Here we go again with the perplexing issue of environmental groups aiding and abetting the Open Borders movement. The major environmental groups mentioned in this Washington Examiner piece by Ron Arnold are the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club along with smaller local cohorts. Hat tip: Erich.
Cops and Border Patrol are kept out of wilderness areas!
Sen. Jeff Bingaman is being called our worst border security threat. Angry Dona Ana County residents have branded the New Mexico Democrat’s Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Wilderness Act as “Bingaman’s Bandit Boulevard” for proposing a 50-mile-long safe haven for Mexican drug runners — and worse.
John Hummer, former chairman of the Greater Las Cruces Chamber of Commerce, reminded his community of the no-motorized-vehicle clause in wilderness laws. The Border Patrol can’t patrol.
Wilderness laws allow our own park and forest rangers to keep the cops out. That’s supposed to protect nature, but ends up protecting drug cartels, illegal immigrants — and terrorists.
We have reported many times on these pages that Other than Mexicans (OTMs) are entering the US. The list reported in this article (and below) is a list of the ones we caught! For example, we know that 270 Somalis recently entered illegally and have not been found. Estimates run into the tens of thousands of dollars per Somali coming to the US by a circuitous world route; surely having paid this much they aren’t planning on doing those $9 per hour meatpacking jobs!
Wilderness designation anywhere on our borders will make it easier still for illegal aliens coming to the US looking for something other than jobs!
A U.S. Border Patrol document obtained by The Examiner shows the nationality and number of OTMs arrested last year. A few samples: Afghanistan (12); Indonesia (95); Iran (42); Iraq (42); Jordan (52); Saudi Arabia (6); Somalia (70); Yemen (22).
Members of the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers say they weren’t smuggling drugs. Retired Border Patrol Officer Zack Taylor said Bingaman’s wilderness boundary is just a stroll from violent Juarez and El Paso.
Terrorists want terror, said Taylor — unexpected targets with severed body parts and dead babies. A dozen relays of three sunburned hikers carrying big backpacks could trek unmolested up Bingaman’s Boulevard, stockpiling materials to obliterate the balloon festival, the state Capitol, the Acoma Pueblo — anything we treasure.
Frank DuBois, a Reagan-era deputy assistant secretary of the interior, told me that interdicting criminals in wilderness is losing priority. Bingaman’s bill makes his wilderness a “component of the National Landscape Conservation System.” That’s ominous.
Why has the Sierra Club led a campaign to keep our borders open? I believe it is because Carl Pope, their longtime head honcho, is first and foremost a Socialist (maybe a Marxist) one-worlder. Longtime advocates of closing our borders have horror stories to tell about how Pope has over the years fought any effort by Sierra Club members to get into the immigration issue. In fact, immigration control groups like NumbersUSA,* FAIR, and the Center for Immigration Studies were initially created to counter the pro-immigration (through silence) bias of the major environmental groups. Now, of course, they have a much broader mission.
I did a lot of research on Pope, here is just one story (with links to previous posts on Pope), he sits on the notorious Apollo Alliance board and is good buddies with Marxist Van Jones.
* See the latest NumbersUSA video on population growth in the US and ponder the consequences for the environment. Strange isn’t it that the environmental leadership in the US is silent.