Thread: Why illegals are a danger to American

WHY ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE A DANGER TO AMERICA

by Michael Cutler
February 20, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

I have included an link to a "news article" that was published by the Catholic New Agency. I have placed the words news articles in italics because in my judgement, this is not a news article but rather a piece of propaganda masquerading as a news article.

I generally do not comment on items written by religious organizations especially when the religious organization does not relate to Judaism because I am Jewish and I don't normally feel comfortable getting into religious discussions outside my own religion. However, the CNA article does not deal with religion but rather with immigration and law enforcement. Consequently I believe that this story should be of great concern to all Americans irrespective of religious orientation.

When I recently testified before the Indiana State Senate on a bill (SB 335) that would enable the state of Indiana to revoke the business license of any business that had repeatedly hired illegal aliens and provide other measures to enable the state of Indiana to do the job the federal government won't do, where immigration is concerned, I heard a representative of the Church talk about the need to honor the dignity of the "undocumented immigrants."

For the Catholic Church to take a stand on an issue that has such extreme implications for national security is outrageous! What is also outrageous is the simple fact that while the Church decries the lack of dignity that the arrest of illegal aliens represents (in the Church's judgement), why is the Church conspicuously absent at those factories and other work-sites where illegal aliens are horribly treated. Why is the Church not showing up to protest the illegal conditions under which illegal aliens often live and work?

As I noted during my testimony in Indiana, I have arrested thousands of illegal aliens in my thirty year career at the former INS. I have, on all too many occasions, found many illegal aliens living in abject squalor. I have seen 20 adult men "living" in an apartment that was intended for a family of four. These men slept on mattresses laid next to each other and placed end to end. They shared a single bathroom. They shared the apartment that had no furnishings with vermin that scampered across the floor and with bugs that encrusted the walls to the extent that when you flipped on the light switch, those bugs would scatter in all directions creating what we used to refer to as a "moving wall."

The stench was so awful and pervasive that it would sometimes remain in my nostrils for a week!

I have raided factories that essentially recreated the horrific conditions found in the Triangle Shirt Factory. The Triangle Shirt Factory, for those who are not aware of it, existed 100 years ago. On March 25, 1911 a fire broke out on a Saturday afternoon in New York City while many young immigrant women toiled in the factory. The fire that broke out caused the death of 146 young women. There was no way for them to escape the flames.

I have seen conditions in factories in which fire exists were blocked by boxes of fabrics and other supplies, while the owner of the factory might have his air conditioners cranked up to maximum output on a hot summer day, the workers on the factory floor had no air conditioners. Often the windows were barely open and between the heat from the summer sun and the steam presses running full tilt, and the only breeze was provided by filth-laden fans on tall stanchions. These workers sat shoulder to shoulder and the dust from the fabric mixed with the hot humid air that was being re-circulated by those fans.

I have seen restaurant workers sleeping on hammocks that were strung up between the pipes in the basement of a diner providing the appearance of a slave ship.

There were days that I found it difficult to go to sleep after a day at work and seeing the wholesale abuse and mistreatment of human beings at the hands of unscrupulous employers.

I have also known aliens who participated in the Amnesty of 1986. In some cases these aliens had been my informants. When they received their official documents from the INS they approached their bosses and, with the new immigration cards in their hands, they asked for minimum wages. They asked to be paid time and a half for overtime and for working on weekends. They simply wanted to be treated the way the law required that they be treated. Most of these aliens were quickly fired by their unscrupulous employers. Those employers did not have to wait long for new employees who would not make such demands. They simply hired the next wave of illegal aliens.

The issue is that lawful immigrants cannot be exploited but illegal aliens can easily be exploited.

The officials of the Church have to understand how this all happens. Why then would the Church talk about the need to treat illegal aliens with dignity but yet they never show up to protest the undignified way that they are all too often mistreated by unscrupulous employers? At best the Church is being naive. At worst they don't care about this exploitation because their interest ends with the recruitment of more members for the Church.

The article below parallels that sentiment and even goes so far as to recommend that the economic stimulus package that has just been approved by the President should also apply to illegal aliens. I feel compelled to respond to this commentary.

Let us start out by making it clear, as I did when I spoke in Indiana, that we must first get our language straight. Illegal aliens are not "undocumented immigrants." The difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien is the equivalent of the difference between a houseguest and a burglar. When an individual runs our nation's borders and enters surreptitiously he (she) may have a number of motivations to violate our nation's border in that fashion. He may simply be desperate to get a job and send money home. He may be on the run, evading law enforcement authorities because he is wanted for a heinous crime in his own country or in some other country. He may be entering our country to commit a crime. He may be entering our country to carry out a terrorist attack, either by having a direct role in conducting such an act of terror or he may be here to provide support for such an attack. It is also possible that this alien had been previously deported from our country for having committed a violent crime such as murder, rape, arson or assault. The problem is that in the case of the illegal alien who runs our borders, we have no idea as to identity and consequently, we do not know why he entered our country illegally.

