12/26/2012
I was lucky to be celebrating Christmas with family and friends gathered about me. Made me think with pain about Americans serving in those cul de sac wars in the Middle East that Messrs Bush and Cheney got us stuck in, starting in 2003.
And about those who made it home alive, but carrying physical and mental scars that will linger all their lives.
It thus particularly annoyed this Democrat (as it would any thinking citizen) to read yet another sob story from one of America’s leading purveyors of such stuff, my hometown Washington Post.
Steve Hendrix emitted it: For many a season of separation | record numbers of deportations sunder immigrant families — right there on page B1 on Christmas Day:
Her husband had always put up the Christmas tree, but this year the 36-year-old wife and mother is on her own in Silver Spring. He offered what guidance he could by cellphone from Honduras, but eventually she gave up on the metal stand with the rusty bolts and just plunked the trunk in a five-gallon bucket filled with rocks.
“It has not fallen over yet,” Rosalda said with a mix of pride and fatigue. “It is very, very difficult at this time of the year. My daughter keeps asking when he will come back. I tell her, ‘Next Christmas, we will be together.’?”
She paused, then began to cry. “I hope to God it is true.”
Rosalda, a pizza cook who entered the United States illegally, doesn’t want to give her last name for fear of making her family’s immigration calamity worse. Her husband of five years, Arturo, was deported in January after being picked up in a sweep of undocumented workers.
Golly — Mr. Obama ordering the government to do its job!
But why is “Rosalda” still here herself?
And if she is so anxious to be with her husband, why not go join him?
She could take her anchor babies along. Oh, yes, there are two:
“It’s been hard all year, with most of the family’s meager income gone and wrenching “Where’s Papa?” questions from their two U.S.-born children, 3 and 2. But December is even worse.
“We will have Christmas on the phone with him,” said Rosalda. “I can get a card for 30 minutes.”“
If your big salty tears aren’t pouring out yet, Hendrix has more:
At a time when political momentum for significant immigration reform seems to be building, the holidays remain an especially difficult stretch for families caught up in the system’s fractured, grinding machinery. After record numbers of deportations in recent years, tens of thousands of families find themselves split at Christmas…
“It’s a difficult time for them,” said Marianne O’Riley, director of the Herndon Community Resource Center. “We have one grandmother who is trying to take care of two kids, with both of their parents having been deported. They have so little — a lot of times they have to worry about putting food on the table before they can even think about presents.”[Links added by VDARE.com.]
Doesn’t sound like life in the good old USA is all that great. So why stay?
WaPo’s Hendrix continues:
Portillo had her father [immigration status unspecified] move in to help pay the bills and told the kids not to expect much for Christmas. They have a small tree but no lights. She’s taken extra shifts at the Reston hotel where she works as a maid. Sitting under posters extolling breast feeding and immunization at the community center, she rubbed hands that ache constantly from vacuuming up to 30 rooms a day.
“She works like eight days a week now,” said Jose, a peppy seventh-grader at Herndon Middle School.
A few minutes later, it was their turn to collect presents from a back room [of the Herndon Center — i.e. more handouts].
No one said immigrants (and American citizens don’t work hard). But not under fire, like our troops overseas.
I don’t think our troops in the combat zones are walking to the giant malls lit up with inviting vistas of decorations and music of joy and reconciliation.
(We got the true picture in another Christmas Day article, by a Los Angeles Times reporter whose son is in Afghanistan: Bring My Son, and Everyone Else’s, Home From Afghanistan, by David Freed.)
Boy, do we have our priorities reversed. Invite The World (Allow 100 million legal and illegal immigrants (and their US-born children) in a period of 40 years)! Invade The World (send our young to die in futile foreign wars that simply create the kind of animosity among Muslims will produce more terrorism)!
Hendrix’s WaPo article concludes:
Deportation has been central to the Obama administration’s response to the immigration crisis. [VDARE.com note: No, it hasn’t. The removals numbers have been exaggerated here. ICE under Obama has also conducted “desktop raids” where they send employers letters telling them to fire illegal employees with bogus SS numbers, but what is really “central to the Obama administration’s response” is Administrative Amnesty.]“Removals,” as the procedure is officially known, climbed from 291,000 in fiscal 2007 to 409,000 in 2012.
And a significant number of the deported left children behind, according to new data obtained through Freedom of Information requests by the liberal investigative news site Colorlines. In the past two years, more than 200,000 deportees reported having U.S.-born children, the site said.
Let’s see, there are an officially-estimated 12 million aliens here illegally. So “removals” this year are a mere 3%.
Frankly, I am not impressed — but then neither are the advocates for open borders! As Hendrix writes:
“We all expect comprehensive immigration reform this year, but we’ve been disappointed before,” said Jeanne Atkinson, head of immigration legal services for Catholic Charities D.C…
For Rosalda, the biggest fear now is that her kids could lose both their parents. She would flee with them — to the poverty of her husband’s Honduras or the poverty of her own Mexico, she doesn’t know which — if she felt endangered. Anything but leave them behind alone.
“It’s very frightening,” she said.”
Would it be too much to suggest that coming here in the first place created the problems that “Rosalda” now faces?
Let’s bring our troops home and send more illegal aliens away — and put a lid on legal immigration too.
About the Author: Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., is CoChair of the National Advisory Board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). However, his views are his own
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.