Mr. President,
While I applaud your decision to place National Guard Troops on our southern border as a small first step toward addressing the illegal immigration problem, this effort strikes me as half-a-loaf masquerading as a solution. I take no small irony in that the actions of the National Guard will be limited to mimicking the efforts of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a group of patriotic Americans you chose to call "vigilantes". The Minutemen have succeeded despite Federal Government efforts to undermine their activities. Without arrest and detention authority, the National Guard can do little more than watch the invading throngs as they import poverty, drugs, crime, disease, and decline into America and haul away our jobs and wealth.
I trust that the National Guardsmen will have the necessary body-armor, reliable, appropriate non-obsolete weapons and communications, night-vision equipment, training and logistical support they need to confront the well-armed drug runners, human traffickers and other armed threats coming across our border daily. I should point out that as a military veteran, I recognize that military personnel are trained primarily to "kill enemies and break things", not to enforce complex immigration and border security laws. This National Guard border deployment would be entirely unnecessary had this and previous administrations along with their Congressional counterparts truly addressed illegal immigration issues.
I also trust that you will not use this deployment as a smokescreen to cover the reintroduction of the failed Hagel-Martinez Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act (CIRA, S.2611) guest worker amnesty program. This program will simply provide de facto amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants already thumbing their noses at our laws and invite millions more to immigrate legally or continue to flaunt our laws, take our jobs, and further economically devastate American citizen taxpayers.
In a web memo published today, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, estimated that if passed, S.2611 would be "allowing an estimated 103 million persons to legally immigrate to the U.S. over the next 20 years—fully one-third of the current population of the United States." Amnesty by any other name is still amnesty. I ask you to explain to the American People how our country can retain its identity, its language, and its culture with such a rapid and profound shift in its population demography.
Mr. President, I have a simple message for you: Protect our Rule of Law by ensuring full enforcement of existing immigration laws, Protect our borders by proposing and supporting proper legislation, organization, funding, and execution of enforcement activities by immigration agencies, and help protect our English language and American culture that make America unique.
If you and the Congress fail in this mission, the American People will hold you and them to account in November and in 2008. America can ill-afford to be run by the Left at this critical time in history, but your leadership failures and the Congressional acquiescence to the Left are fast making that possibility a painful reality.
Sincerely,
Donald R. Castella
Chairman
Vernon Township Republican Central Committee
P.O. Box 96
Lincolnshire, IL 60069-0096
Phone 847-275-5542
Fax 847-557-5081
