the chat rooms include unscrupulous driver’s license bureau employees who share or sell information about the security features of IDs. Buyers can order barcodes and sophisticated holograms on the Internet. Some offshore counterfeiting operations solicit students to be their sales reps on American campuses.
“ID’s made by students tend to be much better than ID’s you buy in the Village or Times Square,” a 19-year-old Columbia sophomore told the New York Times. “All my friends have fake ID’s, everyone I know from high school and all my friends at school. It’s definitely a necessity,” she added.
That notion of necessity keeps the fraud gangs afloat. The fake document trade threatens the rest of us because a fake driver’s license is a passport for anyone to board a commercial jumbo jet. If a member if the Bin Laden gang can easily pass himself off as Sol Goldstein, then we are menaced. Enterprising frauds can make their own bogus documents with software from the Web. High-quality graphics templates for most state drivers’ licenses – complete with intricate backgrounds and authentic color schemes – are available. Specialty and office supply websites now offer the budding crook laminating machines of the sort that were once available only to license bureaus. The information on ID magnetic strips can be erased with a magnet and rewritten using simple equipment. Barcodes can be copied from a legitimate ID. The customer’s photo can be taken with a webcam. Nothing more is required. Just fill in the personal info and laminate the ID. The best fakes now sell for 50 to 200 bucks. Penalties for possession of a counterfeit driver’s license are a state prerogative. In the state of New York it is a felony punishable by a seven year stretch in the slammer.
It goes without saying that the very best documentation is the genuine article issued by a government agency but tricked out with bogus personal information. The very existence of large communities of illegal aliens within the United States who are eager to acquire empowering documentation is an enormous financial incentive for government employees to sell us out. And then there are those stupid government programs that make it easy for scammers to game the system.
For example: The ringleader of an interstate criminal network that shuttled illegal Hispanic border jumpers from New Jersey to Tennessee to acquire easy-to-get driver’s certificates, was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison on April 19th, 2006. Zeneida Concepcion Rivera, 55, speaking through a Spanish interpreter, told a Knoxville judge, “I did not force anybody to come to this state. I was not doing business with these people. I was helping them.” With a straight face she insisted that she was providing a service for hardworking immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Phillips was unconvinced. He noted wryly testimony that Ms. Rivera had reamed each hardworking immigrant for fifteen hundred to $2,000 for a driving certificate. He called her behavior “egregious.” Her claim that she “was not doing business with these people” was simply preposterous.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Theodore observed that Tennessee’s certificate program had made his state a “magnet” for illegal aliens seeking legitimacy. Rivera had brought more than 100 illegals from New Jersey to Knoxville over a two-year period. Her’s was one of three such license-acquisition conspiracies uncovered in Tennessee. Rivera pled guilty to conspiracy to produce bogus documents and Judge Phillips slapped her with the maximum sentence. Rivera’s attorney called her crime a “misadventure;” he pompously asserted that she was no more a “victimizer” than an America that accepts illegals washing its windows and cutting its lawns. Huh? Since when is giving someone a few bucks to wash a window the moral equivalent of charging them two thousand dollars for a bogus driver’s certificate? Oh, I forgot: he’s a lawyer; he’s paid to fling bullshit in our faces.
And then there is Wojciech Ostroski, 35, who hatched a scam that funneled hundreds of Michigan driver’s licenses to a few addresses in Lansing, Michigan. Court records detail how Ostroski and another Polish citizen brought illegal Polish immigrants from a Polish enclave in New Jersey to the Lansing area. For a fee of $1,000 or more these scammers assisted the Polish illegals to fill out driver’s license applications using fake addresses.
Sounding very much like Ms. Rivera’s lawyer, Mr. Ostrowski’s lawyer, Roman Kosiorek, announced that his client “had nothing to do with any plan or intent to defraud anybody.” Said lawyer Kosiorek: “People asked him to drive to Michigan and they offered him gas money and that’s what he did.”
A thousand dollars each for gasoline? Let’s see . . . at two bucks a gallon and 20 miles per gallon that’s enough fuel to drive each passenger ten thousand miles. If there are six passengers, then they can all travel together for 60,000 miles. And it’s how far from New Jersey to Michigan? Maybe Mr. Ostrowski gets lost a lot.
Mr. Ostrowski and his accomplice ran their interstate shuttle service from June 2002 until July of 2004. In 2004, after a review of Michigan’s license issuing procedures, Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land began requiring that all adults applying for their first driver’s license or personal ID card present proof of Michigan residency. As a result of the Ostrowski investigation Michigan cancelled about 300 previously issued driver’s licenses.
The Metro section of the August 19th, 2004 New York Times included a first-page article titled “Immigrants Face Loss of Licenses in ID Crackdown.” The article explained that New York was “home to an estimated 500,000 of the nation’s 10 million illegal immigrants” and that “behind the scenes” and with “little public debate” “public officials at the State Department of Motor Vehicles have begun a crackdown on license fraud that will take away the drivers’ licenses of as many as 200,000 immigrants who cannot prove that they are here legally.” That would seem to be a good thing; what right-thinking patriot would be against fighting fraud? State officials explained that they were using new technology to enforce a 1995 law that required the DMV to collect the Social Security numbers of all driver’s license applicants. Many states passed such laws to improve child support enforcement. New York was the first state to use enhanced computer capabilities to actually verify all of the Social Security numbers that applicants had offered.
The state motor vehicle commissioner, Raymond P. Martinez, remarked that “The public is going to be shocked when they find out how many people’s Social Security numbers were used by other people unbeknownst to them.” He put the figure at 100,000 identity thefts, including one number that was being used by 57 impostors. Some of the suspended licenses were being used by people hiding criminal histories behind multiple identities.
