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An FTAA Sneak Preview
Christopher S. Bentley

The New American, September 6, 2004

Alarming trends among our Southwestern states — and in some metropolitan areas — offer a microcosm of what America would look like without borders.

 

Under the “free trade” fraud known as the FTAA, our already overburdened welfare state would become a giant immigrant magnet for the rest of an impoverished Western Hemisphere. An epidemic, illegal immigrant crime wave — currently raging in urban pockets across the land — would not only get worse, but would spread over the entire nation. And the growing practice of sex slave trafficking that is a moral blight on our country’s landscape would further entrench itself.

The U.S. welcomes more legal immigrants than all other nations combined. In reasonable quantities, immigrants can be a boon and a blessing to our country. But this is only the case when the new arrivals come here legally, become productive law-abiding citizens, and assimilate.

However, many of those entering illegally into our country in recent years are complicit in bringing across our borders the very serious social problems described below. Oddly, these ills serve a useful purpose. They offer a sneak preview, of sorts, of the future that awaits us should our nation’s borders eventually be erased through a fully-developed FTAA.

Welfare Magnet


The El Paso Times reported on July 3: “U.S. and Mexican officials signed a controversial agreement this week that could allow millions of legal and undocumented Mexican immigrants who work in the United States to collect U.S. Social Security benefits.” If Congress passes the measure, one does not have to be an oracle to predict that millions more Latin Americans will set their sights northward, getting in line for more generous retirement payments. The wealthier member states of the European Union are already bracing themselves for the “welfare migration” that is certain to engulf them once the continent’s constitution is ratified.

But Social Security is only one of several welfare magnets now attracting illegal immigrants to our nation. As more and more working Americans groan under the strain of skyrocketing health-care premiums and medical costs, hospitals along the border are poised to receive bigger taxpayer-financed transfusions of money to stave off closures, due in part to a growing number of unpaid ER bills already left behind by illegal immigrants.

Federal law mandates that hospital emergency rooms treat any person who walks through the door seeking care. Not surprisingly, as a December 11, 2002 AP report stated, Mexican hospital officials have instructed ambulance drivers to take “some of [the] sickest” uninsured patients “to the nearest U.S. emergency room.”

According to a December 12, 2002 Washington Times report, “the Southeast Arizona Medical Center in Douglas is on the verge of bankruptcy because of uncompensated care to undocumented aliens; the Cochise County Health Department spends as much as 30 percent of its annual $9 million budget on illegal aliens; and the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee was hit for $200,000 in uncompensated services out of a net operating income of $300,000.” Additionally, “the University Medical Center in Tucson, Arizona, faces up to $10 million this year ‘in uncompensated care to foreign nationals,’ and the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in the city lost $1 million treating illegal immigrants in the first quarter of fiscal 2002.”

The problem is not limited to Arizona. The Brownsville (Texas) Medical Center estimated its losses caused by unpaid illegal immigrant ER bills at $500,000 per month, and Thomason Hospital in El Paso reported over $1 million in losses over a three-month period. Several hospitals in California have closed due to insolvency, reducing services and increasing medical costs for everybody in the region — with even more closures looming on the horizon throughout the state and elsewhere.

Residents along the southern border are increasingly becoming outraged over these trends. In Arizona, 70 percent of the state’s voters support “a proposed ballot initiative that would cut off services to illegal immigrants,” reported the September 29, 2003 Washington Times. Notwithstanding such widespread support for the measure, Arizona’s Republican Senators John McCain and Jon Kyl, along with the state’s governor, oppose the initiative.

McCain’s solution to the borderland healthcare crisis is to skim more from our paychecks to cover the mounting losses. On January 10, 2003, Senators McCain and Kyl wrote President Bush “requesting an additional $200 million dollars … to ease the financial burden that uncompensated health care for undocumented immigrants places on the states’ hospitals.”

Illegal Immigrant Crime Wave


Another problem beginning to plague our nation’s metropolitan areas is a growing subculture of illegal immigrants who violate our laws with impunity. The INS will not round them up. And thanks to “sanctuary policies,” local police in large metropolitan areas are forbidden to touch them — unless the illegals commit a felony. But even then the police are hopelessly outnumbered, so the destruction of life and property by the illegal immigrant criminals continues uninhibited.

“In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens,” reported a blistering Winter 2004 City Journal exposé entitled “The Illegal-Alien Crime Wave.” City Journal also noted: “up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.”

In southern California, “a confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang … is illegal.” These gang members collaborate with the Mexican Mafia “on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations,” committing an “assault or robbery” in L.A. County every day. A 1996 Los Angeles Times report on the 18th Street Gang “included descriptions of innocent bystanders being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members).”

