The public's not with the pols on illegal aliens
Posted by Paul Mulshine August 21, 2007 12:20PM
Categories: Politics, Race & Immigration

The public reaction to that triple-homicide in Newark has taken a 180-degree turn from where the politicians wanted it to go.

Here's how Gov. Corzine, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the other Democratic leaders were trying to spin the story: Those three college kids were killed because an uncaring public didn't want to spend enough money on Newark.

Here's how the public sees the story: Those three college kids were killed because uncaring politicians didn't want to enforce the law and deport illegal aliens who commit crimes.

Tuesday's Star-Ledger has a front-page article that shows why the public is right. It's headlined "How Criminals Dodge Deportation." Reporter Brian Donohue details a number of cases in which illegal aliens who should have been deported for relatively minor crimes were instead permitted to hang around until they did something truly dreadful. In one such case, an illegal immigrant from Honduras named Ricardo Cepates was arrested for holding a knife to a woman's throat in New Brunswick in 1998. Cepates was already under a deportation order, but he was let loose anyway. In 2004, a serial rapist terrorized the city for months. Guess who?.

Later in the article we get to hear from a number of incompetent officials. The reader can practically see them throwing up their hands as they shrug and say "What can we do?" There are so many illegal alien criminals that it's impossible to deport them all, they say.

But why are there so many illegal alien criminals? Because there are so many illegal aliens.

And why are there so many illegal aliens? Because politicians of both parties all the way up to President Bush refuse to solve a problem that the pols claimed to have solved back in 1986, when they passed that immigration amnesty. That law, which was accompanied by workplace sanctions, was supposed to end illegal immigration. But Bush, who failed to enforce those sanctions, has been calling for a new amnesty ever since 2004.

The preppie-in-chief deserves the ultimate responsibility for those murders in Newark. They were just a variation on those September 2001 attacks in New York City, much smaller in scale but equally devastating to the relatives of the victims. The theory of the liberals - a category into which we conservatives have always placed Bush - is that the government can make America into such a wonderful, welcoming society that even homicidal maniacs can be permitted to walk among us unchallenged. We don't have to know who's in our country. We just have to know that the wonderful, caring government, with its liberal or "compassionate conservative" approach, will magically transform them into good citizens.

Nonsense. As of Sept. 11, Bush could have pushed through any program he wished in the area of immigration, including his beloved amnesty and guest-worker programs. Instead he left the borders open to about a million illegal entrants a year. If Bush had cared as much about the people of America as he does about the people of Mexico - or for that matter Iraq - the problem would have been solved by now. The two alleged ring-leaders of that triple homicide would have been back in their native lands. The underground society in which one of them hid from the law for two weeks after the killings would not have existed.

Booker and Corzine could have gotten tremendous public support by making this point at their press conferences. But the Democrats are even more softheaded about immigration than Bush. They will never point out how insane it is to put criminal immigrants back on the streets.

It's all the public talks about, however.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/20 ... _pols.html