It was at this point that the New York Times reverted to type with “But critics say the enforcement will fall mainly on illegal immigrants who are hard-working members of society . . .” The remaining twenty-one column inches are devoted to sob stories about sneak-ins who lost their driving privileges. There is Luis who wailed that “It’s like the DMV has cut off my arms and legs.” Liberal Times propagandist Nina Bernstein goes to pains to tell us that Luis lives in an “immaculate apartment” and that his children are back in Ecuador; we are introduced to a woman who can no longer sell Mary Kay cosmetics from her car. For good measure, Nina wrapped it up with a crying child who feared her mother would be caught by the INS. For some reason liberals believe that illegal aliens should be forgiven for criminal entry and identity theft just because they are hard at work stuffing their pockets with Yankee dollars.
Why are liberals so morally obtuse? Hard-working construction workers are not permitted to double park their cars in the street just because they are working hard. If they double park their cars at a work site, then their cars will be towed away and they will be fined. So why should border jumpers be allowed to illegally park their asses in America just because they are eager to make some money? They should be fined and their asses should be towed back to their homelands.
Six months later (2/18/05) the Times published another Nina Bernstein article in which she tells us that a certain “Justice Karen Black” of the State Supreme Court had ordered the state “to stop taking away the driver’s licenses of immigrants in New York who do not have Social Security cards, saying that the Department of Motor Vehicles is not authorized to enforce immigration law or to make new rules without public notice.” A follow-up article by Julia Preston identifies this same judge as Karen S. Smith – go figure. The court order was a temporary preliminary opinion in response to a lawsuit filed against Governor George Pataki and commissioner Martinez by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. “We think this is a clear victory for the immigrant community, that they are entitled to the same licenses as any other resident of the state,” proclaimed one of their lawyers, Foster S. Maer. Take note: Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens from birth; they can all get their own Social Security numbers; they have no need to steal them. What the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund is demonstrating to us is the fact that its allegiance to Hispanic identity far exceeds its affection for American law, American culture and American sovereignty.
Speaking of this “immigrant community” the New York Times admitted that “Most are in the country without legal authorization, the court papers say . . .” State officials said they were combating fraud and terrorism by rescinding the licenses of people who offer numbers that do not match Social Security records. In any case the DMV wasn’t doing any of the things that Judge Smith accused them of doing: the DMV wasn’t enforcing federal immigration law, it was enforcing its own state law which was enacted to enforce court-ordered child support. To say that there had been no “public notice” was preposterous; the law had been on the books since 1995. It was junk justice from a silly liberal in a judge’s robe.
In a follow-up article dated May 11, 2005, Julia Preston tells us that Justice Karen S. Smith “ruled yesterday that state motor vehicle authorities may not deny driver’s licenses to immigrants who cannot show that they are in the United States legally.”
Got that? The gatekeepers of the most widely accepted form of identification – the one that is anyone’s passport onto a commercial jumbo jet – are not permitted to withhold that powerful document from people who are obvious border jumpers with unknown histories. To Justice Smith a driver’s license is merely emblematic of one’s driving skill and nothing more. New York and every other state has a compelling interest in combating fraud, and besides, the state wasn’t deporting illegal aliens, it was simply denying them the state’s endorsement of their charade.
In the estimation of the New York Times: “Justice Smith’s ruling added fuel to an increasingly ardent debate in New York about illegal immigrants’ rights.” Which begs the question: does a person who has no right whatever to be in the United States nonetheless have a right to drive in the United States? And: are the people who answer “yes” to this question insane? Easy access to American driver’s licenses by foreigners resulted in Mohammad Atta and his eighteen sidekicks boarding commercial jetliners while in possession of sixty-three driver’s licenses. Some of their visas had expired, but these driver’s licenses provided them with access to flight schools and commercial flights. If their licenses had, at the very least, included expiration dates that matched the expiration dates on their visas, then their movements might have been hampered. Clearly, many illegal aliens can afford to purchase high-quality counterfeit documentation. American roads are already overflowing with uninsured south-of-the-border country bumpkins for whom driving is a new experience. The slaughter they cause is epidemic; they are a public health menace. Many of them have criminal histories and avoid all contact with government agencies, including the DMV. In any case, every illegal alien within our borders should be made to reek of illegality every time they make contact with legal residents and government agents. The last thing we should do is to give sneak-ins a cloak of legality by bestowing upon them official documents of authenticity.
Back in April of 2002 the New York Department of Motor Vehicles had changed its rules to require all applicants to present either a Social Security number or proper immigration papers. Immigrants also had to present a visa good for at least one year with at least six months left to go before its expiration. The DMV began issuing “temporary visitor” licenses that would expire when the visa expired. Justice Smith’s ruling abolished the very sensible temporary visitor licenses. Thanks to one liberal judge illegal aliens can get New York State driver’s licenses; her ruling bars the state from suspending the licenses of people using bogus Social Security numbers even though the state has uncovered 600,000 people using phony or stolen numbers. Karen Smith’s ruling guarantees that crime will pay in New York. It may also have set New York on a collision course with The Real ID Act.
The Real ID Act
The Real ID Act began as H.R.418, which made it through the House of Representatives and then lay dormant. It was later grafted onto a military spending bill (H.R. 1268) as a rider by its author Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R) of Wisconsin. The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Supplemental Conference Report, which included the Real ID Act, on Monday May 5, 2005 by a vote of 368 to 58. On Tuesday, May 10, the Senate unanimously passed the SCR. President Bush signed the SCR the following day. The Act’s mandates will take effect in May of 2008.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., describes this legislation this way:
“The 9/11 hijackers could have used their passports to board the planes, but only one did. Why? Those murderers chose our driver’s licenses and state IDs as their forms of identification because these documents allowed them to blend in and not raise suspicion or concern. Mohammad Atta received a six-month visa to stay in the U.S. yet received a Florida driver’s license good for six years!
“The Real ID Act will end this by establishing a uniform rule for all states that temporary driver’s licenses for foreign visitors expire when their visas expire, and establishing tough rules for confirming identity before temporary driver’s licenses are issued.
“The Real ID Act tightens our asylum system that has been abused by terrorists with deadly consequences. It will finish the three-mile hole in the fortified U.S./Mexico fence near San Diego. And it will protect the American people by ensuring that all terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility are also grounds for deportation.
