Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Feb 02, 2017 Letters
Dear Editor,
January 20, 2017 would go down in the annals of American history, as the day when the reins of power of the greatest nation on Earth passed from the grasp of a community activist and Harvard educated constitutional law professor to a billionaire businessman with global real estate holdings. Before even being sworn in as the 45th president, he had already made history being the first American president that has never served in the military or held elected office.
There is no nation in the world that leaves its borders open, yet it appears as if America is being vicariously castigated for doing what every other nation does. Aaron Miller, advisor to both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State and Vice president for New Initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars says that America, the only great power in the history of the world has been fortunate in having good neighbours to its north and south and fish to its east and west. President Trump’s executive orders that deal with immigration are the most testy and likely to be the longest lasting of the batch of first orders.
The President’s border wall is the latest effort of the nation to enforce order, and the last recourse of a nation whose patience is exhausted against the challenge of an abundance of illegals eager to get in the country. In 2015 Jeb Bush, the early Republican presidential nomination favorite, remarked that someone entering America illegally is only doing so out of love. Under direct questioning Bush concurred with the fact that America needed to secure her borders from the rush of illegals coming from the South. He further went on to state that he had a comprehensive plan to secure the borders and had discussed it with some governors and border patrol agents.
While America does not need to erect a visible-from-space wall of American superiority, she does need to secure her borders to curb the tsunami of illegal immigrants. While the wall may have been the expressed brainchild of President Trump, halting the flow of illegal immigrants was also on the minds of other Republicans. His approach is less refined than others, in that he understands that while America will always be a nation of immigrants which is a source of strength, she does not have to be a nation of saps.
Restoring immigration sanity and who will lead the way has always been a political issue. In 1986 Ronald Reagan pushed legislation officially called the Immigration Reform and Control Act and later termed the Simpson –Mazzoli Bill, heralding the first attempt in three decades to enact extensive immigration legislation. George W. Bush tried to distance himself some twenty years later from the Bill, as he did not like the amnesty provision of the Bill. The Simpson-Mazzoli Bill failed as many both in Congress and elsewhere thought that it would.
According to Edward Meese the then U. S Attorney General attributable causes were a failure of political will to enforce new laws against employers. After a brief decline, illegal immigration returned to high levels and continued unstoppable, forming the crux of today’s large population of illegal aliens residing in America.Today no one speaks of amnesty because amnesty, by its sanitized name, is assumed. Barack Obama simply threw open the doors, instructing the Border Patrol agents to stand down, and the gates were soon overrun. Both the legal and illegal type of immigration is doomed to be a factious issue eternally. That is the cost of residing in a place where everyone wants to be.
Incidentally, some countries have not only taken a page from Trump’s book but have also had a headstart on measures to keep illegals out. In a desperate global effort to throw physical barriers in the way of historic streams of migration, France and Britain have started building a wall along their border. The project informally known as the Great Wall of Calais is a roughly mile long concrete barrier, considerably shorter than Trump’s proposed partition of America and Mexico. In 2015 Hungary completed a four metre razor-wire topped border fence to deter desperate Serbian migrants from entering the country illegally.
Along its frontier with Croatia, Slovenia has built a razor-wire fence, to curb the 30, 000 migrants that were arriving daily at its borders. Bulgaria completed its 15 feet, five foot wide fence that sealed its southern border with Turkey. So Trump’s wall is not a strange call, he is just uniting with others who have found a way to keep others at bay.
Normally it takes American presidents hundreds of days before they reach a majority disapproval rating. Here again President Trump scores a first, as he smashes the record to get the fastest ever majority disapproval rating. His latest executive orders have sent America reeling, adding to their already disgruntled feelings. One killed the grossly despised multinational Pacific Rim Trade deal, others include the opening of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a hiring freeze of federal workers (except for in the military), and reintroducing the Mexico City policy of international organizations that receive federal funding being prevented from conducting abortions. The President has openly declared the cessation of globalism, particularly stressing that the leading nation of the world was going to make its own need a foremost priority.
Yvonne Sam.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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