GOP Vixen

Whatever happened to Mexicans' dreams?

Check out my Pajamas Media exclusive today on the Mexican government's major malfunctions, and how they've left those people streaming across the southern border by the wayside:

"They say 'denial' is a river in Egypt, but it’s actually a desert in Mexico.

As much as Mexico’s politicians stress that the dangerous trek across this expanse to slip across the American border is a pursuit of the American dream, they’ve paid no attention to Mexicans’ dreams.

Because for every Mexican who spends a season or more a world away from his family just to send home needed cash, there is a broken dream back home. Behind that is a broken system, a government that seems to have given up on utilizing the country’s resources, on valuing hard workers, and on keeping families together in their ancestral homelands for generations to come without living in fear of vicious druglords or abject poverty..."

Read the whole thing!

Vixen y Fox

Today in the Daily News is the first part of my Friday interview with the former president of Mexico, in which he gamely answers questions such as this:

-- On the 138,000 letters sent by the government to employers in 2006 - including 35,474 in California - advising companies that they had workers with suspicious Social Security numbers: "I don't know any case of using different Social Security numbers. I hear people say this and many other things. I don't know why we have to generalize that my people would be doing that..."

-- On whether America should have an open border with Mexico: "I'm not for open borders; I'm not for breaking the law."

Read the article here, or in the L.A. Daily News today! My upcoming column will focus on the rest of our interview, dealing with a little thing I love called foreign policy...

A couple of severed heads ain’t a big deal

This is the first of what will be a few pieces on my one-on-one interview yesterday with former Mexican Presidente Vicente Fox. I asked him about this staggering fact: According to Reporters Without Borders, the number of journalists killed in Mexico last year was second only to Iraq with nine murdered and three missing. And I asked what can Mexico do to ensure that the press is free to operate without fear of intimidation or violence. His answer may surprise you – but, well, maybe it won’t. More…

Bridget y Vicente

Just got off the phone with Vicente Fox, who took a half hour out of his book tour to chat with me about immigration, foreign policy, etc., and who had some pretty juicy responses. Stay tuned...

Would Calderon agree that where there's a Guatemalan, there is Guatemala?

If how Mexico treats Central American illegal immigrants is any indication, the Mexican president's answer would be a sound "no." I call out Calderon on this treatment -- with a look at the U.S. treatment of illegal immigrants, in light of my recent trip to Puerto Rico -- in my Los Angeles Daily News column today:

"...Migrants from the Dominican Republic, where a quarter of the population is below the poverty line, pay smugglers to take them in small boats called yolas 80 miles across the treacherous Mona Passage to Puerto Rico - where, with 4 million people living on land less spacious than three Rhode Islands, illegal immigration is felt especially acutely.    

The overstuffed yolas face overwhelming currents, and smugglers will toss Dominicans into the sea if the weight in the boat is too much, or leave them on deserted islands to starve. That is, if the migrants survive the sharks teeming below the water's surface.

Fortunate Dominicans are plucked from the yolas by U.S. Coast Guard patrols before they can become shark bait, and, after photos and fingerprinting, are safely repatriated to their home island. On Saturday, the Coast Guard located a 35-foot yola with 31 hungry and dehydrated Dominican migrants after responding to a cell-phone distress call with 20 searches over four days covering 2,400 square miles.

It's a far cry from what happens on Mexico's southern border. While President Felipe Calderon vowed in his state of the nation speech Sunday to mount 'an energetic protest at the unilateral measures taken by the U.S. Congress and government which exacerbate the persecution and abusive treatment of undocumented Mexican workers,' Central American immigrants trying to cross into Mexico face real abuse. If they don't fall prey to criminal gangs on the border, they're subject to shakedowns or worse by notoriously nefarious Mexican authorities. The State Department cites 'credible reports that police, immigration, and customs officials frequently violated the rights of undocumented migrants, including rape.'

Ironically, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, many Mexican landowners claim that they prefer Guatemalans to work the fields because Mexicans won't do the hard work on the banana and coffee plantations. And, making Calderon sound even more like the pot calling the kettle black, Mexican authorities regularly check IDs to locate illegal Central American immigrants and make about 200,000 arrests and deportations each year..."

I guess there isn't a Guatemalan Elvira Arellano to make a stink and boss Calderon around.

Elvira Arellano: A sense of entitlement the size of O'Hare!

The AP reported yesterday that Mexico's foreign secretary was talking with the U.S. about trying to get deported identity-thief-turned-activist Elvira Arellano back in the country. Arellano wants to be a "peace and justice ambassador," a B.S. label usually reserved for minions of Sun Myung Moon or celebrity volunteers at the United Nations. The best part of the AP story is the end:

"Mexico has yet to receive an answer from U.S. officials, (Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia) Espinosa said at a news conference Tuesday.

'The government in the receiving country has to authorize diplomatic posts. It has to grant the visa,' Espinosa said.

