Why Can't We Control Illegal Immigration?

A Snarky Response to Continued Bloviation by the Isolationists

at Both Ends of the Political Spectrum

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Got one of those e-mails describing how tough countries like Afghanistan, China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, even Mexico are on illegal immigrants. It ignores one thing, however. It's not quite true.  Afghanistan does have a flood of illegals in the form of Taliban soldiers, who regularly cross their borders from sanctuaries in Pakistan. Iraq faces waves of foreign jihadists pouring over the borders from Iran and Syria. The current Venezuelan government started out as illegal immigrants working from rebel safe bases across the borders. Even Mexico, which has tough immigration laws on its books, only selectively enforces them. In spite of those laws, there is a steady stream of South American refugees crossing their southern borders headed for "El Norte",.

So the premise is already flawed.  But even presuming that these nation's draconian policies toward illegals were enforced (though they really aren't), why can't Americans do something like that and control our own immigration problem?

Why?  Let me count the ways.....

1. Because Americans are good, decent Christian people who cannot bear to see someone suffer.
2. Because we feel a bit guilty because our country is so blessed and the only reason we're in it is because our ancestors used every means at their disposal to get here in the first place and so we sympathize with anyone who wants to come here.
3. Because we know that there, but for the grace of God could go we. A lot of folk, like me, have a sneaking admiration for the courage, love of family and really profound work ethic of these folks who are essentially refugees - at least the ones who aren't drug mules or terrorists..
4. Because the evil people who run Mexico take advantage of the misery of their own people and the kindness of the United States to solve their problems with poverty, poor education and overpopulation among their own people and the drug runners with whom those evil people in government and law enforcement are in cahoots know they can use these people as drug mules and decoys to ship their crap to the Charlie Sheens of America who fund their lavish lifestyle.
5. Because corrupt business people in the U.S. use them as virtual slave labor. They can't complain or they'll get shipped back to the hellhole they just escaped. It's a priceless opportunity to make some real coin and we like our roses, lettuce and chicken products cheap (or at least we apparently want growers and manufacturers to make as much money as possible producing those goods).
6. And finally, because the libs on the left and right (liberals and libertarians) think we can sit behind our borders and defend it without actually going over there and rooting out the problem at its source.

Unlike the other folk my friend's e-mail mentioned, none of those countries have the slightest problem sending someone to murder, blow up or make disappear those who cause them problems. Also, people want to get OUT of those countries, so there isn't much problem with people sneaking in.  Nobody wants to go there except, of course, terrorists looking for a place to train.

How long do you think the drug cartels would remain unmolested if they were sitting just across the Iranian or Chinese or Afghan border and bothering those governments. The only reason Al-Quaeda is sitting safely within the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran is because those governments find them a useful tool to use against the weak Americans who obviously have no intention of offending anyone by rooting out the problem at the source. Oh, there was that scare with the two Bush's, but the US Congress and public squeamishness eventually made sure that neither one finished the job he started. Once her realized the U.S. wasn't going to follow through, even Libya's Ghaddafi, eventually got his courage back and put on some dry pants after watching those grainy Youtube videos of Saddam swinging from that hemp necktie!

Conclusion:

Right or wrong, we're not going to stop it, even if we spend a fortune trying to shut off the flow of human misery across our southern border. We'd just be punishing people for trying to find a better life for themselves and their families. We up here in "El Norte" just don't have the capacity for that level of cruelty. We find it difficult to swat refugees back into the floodwaters of misery that is Mexico.

And without the will to go down there and root out the bad guys in their dens for ourselves, all we do is leave evil unmolested, festering and spreading just outside our borders. It's like living in a beautiful house with well-stocked pantries, paying an exterminator to come in regularly to protect our own house and hoping that the ravening hordes of plague rats living in the nearby sewers and infesting the houses around us, won't cross our fences looking for a meal and driving terrified field mice and waves of insects before them.

To solve your problem, you clean out the rats nests where they breed. That's the only thing that works.

