Impacts of Illegal Immigration: Crime Summary

From the front lines: Ranchers speak out on border chaos

By Michelle Malkin  •  March 30, 2010 11:09 PM

I will continue to keep you updated on the investigation into Arizona rancher Rob Krentz’s brutal murder. The latest:

*Funeral services have been set for April 9-10 in Douglas.

*Police are working on theories about the shooter possibly belonging to “a drug cartel scout or a band of thieves terrorizing Arizona ranches.”

*Open-borders Sen. Johnny Come Lately McCain, in the political battle of his life, is now calling for the National Guard. Don’t read his lips. Read his border security-undermining, law enforcement-abandoning record.

*The Arizona Farm Bureau sends the following statement:

“The murder of Cochise County rancher Rob Krentz this last weekend should not have happened and was preventable,” said Arizona Farm Bureau President Kevin Rogers. He and his organization send their deepest sympathy to the Krentz family for their loss.

According to Rogers, the ranching and farming community along the border, have been asking for a secure border for many years. “Our members are the ones who see the illegal traffic including drug and human cargo smuggling coming across their farms and ranches.” Rogers explained that over the last several years, his members have reported coming face to face with these smugglers that are well armed and menacing. “It is time for the federal government to fix this problem before another one of our ranch or farm families are injured or killed. No family should have to endure what the Krentz family is experiencing.”

Rogers said inaction by Congress can no longer be tolerated. “The border needs to be secured,” said Rogers. His organization has long called for securing the border and fixing the worker visa program so we know who is coming into the U.S. and who is overstaying their permission to be here. “Fixing the worker visa program becomes part of securing the border,” he emphasized.

If this tragedy is connected to smuggling from Mexico, swift action is needed to make sure this will not lead to an escalation in Arizona of the violence associated with the drug cartel brutality now just south of our border. “Until Congress addresses securing the border, all necessary resources should be focused on Arizona’s border,” concluded Rogers.

Letters from ranchers along the southern border are pouring into my e-mail box. Here’s a sample of messages from the front lines:

From Michael in Florence, AZ…

Thanks for mentioning the story about Bob Krentz’ death. This hit my own family pretty hard at the nearby Riggs Ranch. We’ve been their neighbors for over 100 years, our own place established in 1881 in Dos Cabezas. This Government of ours just won’t provide the protection needed to secure this border, and the media is not even on the same planet with reporting about it. When the US Customs office located at the Maricopa BOT in Nogales got machined gunned last December by one of the cartels, not even the Arizona Republic did the episode any justice. The Fourth Estate doesn’t exist anymore; today, its just a propaganda outlet for special interests.

Thanks for your good work.

From Danielle…

Thank you for calling attention to the murder of the Arizona rancher. This is not an isolated problem. Families who have farmed and ranched on the US/Mexico border for over a hundred years. For many years, we farmed along side those on the other side of the border. Most people who crossed our properties were not a threat, but that has long since changed. We now find ourselves faced with a government that feels the issue is not significant, as well as our neighbors in the city who are more concerned about “immigrants rights” than our safety. While Bush’s fence project had a lot of problems, the section that crosses our property created a significant deterrent. Traffic decreased from over a hundred per day to a handful per week. The cartels don’t care how they get access to your property. If they can’t buy you out, they will kill you and your family.

Families who live along both sides of the border have been threatened and attacked for some time now by cartels. On the same weekend that the consulate worker was murdered, a young man from Fabens, Texas and his father in law were kidnapped and taken into Mexico. He had turned in a group who had moved onto his property and set up a meth lab to law enforcement. Both men were tortured for several hours before they were finally murdered and dumped.

Many families are sending their children, especially their sons, to live with friends or family away from the border so that they can attend school in relative safety without being intimidated into working for the cartels.

The cartels have been cultivating deep reaches into US communities for many years. They front legitimate businesses on this side of the border. Cartel members have used these “respectable faces” to gain influence and seats on school boards and city and county governments as well as working in many of our law enforcement agencies.

From Billie in CA…

Michelle,

…As a ranching wife, my heart goes out to Bob’s family and especially his wife Susan. No one outside the ranching community knows how hard a life this is ( in terms of physical work never being done). To those of us who love it, the price is well worth the benefits. But not for Susan Krentz. I cannot imagine what she must feel, knowing they have been robbed before, vandalized and terrorized.

While Obama and his minions wax poetic about health care ( and the so called threats of not having it) there is a hardworking woman who has been pulling her own weight for decades that now faces her golden years without her beloved husband and without any security for the future of her children or herself on the ranch they love.

