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Victim or Accomplice?
Many people—often those in government or the media—confuse the terms “human smuggling” and “human trafficking.” They’re definitely not the same thing, and are very different issues that are approached in a variety of ways by law enforcement agencies. The critical difference is the nature of the person’s participation in either activity. In human smuggling, a migrant voluntarily embarks on a journey to another country, and sometimes pays a guide—always willingly—to help them along that journey. Human trafficking involves the involuntary movement of people—more often women than men, and quite frequently children—across borders for the purpose of essentially selling them as laborers or sex slaves.
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“Virtual kidnappings” are another phenomenon that many people don’t know about. This happens when Mexican nationals living in the United States get phone calls from unknown individuals claiming they’re holding a loved one hostage somewhere in Mexico. Sometimes they play a recording that could sound like the relative; it’s not hard to convince someone who is in a panic at the thought of a kidnapped relative. The perpetrators then usually manage to suck several thousand dollars out of a family for a kidnapping that never happened. But real kidnappings for ransom happen this way, too, and, in most cases, they’re never reported. Despite the fact that the victim’s family is living in the United States, they’re afraid to call the police for fear the victim will be harmed, or they’re living here illegally and are afraid of being deported.
I’m sure that some people will say that we should have no compassion for any of these people; that the women who are victimized made their choice when they decided to cross into the United States illegally. But is that really the kind of country we want to live in? Do we really believe that rape trees and violence are okay because these people committed the first crime? I don’t. You know that I am as tough on the border as anyone—I want it sealed—but, in the meantime, let’s not allow our politicians to turn us into uncompassionate robots. We need to hold all those who break our laws responsible, but let’s not make the mistake of believing that all criminals are created equal.
INMATES RUNNING THE ASYLUM
The connection between illegal immigration and the drug war has grown even more complicated with the significant increase in the number of Mexican nationals requesting asylum in the United States. Mexico has become one of the top asylum-seeking countries. U.S. immigration courts and officials received 25,223 political asylum petitions from Mexican citizens in fiscal years 2006 through 2010. Only 822 were granted—or 3.3 percent.
You might be thinking that’s good news—after all, we shouldn’t be giving asylum to anyone who asks, right? Of course, but there’s a much bigger issue here: current asylum law is old and outdated, better suited for cases emerging from the Cold War and communism. To obtain political asylum, a person must prove that there’s a well-founded fear of persecution on account of the person’s race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. An individual must also show that he is being persecuted by his government, or that authorities in his country are unable or unwilling to protect the applicant from persecution by another group.
Most of these Mexican asylum cases are very tragic, involving people who have been kidnapped or directly threatened by cartels, or who have had immediate family members murdered by cartels in Mexico. Some have witnessed crimes committed by cartel members, or owned businesses that were being extorted. In several cases, it’s obvious that the individuals petitioning for asylum will be kidnapped, tortured, or killed if they were to be deported back to Mexico. But, to many immigration judges, none of that matters because the organization doing the persecuting isn’t the Mexican government. Never mind the fact that the cartels are the de facto government in many parts of Mexico, or that they own the state and local police, or that there’s no such thing as a witness protection program in Mexico.
It’s obvious that the entire asylum application system needs updating and reform. But is there any real motivation for the U.S. State Department to do so? And if the U.S. courts started granting asylum to every Mexican who feared being killed by a cartel, how many people would start clamoring to cross the border?
It’s a legitimate question, but it doesn’t change the fact that what’s happening in Mexico is a humanitarian crisis. More than forty-seven thousand people have been killed as a result of the drug war, and an untold number of innocent people have been threatened, kidnapped, assaulted, and extorted. It’s easy to try to dismiss it all and say that this just isn’t our problem, but it’s just as easy to look at a map and realize why you’re wrong.
DEEDS, NOT WORDS
So, how do we stop sitting back and admiring the problem and instead get people to start thinking about solutions? Well, first of all, I think everyone involved in the debate needs to define exactly what “securing the border” really means. I’ve been on the border fence bandwagon for a long time now for a few reasons: first, because it would give us all some tangible evidence that the government is actually taking this seriously; and second, because I think that it will dissuade the vast majority of people from attempting to come here. But even given that support I’m still rational enough to realize that no fence is going to keep everyone out, especially not sophisticated cartels. I’ve seen the images of smugglers using catapults to launch drug loads over the existing fence. And those subs and ultralight planes we talked about before would still work just fine.