Arellano said she would not back down from her request and was angered that Mexico was seeking a U.S. visa, adding that the Mexican government should not have to ask permission to send her north of the border.

'I'm not asking for any visa,' she said. 'I want a diplomatic post as ambassador of peace and justice, and I won't accept anything less.'"

Take that, Felipe Calderon! Hell, don't use the proper diplomatic route of asking permission; just invade! See, my first question would be whether she had any specific experience or education to qualify her for a diplomatic post, but I guess one of the first things you learn in international relations is respect for long-agreed-upon boundaries and national sovereignty. Ironically, the coffee-table book in the pic of Arellano and Calderon is titled "Tierra," thought I doubt Calderon was giving her a territorial briefing: "This land is your land, this land is my land..."

Another part from the AP story:

"Arellano's U.S.-born 8-year-old son, Saul, is a U.S. citizen. He flew to Mexico on Friday to be reunited with his mother, and plans to stay here indefinitely, although he was expected to return briefly to the United States this month to participate in an immigrant-rights march."

Would they quit using the kid as a pawn?

Oh Felipe, Felipe, dónde están sus cojones?

I supported Felipe Calderon in his presidential bid because he had one big, golden, shining attribute in his favor: He wasn't Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. And though even though loser Lopez Obrador still thinks he's really president, Calderon is falling fast in my eyes (though he is still kinda cute, like a little accountant).

You see, it's one thing for Calderon to whip out the "blame America" refrain in an effort to boost his populist street cred. But he didn't even have the cojones to deliver his state of the union speech to Mexico's Congress -- dodging the leftist Lopez Obrador mafia and delivering the speech instead from a concert hall where they've held the Miss Universe pageant.

Come on -- it's been nine months since Calderon won, and he's still kowtowing to this crap? If Calderon can't handle a bunch of noisy lawmakers, how on earth can he be expected to crack down on ruthless coyotes?

Question of the day!

If you're an illegal immigrant taking sanctuary in a church to avoid deportation, do you have to put extra money in the collection plate?

Looking at the facts in the Elvira Arellano story

Elvira Arellano, the poster child for the sanctuary movement that vows to shield illegal immigrants from possible deportation proceedings, left the Chicago church where she's captured media attention for a year and came to Los Angeles today, bolding stating that she wasn't afraid of being arrested and was going to campaign for immigration reform. One can guess that they were also hoping for a dramatic, camera-captured confrontation with immigration officials, which wasn't going to happen.

Now, this is a case where emotion runs high -- Arellano claims that she'd be separated from her son, who was born in the U.S. and therefore has citizenship here, if deported. The U.S. is cast as the big, bad government determined to rip children out of their parents' arms in its enforcement of immigration laws that are no secret to anyone. But to appropriately analyze this case -- sans emotion -- one has to step back and look at the facts:

Elvira Arellano first came to the U.S. illegally in 1997, was deported, and came back days later. Break a law, turn right around and do it again.

In 2000, she used a false Social Security number to get a job cleaning planes at O'Hare airport in Chicago. It doesn't matter what country they come from -- do we want anybody with a fraudulent Social Security card working at an airport? That's just basic, no-brainer national security. And another lawbreaking strike.

Arellano would not have to be separated from her son. The two could move back to Mexico, and the son's citizenship could be a strong factor in her application for legal residency in the U.S. She could set the example for her son that, even though she'd taken lawless actions in the past, she would now take responsibility for those actions, respect the laws of the country of his birth, and come back to the U.S. the right way.

That's the problem with the sanctuary movement -- it makes for good, emotional sound bites, but usually the backstory isn't so black and white.

Ramos and Compean get their day on the Hill

Today's Senate hearing on the case of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean seemed to fall on the side of the two Border Patrol agents, who received lengthy prison terms for shooting a drug smuggler in the rump. "This really is a case of prosecutorial ... overreaction in charging," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman at the hearing. "The public sees two Border Patrol agents serving long prison sentences while an admitted drug smuggler goes free," Texas Sen. John Cornyn said, adding that he has "serious concerns about the judgment calls made during the prosecution of this case." From the Chronicle story:

The senators bored in on some of the case's most nagging questions: Why the drug smuggler, who had been driving a van with a million-dollar payload of marijuana, was given immunity to testify against Ramos and Compean; why the trafficker was given unfettered permission to cross into the United States after the agents were charged; and whether he used that border-crossing privilege to bring in another million-dollar marijuana haul just months after the February 2005 incident near El Paso.

Taking issue with the Houston Chronicle story, which in the lede calls Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila "a fleeing, unarmed Mexican drug smuggler": Nobody knows if the guy was, indeed, unarmed! He fled! That sort of hampers any attempt to search the guy for weapons, eh? And what drug smuggler with half a brain would transport a million dollars worth of marijuana across the dangerous border lands without a weapon to protect himself and the stash?