Not So Spontaneous Demonstrations

So, far from being a spontaneous demonstration of anger towards Congressional efforts to reign in illegal immigration, it was a calculated and orchestrated movement spurred on by the Latino media networks.

For English-speaking America, the mass protests in Los Angeles and other U.S. cities over the past few days have been surprising for their size and seeming spontaneity.

But they were organized, promoted or publicized for weeks by Spanish-language radio hosts and TV anchors as a demonstration of Hispanic pride and power.

In Milwaukee, where at least 10,000 people rallied last week, one radio station manager called some employers to ask that they not fire protesters for skipping work. In Chicago, a demonstration that drew 100,000 people received coverage on local television more than a week in advance.

"This was a much bigger story for the Latino media," said Felix Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. "If the mainstream media had been paying better attention, there would not have been the surprise about the turnout."

And the imagery from these demonstrations isn't sure to garner much support among US citizens, not when you see US flags flipped upside down and made subservient to the Mexican flag.

I've not commented on this subject other than as a tangential issue to the broader issue of border control as a subset of national security. The US has to be able to control its borders, and that includes immigration and illegal immigration. I have absolutely no problem with legal immigration - and those individuals who seek to become US citizens or permanent residents through legal channels. It's the millions of illegal immigrants that I have a problem with.

Are the restrictions on immigration so onerous that these people cannot enter the country legally? Can they benefit from a streamlined process? Are reforms needed? Absolutely.

Yet, we're still talking about people who have entered the US illegally and who have broken federal law. That's not something that can or should simply be forgotten in all this, despite the protestations to the contrary by 'undocumented persons' groups. These are not just undocumented persons, but illegal aliens.

So what should be done with the estimated 10-12 million illegal aliens that are already in the US and the millions that cross into the US each year? More stringer border control, including fences is a start. It's not a cure-all either.

Mass deportation is not going to cut it either. Neither is making all those illegal aliens into felons. That's trying to change the status ex post facto, which is illegal under the US Constitution.

A realistic solution will have to include some kind of guest worker program, much to the dismay of those who think that giving an amnesty is out of the question. We are going to need to incentivize illegal aliens to come forward and obtain legal documentation of their status in the country.

Putting the onus on businesses is not going to cut it either.

While increasing penalties, including criminal sanctions, on those businesses that hire illegal aliens necessarily should be part of the reform package, it should not be foisted on businesses to do what the federal government should have been doing all along. Businesses should be discouraged from hiring illegal aliens, but they should be given the tools to weed out those illegal aliens, not forced to incur new costs to implement such policies (costs for computer/data access to check immigrant status/paperwork).

AJ Strata has more on the immigration issue, including questioning the quotas imposed on immigration. Anyone who comes from a country that has already maxed out their annual quota would be here illegally, and those numbers are often arbitrarily set.

This country is a nation of immigrants, and that includes a melange of legal and illegal immigrants who came here and joined with those already here to add to the American cultural heritage. We need to do a better job making sure that those who want to come here do so legally, and weed out those who have come here illegally that either seek to cause harm or have criminal records and should never have been allowed in to the US in the first place.