“I believe these common-sense provisions that enjoy such strong support among House Members and the American people will receive similar levels of support from the Senate and White House.”
“The goal of the Real ID Act is straightforward: it seeks to prevent another 9/11-type attack by disrupting terrorist travel. First, this legislation does not try to set state policy for who may or may not drive a car, but it does address the use of a driver’s license as a form of identification to a federal official. American citizens have the right to know who is in their country, that people are who they say they are, and that the name on a driver’s license is the holder’s real name, not some alias.
The Real ID Act had 115 co-sponsors, including the chairmen of the House Rules Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Intelligence Committee, the House Homeland Security Committee, the House Government Reform Committee and others.
Critics of the Real ID Act, including the ACLU, branded it as “anti-immigration.” Among its other features, the Act would stop undocumented sneak-ins from obtaining state-issued driver’s licenses. Almost a dozen states do not require any proof of legal residency to obtain one of their driver’s licenses. Critics characterized the new federal standards for the creation of state-issued driver’s licenses as a “national ID card.” Actually, all fifty states are free to ignore the new standards altogether, but if they do not meet the new standards their state-issued licenses will not be recognized at federally-controlled facilities as a form of identification. Federally-controlled facilities include federal office buildings, commercial jumbo jets and Amtrak.
The Real ID Act was a material response to recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission to make it difficult for terrorists and undocumented aliens to obtain government-issued identification documents and to roam freely throughout America. The Act’s document-security features are intended to make the counterfeiting of identification documents more difficult. The 9/11 Commission had clearly stated that “The federal government should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as driver’s licenses. Fraud in identification documents is no longer just a problem of theft. At many entry points to vulnerable facilities, including gates for boarding aircraft, sources of identification are the last opportunity to ensure that people are who they say they are and to check whether they are terrorists.”
Those states that chose to include themselves in the Real ID Act would have to produce tamper-resistant driver’s licenses that would include machine-readable encoded information. Compliance with the Act would require all license applicants to present several documents to verify their true identity before being issued one of the new licenses. Such documentation would include a photo ID, a birth certificate, a legitimate Social Security number and verification of the applicant’s home address – such as a utility bill. Foreign applicants must also present proof of their legal presence in the United States, such as a valid visa, proof of refugee status, etc. State DMV employees would verify the documents’ authenticity by checking federal data bases.
One critic of the Real ID Act pouted, “What’s a clerk in Denver supposed to do when someone provides a birth certificate from Angola? Are they supposed [to call Angola] to check the accuracy of that?” Well,yes, if at all possible. Applicants who cannot meet the standards of the Real ID Act could be issued low-tech licenses that would allow then to operate a motor vehicle, but which could not be used as identification at federally-controlled facilities. This is an ID act, not a motor-vehicle-operator act. To quote Representative James Sensenbrenner: “The Real ID Act is vital to preventing foreign terrorists from hiding in plain sight while conducting their operations and planning attacks. By targeting terrorist travel, the Real ID Act will assist in our war-on-terror efforts to disrupt terrorist operations and help secure our borders.” Under our present way of doing things, our enemies can hide in plain site by using false identities.
The Real ID Act states that after May 11, 2008, “ a Federal agency may not accept, for any official purpose, a driver’s license or identification card issued by a State to any person unless the State is meeting the requirements.” The new national standards include what information must be included on the ID card, what documentation must be presented to obtain the ID card and how states must share their databases. Many of these requirements merely mimic those of Section 7212 of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-458).
The minimum information that must be included in the new licenses are the applicant’s full name, date of birth, gender, license number, a digital photograph of the applicant’s face, the applicant’s address and the applicant’s signature. The license must also include security features to prevent tampering or duplication by counterfeiters. The card must include machine-readable technology with characteristics to be determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
The Real ID Act includes provisions that are separate from the matter of trustworthy driver’s licenses. These include standards for asylum seekers and provisions for the deportation of aliens. There are also provisions for waiving laws that would hinder the expeditious construction of barriers along our borders. Critics have raised concerns about the loss of due process rights by property owners along the border.
Some critics argue that licensing restrictions that exclude illegal aliens will encourage them to drive uninsured vehicles as though driving uninsured vehicles weren’t already commonplace behavior among illegal aliens. The counterargument is that the Real ID Act should be even tougher because some states will continue to offer “driving certificates” to those folks who cannot produce proof of legal residency in the United States. Tennessee is one of these states and Tennessee’s certificate program has been a magnet for out-of-state illegal aliens seeking a cloak of legitimacy.
The Problem We Face
In the summer of 2001 Mexico’s chief executive, Vicente Fox, spent five days jetting about the United States extolling the “benefits” that Mexican migrants bestow upon America. He made personal appearances in Detroit, Chicago and Sun Valley, Idaho. Addressing the National Council of La Raza in Milwaukee, Mr. Fox praised the Bush administration for entertaining the notion of an amnesty for millions of illegal Mexican border jumpers. An amnesty, Mr. Fox said, would “allow immigrants who work hard, pay taxes and abide by the law to be treated equally and travel freely.” In other words, to become pseudo-American citizens eligible for welfare programs.
An article in the August 2, 2001 Newark Star Ledger noted the Bush-and-Fox duet this way:
“In September, Bush and Fox are expected to sign a broad agreement on immigration reform. The proposal to grant amnesty to millions of undocumented Mexican workers has drawn fire from grassroots conservatives and others who say Bush is pandering to win Hispanic votes in the 2004 presidential race.” That’s exactly what he was doing.
On a beautiful autumn morning forty days later nineteen foreigners slammed three jumbo jets into the World Trade towers and the Pentagon and tried to slam another airliner into the White House. After that, George Bush felt uncomfortable discussing his willful neglect of border law enforcement. Meanwhile, President Fox was making good on his promise to be “president of 118 million Mexicans.” There are only 100 million people living in Mexico – the rest are hunkered down north of the Rio Grande.
