Immigration and the land where I was born

It is true that South Fulton County is undergoing the most important metamorphosis in its history. Incorporation and annexation issues abound. And while we will continue to bring these issues to your attention, I decided to use this space to make a few observations on the national issue of immigration.

My take on this issue is a little different than the “perspective” I keep hearing from the liberal and conservative talking heads of our highly questionable national news outlets.

For all their endless editorial commentary, usually disguised as “news,” they rarely ever talk about the truly dangerous aspect of the penetration of our borders.

I’m not talking about Mexicans and others coming here for work (there is plenty of conversation and emotions on both sides of that coin). I am talking about an extremely dangerous and nefarious problem that the federal government and the national media have been all but silent on.

For at least the past three or four years, and potentially much longer, we have seen the entry of members of various organized gangs into the U.S. from Mexico and Central American countries.

The Los Angeles gang crackdown of the past years sent many members flying across the border, where they maintained their American contacts, grew in number and certainly grew in sophistication. Then they began to return to the United States.

What began in South Central Los Angeles has come back home with a vengeance and is now virtually nationwide.

One of the most well known of these immigrant gangs is MS-13. Immigration & Naturalization Service and Border Patrol are certainly aware of the problem, having announced in August 2005 the arrest of 1,057 gang members, 582 of whom were members of MS-13.

Another notorious bunch, the 18th Street Gang, specializes in recruiting crime-prone immigrants. Around for decades and now one of America’s largest organized gangs, an estimated 60 percent of new 18th Street Gang members are illegal immigrants.

If you are not familiar with the current reality of gangs in America, not to mention in metro Atlanta (including the south side), do yourself an educational favor and do a Google search.

There is yet another group of people entering primarily through our southern border that pose an even bigger threat. They are terrorist-affiliated individuals.

Presumably much smaller in number, these individuals and their pronounced hatred of America is no secret in today’s world. And please don’t think it’s all Al Qaeda.

You may have seen the U.S. State Department April 2001 report (just months before 9/11) on international terrorist organizations operating worldwide in calendar year 2000. State cited 41 different international terrorist organizations, 29 of which were active that year. In 2002, intelligence journals (the Jane’s publications, for example) were reporting Islamic terrorist operatives present in Latin America.

These are brief examples of a different kind of immigration, criminal immigration. It is a type of immigration that rarely gets mentioned by the national press. But that’s no surprise since they can only seem to cover a couple of stories (ad nauseam) at a time.

It’s the type of immigration that rarely gets mentioned by our otherwise disengaged national Democratic or Republican leaders. And that’s no surprise either.

God forbid that the people become informed on internal matters that affect their safety and security. Come to think of it, maybe the thousands of bad guys that have infiltrated our country in recent years is part of the reason we have to log the private phone calls of tens of millions of Americans (I mean, bad guys).

Maybe if government had done its job in the first place on these and other issues we would not have to to see our privacy and other freedoms incrementally eroded.

More and more, I feel like a stranger in the land where I was born.