Still pouring across the border

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views May 3, 2004]

As illegal aliens pour across the Mexican border, Phyllis Schlafly, in "Unsafe Life On The Border" (4/28/04), asks why this border conflict gets no news coverage. Why aren't cameras showing devastated ranches where American landowners, like Erin Anderson, live in danger? Anderson claims that her family can no longer ranch their land, and they cannot sell it. Schlafly writes:

It isn't safe to go on their own property without a gun, a cell phone, and a two-way radio. Their land has been stolen from them by illegal aliens while public officials turn a deaf ear. Cochise County in the Tucson sector is the major smuggling route for illegal aliens and drugs, and literally thousands cross every night. The Border Patrol admits to apprehending one out of five illegals, but many think it's only one out of ten.

The news of President Bush's amnesty proposal spread like wildfire as far south as Brazil. After Border Patrol agents reported that the illegals said the amnesty proposal had prompted them to come, U.S. agents were told not to ask the question any more.

Ms. Anderson says that American landowners watch in horror as their lands, water troughs and tanks, and animals are destroyed. The daily trampling of thousands of feet has beaten the ground into a hard pavement on which no grass will grow for the cattle.

Places that the illegals use as layover sites, where they rest or wait for the next ride, are littered with mountains of trash, garbage, open latrines, and plastic bags, diapers and wrappers of all kinds. When indigenous wildlife and cattle eat the plastic and refuse, they die, so the residents try to clean up the sites as often as they can.

Illegals fly or take a bus from anywhere in Mexico or Central America to an industry town like Altar in the northern region. They are driven to the Arizona border, walk a few miles across the border, and then are picked up by shuttle buses which take them north to Tucson or Phoenix.

People smuggling is so lucrative and pervasive that it is corrupting some local American high school kids. Youngsters can make thousands of dollars a week by picking up illegal aliens on the road and driving them to the Phoenix airport.

When is the Bush Administration going to put troops on our southern border to stop these crimes, and when are the media going to interview Erin Anderson and other Arizonans so the American people can know what is really going on?

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