In September 2003, according to City Journal, a Miami police department “arrested a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes.” The year before, even though the suspect was in custody for “lewd and lascivious molestation,” his immigration status was not checked. The explanation from the police: “We have shied away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues because of our large immigrant population.”

In Los Angeles, because of the city’s Special Order 40, if a policeman “were to arrest an illegal [immigrant drug] dealer … for his immigration status, or even notify the [INS] … he would face severe discipline” from municipal authorities. Hence, “illegal aliens … commit crimes in plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.”

Many Latinos fleeing northward are merely seeking to escape a hopeless existence, from the clutches of the criminal syndicates who run their governments. It is easy to empathize with them for wanting to better their lives. But far too many come here to violate our nation’s most fundamental principles of ordered liberty, and they do so with impunity. It has to stop.

The first civics lesson taught to illegal immigrants, City Journal pungently noted, is that “this is a culture that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry.” And the “failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall contempt for the law.” That contempt would grow immeasurably if there were no more national borders — only migrating “residents” and criminals between member states in an FTAA regional government.

Sex Slave Trade


Perhaps the grimmest foreshadowing of a post-FTAA world is seen in the unspeakable trade of sex slave immigrants — a growing evil already within our borders.

“The first time I went to the camps I didn’t vomit only because I had nothing in my stomach,” said a volunteer American doctor, who was providing health care to “migrant” workers. She was referring to the treatment of little girls (some as young as nine or ten years old) who were brought over the border through Mexico to be sold as sex slaves to brothels outside San Diego, California.

“The girls were sold to [migrant] farm workers — between 100 and 300 at a time — in small ‘caves’ made of reeds in the fields,” recounted the anonymous doctor to the April American Family Association Journal. The girls would be “used by as many as 35 men in one hour.” When the doctor attempted to “complain to government authorities about the abuse,” she was “instructed by her supervisor to concern herself only with trying to prevent the girls from contracting sexually transmitted diseases by providing condoms.”

A shocking January 25 New York Times article entitled “The Girls Next Door” detailed how “under-age girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked … [into] the United States through Mexico.” This is done with the cooperation of Mexico’s federal preventive police, who work with the traffickers.

One federal officer bluntly told the Times that “10 high-level officials [read: pimps] in the state of Sonora share a $200,000 weekly payoff from traffickers,” and are “key players in the organization.” And a U.S. Embassy official said, “Corruption is the most important reason these networks are so successful.”

In certain ghettos in Mexico City, new worker girls are sold in what amount to “virginity auctions” held out on the street. Immediately afterwards, the girls are taken and are broken in by 20 to 30 men per day to get them “ready” for work in the United States.

But it’s not just the “migrant” workers who are the clients in this wretched commerce. Much of the business is geared towards pedophilic predators born and raised in this country. Once in the U.S., these children (some reportedly as young as four years old) are shuttled around to different houses where they are forced to ply their new trade away from view, earning up to $30,000 per week for their owners.

The FTAA Floodgates


Decent Americans shudder to think that something like this can take place on our own soil, let alone want to read about it. But there is an important detail in examining this that is instructive — and, ironically, that offers hope.

Mexico — like many other countries — is so overtly corrupt that federal officials are complicit in the trafficking, and it often takes place in plain view. However, once it crosses over into the U.S., this despicable commerce is done secretly and out of sight. The vast majority of Americans simply will not tolerate this abuse of others. Our nation’s own corruption and faults notwithstanding, we still have sufficient layers of political and moral vitality to halt this evil.

This critical moral distinction between the U.S. and many other nations is the reason why some rings in the U.S. have already been broken up and the traffickers have been prosecuted. It is likewise a vitally compelling reason why we can defeat the FTAA. Once enough Americans who care about our nation’s future sufficiently understand the graveness of the situation in throwing open our borders, they will want no part of the FTAA.

The price for failing to defeat the FTAA is high — and not just in regard to human trafficking. In a borderless, post-FTAA world, many other problems would mushroom, including increased drug trafficking and the threat of terrorism.

With lawlessness and other social ills escalating, and with terrorists moving easily across “member states,” an FTAA-regional government would eventually impose police-state measures on the entire Western Hemisphere. America would soon cease to be a beacon of hope for oppressed peoples everywhere, but would instead come to resemble a third world region — both in terms of poverty and social chaos, and the resultant loss of freedom.

We must responsibly use every moral and legal means at our disposal to defeat the stealth assault that the FTAA represents on our nation’s independence and morality. If this is not done soon, then the illegal-immigration problems we are already experiencing will pale in comparison to the time when the FTAA’s floodgates are opened, and our nation is engulfed by a tidal wave of crime and moral filth.

 

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