ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS STRESS LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT
by Duane B.
January 14, 2008 10:39 AM EST rating: 10/10 (5 votes) | comments: 5

An article that appeared in my local newspaper, The Greenville News, details how the estimated 50,000 illegal immigrants in the Upstate area of South Carolina are making their day-to-day job of enforcing the law more difficult. In one example, the local police spokesman details how an illegal immigrant, arrested on drug and gun charges, simply posted bond and disappeared after doing exactly the same thing after two previous arrests.

The Constitution requires bonds for accused criminals except in capital cases, but it seems to me that the judges setting bonds should know if the accused had jumped bond after previous arrests. This information would allow him to raise the bond on the current arrest to the point where the accused could no make bond and disappear again.

Local enforcement officers do not have the power to enforce Federal immigration laws, but the SC legislature is currently considering a state law would give them that authority. There are a total twenty-two Federal Immigration agents in SC, including six in the Upstate area. Because of the large number of illegal immigrants in the state, the Federal agents can only deal with the most serious cases, such as alleged murders by illegal immigrants.

This is a scenario that is being repeated in every US state in our country and is a reflection of the refusal or inability of the Federal government to secure our borders or enforce sanctions against employers that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants, and we continue to need immigrants, but it needs to be a controlled, rational process. While we all have some understanding of the poverty and desperation that drives people and families to leave their native country and come here for an opportunity to have a better life, no country can absorb and assimilate large number of immigrants, legal or illegal, without negative impacts on the entire society. The growing backlash against all immigrants in the US is a reflection of the stress we are feeling as a society to the immigration issue.

Our immigration crisis is the direct result of the failure of the government in the nations that supply the bulk of our immigrants, Mexico the other Latin and South American countries, that have failed to create educational and employment opportunities for all their citizens, leaving them no choice but to seek to improve their condition by emigrating. The governments and ruling elites in these nations have consciously chosen to keep the wealth and income produced by their nations concentrated in a tiny minority of the population, leaving the majority to struggle to survive.

In the US the concentration of income and wealth is continuing to concentrate in the top ten percent of the population, and in particular in the top one percent, while real incomes for the bottom fifty percent stagnates or declines. The distribution of income within a society is not a matter of fairness, political correctness, income redistribution, religious beliefs; it is a matter of creating and maintaining a stable and growing opportunity society where the American ideals of hard work, consistent effort and education are rewarded.

Taking any other approach, in the long term, will inevitably result in the creation of an unstable, unbalanced society as we now see in many Latin and South American nations. In the US, the creation of a permanent underclass of workers with no country to emigrate too to improve their lives may cause a backlash at the ballot box that may result in an overreaction and kill the goose that laid the golden egg. We will know in November if that backlash has already begun.
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