Posted by
Michael Kleen on Wednesday, July 30, 2008 2:20:17 PM
National borders define the territorial limits of sovereign nations, and those nations have the right to secure and control their borders. Every nation, state, tribe, and kingdom since the dawn of time has demarcated territory and boundaries and reserved the right to defend them from other tribes or nations.
Yet some in the United States feel that right no longer exists, and that protecting our territorial integrity is fundamentally unconscionable. These same people chastised both Yugoslavia and Macedonia for justly resisting secessionist claims by ethnic Albanians who sought to carve out their own autonomous zones and attach them to their Albanian motherland throughout the late 1990s. Similar forms of irredentism and separatism have been two of the primary challenges to national sovereignty in the past few decades.
Although dozens of comparable examples can be found all around the world, the Balkan mess is a good forewarning for what is increasingly likely to happen in the southwestern United States, where millions of Mexican immigrants have colonized large areas they consider to be theirs by right, even though they lost those lands during the 1840s.
Many in the United States have turned a blind eye to this situation, even when the border town of El Cenizo, Texas declared Spanish its official language in 1999, or when the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, Mario Obledo, claimed, “California is going to be a Mexican state… if people don’t like it, they should leave.”
And what reason should this new immigrant population, much larger than any in the past history of immigration to the US, located adjacent to their country of origin, and with historic grievances against the United States, have for assimilation or even consideration of United States sovereignty, when these actions and words go uncontested?
In that context, a blanket amnesty for the millions of illegal Mexican immigrants in the US would only encourage this behavior in those, like Mr. Obledo, who would use it to further their divisive political agenda.
We are without question failing in our duty to protect our sovereignty, which includes the absolute right to say who can come across our border and for how long. Setting a firm and resolute immigration policy to prevent the disintegration of large areas of our territory is not ‘nativist’ and it is not racist. It is our right as a country to exert supreme political and lawful authority over the territory under our control.