When Fox spoke of being the president of Mexicans living in the United States he was signaling his intention to seek amnesty for illegal sneak-ins, to seek Washington’s acceptance of a “guest worker” program that would allow upwards of a quarter-million Mexicans to enter the United States each year, and to pressure the U.S. for lots more U.S. visas for Mexicans. The Bush administration, which had coasted along without any policy toward Mexico, had allowed Mexico City to dictate the two-nation border agenda and had left all of Vicente Fox’s assertions about Mexican “guest workers” unchallenged. Shortly before the September 11th attacks George Bush said that immigration “is not a problem to be solved.” The future would contradict him.
Steven Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has authored a well-documented report titled “Immigration from Mexico: Assessing the Impact on the United States” which relies heavily on U.S. census information. This study demolishes the smug assertions of Vicente Fox and George Bush.
First of all, America is not in dire need of unskilled workers; immigration from Mexico is not necessary. The bracero program that admitted Mexican agricultural workers from 1943 until 1964 was not necessary to ensure food production; it was a union busting tactic. If the demand for labor exceeded the supply, then the wages of unskilled Americans would be increasing. In truth, the wages of poorly educated full-time workers declined 7.2 percent in the 1990s even as the wages of other workers increased. Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, do not compete with professors, journalists or business big wigs, but they do make it harder for working-class Americans to make a living. The very existence of the bracero program jump started a parallel flow of illegal migration that continues to this day. We can stop calling them “guest workers.” As one analyst observed: “There is nothing more permanent than a temporary worker.”
Worse yet, the presence of so many unskilled workers retards the development of more efficient harvesting and processing machinery in exactly the same way that the presence of slaves in the old South retarded the development of industry in the South. At the time of the Civil War one northern state, NewYork, had three times the industrial capacity than all of the states of the Confederacy combined. The cheap-labor pool in the South kept the South under developed and comparatively impoverished. Without modernization American growers will not be able to compete with low-wage commercial producers in foreign countries. Increases in our minimum wage make that a certainty.
The second myth of Mexican immigration is that these folks are contributing more in taxes than they are consuming in social services. It’s not true. Virtually all of these people are in the bottom 50% of taxpayers and the bottom 50% of taxpayers contribute no more than 4% of the revenues collected. Many Mexican sneak-ins pay no income taxes at all. These same Mexicans are heavy users of means-tested social programs. Using estimates from the National Academy of Sciences it was discovered that the average adult Mexican immigrant consumes $55,200 more in services than he contributes in taxes during his lifetime. Now multiply that by all the millions of adult Mexican immigrants in America. It’s a fact: 33.9 percent of families headed by legal Mexican immigrants and 24.9 percent of families headed by illegal Mexican aliens are enrolled in at lease one major welfare program. Only 14.8 percent of American families are similarly consuming the earnings of taxpayers.
Now consider the fact that the illegal alien population indulges in relentless identity theft, fraud and imposture and the fact that the illegal immigrant population is a haven for countless felons, including hundreds of thousands of sex criminals, and the staggering social cost to America is exposed. Suddenly a push to modernize American agriculture looks socially responsible. Years ago, when migrant Mexican grape harvesters began agitating for big-bucks union wages the grape growers responded by funding the development of grape harvesting machinery. Now there are no Mexican grape harvesters. If corn was harvested by Mexicans, instead of by machinery, there would be no talk of ethanol as a fuel for vehicles; it would be far too expensive. Money sent south by Mexicans living in America is Mexico’s second largest source of income; that’s billions of dollars leaving the American economy each year.
How to Break Into America
To lessen the pressure to reform its failing socialist experiment, the Mexican government undertook the mass distribution of a 31-page booklet titled “Guide for the Mexican Migrant” which offers helpful how-to advice for would-be border jumpers. It’s a blatant encouragement for Mexicans to break American law. A partial translation appeared in the January 9, 2005 New York Times.
It begins,
“This guide is meant to give you some practical advice that could be useful if you have made the difficult decision to seek new labor opportunities outside your country . . .
“By reading this guide, you can also find out about basic legal issues concerning your stay in the United States of America without the appropriate immigration documentation, as well as about the rights you have in that country, once there, regardless of your migratory status.”
The booklet includes such helpful information as:
“Drinking water mixed with salt will help to replace lost body fluids. Although you will feel thirstier, there is a much lower risk of dehydration if you drink salt water.
If you get lost, use power lines, train tracks or dirt roads as guides.”
And: “Avoid calling attention to yourself, at least while you arrange your stay or documents for living in the United States.
The best formula is not to alter your routine at work or at home.
Avoid loud parties; the neighbors might be bothered and call the police and you could be arrested.
Avoid getting into fights. If you go to a bar or nightclub and a fight breaks out, leave, for in the confusion you could be arrested even though you did nothing.
Avoid family or domestic violence. In the United States, as in Mexico, it is a crime. Domestic violence is not only blows, but also threats, shouts and mistreatment. . .
“If the police enter your house or apartment, do not resist, but ask for a search warrant. It’s better to cooperate and ask to be put in touch with the nearest Mexican consulate.”
As the official Mexican guide for the illegal immigrant proclaims, in America “You have Rights!” which include the right “To know where you are. To ask permission to communicate with a representative of the nearest Mexican consulate, so that you can get help. To refuse to make a declaration or sign documents, especially if they are in English, without the advice of a lawyer or a representative of the Mexican consulate. . . Not to state your migratory status when detained . . .”
And if you are packed off to your failing socialist homeland you can pick up a fresh copy of the border jumper’s guide to border jumping and then attempt to break into America once again.
The Mexican ID Card
In 2002, Mexican consulates in American cities began dispensing digitized identification cards to Mexican citizens. U.S. immigration officials say the cards aren’t worth much and immigration watchdogs say the cards allow illegal aliens to live as freely as American citizens – they are calling it a “backdoor amnesty.” More than a million Mexican aliens, most of them in America illegally, were carrying these cards within the first year. That was well over three years ago.
Here’s the problem: the Mexican government has been strikingly successful at persuading banks and city governments to accept these cards as valid personal identification. This will allow millions of mostly illegal aliens to open bank accounts, to buy airline tickets and to flash the cards as valid ID to government employees and the police.
