Sickened by the collapse of our border with Mexico, which for years has been trampled into sandy insignificance by hordes of illegal immigrants, most Americans today robustly cheer the news that their fellow citizens in Arizona are blowing the whistle on international outlaws who have no respect for U.S. rules and sovereignty.
The so-called Minuteman Project privately and peacefully is dispatching fed-up, volunteer gringos to 1) patrol the 23 miles of border in San Pedro Valley, 2) spot any crossing violators, and 3) alert federal agents that our immigration laws are in the process of being broken. Although there is an additional 2,000 miles of border to worry about, the Arizona segment poses the greatest threat to U.S. security, because last year alone 51% of all illegals nabbed by the Border Patrol crossed into the USA via that particular state.
The chilling effect of Americans beginning to take the law, even partially, into their own hands has provoked Mexican President Vicente Fox to leave his hen house long enough to cackle "fowl"!-uh, foul! He threatens legal action against the migrant-hunting "vigilantes." This, in turn, inspired Colorado's pro-border Congressman Tom Tancredo to tell the 21st Century Minutemen, "You are not vigilantes. You are heroes, in my book."
Meantime, in Miami, a continent away and a world apart, the problem with unrestricted immigration since 1958 BC (Before Castro) makes the Arizona border problem look in comparison like a New Hampshire summer picnic experiencing a few ants. Called "The Magic City" by its early 20th Century promoters, Miami, after the last 25 years of tsunami-like immigration (overwhelmingly from Latin America, followed by Haiti), has replaced the adjective Magic with Tragic and acquired unique status on several counts. A recent Brookings Institution study of U.S. Census Bureau data reveals the following:
Who presided over the slide of a subtropical, metropolitan paradise into an impoverished, undereducated Tower of Babel? Jorge Mas Canosa quickly comes to mind, the pompous exile leader described liberally, but not lovingly, by The Miami Herald as "the next Cuban dictator," a powerful man who greased both Democrat and Republican palms in Washington and even gave political advice to Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. Before recently leaving Earth in order to tell God how to run the universe, Se???? ±or Mas Canosa crowed to an audience of his admirers: "We drove the Americans out of Miami!"
The organization created by Jorge Mas Canosa (and bequeathed to his son, Jorge II) is still kicking and now claims it wants to help the stubborn Anglo fools not driven out of town. The Cuban American National Foundation this week began airing condescending "public-service," English-language commercials on Miami's NBC television station to teach the barely tolerated English-speaking remnants of the local populace how to cope with their personal finances! CANF's brassy TV lesson for us poor Anglos (whose median household income actually is $20,000 higher than Latinos' income) is-and I am not making this up-to "save at least $1 a day, and at the end of the year you will have $360."
I shall not quibble with this truncated, bizarre version of the Gregorian calendar. If King Jorge II and his court jesters count only 360 days in a year, that is OK with me. But five bucks is five bucks! In accepting the premise of CANF's act of chutzpah, I shall save a dollar a day-according, however, to my calendar. That will give me $365 (not $360) in the piggy bank by this time next year. According to Southwest Airlines, it will be enough to fly both my wife and me to Arizona, economy class . . . and one way.
