Arizona's Fight – America's Fight

At FrontPage Magazine. (PDF document here):

In mid May, 2010, Mexican President Felipe Calderon took advantage of a state visit to the U.S. to excoriate Arizona before a joint session of Congress. He called the law recently passed by the state that allows police to question the citizenship status of individuals detained on other matters “a terrible idea” and, echoing the pronouncements of many of the liberal legislators he was addressing, stigmatized it as “racial profiling.”

The Arizona law is explicitly not about that, as anyone who bothered to read it would know. (Not that Sr. Calderon should be particularly faulted in this regard, since Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, and others in the current administration who have also criticized Arizona haven’t read it either.) But the deliberate mischaracterization of what Arizona has done — creating state law that mirrors a federal law that the federal government has ignored — was only one small part of the cynicism that characterized Calderon’s unseemly harangue. Far more glaring was the spectacle of the head of a country so precariously close to failed statehood, a country devolving more deeply every day into violence and mayhem, lecturing a neighbor—in this case, Arizona—for trying to protect its people from the spillover of that chaos.

Arizona was forced to act because it is being squeezed by two hostile forces. On one side is a foreign government, the Republic of Mexico, whose leading export to America are the millions of illegal immigrants now living in the U.S. and creating social and financial costs that threaten the stability of communities, regions, and state governments through the Southwest. A growing problem for America because of the legal, economic, and cultural chaos they create, these illegal immigrants are for the Mexican government merely a form of human capital to be manipulated — people who send home hundreds of millions of dollars every year in the form of “remittances,” thus helping to keep in power an oligarchy whose policies have helped create the poverty that leads to massive flight across the border in the first place.

Squeezing Arizona from the other side is WashingtonD.C, which has stood by fecklessly as ...

RTWT.