Immigration and Corruption

Although there are a number of valid reasons why the proposed immigration bill is not the best idea, my concern has been on what it teaches the illegal immigrants. And they are illegal, regardless of any new softer description you might hear bandied about within the media, and that illegality is the heart of the problem. In the Army, I used to tell my soldiers that everything you do is training. You either reinforce bad habits or good ones. The immigration and the resulting amnesty will reinforce a bad habit.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to almost three million illegal immigrants on the premise that this would fix the problem. Obviously it didn’t. What it did was reinforce the notion that if they crossed the border and waited it out, the American government would eventually let them stay. It appears they are right.

It also appears that my initial thoughts regarding deep-seated corruption on the Mexican side of the border might be misplaced. Oh, I’m not apologizing for my estimation of the Mexican government being totally corrupt and numbing their migrating citizens as to any redeeming qualities of a central government.  With all that has happened within Washington this last two weeks, I’m fairly certain we might be no better. The Benghazi lie finally bubbled to the surface and then the floodgates to the cesspool no longer held back the various wastes that we know as Washington.  The IRS targeted conservative groups and acted as a schoolyard bully to intimidate and harass.  Kathleen Sebelius, the Health and Human Services Secretary is coming under scrutiny because she conducted a variation of the IRS tactic. She basically wanted money from the businesses that her agency is supposed to regulate. Tony Soprano would be envious of this shakedown.

But the crowning glory of all this governmental depravity might be the Justice Department’s hijacking of telephone records of the Associated Press. A part of me wants to point and laugh at the shocked and offended media lap dogs. After all, they actively supported the Obama Administration through thick and thin, doggedly shielding the President from any routine vetting or nasty little blunders such as Benghazi or the promise to “have more latitude” with the Russians after the election.  But then some reporter actually did their job and published a leak and the full vindictive force of the Justice Department turned on them. 

But I can’t laugh at their situation. America needs the press to be a counterweight to an overreaching government. Throughout modern history a free and inquisitive press kept us aware and informed and this in turn, kept us respectfully skeptical of the motives and actions of our elected leadership. But since the early 1990’s the press has strayed from the center to the left and assumed they knew more than the mass of Americans outside the Beltway. Hopefully the scales have fallen from their collective eyes. James Carville says this little dust-up will be over in thirty days. The press needs to prove him wrong or we are well on our way to the same corruption that plagues Mexico.