An article in the Newark Star Ledger (5/15/03) introduces us to Aurelio Cazares, a Newark restaurant worker. Mr. Cazares explained: “It’s the only ID I have. Everyone is getting them, but they have to do more, to get them accepted more places.” The popularity of the Mexican ID card began in California where more than a dozen cities, including Los Angeles now accept them. In April of 2003 the California state assembly voted to force all counties and municipalities to honor the Mexican ID card.
Because these cards make life easier for illegal aliens the cards also encourage more Mexicans to jump their northern border. Why apply for a valid visa when American government employees, including the police, will accept the Mexican ID card?
Other countries, such as Guatemala and the Dominican Republic were encouraged to issue their own identification cards in the wake of the Mexican success. Steven Camarota, research director of the Center for Immigration Studies, captured the import of the Mexican card perfectly: “Once the bank says, ‘We’ll take a document issued to an illegal alien by the Mexican government, why wouldn’t they take one from the Egyptian government or the Pakistani government?” The card is a big step toward Vicente Fox’s declared goal of “regularizing” all Mexicans living inside the United States. Other governments are already seeking to “regularize’ their alien countrymen by issuing their own ID cards. The 2000 Census pegs the number of illegal aliens in America at seven million. About 4.8 million of them are Mexican citizens. Mexican consulate officials in New York and New Jersey estimate that more than 80 percent of the Mexicans in the surrounding area are “undocumented.”
As states tightened their requirements for obtaining a driver’s license it became more difficult for border jumpers to acquire this favored form of identification; the sneak-ins had a tougher time opening bank accounts, hopping on commercial flights or buying train tickets. This is as it should be; every illegal alien should stink of illegality and illegitimacy at every face-to-face encounter with a banker, merchant, landlord, airline employee, policeman or anyone else. They should all be unmasked; their impersonations of honest and trustworthy people should be exposed.
According to Miguel Monterrubio, press secretary for the Mexican Consulate in Washington, DC, “They [the cards] are impossible to counterfeit.” But Bill Strassberger, spokesman for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, opined, “Is it a secure document? I don’t think we can guarantee that.” He added that border agents had already apprehended illegal aliens carrying fraudulent Mexican digitized IDs bearing multiple identities.
In the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area Citibank and BancoPopular now accept the Mexican ID cards from strangers applying for new bank accounts. According to the Newark Star Ledger, “Banks see accepting the ID cards as a chance to gain the loyalty of a rapidly growing Hispanic market.” The state governments of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have wisely resisted acceptance of the Mexican IDs. Thirteen states now issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. North Carolina ended this practice in 2006. The following states now accept the Mexican ID card as identification for the issuance of their state driver’s licenses: Pennsylvania, Delaware, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Utah and New Mexico. The states that issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens are Alaska, Connecticut, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Washington and West Virginia.
All 47 Mexican consulates have been feverishly dispensing the matricula consular (literally: “consular registration”). There is even a traveling Mexican consulate that roams about issuing matricula consular cards to any Mexican who lives within that state’s borders who has documents the traveling consulate finds acceptable. No one asks how the applicant got to, say, Illinois. The Bank of America set up a booth outside the Mexican consulate in Oxnard and began dispensing bank accounts and stacks of blank checks to Mexicans who emerged with freshly minted Mexican ID cards.
Cities and counties all over California now accept the matricula as valid identification. In essence, all of these states have effectively erased the distinction between legal and illegal aliens within our borders. It amounts to a virtual amnesty, an amnesty by other means. It is the realization of President Fox’s dream. The new president of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, carries on the Fox legacy.
No Mexican citizen who had entered the United States honorably would have any use for this ID card: he would already possess a far more authoritative visa or green card. The only purpose for the matricula consular to exist is to increase the comfort of illegal Mexican aliens in the United States and to prolong their sojourn in America.
Illegal aliens who are packing the Mexican ID are much less likely to be deported. Having no identification is a common reason that aliens are detained after attracting the attention of the police, often at traffic stops or accidents or scuffles. Flashing the card can prevent low-key encounters with the police from escalating to an arrest. The cop may issue a ticket, but he has no incentive to arrest the alien; the cop is convinced that the alien is an illegal border jumper but it is not the cop’s job to enforce federal immigration law. So the cop writes a ticket and the alien takes the ticket to the nearest waste basket. The cop has done his job; no one is going to bother to track down the alien. So the matricula consular is sort of a get-out-of-jail-free card. Criminals prefer the Mexican ID to valid state driver’s licenses because, if stopped by the cops, they can “identify” themselves with a card that is not intimately linked to a state data base that would include outstanding warrants for their arrest. It’s a card without an attached criminal history. The clever criminal wouldn’t dream of leaving home without it.
It’s easy to get a Mexican ID card. You don’t even have to be a Mexican! Any fraudulent Mexican birth certificate will get you an official Mexican ID card. Lots of Mexicans who were born in remote Mexican villages never had a birth certificate – they just purchased a bogus certificate later, using whichever name they chose, from a Mexican fraudulent-document mill. For as little as $25 anyone can purchase a forged birth certificate on Alvarado Boulevard in L.A.’s MacArthur Park. If the guys at the Mexican Consulate think your birth certificate is bogus you may not be issued an ID, but nothing else will happen to you; they’ll just say, “Adios.” The consulate staff do not check an applicant’s documentation against a data base; all presented documents are “authenticated” visually by the consular staff who have no incentive to question any piece of paper presented to them. After all, the chief executive of their homeland is enthusiastic about “regularizing” every Mexican in the United States.
Once you have a Mexican ID card you can go about your business, even if your business is money laundering or the smuggling of guns, drugs or other aliens. One immigrant smuggler was apprehended with seven Mexican ID cards in his pocket – each with a different name but the same photograph. Despite all of this card’s “security features,” its coded texts and its hidden images, the card is junk because the Mexican consular staff will issue the card to any jerk with a back-alley birth certificate. Among the many “Mexican” card holders are an increasing number of “Mexicans” from places like Yemen and Egypt who blend right in.
