What part of “illegal” does Secretary Napolitano not understand?

By Michael W. Cutler

An article in the San Diego Union Tribune on Monday, October 18, Homeland Security secretary recounts an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. The Secretary had the audacity to declare,

“There are areas in terms of visas and visa overstays, again, that should be addressed legally through an immigration reform bill,” Napolitano said. “We need a new legislative framework from which to act. It’s the 21st century. We need a bill that builds for that.”

According to the article, “She did not provide specific details on how an immigration bill would address visas overstays and other enforcement challenges.”

Let us stop and consider how insulting it is to We the People that Janet Napolitano would even consider saying something that so outrageous!

The laws that deem aliens who violate their terms of admission into the United States have been on the books for decades. What reform is needed to render an alien who is already deemed to be illegal under the current laws illegal?

Years ago when then President George W. Bush proposed a guest worker amnesty program for immigrants and said that he wanted to legalize immigrants, I made the point that offering to legalize immigrants is a bit like offering to make water wet!  Water is already wet and immigrants are legal! Bush wanted to legalize illegal aliens. Cognizant that the American people would never get behind his plan to legalize illegal aliens, he used deceptive language.  Similarly, President Jimmy Carter demanded that INS employees never refer to illegal aliens as being illegal aliens- he demanded under the threat of disciplinary action against errant employees, that INS employees refer to illegal aliens as undocumented workers!

So now we have a new version of attempting to make water wet!  Janet Napolitano claims we need Comprehensive Immigration Reform in order to make illegal aliens into illegal aliens!  What a concept!

Of course she has no concrete answer to any questions concerning how her “plan” would work!

What we need is not new law but actual resources to track down illegal aliens, arrest them and seek their removal from the United States.

Meanwhile, the administration is seeking to dismiss removal (deportation) hearings against illegal aliens. There are fewer than 300 special agents at ICE (immigration and Customs Enforcement) who have been assigned to seek to locate and apprehend visa violators.  One recent news report pegged the precise number of such special agents at just 272 for the entire United States of America!  There are varying estimates as to just how many illegal aliens who are present in our country who entered the United States not by running our borders but by entering with visas or via the dangerous and ill conceived Visa Waiver Program and then went on to violate the terms of their admission.  The government position is that there are about 5 million but it is my belief there are substantially more, and they are purportedly being sought by 272 special agents!

Ms Napolitano would simply provide them with United States citizenship and thus they would no longer be illegal aliens!  What an amazing plan!

If we follow Napolitano’s lead we could make our entire country crime free- all that would be needed is criminal law reform- declare no activities to constitute a “crime” and we could then say that there were no crimes committed in our entire country! The United States would no doubt become the most violent but crime free country on the face of this entire planet!

“Napolitano tried to show Monday that immigration is also about homeland security, touching on a crucial security issue related to the 9/11 attacks and the perpetrators whose visas had expired.” Really?

Not a word about the infamous Visa Waiver Program, which now covers citizens from 36 countries. Is the Secretary in favor of ending the Visa Waiver Program?  Don’t hold your breath for the answer to that question.