In Huntington Park, the city council this month appointed Julian Zatarain to its Parks and Recreation Commission and Francisco Medina, both illegal immigrants, to its Health and Education Commission.
In San Francisco, Kate Stein was shot and killed in July by Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant who had been deported to his native Mexico on five previous occasions.
In Irvine, federal agents in May arrested attorney Ken Zhiyi Liang, who attempted to spirit out of the country a Chinese woman who was a material witness in an ongoing criminal probe of a Southern California “birth tourism” racket. The woman had entered the country on a tourist visa for purposes of birthing a baby that would be an automatic U.S. citizen.
These recent disquieting immigration-related stories made news not only here in the Golden State, but throughout the entire country. They are emblematic of the failings of our immigration system.
They also explain why so many Americans have responded approvingly to certain of Donald Trump’s proposed immigration “reforms,” which the frontrunner for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination set forth this week.
Well, I’m not a Trump fan. And I think certain of his immigration reforms are, well, wack.
Like building a nearly 2,000-mile wall separating the U.S. and Mexico (which presumably would be manned by military-trained marksmen with .300 Win Mags ready to put down any of the wretched refuse from south of the border who try to enter the U.S. anywhere other than Checkpoint Donald).
Yet, there are proposals included in the Trump plan with which even those of us who are not fans of the shoot-from-the-lip candidate might be inclined to agree.
That includes his call to triple the number of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
Indeed, ICE has roughly 5,000 officers to cover the 50 states. By comparison, the Los Angeles Police Department has approximately 10,000 officers.
Trump also proposes mandatory return of all “criminal aliens.” While most Americans, including your’s truly, oppose mass deportation of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, they haven’t a problem with returning murderers, rapists, drug traffickers and other felons to their home countries.
As it is, the Obama administration since 2013 has released some 76,000 illegal aliens with criminal convictions, as Trump noted. That included, outrageously, five-time deportee Lopez-Sanchez.
The GOP’s wannabe 2016 standard-bearer also proposes an end to birthright citizenship, which, he submits, is “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.”
That jibes with the views of nearly half of Americans, according to a 2010 CBS poll, who said that current law should be changed so that children born to illegal immigrants do not automatically become U.S. citizens.
I’m not sure about rewriting the 14th Amendment, which confers citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. But I do have a problem with pregnant women in China and other countries who obtain a U.S. tourist visa under pretense of taking a vacay in this country when their real intent is have a U.S. citizen baby, with all the benefits that go with.
Finally, there’s the issue unaddressed by Trump – the conferring upon undocumented immigrants certain privileges that arguably should be reserved for U.S. citizens and immigrants here legally.
If state governments want to proffer driver’s licenses or in-state college tuition or state-paid health benefits to illegal immigrants, I think that ought to be their prerogative.
But when it comes to appointments to public commissions, election to public office and participating in public elections, those should be reserved exclusively to U.S. citizens.
Because if we allow noncitizens of this country to subvert the will of citizens, we will devalue what it means to be an American.
