The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“With Election Day less than one week away, the results of Arizona’s midterm races could shake up both national politics and recent statewide trends. Immigration has emerged as a central plank for high-profile Republican candidates, including Senate candidate Blake Masters and gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who routinely lean into their party’s worst impulses. Their platforms include policies that are legally fraught and unlikely to solve persistent problems at the border. . . .
“Lake and Masters see illegal immigration as an ‘invasion’ to be combated. ‘It’s time to militarize this border,’ Masters said in a campaign ad. Lake’s first ‘solution’ to secure the border involves invoking Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution ‘to fend off the invasion at our southern border in the absence of federal protection.’ She claims this will allow Arizona—and ‘a compact of like-minded states’—to ‘arrest illegal immigrants’ and ‘return them back across the border.’
“As David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, explained for Reason last year, the Constitution does indeed require ‘the federal government to protect against an ‘invasion’—what every court that has reviewed the question has interpreted to mean an ‘armed hostility from another political entity.’ Further, ‘the Constitutional Convention debates connected the power to repel invasions with the power to raise armies.’
“Incoming migrants seeking safety and economic opportunity do not match the Founding Fathers’ concept—nor any modern one—of an invasion. As Bier wrote, migrants “want to be us, not conquer us.” Lake’s misinterpretation of the Constitution could be truly damaging: It severely distorts the nature of the people crossing the border, reinforces anti-immigrant animus, and could help open the door to an extraordinary allocation of state funds toward misguided enforcement schemes.”—In Arizona, Blake Masters and Kari Lake Embrace Bad Border Policies, Fiona Harrigan, Reason, 11/2.22 [Link]
Fact Check of Above Quote: This article maintains that the record level surge of illegal aliens across our border is not an “invasion” because courts have interpreted that to mean an “armed hostility from another political entity.” Perhaps the courts should take another look because what’s happening now increasingly fits that definition. Hostile and well-armed entities are closely involved in the movement of illegal aliens into the U.S. These are the Mexican drug cartels, governing powers which operate outside the control of the Mexican government. They are well armed, and on some occasions, they have defeated Mexican military forces.
To a significant extent they control our border, and thereby violate our national sovereignty. The cartels profit handsomely as they charge migrants thousands of dollars to usher them into the U.S. According to a senior Homeland Security official, the cartels rake in as much as $6 billion a year from their human trafficking. Contrary to what this article suggests, illegal immigration is not a victimless crime committed by people who “want to be us.” It is a crime with many costs to American citizens. Adding to those costs are the drugs that the cartels move into our country. Most notably among those drugs is fentanyl, which is now the leading cause of death among American adults.
In short, the cartels and their trafficking are a genuine threat to the security and order of our country. Although Lake and Masters lost their races in Arizona, 56 percent of Arizonans agree with their view that what’s happening at the border is an “invasion.” Fifty-three percent of all Americans share this view. Just recently, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott referenced Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution to declare that the migrant surge into his state is an invasion. As part of his plan of action, he proposes to designate Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
What Abbott called them is right on target. America has battled terrorism around the world, but will we resist a terrorist-promoted onslaught across our own southern border? Only time will tell.