Ranching families work hard as teams to get everything done to care for their animals. They are usually short on help considering all that needs to be done. I hope that Susan’s loss of her husband, her partner in the business and the head of a multi generational legacy is not lost in the reporting. Her life is forever changed and helping her find a sense of peace and sanity is what we all need to think about.

Activists tell Obama to protect illegals

March 10th, 2010

By Stephen Dinan, Washington Times

 Immigration Activists want payback from Obama

Immigrant rights groups on Monday demanded that President Obama impose a full moratorium on deportations of illegal immigrants, arguing that his policies have been worse for their cause than those of his Republican predecessor.

Saying they’ve been “betrayed” by and lost patience with Mr. Obama, the advocates suggested that the president could regain their support by leading a fight on Capitol Hill for a bill to legalize illegal immigrants. Mr. Obama took the first step toward legalization during a meeting Monday at the White House with two lawmakers working on a bill.

But a bill could take months to pass. In the meantime, the immigrant rights groups say, Mr. Obama must end deportations altogether.

“We demand an immediate stop to all deportations, because each one of these deportations, each one of these numbers, equals a life destroyed and a family devastated,” Angelica Sala, executive director of the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, said at a news conference in Washington.

Read More:

Tax Reminder………April 15, 2010 I blieve in legal immigration illegal is against the laws of the U. S. DUH!!

 

Tax  Reminder………April 15, 2010        Important tax  reminder:     Don’t forget to pay  your taxes…. Muchas  gracias!     21 million illegal  aliens are depending on you!

 

THE BORDER

THE BORDER

 

IF YOU CROSS THE NORTH KOREAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET 12 YEARS HARD LABOR.

IF YOU CROSS THE IRANIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU ARE DETAINED INDEFINITELY.

IF YOU CROSS THE AFGHAN BORDER ILLEGALLY, YOU GET SHOT.

IF YOU CROSS THE SAUDI ARABIAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE JAILED.

IF YOU CROSS THE CHINESE BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU MAY NEVER BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.

IF YOU CROSS THE VENEZUELAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE BRANDED A SPY AND YOUR  FATE WILL BE SEALED.

IF YOU CROSS THE CUBAN BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU WILL BE THROWN INTO POLITICAL PRISON TO ROT.

IF YOU CROSS THE U.S. BORDER ILLEGALLY YOU GET. A JOB, A DRIVERS LICENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY CARD, WELFARE, FOOD STAMPS, CREDIT CARDS, SUBSIDIZED RENT OR A LOAN TO BUY A HOUSE, FREE EDUCATION, FREE HEALTH CARE, A LOBBYIST IN WASHINGTON. BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH OF PUBLIC DOCUMENTS PRINTED IN YOUR LANGUAGE. THE RIGHT TO CARRY YOUR COUNTRY’S FLAG WHILE YOU PROTEST THAT YOU DON’T GET ENOUGH
RESPECT.

 

 

*I JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE I HAD

A FIRM GRASP ON THE SITUATION.*

 

Mexican Drug Cartels Armed to the Hilt, Threatening National Security

Mexican Drug Cartels Armed to the Hilt, Threatening National Security
Wednesday, February 04, 2009

By Matt Sanchez

In November, along the border with Texas, Mexican authorities arrested drug cartel leader Jaime “el Hummer” Gonzalez Duran — one of the founders of “Los Zetas,” a paramilitary organization of former Mexican soldiers who decided there was more money to be made in selling drugs than in serving in the Mexican military.

As El Hummer was being transported to the airport in an armed vehicle, his fellow cartel members launched a brazen attack against the federales.

They were armed to the teeth. Their arsenal ranged from semi-automatic rifles to rocket-propelled grenades. When the smoke finally cleared and the government had prevailed, Mexican federal agents captured 540 assault rifles, more than 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 150 grenades, 14 cartridges of dynamite, 98 fragmentation grenades, 67 bulletproof vests, seven Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifles and a Light Anti Tank (LAW) rocket.

Click here to see video of the Mexican military’s fight with the drug cartels.

This is modern Mexico, where the leaders of the powerful drug cartels are armed to the teeth with sophisticated weapons, many of which are smuggled over the border from the United States. It is with this array of superior weapons that drug cartels are threatening the very stability of their own country. And it’s why America’s outgoing CIA Director, Michael Hayden, says violence in Mexico will pose the second greatest threat to U.S. security next year, right after Al Qaeda.