And before someone attaches my name to this "chilling" quote, let me explain that I'm talking about the cartels and their allies in the ancient and corrupt Mexican government - not about the poor folks just trying to get out of there alive..

I ain't saying it would be a pretty solution or that it would make anyone love us, except possibly the Mexican people, but it would work. I mean, after all, the Japanese are our friends and we dropped a couple of A-bombs on them. I'm not recommending dropping A-bombs on Mexico, but it's tempting to send some SEAL teams in to make the cartels go away at the very least.  I think the Mexicans would probably forgive us.

As to issues of morality, I'm not speaking to that. I'm talking about what would be effective. In this evil world, evil people respect and fear only strength. They find compassion laughable. That's why the only solution to the ultimate problem of evil was for God to intervene directly to provide a way to save the good people and let the evil people destroy themselves.

That's why Jesus' second coming will be accompanied by waves of death and flames and horror. Once we good guys, whom every evil jerk that walks the planet takes advantage of because they see us as "suckers", leave this place, the universe will see the ultimate consequence of sin.....................death and death, I suspect, will come for the evil people in this world by their own hands. I don't think God will have to lift a finger.

Just one opinion. I'm sure there are others. They would be wrong, but you guys just talk among yourselves.*

Tom

*Sorry, I'm tired of political fantasy today and I'm not sending this to ten of my friends, although, I assure you, I do care and I do love Jesus.

The Moral Sword - Preemptive War and the Christian Nation

He who hesitates?

Should we ever strike first and how do you define a first strike?

(c) 2011 by Tom King

Okay, what would you do in this scenario.

You are confronted by a man you know for a fact has killed and attacked his neighbors repeatedly. He has what looks like a gun in his side pocket. His hand is in the pocket. The shape of the gun points at you.

Your family is standing behind you. The man says I am going to kill you and all of yours. You have a gun in the back of your pants.

Do you:

1. Stand there and hope he doesn't really mean it when he says he's going to kill you and your family.
2. Stand there hoping he really doesn't have a gun.
3. Ask him to show his gun before you let him shoot you.
4. Snap out your pistol and put 3 shots center mass before he can react and shoot you back.

The Ron Paul crowd and the liberal-pacifists never tire of pointing out that attacking Iraq was immoral because we attacked first, supposedly without warning. Afghanistan, sometimes gets a pass since they were harboring Al Quaeda at the time of the 9/11 attacks, but lately, not so much. They particularly love the "How can you be a Christian and support...." argument.

I realize that as a Christian I am required by God to turn the other cheek if it's just me. When my family is standing behind me and are threatened, the ethos changes somewhat. I doubt many of these sunshine moralists have ever stood unarmed facing a guy with a two by four or an 8-inch hunting knife pointed at their bellies and the look of death in their eyes and been required to "turn the other cheek".  I have.  It's frightening and requires an incredible exercise in faith in your Maker, I'm here to say. I worked with mentally disturbed kids and adults for a couple of decades of my career and this kind of thing happend a lot, so don't tell me I don't understand how to turn the other cheek. When my family is threatened, however, my viewpoint on the matter changes radically. 

My wife rags me constantly on my driving when she's with me. I asked her once how she thought I drove when she wasn't in the car?  She said, "God takes care of you then, but when I'm here, but when I'm in the car, He expects me to do my part."

That's kind of my take on whether to adopt a passive or proactive response to defense. Don't get me wrong, I do trust God to look out for my family when I'm not around. It's just that when I am around, I think He expects me to do my part.

The command "Thou shalt not kill" by all surrounding Scriptural evidence should read more nearly "Thou shalt preserve life". Scripture shows God repeatedly sending his people to war when the lives of the women and children are threatened. He often seems to order a preemptive strike too with overwhelming force, especially when God knows the enemy plans to strike first.

Sometimes God hurls lightning bolts at the ravening hordes on our behalf as he did for the prophet Samuel on one occasion. At other times, he sends David to whack Goliath on the head with a rock. Now David was preemptive. Goliath had not, after all, actually hurled that spear with the 30 pound head and shaft like a weaver's beam. So far he had been nothing but talk and waving a sharp sword around.

