Pursuant to yesterday’s post, this piece by the estimable Heather Mac Donald in City Journal furthers my argument that while the verdict in the murder trial of the illegal Mexican alien who killed her may have been legally and technically correct, it’s vital not to lose sight of the larger issues at play:
Advocates for illegal immigrants are unrepentant after yesterday’s shocking acquittal on all homicide charges of an illegal-alien confessed killer. The advocates are defending the sanctuary policies that had set in motion the 2015 killing in San Francisco; they have also doubled down on their opposition to any deportation of illegal aliens, criminal or otherwise. If ever there were a clarifying moment regarding what is at stake in the battle for the immigration rule of law, this is it.
Jose Ines Garcia Zarate was a poster boy not just for the folly of sanctuary policies but also for the mass low-skilled Hispanic immigration that has transformed California. A barely literate drug dealer from Mexico with a second-grade education, no English, and a penchant for criminal aliases, Garcia Zarate had been deported five times by federal immigration authorities following convictions for various crimes.
Despite his record, Garcia Zarate was the sort of immigrant that the San Francisco authorities apparently believed that this country needs….
“Needs” is the operative word here. Immigration used to be — and should be — based upon the needs of the host country, not on the wants and desires of “immigrants” who freely choose to leave their dysfunctional countries in order to take advantage of America’s debilitated sovereignty and generous social freebies. But the Left has chosen to make the fringe benefits of American citizenship — but not the responsibilities — freely (literally) available to the Third World as a matter of “human rights.”
As I noted yesterday, they’ve accomplished this by garbing their political aims in the robes of Christian doctrine, specifically regarding charity. The image they choose — especially this month — is that of the Holy Family taking refuge in a manger because there is no roo at the inn. But the “immigrants” who will fully choose to break our laws to enter our country are more likely to be Jose Ines Garcia Zarate than Jesus Maria y Jose.
Further, by “charity” they do not mean individual, private beneficence, but rather forcibly provided benefits at taxpayer expense. This is an odd conception of charity, but such is the post-Christian world the Left is making for us, with all of the obligations provided not by the conscience or the soul, but by the government, at gunpoint. That “open borders” — which means of course no borders at all — also puts personal safety and social stability at risk they view as a feature, not a bug.
Indeed, as Mac Donald notes, the verdict has been received by renegade California officials as proof that the state needs tougher gun-control laws, and they warn that illegals (like Muslims after every Islamic atrocity) should be worried about a backlash:
The people we should really be concerned for now, according to former San Francisco Supervisor David Campos, are illegal aliens themselves. “I’m afraid the immigrant community is going to be made to pay for something that the jury decided appears to be a very tragic accident,” said Campos, now chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party. Trump and pro-enforcement forces would react to the verdict by “ramping up their rhetoric.”True to form, a sitting San Francisco supervisor turned the case into a gun control matter. “I always thought this is not an immigration issue, as Trump made it out to be— this is a gun management issue,” said Sandra Lee Fewer.
Like South Carolina in 1860, California is spiraling out of control; unlike South Carolina then, California is now the most populous and among the most important states in the Union. Will the American people allow the Golden State to continue to reject federal immigration laws, as a kind of renegade Bear Republic? Will the Trump administration, which has sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution, let them get away with it?
California’s once-unrivalled status as the country’s most educated state has long since disintegrated under the waves of low-skilled, low-social-capital Mexican and Central American immigrants. Now, California’s K-12 system rivals Mississippi and Alabama as an education backwater. The state’s school-age population, now majority Hispanic, lacks competitive linguistic and math skills. (Of course, defense counsel conducted part of their post-verdict press conference in Spanish, oblivious to the symbolism.) California is becoming another Brazil, divided between fabulously wealthy elites hunkered down in their own coastal sanctuaries, and a poor, Third World population. Before the rest of the country ends up in the same situation, the immigration policies that gave rise to the Steinle homicide must change. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been conducting a largely unheralded effort to end sanctuary jurisdictions, but the illegal-alien lawyer’s lobby has fought him at every turn.
The very notion that we willingly harbor an “illegal-alien lawyer’s lobby” is a national disgrace. We know what their end game is:
The advocates’ agenda is clear: they want to stop all deportations and in so doing eviscerate our sovereignty once and for all. Their ultimate aim is to transform the country culturally and demographically. Sanctuary policies are one of their most powerful weapons in that crusade.
Do we have the will to stop them?
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