“Americans are understandably focused on the flow of drugs and migrants into the U.S. from Mexico,” says Andreas Peter, author of “Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide.”

“But too often glossed over in the border security debate is the flow of weapons across the border into Mexico,” he told Foxnews.com in a statement via the Internet.

The cartels are obtaining arms from America by using “straw man” buyers, who legally purchase weapons at gun shops and gun shows in the U.S. The weapons cross into Mexico, where border security is much weaker heading south of the border than it is going north.

Authorities don’t know how many firearms are sneaked across the border, but the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) says more than 7,700 guns sold in America were traced to Mexico last year, up from 3,300 the year before and about 2,100 in 2006. Mexican authorities say 90 percent of smuggled weapons come from the United States.

In Northern Mexico, high-powered American weapons have enabled drug cartels to control whole territories. There is the Colt AR-15, the civilian version of the military M-16. And there is the “cuernos de chivo” — Spanish for goat horns . . . the 30-shot curved banana clip of the AK-47.

The AK-47, long the symbol of guerrilla revolution, is not the most accurate or technical assault rifle, but it gets the job done. It is the workhorse of drug cartels, and ammunition can come from a variety of world sources, including the United States.

And then there are the sniper rifles.

“The .50-caliber was interesting because we haven’t seen that type of arm used in Mexico yet,” said Scott Stewart, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an analyst for Stratfor, a geopolitical security firm. The .50-caliber long-range sniper rifle is incredibly accurate and dangerous; a trained operator could kill a human being with a round from well over a mile away.

For criminal cartels like Los Zetas, greater firepower means greater influence in not only the drug trade; it has enabled them to infiltrate and threaten the entire power structure of Mexico. In December, the Mexican attorney general announced the arrest of Maj. Arturo Gonzalez Rodriguez for allegedly assisting Mexican drug trafficking organizations — allegedly for $100,000 a month.

The connection between the drug cartels and the Mexican army has given cartel leaders access to military grade weapons like the high powered Five-Seven semi-automatic pistols.

A favorite with the cartels, the Five-Seven has the advantage of being light: under 2 pounds, with a 20-round clip filled with bullets the cartels call “matapolicias’ — “cop killers.”

“The 5.7 x 28, armor piercing (AP) rounds are not available for sale to the general public and are probably coming from the Mexican military,” said Stewart who has analyzed U.S.-Mexican border security issues for half a decade.

The drug-related murder rate in Mexico doubled in 2008 from just one year before, and as the violence escalates, the power of the drug cartels has destabilized Mexican authority to the point of threatening national security.

Last week Gen. Ángeles Dahuajare announced that more than 17,000 soldiers had deserted in 2008.

“The Mexican Army is becoming a revolving door for the enforcement arm of the drug cartels; they simply pay better,” Stewart said.

“If they don’t get the weapons from the U.S., they’ll get it from somewhere else: Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina or even former satellite state ‘gray markets,'” he said.

Despite the efforts of his comrades in crime, El Hummer wound up in jail — and Mexican authorities paraded him before the media to reassure the public that they are still in control.

But that was largely for show. As long as weapons flow into Mexico, the drug cartels will be able to develop an arsenal. “Control” will be unstable, at best.

What If Mexico Loses Its Drug War?

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, January 14, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Security: A new Pentagon forecast warns that Mexico is so embattled by drug lords it could rapidly collapse. The study says the only other state so threatened is Pakistan. This ought to be a wake-up call about U.S. priorities.

---

Read More: Latin America & Caribbean

---

 

As the Obama administration moves into office, new faces at the national security establishment with fresh perspective and a few long memories will be a good thing. That’s because the U.S. may be forced to shift national security resources toward Mexico, based on the grim possibility that it might not make it out of its drug war.

Vicious traffickers plaguing its border cities have a good chance of taking over the nation. If the worst happens, it will have major implications for the U.S. It’s time to pay attention now.

In its assessment of worldwide security threats, known as the “Joint Operating Environment,” or JOE 2008 report, the United States Joint Forces Command warns that Mexico and Pakistan face the possibility of a “rapid and sudden” collapse.

“The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that international conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone,” the report said.

Some of those implications are very grim indeed.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said last week that the U.S. needed to be prepared for a spillover of the drug violence into the U.S. and would have to be prepared to fight it.

That means a military surge — not to defend faraway Iraq, but defending our own homeland. A collapsed state will bring millions of Mexicans spilling over our border, not as illegal immigrants, but war refugees, fleeing for their lives from violence.

