Athens Banner Herald ( Georgia)

Forum: Time to pick sides on illegal immigration
By D.A. King Link to original column and comments HERE

Former Mexican president Vicente Fox unabashedly advanced his “new vision for North American prosperity” at a recent Kennesaw State University event along with Robert Pastor, author of the 2001 book “Toward a North American Community.”

Readers who have not yet heard they should adopt a “North American identity” may be surprised to learn of Fox’s proposals that we officially eliminate American borders and wave the white flag of surrender over the nation passed on to us.

Also, the United States should repeat the 1986 legalization program for the millions of aliens currently here illegally who didn’t wait for the officially borderless continent, insists the man who was president as millions of his countrymen fled the corruption and grinding poverty of Mexico for “El Norte.” More than 10 percent of Mexican-born people now live in the United States.

A little background:

As he has many times, in a 2000 interview on ABC’s “This Week,” then Mexican president-elect Vicente Fox hopefully predicted that by 2010, people would move freely across the border between Mexico and the United States.

His cure for illegal immigration from Mexico? Eliminate American immigration laws. End that old-fashioned American sovereignty and eventually “integrate” the nations of “North America.” Defined, defended borders are selfish and Americans live far too well.

“Is the dream of prosperity just for Americans or can it be shared with the rest of us?” Fox asks while he relentlessly pushes for the expansion of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement to include people.

At the sparsely attended KSU event last month, Fox promised that without borders “the dreams of our founding fathers will be fulfilled with freedom and better distribution of the wealth.”

This longtime American is not the first to note Lenin and Marx were not our founding fathers.

In his autobiographical 2007 book “Revolution of Hope,” Fox boasts, “I proposed a ‘NAFTA Plus’ plan to President Bush and Canada’s Prime Minister Jean Chretien to move us toward a single continental economic union, modeled on the European example.”

For Americans, it would be alarming enough if Fox were a singular voice in the privileged and oh-so enlightened “post-American” ruling class.

He isn’t.

After Fox and George W. Bush were sworn in, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran an editorial accurately noting that “though neither Fox nor President Bush expects to dissolve the 2,000-mile border overnight, the Mexican leader clearly prefers sooner rather than later.”

The Atlanta newspaper went on to accurately announce that “Mexican President Vicente Fox envisions a North American economic alliance that will make the border between the United States and Mexico as unrestricted as the one between Tennessee and Georgia.”

Other editorial pages – including The Wall Street Journal’s – joined in endorsing the concept. The AJC recommended that “the ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union.”

Fox is president no more, and Bush failed in his repeated attempts to legalize the illegal aliens who escaped U.S. Border Patrol agents.

The open-borders, amnesty-again agenda lives on, however. Under enormous pressure from Mexico and a coalition of big business and the corporate-funded ethnic lobby – and against huge resistance from the American people – President Obama has promised to push his own legalization legislation.

Allowing millions of illegal aliens into our country with an amnesty every 20 years or so is merely official open borders in slow motion. The rule of law upon which our nation was founded? Disposable, dated and inconvenient.

On the issues of “migration,” open borders and legalization, we all should be asking how large a population we want in what is now the United States, and remember that under the current interpretation of our Constitution, most people born on our soil are awarded the title, rights and benefits of “American citizen.”

Amnesty-again and a borderless North America would make the term – and the concept of sovereignty and republic – meaningless.

We all should pick a side.

• D.A. King of Marietta is president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, which is opposed to legalization for illegal aliens and open borders. The society’s Web site is www.TheDustinInmanSociety.org.

Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, June 10, 2009