Speaking of the Mexican card program, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, observed, “This does have homeland security implications in that it compromises our identification system and contracts it out to foreign governments. I think that the White House didn’t think through the implications of them giving the green light to Mexico to give an end run around Congress. This has real implications for how policy is made in the United States.”
So why did George Bush’s Treasury Department issue written regulations allowing banks and other financial institutions to accept the matricula as valid identification? Once in possession of bank accounts, credit cards, ATM services, access to credit and home ownership, any illegal alien is perfectly camouflaged. He could be the commander of a terrorist sleeper cell hiding in plain sight. Once aliens become entrenched in communities it becomes almost impossible to deport them, thanks to the tender One World bias of liberal judges.
If an alien can get his hands on a Mexican ID, then he can use that card to obtain a state driver’s license. Once he has that driver’s license he can obtain all of those things that do not require a Social Security card, such as unobstructed travel throughout the United States, emergency medical care, city services, and various government benefits. He could even obtain a marriage license and sweet talk a citizen into marriage for the sole purpose of securing his presence in America. Heck, the sneaky jerk would even have a good chance of voting in the next election. Chances are he’d vote for a liberal or a closet liberal – someone like George W. Bush.
Funding the Illegal Alien Lifestyle
The New York Times was eager to spread the word: “Immigrants Wary of Banks Put Faith In New Card” was the title of its good-news infomercial (12/30/06). The article opened with a Mexican immigrant griping about the fees he must pay to cash his paycheck and the $10 charge he must fork over every time he wires $150 back to Mexico. Cheerily the Times continues: “But now Mr. Dimas, 32, a food preparer at a catering company, has a new tool that has erased his discomfort with all things financial. It is a special debit card, provided not by a bank but by a nonprofit worker center here [New Brunswick, NJ], enabling hundreds of immigrants without checking accounts or credit cards to keep their cash somewhere safer than beneath their mattresses. The card also makes it easier to shop at stores as well as online.”
The Mexican, Jose Dimas, chirped, “This card is better for me for a lot of situations. You don’t have to pay those big charges to send money back to Mexico.” That’s a shame because those big charges stay in America while the money sent south props up a mismanaged socialist workers’ dystopia.
The new debit cards are called Sigo, which is a conflation of the Spanish word for “yes” and the English word “go.” This card is affiliated with MasterCard and can be used wherever MasterCard is accepted. The Sigo cards can be “reloaded” by depositing cash or paychecks directly into accounts at a local pharmacy or worker center for as low as 50 cents. In essence, it’s a checkless checking account that allows lots of illegal aliens to shop and pay bills over the Internet.
It should surprise no one that the Sigo card was the brainchild of a Rutgers University labor relations professor named Janice Fine. It’s just another knife in the back for America’s native-born working class which would be earning 8% more every week if the labor pool weren’t overflowing with Mexican border jumpers, which seems to be of no concern to certain well-paid university professors. Not surprisingly, the worker center makes money from the cards which are sold for $4.95 and reap an additional $2.50 each month thereafter. The card company and the worker’s center split the fees.
The New Brunswick center, called New Labor, pioneered the new debit cards. Since November of 2006, New Labor has provided hundreds of cards to “immigrant workers, including some who are here illegally” says the Times. What do they mean “some”? The Mexican Consulate in New York City openly affirms that 80% of Mexican immigrants in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area are totally undocumented , so we can assume that these debit cards are especially attractive to folks who don’t have the documentation to open a bank account. The new cards help illegal aliens to game the American system.
Professor Fine’s survey of immigrant workers was bankrolled by the left-leaning Ford Foundation. The survey revealed that the average immigrant member of a work center was sending more than a fifth of his wages down to Mexico. Confirmation of the members’ legal status comes in this sentence: “Many of the immigrants surveyed said they lacked identification papers needed to open bank accounts.”
The New York Times explained:
While many American banks require two United States government documents to open an account, immigrants can obtain a Sigo card with just one form of identification, including birth certificates, passports and other records from their home county.” Or one of those new ID cards being dispensed by the Mexican and Guatemalan consulates.
The Times informs us that:
“Cardholders can send a second card to relatives abroad, who can then make withdrawals at a local A.T.M. Several workers said it cost $15 to send $300 to Mexico through Western Union. But with the Sigo card, the card’s sponsors say, it will cost about $4.50 – the fee for using the A.T.M. in Mexico.”
Not to be left out, Citibank and Western Union also offer reloadable cards. A Texas company called NetSpend also offers such cards and lets cardholders check their balances by cell phone. NetSpend’s boss man, Rick Savard, says, “When people go from a cash-based payment system to an electronic-based payment system, it’s very empowering.” But does America really need millions of empowered illegal aliens? If anyone can sneak into America and live as freely as an American citizen, then the value of American citizenship has been greatly diminished.
It is the outspoken opinion of race-centric advocacy groups such as La Raza (literally: The Race) that all those millions of pampered and sluggish Americans couldn’t survive without the assistance of all those warm and wonderful folks from Latin America. They are quick to point to estimates by the Pew Hispanic Center (2000) that the illegal-alien labor force in the United States now numbers about 5.3 million, which includes 700,000 restaurant workers, 250,000 household helpers, and 620,000 construction workers. A study by Philip L. Martin, a professor at the University of California at Davis, estimates that an additional 1.2 million of America’s 2.5 million farm workers are living here illegally.
To hear the spokesfolks for the border-busting Latinos tell it, without them our produce would rot in the fields, our hotel linen would be forever soiled, our homes would fall apart, taxicabs would stand empty and idle, and Manhattan mothers would be reduced to caring for their own offspring. Life in America would be a Latino-less horror.
Is this an accurate portrayal of our present condition? Not according to George J. Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at Harvard University, who has written extensively about the downside of unrestrained illegal immigration.