Assuming we can’t stop everyone and everything, we have to prioritize our limited resources and the top priority needs to be stopping terrorists from entering the United States from Mexico. The next priority should be stopping violent criminals and drug traffickers from crossing the border.
But before any real changes can be made, our leaders need to demonstrate that they are willing to tell the truth about the drug war and all the people who are being victimized by the violence. I’m not saying they’re not concerned, but they all obviously have a political agenda for not letting on that they’re worried. For example, picture the impact on Americans’ sense of security if Secretary Napolitano were to go on TV and offer the truth: “We can’t really secure long stretches of our border and actually have no idea how many people are coming across it every day, let alone who those people are. Oh, and the cartels? They come across at will and we really can’t stop the spillover violence. In fact, we can’t even decide on the definition of it.”
If politicians and elected leaders say anything less than what a great job is being done and how safe the border is, then it’s equivalent to admitting failure in managing the border—and that, we all know, is not an option in politics.
Mexico’s drug war isn’t just a battle against faceless murderers who want top dollar for the illegal drugs they’re peddling. It’s a conflict between criminals who operate with impunity and a complete disregard for human life and a decent, moral, civilized society in which the rule of law still matters. It’s a struggle for common ground between two nations that have viewed each other with suspicion for over a hundred years. But most of all, it’s a fight to give back to everyone what we all deserve most: safety, security, and the freedom to live our lives as we choose.
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”
—Patrick Henry
THE NEXT TIME you have the pleasure of having your crotch fondled by the latex-fingered heroes of the Transportation Security Administration, take a moment to reflect on this simple, infuriating fact: Osama bin Laden won.
What are you talking about, Glenn? How can you say that?! We shot him in the face!
Yes, SEAL Team Six won the battle for sure, but we’ve been steadily losing the war. When it comes to the fight to retain our civil liberties—the rights and privileges granted by
the Constitution we’re claiming to protect—America is losing ground at an alarming pace.
Now, I don’t think that bin Laden was clever enough to anticipate that his surprise attack on 9/11 would cause us to tear ourselves apart over the ensuing decade, but that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. It hurts to think that these terrorists didn’t just bring down four planes and a few buildings; they may very well have helped to bring down America as well. Or, at least the America we want to live in.
If you’re not paying attention, you should be. And if you are paying attention, you should be worried. Things have happened fast—and they aren’t about to slow down. Those who crave a more powerful and totalitarian government, and even those who genuinely believe that we can purchase security with liberty, are not about to take their foot off the gas.
A SERIOUS CRISIS DID NOT GO TO WASTE
We know one thing for sure: politicians will always take advantage of crisis. Even as the rubble at Ground Zero was still smoldering, the United States government, in full panic mode, rushed to establish a brand-new, poorly thought-out security behemoth. They endowed it with the humble moniker “Department of Homeland Security.”
Before anyone knew exactly what this new bureaucracy would be doing for (or to) us, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan was quick to point out that the name itself was pretty creepy : “The name Homeland Security grates on a lot of people, understandably. Homeland isn’t really an American word, it’s not something we used to say or say now. It has a vaguely Teutonic ring—Ve must help ze Fuehrer protect ze Homeland!”
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I Was for It Before I Was Against It—Coming Clean on the PATRIOT Act
In the wake of 9/11 most of us anticipated that another attack could come at any moment. We weren’t thinking clearly. We were in shock. Though I had reservations about the PATRIOT Act, I thought it made sense at the time. The reservations I had—that it gave the chief executive way too many powers outside of the Constitution—were addressed by the “sunset” provisions, as well as the fact that I believed George W. Bush to be acting in the best interests of the country. In retrospect, it turned out to be a raw deal. I should have known better. The sunsets were dropped later on and the act has been renewed every time it came up. Not to mention the fact that the act has been misused on numerous occasions. I believe it can do more harm than good, especially in the wrong hands. And it’s definitely in the wrong hands.
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I’m not trying to work a Nazi reference into this book for my own amusement, I’m just trying to point out that one of the country’s most enormous bureaucracies was cobbled together so quickly, and with such lack of foresight, that they didn’t even devote enough time to thinking up a name that doesn’t conjure up images of Adolf Hitler.
We can also credit bin Laden with helping to put a dramatic and immediate (if not extremely temporary) end to partisanship in Congress, as a panicked mob of politicians managed to put their differences aside just long enough to pass one of the most liberty-threatening pieces of legislation in a long time: the USA PATRIOT Act. The name alone would be funny if it weren’t such a desperate attempt to make all of us believe that we hated America if we didn’t support it.
