Thread: Heather MacDonald: Diplomats unleashed

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Mexican consulates are attacking our laws and threatening our security to get illegal migrants into the United States

06:13 AM CST on Sunday, December 4, 2005

Diplomacy may be the art of lying for one's country, but Mexican diplomacy requires taking that art to virtuosic heights.

Mexican officials here and abroad are involved in a massive and almost daily interference in American sovereignty. The millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in this country are here thanks in part to Mexico's efforts to get them into the U.S. in violation of American law and to normalize their status once here in violation of the popular will. Mexican consulates are engineering a backdoor amnesty for their illegal migrants and trying to discredit American immigration enforcement – activities clearly beyond diplomatic bounds. Mexico's governing class is not content simply to unload the victims of its failed policies on the U.S., however. It also tries to ensure that migrants retain allegiance to La Patria, so as to preserve the $16 billion in remittances that they send to Mexico each year. Mexican leaders have thus tasked their nation's U.S. consulates with spreading Mexican culture into American schools and communities. Given the American public's swelling anger about illegal immigration, it's past time for Washington to tell Mexico to cease interfering and for the Bush administration to start enforcing the law.

Just how shameless is Mexico in promoting illegal entry into the U.S.? For starters, the government publishes and distributes a comic book-style guide on breaching the border safely and evading detection once across. Disseminating information about how to evade a host country's laws is not typical consular activity. Consulates exist to promote the commercial interests of their nations abroad and to help nationals if they have lost passports, gotten robbed or fallen ill. If a national gets arrested, consular officials may visit him in jail to ensure that his treatment meets minimum human rights standards. Consuls aren't supposed to connive in breaking a host country's laws or intervene in its internal affairs.

The border-breaking guide is just the tip of the iceberg of Mexican meddling. After 9-11, Vicente Fox's government realized that the immigration amnesty that it had expected was on hold. So it came up with the second best thing: a de facto amnesty, at the heart of which is the matricula consular card.

Mexican consulates, like those of other countries, have traditionally offered consular cards to their nationals abroad for registration purposes, in case they disappear. In practice, few Mexicans bothered to obtain them. After 9-11, though, officials at Los Pinos (the Mexican White House) ordered their consulates to promote the card as a way for illegals to obtain privileges that the U.S. usually reserves for legal residents. The consulates started aggressively lobbying American governmental officials and banks to accept matriculas as valid IDs for driver's licenses, checking accounts and other benefits.

The only type of Mexican who would need such identification is an illegal one; legal aliens already have sufficient documentation to get driver's licenses and bank accounts. Predictably, the IDs flew off the shelf – more than 4.7 million since 2000. Every day, illegals seeking matriculas swamp the consulates.

A consulate's right to issue such a card to its nationals is indisputable; where the Mexican diplomats push the envelope is in lobbying governments to adopt it as an American ID. In announcing the normalization-through-the-matricula push, then-foreign minister Jorge Castañeda was characteristically blunt: "We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant activities – if you will – in their communities."

Mexico's disrespect for the law regarding its illegal migrants begins on its side of the border. Mexico's own regulations require that all exits from the country go through established crossing points. Decades ago, Mexico enforced that rule. Now, any Mexican can cross wherever he wants.

Mexicans view migration to the U.S. as a fundamental human right, says former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Jeffrey Davidow; no laws should stop it, they believe. In addition, nearly 60 percent of Mexican respondents polled by Zogby in 2001 said that the southwestern U.S. belongs to Mexico. Only 28 percent disagreed.

Mexican consuls denounce any U.S. law enforcement effort against illegal immigration as biased and inhumane. For the moment, they still tolerate deportations if officials pick up the illegal Mexican right at the border and promptly set him down on the other side – whence he can try again the next day. Once in the U.S., however, an illegal gains untouchable status, in the consuls' view.

This past April, for example, Ipswich, N.H., police Chief W. Garrett Chamberlain had grown frustrated with the federal government's refusal to take custody of illegal aliens that his deputies reported to immigration agents. So he charged a Mexican illegal for criminal trespass – for being in a place without legal authority. A chief in a nearby town followed suit. Mexican officials went berserk: If this legal move succeeded – and police chiefs across the country immediately declared interest in using it – it would breach the nationwide sanctuary for Mexico's illegals.

