Abolishing Our Southern Border. (Insider Report).

With each new expansion of federal authority in the name of homeland security, Americans are reminded that "everything changed" on September 11th. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Bush administration's commitment to abolish our southern border with Mexico.

"The Bush administration is pushing Congress to act on the president's plan for granting amnesty to millions of Mexican workers living and working illegally in the United States," reported the February 15th Washington Times. "Administration officials insist that, although the subject faded from the minds of many after the September 11 attacks, it has remained a priority for Mr. Bush." Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) denounces the amnesty plan as "a kick in the teeth" to law-abiding people who seek to immigrate legally. A spokesman for Tancredo told the Times that the White House "is pressuring representatives" to act on amnesty legislation.

The Bush budget contains another gift to illegal aliens: federal funding to build water and sewage systems in "colonias" -- wretched shantytowns erected on the U.S. side of the border. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would disburse the funds, notes that the colonias usually spring up "as ad hoc settlements, often on private land" -- a sanitized way of describing criminal trespass.

"Targeting federal tax dollars to the colonias has long been a pet project of liberal Democrats," notes Terence Jeffrey in Human Events for February 18th. Jeffrey notes that children born to illegal alien squatters from Mexico "become U.S. citizens," and that these illicit settlers are effectively absorbing "sectors of U.S. territory into Mexican peasant culture."

President Bush will meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox during the UN's March 22nd International Conference on Financing and Development in Monterrey, Mexico. On the agenda for that meeting will be "ongoing cooperation on border security," which may include intelligence sharing and the use of "smart cards" for frequent travelers. All of this fits quite nicely into the Establishment's program for integrating the U.S. with Mexico and Canada as part of one seamless political entity (see "Abolishing Our Borders" in our October 8,2001 issue).