But we can forgive human nature—we all remember those days; we were freaked out—and I was no exception. We demanded that government do something. And at that point, with all of those lawmakers standing out on the Capitol steps and singing “God Bless America,” most of us would have accepted almost anything if they promised it would keep us safe.
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The Power of One
In 2011, the PATRIOT Act was extended for four more years. The vote totals were 72–23 in the Senate and 250–153 in the House. President Obama signed it “minutes before a midnight deadline” would have caused it to expire. But if you don’t think that one vigilant politician can make a difference, consider this account from the Associated Press:
Congress bumped up against the deadline mainly because of the stubborn resistance from a single senator, Republican freshman Rand Paul of Kentucky, who saw the terrorist-hunting powers as an abuse of privacy rights. Paul held up the final vote for several days while he demanded a chance to change the bill to diminish the government’s ability to monitor individual actions.
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In retrospect, that was exactly the moment that those who’ve had police-state-type plans lying around in their desk drawers had been waiting for.
The good news is that the PATRIOT Act was a temporary measure. Many politicians held their nose and voted for it because the “sunset” provisions in the bill meant that it would likely go away in a few years. The bad news, of course, is that economist Milton Friedman hit the nail on the head when he said “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.” Most of the sunset provisions are long gone—dropped at the first opportunity. Each time the PATRIOT Act has come up for a vote (under administrations led by both political parties), it’s been renewed with very little debate. Like Vladimir Putin, the PATRIOT doesn’t want to go anywhere.
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DUMB: Developing Useless and Misnamed Bills
I wonder how many congressional aides it took to figure out something believable that PATRIOT could stand for. Because you know they must have started with patriot and then tried to back into the dumb phrase, not the other way around, right? Here goes:
PATRIOT: Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism
Maybe that’ll help you win a trivia contest one day.
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THE HOBGOBLINS
Our constitution was designed to keep the federal government off our backs—and, frankly, it’s done an amazingly good job of it. For that, we should give ourselves credit.
There have, however, been moments throughout history when the resilience of the Constitution has been tested; moments when this country’s leaders have been tested in their understanding of, and respect for, the law of the land. And in many of those moments, our leaders have failed.
All of these instances of governmental overreach have one thing in common: they were done under the guise of protecting us from some collective danger. In other words, in an effort to “keep us safe” from some threat, real or perceived, the government usually targets the one document that actually keeps us safe: the Constitution.
From the earliest days of our republic we’ve known that if our rights were going to be stolen from us, they would be stolen by our own government, and that the government would do it while telling us that it was in our own best interest.
In 1783, the British politician William Pitt said, “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” Nearly a century and a half later, the libertarian journalist H. L. Mencken proved that Pitt’s sentiment hadn’t changed much. He wrote, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Those hobgoblins have come in many forms over the years, but the government’s reaction has invariably been the same: Don’t worry, we’ll protect you! The problem is that protection isn’t free; it comes with a very heavy price: we buy security—or at least the belief that we’re buying security—with our liberty.
After the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, the new hobgoblin became the Japanese. Americans were in a panic and wanted to be sure they were safe from what had been labeled the “yellow menace” (things weren’t quite so PC back then). The government was there to protect us, of course, but this time the price tag would be extraordinarily high. While most people would never feel the sting, a high price was paid by those Americans who happened to be of Japanese descent.
In 1942, a little over ten weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of American citizens. Ten weeks is all it took for fear to usher in an atmosphere where the civ
il rights of 110,000 individuals could be shredded. Not because they were a threat to the nation, or because they practiced some seditious ideology, but because of their ethnicity. People who thought they lived in “the land of the free” found themselves on the outside looking in—or, in this case, on the inside of a barbed wire fence looking out.
It’s really hard to even fathom how this happened. After all, this wasn’t a decision made by some dictator; it was a decision made by America’s chief executive—a hero to many on the left still today—with the full support of members of Congress who had been sending FDR memos like this:
It is my sincere belief that the Pacific coast should be declared a military area which will give authority to treat residents, either alien or citizens, as camp followers and put them under military law, permitting their removal, regardless of their citizenship rights, to internal and less dangerous areas. (Harley M. Kilgore, D-WV)
Columnists like Westbrook Pegler also fanned the flames, penning influential columns that stated “[they] should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now, and to hell with habeas corpus. . . .”