The U.S. will have no choice but to accept such refugees on humanitarian grounds, just as Pakistan, Thailand and Venezuela have had to do from over their own borders in the past. Criminals often embed themselves among them, to prey on the helpless and to expand their operations, creating a new internal threat to the U.S.

It sounds like extreme contingency planning to warn of these threats, but history, for one, is not entirely on Mexico’s side.

Mexico’s history has been of warring caudillo fiefdoms, which drug lords thrive in. Mexico’s history as a modern state is brief, dating from 1930 after PRI socialists consolidated power.

Its history as a democracy is even briefer because the PRI went on to rule as a one-party state for 70 years, stunting democratic development, although it inched forward and gained a two-party system in 2000.

That leaves Mexico with only eight years of multiparty democracy. Again, it’s ideal for drug traffickers, whose aim is to corrupt it to their own ends — just as in Colombia, where a duly elected government is at war with Marxist FARC narco-guerrillas.

That’s where Mexico could be not too long from now and unlike any other drug empire, it sits right on our border waiting to spill over. Clearly, some important action needs to be taken.

First, the U.S. must find more money to strengthen and support the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative designed to professionalize Mexico’s military and civil forces to fight the well-armed and well-funded drug traffickers. The U.S. has given out the first $400 million, but in an era of big bailouts it should find room to give Mexico the additional resources it has asked for.

Second, U.S. defense contingency plans need to be stepped up, as the report implies. We shouldn’t be caught napping.

Third, we need to educate the public about the threat so that Congress will have less trouble scaring up the resources.

All of these things are important, and will undoubtedly be considered by the Obama administration.

If there is one sign of hope from this Pandora’s box of coming trouble, it’s that President Clinton and then-Senator Joe Biden took the lead in helping to crush the drug war in Colombia in 1998.

A Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden are likely to understand the implications of a potential narco-state, and on our border no less.

Let’s hope they put the experience and success of 1998 to an even greater task of defending the U.S. from an outside threat every bit as serious as that seen in Pakista

Barack Obama, An Illegal Immigrant’s DREAM

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2008/10/barack-obama-illegal-immigrants-dream.html

INTERESTING…………….. You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much? Read this:

Interesting…   AN EDUCATION TO ALL WHO ARE AMERICANS… You think the war in Iraq is costing us too much?  Read this: Boy am I confused.  I have been hammered with the propaganda that it is the Iraq war and the war on terror that is bankrupting us. I now find that to be RIDICULOUS. I hope the following 14 reasons are forwarded over and over again until they are read so many times that the reader gets sick of reading them.  I have included the URL’s for verification of all the following facts. 1.  $11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year.      Verify at: http://tinyurl.com/zob77 2.  $2.2 Billion dollars a year is spent on food assistance programs such as food stamps, WIC, and free school        Lunches for illegal aliens.      Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 3.  $2.5 Billion dollars a year is spent on Medicaid for illegal aliens.      Verify at: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscalexec.html 4.  $12 Billion dollars a year is spent on primary and secondary school education for children here illegally and they      Cannot speak a word of English!      Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.0.html 5.  $17 Billion dollars a year is spent for education for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor      Babies.      Verify at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 6.  $3 Million Dollars a DAY is spent to incarcerate illegal aliens.      Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 7.  30% percent of all Federal Prison inmates are illegal aliens.      Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 8.  $90 Billion Dollars a year is spent on illegal aliens for Welfare & social services by the American taxpayers.      Verify at: http://premium.cnn.com/TRANSCIPTS/0610/29/ldt.01.html 9.  $200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.      Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/01/ldt.01.html 10. The illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens.         In particular, their children, are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US       Verify at: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0606/12/ldt.01.html 11. During the year of 2005 there were 4 to 10 MILLION illegal aliens that crossed our Southern Border also, as many as         19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries.  Millions of pounds of drugs, cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana, crossed         Into the U. S from the Southern border.       Verify at: Homeland Security Report: http://tinyurl.com/t9sht 12. The National Policy Institute, ‘estimated that the total cost of mass deportation would be between $206 and $230 billion       Or an average cost of between $41 and $46 billion annually over a five year period.’       Verify at: http://www.nationalpolicyinstitute.org/pdf/deportation.pdf 13. In 2006 illegal aliens sent home $45 BILLION in remittances back to their countries of origin.       Verify at: http://www.rense.com/general75/niht.htm 14. ‘The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants In The United         States ‘         Verify at: http://www.drdsk.com/articleshtml The total cost is a whopping $338.3 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.  Are we THAT stupid? If this doesn’t bother you then just delete the message.  If, on the other hand, if it does raise the hair on the back of your neck, I hope you forward it to every legal resident in the country including every representative in Washington, D.C. – five times a week for as long as it takes to restore some semblance of intelligence in our policies and enforcement thereof.      — Semper If,

Immigration Enforcement? Yes, We Can!