Any abrupt change in the way whole industries get things done is sure to cause disruption, but this disruption would be short-lived, according to Professor Borjas. He says we need look no further than those states where illegal immigrants are a rarity to see that modern American living standards do not depend on illegal aliens. In states like Maine and Iowa the hotel sheets get changed, fast food restaurants are humming and the lawns are nicely trimmed.
The truth is that the vast majority of illegal aliens are hunkered down in a few states – California, Texas, New York, Illinois and Florida. Most of America has remained comparatively un-invaded. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, using 2000 Census data, has concluded that only 15 states harbor all but 13% of the illegal alien invaders. Of course, for those native-born working-class folks who are so unfortunate as to live in those 15 states, the intrusion of such a vast tide of cheap foreign labor might as well be an attack by a strike force from the planet Mars.
If deprived of this cheap-labor pool employers would feel pressure to pay a bit more in wages; this would attract low-skilled workers from other parts of America; this would be good for American-born low-skilled workers. The employers would complain a little but the lawns would get cut, the linen would get washed, the Manhattan moms would get to work on time. Professor Borjas observed: “The workers would be slightly wealthier and the employers would be slightly poorer, but everything would get done.”
Research by the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California predicts that a ban on illegal-alien farm labor would cause a short-lived spike in prices for produce items that are typically picked by the border crashers: lettuce, spinach and strawberries. Farmers and agricultural companies would be motivated to employ cheaper methods of harvesting and processing, such as new technology. If the farmers were slow to innovate, then Americans would seek cheaper substitutes from foreign vendors.
Enforcing the Law
The Smithfield pork-packing plant at Tar Heel, North Carolina is huge; it processes as many as 32,000 hogs in a day. The plant employs 5,200 workers. Smithfield participates in a program offered by the bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.). Under this program the company critically examines the documentation presented to it by applicants for employment and shares its findings with the immigration agency. In exchange for its cooperation the government enforcers agree not to disrupt company production with dramatic surprise raids and roundups.
On Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007, the authorities informed Smithfield that agents were coming to question 18 Mexicans and 3 Guatemalans about their documentation. The “raid” went smoothly. Smithfield spokesman Dennis Pittman said that the resulting arrests caused no disruption at the plant. “There were no helicopters or buses or even anybody in uniforms. It was done in an orderly, professional fashion,” he recalled.
Last summer Smithfield had fired about fifty workers who had falsified Social Security numbers to get employment. The company generously offered to reinstate these workers if they could correct any errors in their documentation within 60 days and present proof of their true identities and immigration status. About 48% of the plant’s employees are Hispanic and 37% are African-Americans. These numbers put the lie to that nonsense that illegals are doing jobs that Americans will not do. It’s obvious that if Smithfield sends all of its undocumented workers packing, then there will be more employment opportunities for African-Americans at the Smithfield plant.
The enforcement raids at six Swift & Company plants were more dramatic when more than a thousand agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement appeared at the plants at 6 a.m. and rounded up hundreds of migrants in what the agents called a sweeping criminal investigation of identity theft. The New York Times reported that
“In a new enforcement tactic, federal officials said they planned to bring criminal charges against some of the immigrants accused of using stolen identities. They said the raids were tied to complaints from United States citizens who discovered that their names were being used by Swift plant workers.”
A spokesman for the enforcement agency said, “Those are several hundred Americans who were victimized.” So much for the argument that illegal immigrants don’t really harm anyone. According to the
Times
Hundreds of criminal aliens were trundled off to detention centers from the Swift plants in Hyrum, Utah; Greeley, Colorado: Cactus, Texas; Grand Island, Nebraska; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minnesota. In all, 1,282 legal and illegal immigrants were arrested.
The New York Times published follow-up articles, all of them featuring photos of the weeping wives and girlfriends of those who were arrested. There was not a single article about even one American citizen whose life was made a shambles by these identity thieves. The Times was eager to quote Barbara Kremer, a schoolteacher in Worthington, Minnesota: “I’ve never seen anything like it, the sadness, the emptiness, the fear.” Ms. Kremer had hidden 24 immigrants in her house “who were afraid to return to their homes.” It was clear that no one had stolen Ms. Kremer’s identity or ruined her credit or attached her name to a criminal history or made her the target of baseless demands from the Internal Revenue Service.
Back in March of 2006 the immigration agency had subpoenaed the work documents of every Swift employee and retained lots of them, including 665 from the Marshalltown, Iowa plant alone, under suspicion that they were counterfeit or stolen. After that, Swift began interviewing its employees. These interviews alone prompted about 400 workers to drop out of sight. After that, Swift was ordered to stop interviewing suspects. According to the New York Times:
These enforcements are small steps in the right direction but they are far from sufficient. Less than one percent of illegal aliens are deported as a consequence of I.C.E. apprehensions. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the Swift & Company raids were part of a crackdown on illegals who steal the identities of American citizens. He warned of the likely economic consequences for industries that employ many illegal aliens. The Times noted that Mr. Chertoff “acknowledged that the program, known as Basic Pilot, is unable to detect authentic identity documents that have been stolen.” Mr. Chertoff urged Congress to pass legislation that would permit the Social Security Administration to release information about Social Security numbers that are being used in numerous workplaces, which would allow Basic Pilot to channel this information to employers.
This is all rather half baked. There is a much better way to manage the problem of stolen Social Security numbers: issue new ones. If MasterCard and Visa can dispense new cards with new numbers, then so can the Social Security Administration. It’s no big deal: a computer cranks out a unique number and associates it with a single human being. If that number is purloined and misused, then the computer can crank out a substitute number and associate that number with the theft victim. The old number would be voided.
If the credit card companies can do this, then why can’t the government provide us with the same protection; why must we all be associated with a single number until death no matter how corrupted that number has become? Here’s the answer: the credit card companies have a financial incentive to suppress fraud; the government has a financial disincentive to make things honest and uncorrupted. The government collects taxes on all uses of the same Social Security number, even fraudulent uses. The government isn’t penalized when Social Security numbers are misused – only the rightful number holder suffers. Perhaps Mr. Chertoff could ask Congress for a law that would make the Social Security Administration behave more like the folks at MasterCard. Then we could all sleep better at night.
