Joe knows. HRS

Surprisingly, Mark Steyn has some hardheaded remarks on the immigration issue in his current column:

http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi

“The world’s most powerful nation has an illegal immigration problem because it has a legal immigration problem,” says Steyn. He is right. Illegal aliens pour into the United States and disappear into alien communities with a core of legal residents whom we admitted. If we ended legal immigration, as we should, and revoked the residency permits of immigrants who are not assimilating or who become public charges, as we should, then - by definition - illegal aliens would stand out. It would be easier to identify, arrest and deport them.

All that presupposes a will on the part of government to enforce the law, which patently does not exist in the Bush administration. Immigration is a single problem. The illegal alien is part of that problem, as is the legal immigrant admitted for no good reason. Immigration reformers need to pursue enforcement of immigration law against illegal aliens, focusing for now on defeating President Bush’s amnesty. But if we do not combine that with pursuing an end to legal immigration, for at the very least a decade, we will still lose. HRS

The link to Mark Steyn’s article mentioned by thucydides appears to be: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn11.html

A review of Operation Wetback is in order, especially in regard to claims that we cannot deport the illegals who are here:

http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/OO/pqo1.html

It’s worth noting that the background of the Operation had parallels to the Bush plan — illegals entering the U.S. for low wage jobs, followed by a ‘temporary’ worker plan which then became less than temporary. The further details are quite interesting, involving the usual suspects, (agricultural industry, U.S. Immigration officials, et.al.,) but with different dynamics in play.

When the Operation kicked in, 4,800 illegals were arrested the first day. Arrests stabilized to about 1,100 per day. Note that this was accomplished by a govt. force of ONLY 700 men!

The figures as to how many illegals were actually deported are disputed, but it was certainly in the hundreds of thousands — with a 6-figure number also for those who fled back to Mexico to avoid being rounded up. Regardless of the accuracy of the figures, this was not bad for under 6 months of effort!

http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/20.html

“In 1949 the Border Patrol seized nearly 280,000 illegal immigrants. By 1953, the numbers had grown to more than 865,000, and the U.S. government felt pressured to do something about the onslaught of immigration. What resulted was Operation Wetback, devised in 1954 …”

The main problems were not logistical, but political. ‘Civil liberties’ groups, and Mexican-Americans, howled loudly. Other problems, still in need of being addressed: “In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens.”

We know about these problems already. But it’s the other detail that we learn from Operation Wetback: We CAN round up and deport large numbers of illegal aliens and send them back from whence they came. We have the means, and greater technology, to monitor and patrol our borders.

We CAN, and we MUST.

“We CAN, and we MUST”
Bravo Mr. LeFevre, you are right on the money!
And, as for the ensuing outcry from the usual suspects, they already accuse the U.S. of having a cruel and heartless immigration system anyway.
Mass deportations would prove we are serious. The white Mexican elitists would be shaking in their boots. Who knows, they might actually start taking responsibility for reforming their own country.

“We CAN, and we MUST.”

I join the others here in appreciating and seconding Mr. LeFevre’s strength-giving affirmation. A Freeper who signs as “Sabertooth” weighs in with a bunch of excellent ideas (eighteen of them) on how simple it would be for the government to get there from here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1053318/posts

So much for the nay-sayers: it would be as easy as pie to accomplish this, given the political will. Every claim to the contrary — “It’s impossible! It can’t be done! It’s way too late!” — is a damned falsehood.

Sabertooth has a lot of good ideas, but I have two quibbles. The first is that he opposes using the armed forces to guard the border. We should deploy Army units to the Mexican border. Isn’t the first duty of any army defense of its nation? The second is that he would offer deported parents of anchor babies the alternatives of taking them with them or putting them up for adoption. As a family values kind of guy (like GW Bush, only where citizenship is concerned mine do stop at the Rio Grande), I cannot agree that illegal aliens should have the opportunity to foist off their children - who are not Americans - on America. America is for the Americans!

Those really are quibbles about an excellent list, though. HRS