The Washington Times reminds us again today about the Trojan Horse that is Mike Huckabee’s social conservatism. As pro-lifers and conservative Christians flock to Huckabee en masse, they continue to ignore the fact that Huckabee is just plain wrong on a number of issues, including immigration:

Groups that support a crackdown on illegal aliens haven’t settled on their champion in the race for the White House, but there’s little doubt which Republican scares them most — former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

“He was an absolute disaster on immigration as governor,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that played a major role in rallying the phone calls that helped defeat this year’s Senate immigration bill. “Every time there was any enforcement in his state, he took the side of the illegal aliens.”

[snip]

“Huckabee is the guy who scares the heck out of me,” said Peter Gadiel, president of 9-11 Families for a Secure America, a group instrumental in fighting for the REAL ID Act that sets federal standards for driver’s licenses.

Some leaders said Mr. Huckabee reminds them of President Bush, who pushed for legalization of illegal aliens and a new supply of foreign guest workers, despite his base calling for better border security and enforcement.

“I would say that Huckabee comes from the same perspective on the issue that George W. Bush came from — that out of a strong sense of compassion, he tries to identify with someone who comes to the United States, even if they came illegally,” said Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies.

Mr. Huckabee yesterday defended his record, but he said if voters are looking for the toughest guy, he’s not their man.

“Is my answer satisfactory to all the Republicans? The answer’s ‘no.’ ” he said. “Some people want me to be a lot harsher. I think my answer is the honest and the right one.”

This answer, if you care about this country, should bother you. A lot.

I finally got around yesterday to digging into Pat Buchanan’s State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.

What I enjoy about Pat Buchanan’s books are what a lot of you probably enjoy about horror movies - they scare the crap out of me. What I don’t like about his books is that I don’t get to just turn on the lights when it’s all over and drink a nice cup of hot chocolate and feel better. But the lingering fear is, in my opinion, a good thing. We need to be scared about what’s going on in this country, and the immigration issue, while having risen to the forefront of national consciousness, still isn’t being dealt with sufficiently seriously.

In the eighteenth century, America began her restless, relentless drive to dominance from the Atlantic seaboard over the mountains to the great river. In the age of Jackson and Polk, the United States tore Florida away from young Mexico. By century’s end, we had annexed Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In 1900, U.S. Marines marched beside British imperial troops to Peking to crush the Boxer Rebellion. In the first half of the twentieth century, American invaded Mexico, built the Panama Canal, intervened in Caribbean and Central America, smashed Japan’s empire, and conquered the Pacific and East Asia.

Now the tape has begun to run in reverse. In 1960, there were perhaps 5 million Asians and Hispanics in the United States. Today, there are 57 million. Between 10 percent and 20 percent of all Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean peoples have moved into the United States. One to 2 million enter every year and stay, half of them in defiance of America’s laws and disdain for America’s borders. No one knows how many illegal aliens are here. The estimates run from 12 to 20 million.

This is not immigration as America knew it, when men and women made a conscious choice to turn their backs on their native lands and cross the ocean to become Americans. This is an invasion, the greatest invasion in history.

- Pat Buchanan; State of Emergency, Pg. 4-5

I know people will read this and say, “So what?” I’ll tell you so what (all stats taken from Buchanan’s book, released in 2006):

• In the first five years of this century, 4.5 million illegals were caught entering the U.S. Among them, more than 350,000 - one out of twelve - had criminal records.
• Nearly 8 million foreigners did make it in during that five year period, 3.7 million of them illegally. If the pattern holds true and one in twelve of these were criminals, 300,000 felons slipped in during this period of time.
• In 2004, Time Magazine reported that “the number of illegal aliens flooding into the U.S. this year will total 3 million—enough to fill 22,000 Boeing 737-700 airliners, or 60 flights every day for a year. It will be the largest wave since 2001 and roughly triple the number of immigrants who will come to the U.S. by legal means.”
• In 2005, 687 assaults on U.S. Border Patrol agents were reported. In San Diego and Tucson, agents were fired upon forty-three times.
• By 2050, the Hispanic population will have tripled to 102 million, or 24 percent of the nation.
• About four of every five non-Mexican illegal immigrants we catch are released in society and asked to return for a court date. When the date arrives, about 75 percent of those released don’t show up at court. As a result, in 2004, only 30,000 of 160,000 non-Mexicans caught coming across our southwest border were sent home.
• According to President Bush, no friend of border security, “Under current law, the federal government is required to release people caught crossing our border illegally if their home countries do not take them back in a set period of time…Those we were forced to release have included murderers, rapists, child molesters and other violent criminals.”
• Under the Bush administration, work-site arrests of illegals dropped exponentially lower than those during the Clinton years, from between 10-18,000 in 1997 to just 159 in 2004.
• MS-13, of El Salvadoran heritage and considered among (if not THE) most violent gangs in the world, is estimated to have 8-10,000 members in 33 states, with the largest concentration here in Northern Virginia’s Washington suburbs. In Fairfax county, they are credited with 90 percent of all gang-related violence.
• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide, which total 1,200 to 1,500, target illegal aliens.
• Two thirds of the 17,000 outstanding fugitive felony warrants in LA are for illegals.
• Some 12,000 of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang tha operates across Souther California are illegals.
• In 1980, our federal and state prisons housed fewer than 9,00 criminal aliens. By the end of 1999, that number had risen to 68,000. Today, over 29 percent of prisoners in the Federal Bureau of Prison facilities and a higher share of all federal prison inmates are criminal aliens. They are the fastest growing segment of the prison population.

Is that enough to get you thinking? I’m still in the opening chapters of the book. While abortion remains the highest-priority issue in this country, we cannot continue to ignore other issues that are leading to the disintegration of the country as we know it.

I know I sound like a broken record, but it bears repeating: the war in Iraq, the poorly named and defined “War on Terror”, the looming conflict with Iran, our overextended and unconstitutional foreign policy, the dollar and housing crises, the border issues, the growth of our national debt - they are all threatening us as a nation.

We may have reached a point where we can’t elect our way out of this mess…I don’t know. But we have to be awake and aware of what’s going on if we’re going to have even an outside shot at fixing things.

Filed under: Immigration, Politics