TOWARD A NORTH AMERICAN UNION

For The Tribune Papers

By Mike Scruggs

Part 2 of a Series

 

According to ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis, the number of illegal immigrants arrested in conjunction with violations of U.S. immigration laws forbidding the employment of illegal aliens dropped from 17,554 in 1997 to 159 in 2004.  The number of employer fines for hiring illegal aliens dropped from 865 to only 3 during the same period. Such data gives the distinct impression that the Clinton and Bush Administrations made a deliberate decision not to enforce U.S. immigration laws. Not surprisingly, Homeland Security has ceased publishing such embarrassing statistics.  Except for a few public relations flurries, the Bush Administration has ignored its duty to enforce immigration laws at employer worksites.

 

 After serving on a County Commission committee to investigate the impact of illegal immigration in Henderson County, North Carolina, I and others concluded that the federal government has deliberately made it difficult for employers, law enforcement agencies, news agencies, and ordinary citizens to determine the legal status of immigrants or the number of illegal immigrants in a community. The Bush Administration, a sizeable number of U.S. Congressmen—especially in the Senate—and many of the most powerful corporations in America do not want our immigration laws enforced.

 

When Bush took office in 2001, he immediately tried to get Congress to approve an amnesty for 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants. Only the rude awakening of 911 stopped its passage.  In addition, the U.S. Border has been a virtual sieve since Bush took office. Contrary to popular opinion, however, the border is only half the problem. Almost half of all illegal immigrants come to the U.S. on legal visas and then disappear. Visa regulations, like employer sanctions, are seldom enforced. Since Bush’s inauguration in early 2001, the number of illegal immigrants in the country has grown from 7 million to over 12 million, and a Bear Stearns study recently estimated the number to be over 20 million.

 

The sharp drop in enforcement of immigration laws during the last two years of the Clinton Administration may have been at least partially associated with Democratic politics and Al Gore’s anticipated Presidential campaign. The Clinton Administration was eager to speed up the citizenship process and create as many new Democratic voters as possible.  By far the largest share of recent legal and illegal immigrants to the U.S. is from Latin America.  A 2001 Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) survey confirmed what most people already knew—most Latino voter groups favor the Democratic Party over the Republican Party by margins exceeding 20 percent.  Two demographic exceptions within the Latino or Hispanic voter groupings are Cubans and Evangelical Protestants. Both of these favor Republicans by only a slight majority. Three studies cited in the CIS report indicated that Latinos prefer the Democratic Party because they favor expanded healthcare and social security programs. The study also showed that those Latino immigrants who were not yet citizens favored the Democratic Party by even larger margins.  The study concluded that:

 

“Current immigration policy is slowly but steadily shifting the nation’s electorate toward the Democratic Party.”

 

We must ask ourselves why a Republican Administration would continue such an immigration policy. One reason is that the Republican Party has held out a hope that an appeal to social and religious conservatism would attract Latino voters to Republican candidates. The underlying assumption of Latino social conservatism is, however, about two generations out of date. The same socially destructive secular influences that have affected the U.S., Canada, and Europe, have also affected Mexico and Latin America. Most recent surveys indicate that the latest wave of Latino immigration is much less socially conservative than the U.S. population in general. In addition, the social-welfare issues appear to have the greatest weight in the voting booth. The CIS Study concluded that the Republican Party would need to move much further to the left on social-welfare issues to capture a majority of Latino votes. Even families with more than $100,000 annual income favored Democratic policies over Republican policies by a 10 percent margin.

 

Our current immigration policies have also substantially reduced the living standards of American workers and their families. The studies of Harvard economist George Borjas indicated that as of 2000, the wages of American workers had been suppressed $1,700 per year per worker because of competition from foreign workers here either illegally or on work visas. Adjusting this number for the impact of additional illegal immigration since 2000 reveals a median wage loss of over $2,900 per year for American workers. Recent reports from the Economic Policy Institute and Northwestern University indicated that the median income of American workers had actually declined by over $1,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars from 2000 to 2006.  This is a primary cause of the recession that now threatens the U.S. economy. U.S. taxpayers are also burdened with at least $60 billion in additional state and local taxes resulting from illegal immigration. So what is going on here?