Pulling out all the stops, the Mexican government paid for the defendants' legal representation – another departure from traditional diplomatic practice, which forbids interference in a host country's judicial process unless it is patently unfair. Boston consul general Porfirio Thierry Muñoz Ledo declared the Ipswich trial "legally invalid, discriminatory and a violation of human rights."

Yet the New Hampshire chiefs weren't using the law against the defendants because they were Mexican but because they were illegal. No legal Mexican need worry about arrest for trespass or for violations of the immigration law. Mexico's campaign against immigration enforcement, however, equates being Mexican with being illegal – a presumption that the country would undoubtedly label racist if an American articulated it.

For the moment, Mexican illegals inside the border are safely insulated from enforcement. A New Hampshire judge rejected the Ipswich indictment this August, ruling that local police departments may not use trespass laws against immigration violators. Since the federal authorities virtually refuse to arrest immigration violators, and since most big cities forbid their police to inquire into immigration status, the nation remains one big sanctuary for illegals.

Mexico's consuls go even further in undermining U.S. border law. They're evolving a "disparate impact" theory that holds that any police action is invalid if it falls upon illegal Mexicans, even if that action has nothing to do with immigration.

In July, the Mexican consul general in New York City, Arturo Sarukhan, lambasted Suffolk County, Long Island, officials for evicting more than 100 illegal aliens whose dangerously overcrowded housing violated fire and safety codes. The code enforcement constituted a "vilif[ication]" of the Mexicans, Mr. Sarukhan said, and inflamed community "tensions."

Policing fire and safety codes is a core function of local government – unless it interferes with an illegal Mexican, in the New York consul general's view. He might note that the "tensions" in Long Island aren't due to the Suffolk County government, but to the continuing influx of Latin Americans flouting American law.

Quick to defend individual illegals, the consuls just as energetically fight legislative measures to reclaim the border. Voters nationwide have lost patience with the federal government's indifference to illegal immigration, which imposes crippling costs on local schools, hospitals and jails that must serve or incarcerate thousands of illegal students, patients and gangbangers.

In November 2004, to cite but one example, Arizona voters passed Proposition 200 over the strenuous protests of the Phoenix consul general, who sent out press releases urging Hispanics to vote against it. The proposition merely reaffirmed existing law that requires proof of citizenship to vote and to receive certain welfare benefits. After the law passed, Mexico's foreign minister threatened to bring suit in international tribunals for this human rights violation, and the Phoenix consulate supported a federal lawsuit against the proposition.The gall of Mexican officials does not end with the push for illegal entry. After demanding that we educate their surplus citizens, give those citizens food stamps, deliver their babies, provide them with doctors and hospital beds and police their neighborhoods, the Mexican government also expects us to help preserve their loyalty to Mexico.

Since 1990, Mexico has embarked on a series of initiatives to import Mexican culture into the U.S. Mexico's five-year development plan in 1995 announced that the "Mexican nation extends beyond ... its border" – into the U.S. Accordingly, the government would "strengthen solidarity programs with the Mexican communities abroad by emphasizing their Mexican roots and supporting literacy programs in Spanish and the teaching of the history, values and traditions of our country."

The launching pad for these educational sallies is the IME. The IME directs several programs aimed at American schools. Each of Mexico's 47 consulates in the U.S. (a number that expands nearly every year) has a mandate to introduce Mexican textbooks into schools with significant Hispanic populations.

Immigrants have often tried to hold on to their native traditions, but not until recently did anyone expect American schools to help them do so. And it is hard to see how studying Mexican history from a Mexican perspective helps forge an American identity. Study exercises from a sixth-grade textbook that include discovering "what happened to your territory when the U.S. invaded" don't clarify things. The audacity of Mexico's interference in U.S. immigration policy stands in sharp contrast to Mexico's own jealous sense of sovereignty. It is difficult to imagine a country touchier about interference in its domestic affairs.

This summer, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza closed the U.S. consulate in Nuevo Laredo after a particularly bloody period of drug violence that included the assassination of the town's police chief. Mr. Garza admitted to a reporter that he shut the consulate "in part" to punish Mexico for its failure to control the mayhem. Such measured language, in response to a public threat, provoked a sharp correction from Mexico's deputy foreign secretary, Geronimo Gutierrez. Mr. Garza's words, fumed Mr. Gutierrez, do "not correspond to the role of an ambassador."

