Illegals get amnesty, everyone else on the dole. Yay!

I see where our drug police — including the Nevada Department of Wildlife and the Drug Enforcement Agency — have found and seized four acres of scattered marijuana plants growing on Mount Charleston, northwest of Las Vegas. The pot farmers are bad people because they litter and sometimes hunt wildlife out of season, says Forest Service spokesgal Judy Suing.

Suing says the field was accidentally discovered by a police rescue helicopter months ago. By waiting all summer, authorities get to claim more tonnage destroyed. It’s unlikely accidents led to the discovery of the six other local fields Suing says authorities are soon planning to exterminate, though. In fact, these outfits spend millions of our tax dollars overflying sparsely inhabited areas, employing high-resolution thermal imaging to find these plants. Then, hundreds of thousands more are spent eradicating a harmless ditch weed which Nevadans — like residents of a whole bunch of other states — have said should be legalized for medical use and otherwise treated as the lowest law enforcement priority.

Since the courts keep ruling people can’t SELL this herb — even where voters have legalized its use (http://tinyurl.com/3gaboel) — wouldn’t it be more appropriate to simply publicize the location of the plants, so those who need them can go pick the stuff for free, without engaging in any federally regulated “interstate commerce”?

Elsewhere, people grow indoors. So the federal government has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on undercover operations to catch, prosecute and imprison people who sell “grow lights,” arguing before judge-stacked juries (actually made to swear in advance they’ll enforce unconstitutional edicts without being given a chance to read them) that the sellers “must have known” buyers intended to use them to grow the harmless medicinal plant — despite the fact defendants could show that whenever an undercover government agent asked them how to use their lights to grow marijuana, the store owners said they couldn’t and wouldn’t discuss that. (http://www.fear.org/960115.html)

Meantime, legitimate American collectors of old firearms are frightened — with good reason — that if they try to sell off more than a few of their artifacts to other collectors they could be imprisoned by undercover feds for “operating a gun sales business without a federal firearms license” — a license which it’s now virtually impossible for a non-full-time seller to acquire.

But how much high-tech aerial surveillance, how complicated a “sting” operation would it take to start rounding up the illegal aliens that swarm through the Southwestern United States? How hard would it be for federal agents to stop someone who’s just wired money to Latin America from a post office or private “envio” storefront, saying, “Pardon me, I notice you don’t speak very good English and you just wired money to Mexico. This gives me probable cause to ask if you have any documentation to show you’re in this country legally? Wow, these are some very interesting identity documents. Why don’t you just wait in this nice, air-conditioned bus while I run them through our database?”

But last week, the Obama administration announced immigration enforcement has actually been working too well, so they’re going to cripple it further.

“President Barack Obama is in a pickle. Immigration enforcement actually is working — or at least it was working,” writes Deborah Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Under the Obama administration, the government has removed almost 400,000 illegal immigrants annually. … Thanks to the Secure Communities program, which requires local law enforcement to share arrestees’ fingerprints with Washington, about half of those deported have criminal records.”

(Yes, “Secure Communities” is something else they can blame on George W. Bush.)

So what did the White House most recently announce? On Aug. 18, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Munoz blogged that the Department of Homeland Security will review its entire deportation caseload — that’s 300,000 cases — to “clear out low-priority” cases and “make more room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk.”

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., “likened the Obama policy to his proposed legislation, the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or DREAM, Act,” Ms. Saunders reports.

That being the up-to-age-35 amnesty act which is opposed by most Americans and can’t pass Congress.

Worse, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, points out the new policy will allow individuals who have been caught up in a Secure Communities review to apply for work permits, which makes getting arrested equivalent to winning the lottery, since “Their fellow illegal aliens who were not arrested don’t get work authorization.”

Mr. Krikorian calls the new policy “administrative amnesty.”

The problem here is not with “Mexicans.” Plenty of people of Hispanic extraction are great Americans and a vital part of our culture.

The problem is that American citizens increasingly fear a federal government which will spend vast sums on undercover operations trying to entrap, arrest and imprison them for violating edicts which are absurd, which do not enjoy majority informed public support, and which blatantly violate the 2nd, 9th or 10th amendments — while this same government won’t lift a finger to round up and question likely immigration lawbreakers who anyone can spot in a typical day driving around town, to enforce immigration laws which ARE a specified Constitutional duty of the central government.

This is supposed to enhance respect for the law?

Sure, our immigration laws should be “reformed.” Right now, an entire restaurant can close, costing American jobs, if a chef has to return to the home country and then can’t get back because his “work visa” expired. Just ask Raj Patel at the Saffron restaurant, at Craig & Tenaya, who now hopes to get his chef back from the Punjab and re-open in late October.

Before the Democratic party turned “immigration reform” into a euphemism for “yet another amnesty,” plenty of sensible souls were pointing out the need to bring back some version of the old “bracero” program, allowing willing Latin workers to come here and work during the harvest season, without bringing their families to burden our public schools and other welfare rolls.

One thing you have to say for a lot of these illegal immigrants is they do come here to work.

I regularly drive by the U-Haul lot at Rancho and Jones. Even in the heat of the Mojave Desert summer, you’ll frequently spot a dozen men squatting or standing in the vacant lot across Jones, hoping someone who’s just rented a truck or trailer will wave them over and offer them a few hours physical labor.

The official Southern Nevada unemployment rate now hovers around 14 percent. Include “discouraged workers” and you know it’s over 20. Nationally, black teen-age unemployment is reported around 27 percent. Hereabouts, I’d bet it’s closer to 35. So why are the men hanging around in the sun anxious for day work almost exclusively Mexican?

I suspect the answer is the same as the answer to the question “Why are Americans so complacent as our screwed-up federal government CLAIMS to be in favor of job creation, at the same time it freezes the economic recovery by propping up “walking dead” banks with $2 trillion of our tax money; at the same time it energetically destroys employment in manufacturing and sales of high-capacity toilets and shower-heads; at the same time it blocks new oil wells and refineries and coal-fired power plants; at the same time it wastes tax moneys on subsidies and otherwise seeks to coerce auto manufacturers to churn out glorified electric golf carts which Americans refuse to buy; at the same time its EPA is gearing up to lay on American businesses a trillion dollars in new annual costs regulating virtually harmless ‘ozone emissions’?”

The answer to both questions, I suspect, is that hardly any Americans today are truly “unemployed,” if you count as a form of employment “going down to the post office every month to pick up your welfare check, your unemployment check, or your check for some made-up ‘disability’ no one else can see.” (http://tinyurl.com/3ztlh83)

This is why the politicians are so terrified of slashing back “entitlement” spending. Once those Americans are off the dole — once they need work as badly as an illegal Mexican — the question of why state-socialist government regulators are systematically destroying our job-producing economy will suddenly become a whole lot less academic, and a whole lot more likely to result in double-talking politicians swinging from lamp posts.

2 Comments to “Illegals get amnesty, everyone else on the dole. Yay!”

  1. Bruce Says:

    Hate to say it, but it changes when it crashes.

  2. R Says:

    Why do I always smile at that last sentence when Vin uses it?