Today a federal judge struck down the operative portions of Arizona’s controversial illegal immigration law. While it is probably not the end of this law (as it will almost certainly end up in the Supreme Court), this has many people worried, and not just Brad Kozak or Arizonans.
In El Paso, you can see the stark difference in economic status between the two countries. To the North of the Rio Grande, you see well-to-do homes, while to the south you see what can only be described as shacks. It is not unheard of to see a family wading northwards across the river. One local Dallas man went to visit his parents on a farm out of El Paso.
He discovered that in El Paso, you do not go unarmed. His mother told him, “We don’t go out in the field unless we have to, and we definitely don’t go out there without a gun”. He asked her why. Rather than telling him, she took him to the back porch, pulling a handgun out of her purse as she went. She fired a single shot over her fields, and Hispanics of every description fled like birds startled by the sound of a falling tree in a forest.
It isn’t just the fields, either. Vacated homes on the border don’t stay that way very long. If their legal occupants aren’t around, the pragmatic illegal takes advantage and moves right on in.
People aren’t happy. Some particularly angry citizens formed the “Minutemen” to patrol the borders themselves, but a rabble of vigilantes with assault rifles is a mere drop in the bucket with a problem on this scale. Arizona’s law, which is effective even though it hasn’t even been enforced yet, has been neutered (for the time being).
Obama himself made a token offering of 1,200 troops as “gap-fillers”. However, the American-Mexican border is 2,000 miles long. That isn’t even 1 man per mile. Another drop in the bucket. Additionally, they are handicapped by policies similar to the UN troops: they can’t shoot unless they are attacked.
The Constitution tells us that the government is supposed to “provide for the common defence” and “secure the Blessings of Liberty for us and our Posterity”. But, while the government is busy nosing into places it doesn’t belong, people in El Paso don’t have the liberty to walk into their own fields without fear of being attacked by someone from a foreign country.
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with that?