Some Inconvenient Truths about Illegal Immigration

[Unknown User]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 12:51pm

"On April 28th, in a letter to President Obama, seventeen members of Congress, most of them from the Southwest, demanded immediate action to increase border security, noting that “violence in the vicinity of the U.S.-Mexico border continues to increase at an alarming rate.”...Senator John McCain...went on to cite numbers for illegal immigrants apprehended last year “that stagger.”

In fact those numbers are surprising: they are sharply down, according to the Border Patrol—by more than sixty per cent since 2000, to five hundred and fifty thousand apprehensions last year, the lowest figure in thirty-five years. Illegal immigration, although hard to measure, has clearly been declining. The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states."

Pass these facts on to your local tea party-er and watch their head explode.





The New Yorker

[Unknown User]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 12:58pm

"“If the president had actually visited the Arizona-Mexico border, he would understand the real threats Americans are facing from violence along the border related to drug trafficking and human smuggling,” McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said in a statement. McCain has called on Obama to deploy 6,000 National Guard troops to the border, four times what the president has pledged."

Out of touch much?

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 1:02pm

Yet they were incredulous when people wanted W to stop by Cindy Sheehan's pup tent.

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 1:02pm

I am convinced McCain is in the throes of Alzheimer's.

[YouWantitWhen????]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 1:06pm

^^^^^^

This.

[Unknown User]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 1:08pm

The "Visit the Arizona border" meme is also part of Birther mythology where they have long wanted Obama to get caught in a "citizenship trap." As one blogger puts it "If he visits Arizona and can't prove his citizenship can we send him back to Kenya?"

And of course, Obama has visited Arizona, most recently in February of 2009.

[Plum]

Posted: 7/22/10 at 9:27pm

Oh, I know folks who have visited the border with Mexico. They went there to do legal work for immigrants who got transported with no notice from all over the country to a detention center in the middle of bum**** nowhere (where there are conveniently no lawyers) to be held indefinitely.
Ah, those charmers in immigration enforcement.