Thread: What Congress hath wrought

pittsburghlive.com

What Congress hath wrought

Sunday, August 21, 2005


WASHINGTON -- Fifteen years after liberal Democrats pressured Congress to pass new immigration laws, we face the consequences of our legislators "humanitarianism."
We see it across our country in the scores of killings and maimings carried out by Salvadoran gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13) and in the frightening possibility of an invasion of Colombian revolutionaries.

The 1990 law allowed illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Colombia to be given Temporary Protected Status (TPS). They broke laws coming into the United States illegally, did not pay taxes and lied when they were job-hunting. But they could not be deported. They stayed. They have multiplied. Temporary became permanent.

Some became responsible citizens. But police say there are about 5,000 members of MS13. Last weekend here there were nearly a dozen MS13 stabbings. A man had his hand cut off with a machete. A gas station attendant was shot and killed. A girl had her face slashed.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a gathering from Immigration and Customs Enforcement: "These gangs pose a severe threat to public safety and their growth must not go unchallenged."

But in a five-month campaign to deport illegal immigrants with even suspected ties to violent criminal gangs, only 1,057 suspected gang members were deported. Police say there are more than 5,000 gangsters running around D.C.

Our national security is at risk because of MS13 and because hundreds of Colombian rebels are waiting in the wings to take advantage of the 18,000 slots for legal immigration from Colombia to our country. And since the early 1960s, an organization that has exceeded 20,000 members, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has operated in the south of that country. It has one goal: to overthrow the elected free-market government in Bogota and replace it with Marxist-Socialist regime.

FARC finances its operations through kidnapping and ransom. It earns $300 million a year, with 65 percent of that income produced through the cultivation and trafficking of narcotics. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, in office since 2002, is determined to defeat the FARC and has the support of President George Bush, who has invested $3.3 billion in "Plan Colombia" since 2000. The plan is working.

FARC has retreated, moving its coca and poppy fields into Peru and Bolivia as the Colombian forests shrink. Their fighters -- without the drug growers to protect or cocaine to be transported, and beaten down by Uribe's forces -- are looking for a better life. According to the United Nations, 2 million Colombians have left their country in the past two years; many are coming to the United States as "economic refugees."

FARC is known to have links to organized crime networks throughout South America and the United States and may be preparing to expand its drug trade here. Their instructors are from the Irish Republican Army (IRA); three IRA bombing experts captured by Uribe's forces later escaped to Ireland.

While the Salvadorans in MS13 originally were battle-hardened veterans of their civil wars, their "gangstas" are now "muchachos" (kids), untrained in bomb-making and the use of heavy weapons. Meanwhile, FARC has the enthusiasm of salesmen looking for new drug markets and a way to drive off the competition.

They may end up shooting and bombing one another but we have to learn how to keep out of the cross-fire.

How many people live in North Carolina? I would look there first for "What Congress has Wrougt. Start with the female congress women.

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