Presidential debates are quite questionable, in that the audience of viewers, both television and in-house, never really know whether the candidates have agreed, prior to the airing of the event, to handle a particular issue in a particular way, or whether, or not, they have been allowed to know the questions and rehearse their answers. In the recent Los Angeles Democratic debate between Obama and Clinton, it was peculiar that neither Hillary, nor Barack, called illegal immigration wrong, and a basically criminal act.
Obama approached the question posed by Politico’s chief correspondent, concerning the loss of available jobs for working class black folks due to illegal aliens, with his rendition of generic immigration reform. Yet, in all of his rhetoric, he never actually called the act of illegally crossing a U.S. border into the United States a crime, though he did say that it would be necessary to secure the nation’s borders. His allusion to the sixteen-million illegal aliens within the country as merely “people on their way to citizenship” makes me wonder what he considers a federal crime.
Most, if not all, of the millions of undocumented aliens presently within the nation have already committed the federal crimes of conspiracy to commit illegal immigration, as well as that of the act of illegally entering the United States. According to the U.S. Code, illegally crossing a federal border into the United States is a federal misdemeanor. If repeated, it rises to the status of a federal felony. The way the law was initially legislated back in the 1930s, it seems that Congress was, somehow, inviting Mexicans to make an attempt to illegally immigrate by classifying the crime at the lowest level, much like shoplifting is classified by most state criminal codes as a misdemeanor. And we know that most shoplifters go un-apprehended and, usually, are repeat offenders. Both Clinton and Obama are lawyers and should know the difference between misdemeanors and felonies, but, by their responses to that one question concerning illegal Hispanics and employment, they demonstrated a serious disregard for enforcing federal law.
An analogy might serve well in this particular instance. If, perchance, ten-thousand irate, and unarmed, American citizen taxpayers converged one morning on the border of the secret federal installation known as “Area 51″ in the Nevada desert and, in mass, moved across the border area demanding to know what their billions of tax dollars are actually funding there, I am pretty sure they would be “all” be arrested, if not shot and killed by unmarked black helicopters, and charged with illegally entering a prohibited federal compound.
This crime, by the way, is listed in the U.S.C. as a felony. Yet, a group of fifty armed Mexicans can plan, and perpetrate, a mass crossing of the U.S. border into Arizona and only be charged with a misdemeanor crime? Which of the two would actually be worse? I personally think that a group of unknown Mexicans, who have conspired to clandestinely cross the U.S. border during early morning hours, and do so willing to kill anyone who stands in their way, is much worse than indignant U.S. citizens being civilly disobedient against what they consider unjust laws.
If I were a foreign terrorist and wanted to gain entry into the United States in order to do some real damage, I would seriously consider joining with a group of Hispanics planning a covert border-crossing. Of the sixteen-or-so million illegal undocumented aliens presently dispersed across the forty-eight contiguous states, I’ll wager that there are quite-a-few terrorists among them, who have entered at the Southern gate, just waiting for the right opportunity to concertedly act, in unison, against the interests of the federal government. To not consider such as a reasonable probability, and to think that the newly established Department of Homeland Security, the F.B.I, and the NSA have a secure handle on who is actually here, and the threats that they present to the nation, is absolute lunacy.
During the 1920s and 30s, with its primitive low-tech, yet very effective intelligence gathering operations, the FBI actually had a better knowledge of who was an active communist in the U.S. than they have, today, of who are undocumented alien terrorists, with the sophisticated computerized satellite technology available today. Of course, the federal government wants the average citizen to believe that she’s safer today than she was yesterday, with the trillions of dollars of tax money which have been spent on advanced technology. Yet, the old computer expression seems to aptly hit-home. GIGO, which means “garbage-in-garbage-out,” applies to basic human nature when arrogant and very imperfect people attempt to blame perfectly functioning computers for their continuing errors. Now that computer systems are essentially running the federal administration, it’s much easier for an executive agency to say that the “system” is not up-and-running, than admit to human failure, inadvertent or deliberate, and hold someone accountable for it.
I seriously believe that illegal criminal immigration is an extremely provocative issue about which most American citizens have a very uneasy feeling. Moreover, when the only two Democratic presidential candidates are unwilling to call illegal immigration a crime during a debate, in order to court the support of the U.S. Hispanic voting population, a great many citizens, black, white, Hispanic, Jewish, Oriental, etc., and especially those immigrants who have strictly obeyed the law of naturalization over time, get a gut feeling that something is tragically wrong with the candidates’ civic perspectives and priorities.
In a manner of speaking, Hillary and Barack are making it quite easy for the rationally-minded independent voters to see the Republican Party’s priorities, of strict border control and the arrest/deportation of illegal undocumented aliens, as a viable alternative to pampering of, and offering drivers licenses to, millions of undocumented illegal aliens. Such inaction by the Democratic Party is, unfortunately, going to only aid in putting John McCain or Mitt Romney into the White House come the November 2008 Presidential Election.
Norton R. Nowlin took M.A. and B.A. degrees in the social and behavioral sciences from the University of Texas at Tyler, studied law for one full year at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, in San Diego, California, and earned an ABA-approved advanced paralegal certification from Edmonds Community College, in Lynnwood, Washington. Mr. Nowlin is a certified educator, and has attended La Jolla, California’s National University and Malibu’s Pepperdine University to attain credits in business management and economics. A paralegal, published essayist, poet, and free-lance fiction writer, Mr. Nowlin resides in Northern Virginia with his wife, the renown math tutor, Diane C. Nowlin, and their two very intelligent cats.
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