“WE ARE FOR BORDER SECURITY, BUT NOT A WALL”
December 21, 2018
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
I recognize that this is not in the spirit of the season; but, the big headline today is ‘…shudder’… possible, partial government shutdown over funding for the border wall.
Proof that media group-think sifts what news they will tell us or write about is the fact that very obvious questions – questions that even a kindergartner might ask — are never asked because the media wouldn’t want us to hear the answers. And one can only wish that the ‘sages’ in our Congress might step up and ask those questions of one another during committee sessions and floor debates.
We live in a world with doors and locks on everything. We lock our car doors. We have doors on our homes and apartments – and often double or triple locks on those doors. And even inside our homes and places of work, we have doors. And what do all these doors have in common? They have WALLS – to which hinges of one sort or another are attached. So, you can’t have doors to let people in unless you have walls to which the doors are connected.
The purpose of the walls is to allow the door to open and close and to keep out things that have no business coming in. To assist apartment-dwellers to determine who is on the other side of the door, there is a little peephole that one can look through. Everybody knows all this, right? So why can’t we ask those who claim they support border ‘security,’ but not a wall, if they have doors on their offices, their homes, their cars? And when they answer in the affirmative, ask them why they have those doors? Then remind them that those doors are really openings in the walls that secure them.
“We are a nation of immigrants,” we are told, but as soon as our foothold on this continent was established, the Brits put in place customs houses and immigration procedures. Once we became independent, we did the same. When the majority of newcomers came from Europe in the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries, they were funneled through Ellis Island where they were given health checks — and quarantined when appropriate — and had to prove who they were and that their backgrounds were clean. Not everybody got in. Those who failed were returned to their places of origin.
Today, most folks coming here do so by air, and any flight arriving from a foreign country is funneled through one of the several ‘ports of entry’ on each coast, or in some cases inland. Each port of entry is staffed with US customs and immigration officers who check not only foreigners, but every US citizen arriving as well. Foreigners whose papers are not in order are detained and then sent back to their origins. Only a few are denied entry. Almost all get in and we know who they are, where they are going, and that their records are clean.
We have ports of entry along our southern border, too. And folks coming and going through these ports get a pretty routine, although thorough, check. But over hundreds of miles of our southern border there are no walls – and thus no doors — and folks who might otherwise not be allowed to enter through the established entry ports sneak over the open border – which is against the law. In some cases, the reasons for likely denying them entry may be that their records don’t measure up to our rules for entry, or because they are smuggling in contraband – like cocaine, fentanyl, heroine, PCP, methamphetamines, weapons, or other things that are controlled or banned. Or maybe because they or their kids have tuberculosis, or VD, or Polio, or measles, or any of the other diseases that were ‘eradicated’ from our schools just a few short years ago – but have somehow reappeared. Did uncontrolled ‘immigration’ introduce seriously-ill newcomers into our kids’ classrooms?
We are ‘informed’ that folks in the caravans from Central America are escaping wanton gang violence at home and thus are ‘refugees’ seeking asylum. And yet, within the very same caravans, there are scores (if not hundreds) of the MS-13 and other gang members. So, let’s see: these folks are supposedly running away from these vicious hoodlums — who actually are running along among them? Can’t anybody in the media or in the Congress see the folly of this question?
Doors are good, because they allow people and things in – but they can also exclude things we don’t want to allow in. But walls, TO WHICH DOORS MUST BE ATTACHED, are bad? And, somehow, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi get a free pass when they look into camera and tell us saps, “We are for border security, but not a wall…!” And no follow-up from the media. Why is that? I’ll bet you already know why. Is half the country that votes Democrat satisfied with Chuck and Nancy’s position on this important issue?
Honk if you agree!
Old Frank