This is why I compare illegal aliens with burglars. If, God forbid, you came home and found a total stranger who had broken into your home, sitting in your living room, sipping your iced tea and watching your television, I do not believe your first thought would be to offer him a job and the keys to your apartment unless you suffered from some sort of debilitating mental illness!

A nation's primary responsibility is to provide for the safety and security of its citizens just as a family's primary responsibility is to provide for the safety of the members of that family, especially the children of the family. Inviting an utter stranger who broke into your home to move into your guest room would make about as much sense as it would for our nation to provide lawful status to aliens whose identities and backgrounds are unknown and unknowable.

The "background checks" that the proponents of open borders and a Guest Worker Amnesty program claim will properly identify the millions of illegal aliens who would undoubtedly seize the opportunity to participate in the amnesty program really will not work. This is why: A background check simply means that the overworked adjudicators at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) would run the name that the illegal and undocumented alien provides on the applications for amnesty through a computer database. They would also run the fingerprints of those illegal and undocumented aliens through a database. If the name shows up as not matching any known criminal or terrorist and if the fingerprints similarly come back as not relating to anyone with a criminal history, then USCIS would issue a temporary identity document that the alien in question would be able to immediately use that document to obtain a Social Security Number, a driver's license from the state in which he lives and other such documents.

While this may sound reasonable, let me tell you what is wrong with this process. If a terrorist or criminal provides a false name on the application, there would be no way of knowing that the name is a false name. If the alien in question is a person who is wanted in another country but has no criminal history in our country, then his fingerprints may well come back as having no criminal history. In this situation a criminal or even a terrorist would most likely receive a temporary identity document and go on to receive the other identity documents, all in an assumed identity to enable him to embed himself in our country.

If you believe I am not being reasonable, I want to remind you that according to the 911 Commission, the 19 terrorists that attacked our nation on September 11, 2001 used a total of 364 false names and variations of identity among them! This is the reason that the Real ID Act was enacted- to try to address a serious vulnerability that was identified by the 911 Commission.

It is also essential to understand that USCIS is unable to cope with its current workload. To expect an agency that according to the GAO "lost" 111,000 immigration alien files relating to aliens seeking a variety of immigration benefits including 30,000 who applied to become naturalized citizens and others applied to acquire resident alien status and then adjudicated all of those applications without the relating files should keep every American awake at night! For part two click below.
This is a level of incompetence and malfeasance that should have resulted in the firing of the managers of this agency. No one was fired! If you want to read the ugly and unvarnished truth about this monumental disaster, read the press release issued by Senator Charles Grassley who joined Senator Sue Collins in demanding an investigation by the GAO. You can find the press release that contains a link to the report by clicking here.

The point of the matter is that while the President and other politicians often state that the "illegal aliens are willing to do the work Americans won't do," the hard reality is that illegal aliens will accept unreasonable wages under often illegally dangerous conditions because they are illegal aliens and as such are vulnerable to exploitation.

We the People should demand to know why any organization that would decry the mistreatment of illegal aliens would not complain about the exploitation of illegal aliens by those who employ them.

I have a theory. Mind you this is only a theory, but I wonder if the open borders advocates and the advocates for amnesty for illegal aliens believe that if employers were made to treat their employees fairly that they would probably simply decide to hire Americans and those who are lawfully entitled to work in the United States. This would lead to a decline in the number of illegal aliens in the United States. This, in turn, would mean that there would be fewer people to recruit into the Church.

Perhaps I am wrong. The thing is that I would love to know why those who claim they are concerned about the arrest of illegal aliens don't complain about the way that they are mistreated on the job and where they live. Wouldn't it make sense for those humanitarians to be concerned about such exploitation?

If the open borders advocates could muster huge numbers of illegal aliens and their supporters to stand on street corners across the United States to chant that ever-popular war chant of illegal aliens "Si se Puede!" ("Yes we can!") a chant that has been picked up by none other than Presidential candidate Barack Obama, then why doesn't the Church mount demonstrations outside of factories and meat processing plants that pay illegal aliens substandard wages under substandard conditions? Wouldn't this make it clear that this is all about human dignity? When vulnerable humans are exploited, it would make sense to stand up and oppose that exploitation!

So here is a suggestion: lets all of us encourage the Church, "immigrant rights" groups and all others who decry the need to treat illegal aliens with dignity to have them demand that these illegal aliens be paid prevailing wages and be given all of the benefits that American citizens and lawful immigrant workers would expect to be provided with.

Why would the Church complain that illegal aliens are not going to receive the economic stimulus checks that American citizens and lawful immigrants are going to receive? It is an established fact that law enforcement authorities on all levels (local, state and federal) are increasingly resorting to asset forfeiture tactics to seize ill-gotten assets. If you acquire money or material goods such as a car, airplane, jewelry or even a house by violating the law, there is a good chance that the government will take those fruits of illegal activities away from you. If an illegal alien works illegally, why should We the People provide them with economic incentives for working illegally?

Consider this statement from the Catholic News Agency. “We should not accept the fruits of the labor of these workers at the same time we refuse to provide them the protection of our laws."