But Mexican diplomats in the U.S. often express far harsher, and ad hominem, political judgments, with little regard for protocol. Mexican politicians are even starting to allege that American responses to illegal immigration in the U.S. are a violation of Mexico's sovereignty.

This August, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson declared a state of emergency in four counties bordering Mexico because of violence and devastation wrought by trafficking in aliens and drugs. City Council members from the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez branded Mr. Richardson's declaration an interference in Mexico's domestic affairs.

Mexico's own immigration policies are the exact opposite of what it relentlessly advocates in the U.S. Its entry permits favor scientists, technicians, teachers of underrepresented disciplines and others likely to contribute to "national progress." Immigrants may only enter through established ports and at designated times. Anyone not presenting the proper documentation and health certificates won't get in. Foreigners who do not "strictly comply" with the entry conditions will face deportation.

What about textbooks to propagate American culture in Mexico? When President Ernesto Zedillo tried in the 1990s merely to revise Mexican textbooks to acknowledge contemporary cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, he found himself denounced as a traitor. The revisions went nowhere.

Mexico's border police have reportedly engaged in rapes, robberies and beatings of illegal aliens from Central and South America on their way to the U.S. Yet compared with the extensive immigrant-advocacy network in the U.S., few pressure groups exist in Mexico to protest such treatment. And if Americans run afoul of Mexico's border police, watch out.

The Mexican government will push to control as much U.S. immigration policy as it can. It's up to American officials to stop such interference, but the Bush administration simply winks at foreign attacks on immigration laws that it itself refuses to enforce. President Bush should worry less about upsetting his friends at Los Pinos and more about listening to the American people: Illegal immigration, they believe, is an affront to the rule of law and a threat to American security. It can and must be stopped.

Heather MacDonald is a contributing editor of City Journal (www.city-journal.org), in whose latest issue a longer version of this essay appears. You may e-mail her at cj@city-journal.org.

COUNTERPOINT

Points extended to Carlos Garcia de Alba, Mexico's consul general in Dallas, an opportunity to respond in this issue to Heather MacDonald's essay. His spokeswoman declined the offer.

Close All Mexican Consulates Tomorrow.

Thank you.

I'm SERIOUS!! A consulate is a courtesy, not a right. These consultate facilities in all of these cities are performing illegal activities, anti-American activities, aiding and abetting violations of our laws that affect illegal immigration, drug trafficking, human smuggling, crime, violence, theft, drunking driving, stealing money from our country, stealing benefits from our citizens, and all the "yuck" associated with the horrors of illegal immigration into the United States by Mexican nationals and other nationals freely entering the United States through Mexico.

Close them all down tomorrow and stop this nonsense.

If it leads to conflict with Mexico, then so be it.

WE have to take a stand to protect our nation, our sovereignty, our people. God knows this President isn't going to, so WE have to insist that our US Congress step to the plate or pay the consequences.

Heather McDonald !! That is the best article I think I've ever read regarding revealing the truth about the Bush Administration and Mexico.

All I want for Christmas is for every American to recieve and read this article.

But by then it could be too late.

I'm going to post it on another forum where there is a bunch of hard-headed BushBelievers.

This article just might get to their "souls".

Thanks Legal!!



All I Want For Christmas Is My Country Back, My Country Back, My Country Back!

My sentiments EXACTLY. CLOSE THE CONSULATES. WHO is running OUR government anyway?? The most disturbing little sentence in this
article was:

"We are already giving instructions to our consulates that they begin propagating militant activities – if you will – in their communities."

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS???? WHERE are OUR PROTECTIONS? What is it going to TAKE to awaken our government? IF it is STILL OUR GOVERNMENT. It sounds like Mexico is just moving in and running our country unchallenged by OUR ADMINISTRATION. Did Bush ABDICATE and we MISSED IT?? If this trend continues, we won't have to worry about impeaching Bush and Company. Mexico will step in and take over.

Bootsie, thanks so much for highlighting that particular statement.

If this doesn't show America the face of this enemy, I don't know what will!!

Wake Up America!!

The time to close the Mexican consulates was yesterday!!

Write your reps and sens and tell them, we want Mexico's anti-American, illegal activities in the United States SHUT DOWN starting with their Consulates!

HOW STUPID could they BE if they don't mind SAYING that they are ENCOURAGING MILITANT ACTION???? Where is our STATE DEPARTMENT? Shouldn't CONDI be looking into this charge???