Immigration Enforcement? Yes, We Can!

By Mark Krikorian
Center for Immigration Studies | 8/20/2008

What to do about illegal immigration? Too many people are paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem, and figure that since we can’t deport them all, we’ll have to bite the bullet and let them all stay legally — i.e., give them amnesty.

But this is a digital (on-or-off, one-or-zero) approach to an analog problem. Our goal should not be a magical solution that eliminates illegal immigration, but rather a real-world solution that reduces it over time.

This approach — which has come to be called “attrition through enforcement” — involves a program of consistent, comprehensive application of the immigration law (something we have never attempted), not only at the borders, but also at our consulates overseas and at worksites and elsewhere inside the country. The aim is to reduce the number of foreigners sneaking in to the country (or overstaying visas) and at the same time increase the number of illegal immigrants already here who go home — some forcibly through deportation, but most voluntarily, through what might be called self-deportation. By engineering a steady decrease in the total number of illegal aliens, instead of the continual annual increases we’ve permitted over the past two decades, we can back out of a problem that has taken many years to develop.

But can it work? In particular, can illegal immigrants be induced to pack up and go back?

The evidence is in and the answer is “yes.” The Bush Administration began with a deep hostility toward immigration enforcement and a commitment to amnesty. But as the drive for amnesty was stopped by public outrage, the Department of Homeland Security has been given the green light to actually do its job. There have been significant increases in detention capacity, Border Patrol agents, border fencing, deportations, and local jurisdictions cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Perhaps most important have been the efforts to turn off the jobs magnet that attracts illegal immigrants and keeps them here. Worksite arrests have grown five-fold since 2004 and the E-Verify program, a voluntary online system which enables employers to identify illegal workers, has been ramped up significantly and now vets more than 10 percent of all new hires. Arizona this year has started requiring use of E-Verify by all employers in the state, and soon its use will be a requirement for federal contractors as well.

The results of this stepped-up enforcement were reported by the media in story after story quoting illegal immigrants saying that they were packing up and leaving because of the new enforcement climate. But data was hard to come by, since the enforcement push was so new.

Now there is research showing that attrition through enforcement works. A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (which I head) used Census Bureau surveys to estimate that the illegal-immigrant population has fallen from a peak of 12.5 million in August of last year down to 11.2 million this past May, a drop of 1.3 million or 11 percent. This decline is at least seven times larger than the number people removed from the country by the immigration authorities during that period, meaning that most of the drop was due to illegal immigrants deporting themselves. If that rate of decrease were to continue, the illegal population would be cut in half in five years.

So far, so good. But did enforcement contribute to the decline or was it driven just by the weakening economy? Though the slowdown in construction and other industries no doubt contributed to the decline, there are several reasons to think that enforcement was a major factor in the decision of illegal immigrants to leave. First of all, the decline in the number of illegal immigrants started before their unemployment rate increased; in the past, much smaller dips had been seen in the illegal population, but only after their unemployment rate increased — which stands to reason, of course. What’s more, only the illegal population declined; the number of legal immigrants continued to grow.

And the enforcement climate is determined not only by actions but also by words — especially the words of lawmakers debating immigration policy. It seems that the number of illegal immigrants actually spiked last summer as the Senate conducted a high-profile debate on the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill. That debate was widely reported in the immigrant media, which presented amnesty as an inevitability, the culmination of several years of activism backed by all the major institutions of American society. When instead the legislation failed spectacularly in the Senate, as the result of an unprecedented public outcry, those amnesty expectations were dashed, casting the enforcement push in a whole new light. As a result, the illegal-immigrant population began to drop almost immediately.

The challenge will be to maintain this new enforcement climate under a new administration. After all, 90 percent of illegal aliens are still here, and the pressure will have to continue if the problem is to be shrunk down from today’s crisis to a more manageable nuisance. Unfortunately, both presidential candidates have an digital, all-or-nothing view of the problem, and have legalization as their chief priority.

---

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.