If the Church is concerned about the protection of our laws, why have they not taken a visible position on the labor laws? Why haven't we heard or seen the representatives of the Church complaining about the substandard wages and substandard working conditions under which the illegal aliens toil? Would it not make sense for the Church to demonstrate their disapproval of the way that illegal aliens often live and work in the United States? Could it be that the Church does not care about these deplorable conditions that illegal aliens face in our country because they realize that if employers were pressured into paying living wages that they would then be more likely to simply hiring American citizens and lawful immigrants rather than illegal aliens?

As for the stated concern that illegal aliens must be protected by our laws, illegal aliens are protected by all of the due process provisions of our laws. What must be remembered is that protection of law does not include the right to violate our laws!

The thing to remember is that illegal aliens are violating our nation's borders and immigration laws. Our nation must have secure borders. In order to secure our nation's borders, our nation needs to take a tripod approach to immigration law enforcement. This means that we need to hire more Border Patrol agents and build a true fence (not a ridiculous virtual fence that is largely dysfunctional). Additionally we need more CBP inspectors at ports of entry and we should end the Visa Waiver Program. (Right now it is estimated that some 40% of the illegal aliens did not run our nation's borders but rather entered our country through ports of entry and then, in one way or another, violated the terms of their admission.)

On May 11, 2006 I testified before the SUBCOMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS, OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES on the topic of: "VISA OVERSTAYS: CAN WE BAR THE TERRORIST DOOR?"

Finally, the third leg of that tripod is the interior enforcement component of the immigration laws. This includes seeking out and arresting aliens who fail to show up for deportation (removal) hearings. These fugitives are known as "absconders." There need to be an adequate number of ICE special agents to investigate those who enter into conspiracies to commit immigration fraud where, for example, United States citizens or lawful immigrants marry aliens who want to achieve immigrant status. In these cases, these people do not live together and the citizen or immigrant receive money for this "business arrangement."

Interior enforcement must also include a vigorous effort to go after the employers of illegal aliens and the illegal aliens who work illegally in our country.

If all of these measures implemented, our nation will not be able to gain control over our borders. Without gaining control over our nation's borders and creating an immigration system that possesses real integrity, our nation will continue to be inundated by criminals and potentially terrorists. Open borders also lead to the movement of massive quantities of illegal drugs entering our country and destroying the lives of so many of our citizens. This massive influx of narcotics and other dangerous drugs is at the root cause of much of the crime and violence in our country.

Immigration fraud has been linked to criminals, spies and terrorists acquiring the ability to move freely across our nation' borders and embedding themselves in our country. This is a matter of extreme significance under any circumstances. As we wage a war against terrorists and violent gangs, it is absolutely vital that our nation be able to prevent the entry terrorists and others who would enter our country to do grave harm to our nation and our citizens.

The massive influx of illegal aliens also hammers the ability of Americans and resident aliens (lawful immigrants) to support themselves and their families by driving down wages and rolling back many of the hard-fought and hard-won battles by the labor movement over the past century. In the 1940's, the enforcement and administration of the immigration laws was placed under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Labor to protect the American worker from the deleterious effect of the entry of exploitable labor offered by illegal aliens. Our government, back then, was actually concerned about the well-being of our citizens! (Could you imagine the federal government actually being concerned about its citizens- and not just those citizens who are worth millions of dollars?)

While we are on the topic of American workers, wouldn't it also make sense for those who claim to be motivated by a concern about morality to want to provide opportunities for American citizens and resident aliens to be able to find work and help bootstrap them into mainstream economic America and enable them to participate in the "American Dream?"
http://newswithviews.com/Cutler/michael25.htm

"If the Church is concerned about the protection of our laws, why have they not taken a visible position on the labor laws? Why haven't we heard or seen the representatives of the Church complaining about the substandard wages and substandard working conditions under which the illegal aliens toil?"

In this man's opinion, the church--and I mean mainly the Catholic church, is committing the same sin that they committed with the pedophiliac priests. Thy are trying to hide the truth. They are trying to restore the size of their congregations to the pre-scandal levels. They will stoop to any level. I, among many others, do not, nor will not participate in any Catholic church functions any longer. They have betrayed me, first by sins against the young boys and girls and now by urging their congregations to aid and abet in the violation of American law.

I am no Bible or religious scholar. I am just a man who attended 12 years of Catholic school and considered for a while, entering the priesthood. The efforts of the church to win back fallen away Catholics and increase their members to assist in replacing the wealth that was lost through the fines and judgments levied against them due to their lack of faith in hiding the crimes, and in essence aiding the sinning priests will not stop. That is their agenda--replenish the coffers and the numbers in the congregation.

The result, I believe, will be to turn even more American Catholics away from the modern day, sinful Catholic church.

I would suggest to the church that they return to their mission of saving souls by , once again, sending their missionaries out to the people, not by inviting all the people to come to America for the salvation of their souls.

Why do churches have locks on their doors--doesn't this 'dishonor the dignity of all'?

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."
Franklin D. Roosevelt