By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — When conservative filmmaker and activist James O’Keefe released a dramatic video on August 11 of a rubber-faced terrorist easily wading across the Rio Grande River into Texas, there was another touch he could have added but didn’t.
O’Keefe could have floated some little rubber ducks on the river separating the U.S. and Mexico and labeled them “fierce alligators.” Remember when Barack Obama pledged in 2011 that the border already was secure, but, the president said, some picky critics wouldn’t be satisfied until there were alligators on patrol?
Some little duckies on the Rio would have had all the bite of Obama’s toothless border security.
Often working with hidden cameras, O’Keefe in the past has exposed wrongdoers including ACORN, other liberals, and Planned Parenthood.
This time he was right out in the open, first easily crossing the Rio Grande, quite shallow at this point, in his own clothes and persona, then slipping into the costume and mask of the late terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and repeating the knee-deep jaunt.
There was even a nearby wide-open steel footbridge for those who wanted to avoid a dip, O’Keefe’s video showed.
Most of the waves of recent illegal immigration into Texas are east of the area where O’Keefe made this video.
He reportedly said he had his passport with him, but there was no one to ask to see it. Indeed, the camera showed vast open space.
One needn’t be a terrorist mastermind in order to engineer a crossing that has been accomplished by many aliens from terrorist-linked countries who may be biding their time now. It’s a good rule of thumb that illegal immigrants who are caught are only a fraction of those who successfully slip through.
Left-wing critics said O’Keefe’s video avoided dealing with the possibility he could have been apprehended later along the way. But they, in turn, avoided the possibility that even putting one foot into the U.S. may be good enough to secure residency here under Obama’s lax improvisations.
And there was no doubt whatever that an impressive Texas border fence O’Keefe pointed out came to an abrupt end, succeeded by four little strands of barbed wire. A story in London’s Daily Mail about the O’Keefe video said it looked like “construction crews ran out of materials one day and walked off the job.”
I’ve personally seen the same scene along the Arizona line with Mexico. A high metal border fence abruptly stops and only a few strands of barbed wire continue eastward. Footprints in the dirt visibly come over from Mexico to the spindly, useless wire.
Even though the high fence looks impressive, it’s single-layered, not the more effective double-layered type. It’s a partial concession to voters’ demands that the U.S.’s open-borders government decided it had to build.
However, it’s very incomplete security against drug runners, violent gang members, people-smugglers and terrorists — border-jumpers who never seem to be much of a worry for U.S. Catholic bureaucrats’ blueprints.
Back in May 2011 Obama went to El Paso to push for “comprehensive immigration reform” in a speech that we’ve subsequently learned had his customary bundle of bold lies. Referring to people’s desire for border security, Obama claimed, “All the stuff they’ve asked for, we’ve done,” and the fence “is now basically complete.”
Even though Obama mocked those who would demand adding “alligators in the moat,” he bragged about many impressive accomplishments to secure the border.
So impressive that, more than three years later, tens of thousands of alien minors and some of their parents easily crossed into the U.S. illegally within a few months — in addition to hundreds of thousands of other boundary violators.
Obama’s government began embedding the minors furtively across the nation, many of whom may never show up for immigration hearings and thus join the shadowlands population awaiting improbable legalization.
Alien minors are the future of this nation, Obama and other Democrats stoutly insisted. Babbling Vice President Joe Biden even remarkably proclaimed on August 6, “These are not somebody else’s kids. These are our kids.”
National radio host Rush Limbaugh was aghast at such talk. Obama’s regular ideological position is that U.S. achievement is built on stealing from others, Limbaugh said, but now Obama actually justifies stealing other people’s children and depriving other nations of their presence and talents in order to bring benefit to the U.S.
What about building our nation’s future with our own children, Limbaugh wondered. Are they just junk?
False Illusions
A Catholic bishop in Honduras also seemed to wonder how his country is supposed to get along without its children.
EWTN news reported a Catholic News Agency (CNA) story of August 6 saying that Bishop Romulo Emiliani Sanchez, CMF, said the recent population surge into the U.S. had been encouraged by “false illusions” from organized criminals and traffickers.
The traffickers gain large fees from smuggling people.
The story said the Honduran newspaper La Tribuna quoted the bishop, “It is unfortunate that the illusion and mirage that the U.S. is the best place for all of the children from Honduras, when it is a false and empty promise to say that arriving there they will have free education, health care, food, and clothing.”
U.S. taxpayers know this smorgasbord is billed to them.
Emiliani indicated that “it is undignified and sad that in this country we cannot provide our children with the basic needs of education and food; it is a duty of the state and of all of us to care for the children of Honduras,” the CNA story said.
Constitutional Obligations
Meanwhile, columnist Reihan Salam noted at Slate on August 8 that the U.S. House is responding attentively to Americans’ majority viewpoint by refusing to approve the “comprehensive immigration reform” bill OK’d by the Senate last year.
The Senate bill would increase the level of legal immigration while allowing large-scale illegal immigration to continue.
Having demanded that the House dance to his open-borders tune, Obama definitely doesn’t get the power to take unilateral action if the House declines.
Salam wrote at Slate:
“It’s not at all obvious that members of the House are failing in their constitutional obligations when they are resisting a legislative proposal — even one backed by every significant business lobby under the sun, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and other enlightened billionaires — that increases immigration levels when doing so is extremely unpopular.”
Indeed, probably the most remarkable aspect of the House refusing to approve “comprehensive reform” is that the entire Washington, D.C., power structure has been screaming for its passage for years — from liberal Democrats to establishment Republicans to liberal “news” media to left-wing lobbyists to big business to closeted internationalists to self-focused groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
Literally the only thing that has prevented these heedless insiders from smashing their way to their own personal victory has been the determined majority of the American people repeatedly rising up in protest, and letting Congress know about it.
So now Obama is putting his toe in to test the border waters to, in effect, simply declare major “immigration reform” has been passed on his personal authority. What a constitutional crisis this would be. What else is an incipient dictator to do when his unfaithful subjects keep resisting? What are the subjects to do when their elected leader thinks he’s an actual dictator?
Meanwhile, smuggling incidents continued apace.
The August 10 Arizona Daily Independent reported that in four separate incidents over the weekend near the border, nearly $734,000 of drugs was seized by U.S. officers, who turned subjects over for investigation.
And the website of the Nogales (Ariz.) International newspaper on August 12 said border agents recently processed nearly $250,000 of drugs, a firearm, ammunition and vehicles for seizure, and turned suspects over for prosecution, including four involved with alien smuggling.
The Profit Motive
A southern Arizona woman told The Wanderer on August 12 that big-money interests are deeply involved in wanting to keep recently arrived alien minors in the U.S. because it means profits from the contracts the government provides to care for them.
The woman declined to be named because of her security concerns living near the border.
“The more kids, the more profit,” she said. “. . . It’s a very complicated web, but it’s a web that’s all over the United States.”
The marketing possibilities could be endless.
A 2013 article by Pew Research’s Religion & Public Life Project said that in 2010, nearly 425,500,000 Catholics lived in the Latin America-Caribbean region.
Either many waves of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. should be able to find a welcome by going south instead, to be among other, more culturally similar Latinos.
Or maybe Obama and the USCCB could talk this nearly half-billion people into heading illegally into the U.S. That would mean soaring federal contracts, including for Church charities. Then who could deny illegal immigration is a religious cause?
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