 

There is no doubt that a substantial reason for our borders not being sealed and our immigration laws not being enforced is that both the Republican and Democratic Parties have been catering to the big businesses and employer associations that fund their campaigns and demand a continued stream of cheap foreign labor.

 

Two other reasons for our borders not being sealed and our laws not being enforced are that Democrats cater to Latino voting blocks and Republicans fear being seen as anti-Hispanic if they push for tough border and employment sanctions.

 

But there is something even bigger going on. On March 13, 2005, it began to come to the surface. U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez met with the Mexican Secretary of the Economy Fernando Canales and Canadian Privy Council Assistant Secretary Phil Ventura. Ten days later in Waco, Texas, they announced the formation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) of North America. Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin said of this new development that:

 

“The world is not standing still; new economic power houses, such as China and India, are rising and we face new opportunities—but we also face new challenges. And this requires a new partnership, stronger, more dynamic, one that is focused on the future. We are determined to forge the next generation of our continent’s success. That’s our destination. The security and prosperity partnership that we are launching today is the road map to getting there.

 

What does this mean? Curiously, there is no law or declared “Sense of Congress” authorizing the creation or funding of the SPP. Even more ominous, no congressional committee has any oversight of its activities. It sounds remarkably like the road map that led to the formation of the European Union, whose growing power is now beginning to transcend the laws and political rights of the citizens of its member nations. The road to the European Union was stealth and deception. Just as the former Soviet Union deported thousands of native Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians from their Baltic homelands and settled thousands of ethnic Russians in their place following World War II, the European Union is using immigration—especially Muslim immigration from the Middle East and North Africa—to change the demography and political balance of power in its member nations in order to preclude any effective resistance on their part to its supra-national power.  It is transforming Europe into a multicultural state where past cultural and ethnic distinctives and social cohesion are being destroyed in order to subordinate its member nations to its own supra-governmental despotism. The European Union started with economics and has continued to add other areas of supra-national dominance including even matters of free speech on social issues. Hence free speech and the ability to resist government tyranny are beginning to disappear in Europe.

 

The SPP, like the early stages of the European Union, consists of various working groups and committees operating outside of public scrutiny. Its elite membership includes the chief executives of many of the largest corporations in the U. S., for example: New York Life, Ford, General Motors, Merck, General Electric, Wal-Mart, and Lockheed Martin. These working groups report to the “leaders.”  Some of the American “leaders” are Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George Soros, Jimmy Carter, and the SPP’s intellectual founder, Dr. Robert Pastor of American University.

 

In 2005, the SPP sympathetic Council for Foreign Relations released a report vice-chaired by Robert Pastor that gave this summary of its recommendations:

 

“The Task Force proposes the creation  by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity…Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free secure, just and prosperous North America.”

 

In other words, there will be open borders. There will not be any more illegal immigration because no one in North America will be classified as an immigrant or illegal.  There will also be a common currency called the “Amero.” A NAFTA superhighway will run from southern Mexico to distribution centers in the U.S. and Canada.  The United States, Mexico, and Canada will all be in one big happy family, and that pesky U.S. Constitution can be discarded. It will be government by the corporate and government elite, of the corporate and government elite, and for the corporate and government elite—the consent of the governed be damned.

 

It is no wonder George Bush and John McCain are annoyed with all this talk of building fences and walls and enforcing laws against employers hiring “undocumented workers.”

 

Buried in the middle of the latest Kennedy-McCain stealth amnesty successor, deceptively and hypocritically titled “The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007, was this statement:

 

“It is the sense of Congress that the United States and Mexico should accelerate the implementation of the Partnership for Prosperity.”

 

Fortunately for the American people but to the frustration of its major sponsors—President Bush, Senators Ted  Kennedy,  Harry Reid,  John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Arlen Specter, Chuck Hagel, and Mel Martinez—this stealth amnesty bill and precursor to the end of the Constitutional Republic of 1789 and the birth of  a North American Union was stopped by loud public protest.  But North American Union fans should not worry. Its planning groups are still going full speed ahead; its political and corporate sponsors are thriving; and the American people are still asleep.

 

Word count 1743

January 31, 2008