At present the Social Security Administration has no power to punish employers who ignore its notices about the mismatched names and numbers of its employees. The Immigration and Naturalization Service can fine an employer, but the INS can’t get helpful information from the Social Security Administration. Meanwhile, the illegal aliens can obtain ID numbers from the Internal Revenue Service to file tax returns at the same time the INS is trying to prevent them from working here at all. That’s our weird republic.
A poll sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank reveals that nearly one in five Mexicans regularly receives money from a relative employed in the United States. These Yankee dollars line the pockets of at least a quarter of Mexico’s 100 million inhabitants. Roberto Sura, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, estimated that annual remittances to Mexico and Central America could rise to $25 billion by the end of this decade.
After the September 11th attacks it was expected that illegal border crossings would decline as law enforcement along the southern border increased. (Only 3% of illegal crossings occur along our northern border.) The “experts” had predicted that remittances to Mexico would decline because fewer Latinos would be sneaking into the United States. Forecasts of a shrinking American economy suggested that illegal immigrants would be unemployed and unable to send money south of the border. Those forecasts were junk.
The northward surge increased in spite of increased enforcement and America’s indwelling population of sneak-ins hunkered down and refused to budge. In a country with lavish no-questions-asked welfare programs they could weather any economic slump by living at the expense of the taxpaying suckers they had been impersonating. As Roberto Sura observed, “For most Mexicans, the increased risks of crossing the border have had no impact on their willingness to migrate.”
North of the border the Democrat and Republican Parties have tacitly agreed to make Mexico the fifty-first state: The Republicans want to please big-business contributors by sustaining a vast pool of cheap labor; the Democrats entertain the fantasy that the swelling Latino population will “naturally” vote for Democrats. The Dems may be disappointed; there is a growing resentment against recent border jumpers by the more seasoned border jumpers and their American-born offspring because the bottomless well of cheap Latino labor is depressing the wages of earlier Latino migrants who had hoped to climb the American economic ladder. Unemployment is less than 2% for those with any college degree; unemployment is highest for unskilled workers. America doesn’t need more unskilled workers; their increasing numbers merely increase the amount of unemployment among the unskilled.
Yesterday and Tomorrow
Gone are the days when Florida would dispense a driver’s license to a woman who was photographed in a veil shrouding everything but her eyes or when North Carolina routinely did the same thing and allowed applicants to refuse to be photographed at all “for religious reasons.”
Before that day when a mere nineteen Muslim bigots slaughtered thousands of American citizens there were at least 250 forms that were routinely accepted to obtain a driver’s license in the United States. Back then anyone with a bogus green card and a sworn statement of his identity could obtain a Virginia driver’s license. In North Carolina, a state that required an applicant to present a valid Social Security number to obtain a driver’s license, records revealed that 388,000 people were issued driver’s licenses with the Social Security number 999-99-9999, the number clerks used if applicants couldn’t provide a valid number. Worse yet, until Florida’s motor vehicle department director cancelled the interstate courtesy agreement, these trashy North Carolina licenses could be swapped for valid Florida licenses with no questions asked. Back then the California legislature agreed to hand out driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, a move that thrilled then-Governor Gray Davis who was hungry for Mexifornian votes.
When the newly elected Governator Arnold S. said “nein” to this stupid plan, Assemblyman Juan Vargas, a San Diego Democrat, sputtered that all opposition was born of “such hatred, such vehemence against these people . . .We entrust everything to them but our rights,” as though Americans were cruel bastards for reserving the rights of American citizenship for Americans. Pleeeese!
Illegal aliens don’t have a right to drive in America; they don’t even have a right to be in America. For that matter they don’t even have our permission to be in America.
The most dangerous aspect of licensing aliens is the way in which so many of them use this credential as a tool to obtain even more credentials which they then use as a cloak of legitimacy to help them gain access to dimensions of American life that should be restricted to citizens only, dimensions such as taxpayer-funded welfare programs and voting privileges. Citizenship matters!
The many millions of illegal aliens hiding in America are not guests in our homeland, they are international burglars. The fact that those of them who are not already collecting welfare and impoverishing our hospitals may be working for the Yankee dollar does not alter the fact that they are burglars. If a burglar entered your home through an open window would you accept his presence in your home just because he made the bed and dusted your piano? Of course not. These gate crashers do not respect our national sovereignty; their chosen way of life demands imposture and impersonation and the appropriation of fraudulent credentials. There are millions of these identity thieves. At this moment one of them, or dozens of them, may be preparing to become your personal evil twin by stealing your Social Security number, by screwing up your credit rating, by slapping you with an unowed tax bill, by attaching your name to a criminal history.
It is an act of simple self-preservation for every American to see this shadow nation of unidentified foreigners for the menace that it is – its presence in our country depresses the wages of our most economically fragile citizens; it burdens American taxpayers with its elevated use of welfare programs intended for needy American citizens; it congests our overburdened prison system; it tests the limits of law enforcement. Any attempt to legitimize this shadow nation would have calamitous consequences because twelve million sneak-ins would immediately seek to invite their extended families to join them in America. That’s a burden America could not sustain. It would plunge the hopes of America’s native-born working poor into the deep freeze. It would wildly exacerbate the existing competition between American blacks and the Latino newcomers for limited opportunities.
Back in the 1950s President Eisenhower demonstrated that it was possible to send a million Mexican aliens back to Mexico. So there is no obstacle to repatriating ten million Mexicans in ten years other than the cowardice of our political class. The biggest coward of them all is a closeted liberal named George Bush.
Thomas Clough
“I.C.E. officials said the operation focused on immigrants who had obtained documents with identity information corresponding to that of United States citizens, in some cases by buying them from underground organizations that traffic in false documents.”
“Prosecutors in several states began filing criminal charges against accused suppliers of the illegal documents. In Salt Lake City, officials unsealed a complaint against Veronica Carrillo, a Mexican immigrant accused of selling real United States birth certificates to Swift employees.”
Copyright 2007
February 5, 2007