When someone acts like he has weapons of mass destruction, denies he actually does, but has a history of outright lying about the subject, then "What do we do?" becomes a tougher question.

On a personal level, that kind of situation requires a personal relationship with God and some coaching on His part to figure out the answer - and I've found that, in such situations, God does present the answers.

On a national level......well I think God guides there  too. 

I think God placed G.W. Bush where he was at the time he was needed. For that matter, He also placed LBJ where he was for a specific purpose - probably Civil Rights legislation which no Republican president could ever have pulled off with a Democrat majority in congress. I think Vietnam was allowed, in order to teach us a lesson about arrogance in how we use our strength. In Vietnam we poured out American blood in order to test war toys (which coincidentally made wealthy arms dealers and ex-congressmen and senators and generals wealthy too). We learned from that never to go to war unless you fight to win. The Gulf War taught us not to quit till the job is finished. Iraq and Afghanistan may be about simply opening up the middle east to the idea of democracy, if only long enough to provide a window for God to rescue His people from among the soldiers of the evil one.

Scripture talks about the angels holding back the winds of strife at the very end of Earth's history. I suspect they're having to rope and hog tie those winds right now and that when they let them go, a horror will descend on this planet the likes of which we have never seen.

The United States, for all its flaws, has been a tool in the hand of God and the President's heart is, as the psalmist says, "In the hands of the Lord."

Doesn't mean I won't worry about this president. It doesn't mean I won't question the president or argue with him if I believe what he is doing is wrong. All it means is that I'm confident it will all work out as it should in the end.

Thank God for that.

Tom

Is the Pope a Progressive Socialist?

"Disturbing Encyclical Calls for World Government and U.S. to become "Subsidiary" To It

(c) 2011 by Tom King

A friend forwarded me the link to this Encyclical released by Pope Benedict XVI. As an American conservative, I find it totally disturbing. I have included, perhaps, the most disturbing bit, in which the Pope calls for a global government to which all the world's nations would be subsidiary. In essence, he calls for the United States, long a bastion of religious and individual freedom, to join the international community and submit itself to the judgment of the world - a world from which our ancestors, wave on wave of immigrants, fled seeking freedom and opportunity.

I'm glad I'm not Catholic. I would have a great deal of difficulty opposing the supreme leader of my church on this issue and oppose him I would. Jesus said we fight against principalities and powers. It seems, if you've been following the news lately, that those powers, many of which are mentioned in this encyclical, are joining together to create a world in which individuals submit their will to the collective judgment of a powerful world government. In another place in the encyclical, the Pope states that such a government should have "some teeth".  He repeatedly uses words like "subsidiarity" and "solidarity". He refers to trade unions and progressive governments as important partners in the process.  He states, "Obviously it (the global government) would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums."  It is the same thing called for by progressive socialists, union leaders, environmental groups and even radical Islamists.  Though their vision of a one world government is quite different, the Islamic jihadists seem prepared to work arm in arm with other factions to create such a world government, if only, to make the world conquerable in a single stroke rather than piecemeal as they would have to in today's world of independent nations.

Don't get me wrong here, I am not anti-Catholic. I have dear Christian friends who are Roman Catholic whom I know God loves and blesses. That said, when a world church leader of the influence and power of the Pope, comes out in favor of something as drastic as a world government, those who have a moral objection to that cannot remain silence, whether we respect the leader or not. If the General Conference President of my own church advocated that the U.S. should submit itself to a world government, I'd be setting up a howl.

If you would like to read the entire document and judge for yourself, click on the title below.  It will take you to the Vatican website where the entire encyclical is published. This is the most telling part of encyclical.

IN VERITATE

OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF

BENEDICT XVI

ENCYCLICAL LETTER

CARITAS

2009

Excerpt:

• "To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good[147], and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights[148]. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums. Without this, despite the great progress accomplished in various sectors, international law would risk being conditioned by the balance of power among the strongest nations. The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization[149]. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations."

This confirms my reading of Revelation. Even so, come Lord Jesus.

© 2011 by Tom King