Who gets hurt?
Is Illegal Immigration a victimless crime?
Part 4
Sunday, August 09, 2009
By Carl Braun
Examiner.com
Tai Lam, killed by illegal alien gang bangers
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This is the fourth article in a four part series. In the previous three I wrote about illegal alien crime, immigrant on immigrant crime and the impact of illegal immigration on the American worker and taxpayer. This final piece in the series identifies some of the victims of illegal alien murder and drunk driving.We've all seen the movies. If so and so wasn't in this particular place at this particular time, well, they would still be alive today...and so the story goes. It is inevitable. Life happens and sometimes, bad things happen to good people. It’s just the luck of the draw as they say. It is God’s will. But what if, the bullet that killed Tai Lam wasn’t manufactured? What if the gun that fired the bullet was still a block of steel in a foundry somewhere? What if the man that pulled the trigger wasn’t illegally in this country to begin with? Then what? Would Tai Lam still be alive today? Yeah.
We can argue all day long about guns and gun control but at the end of that day we would have to conclude that the gun and the bullet are inanimate objects that take humans to turn them into deadly weapons. Do cars kill people? They are just as much, if not more a deadly weapon. Yet we do not outlaw cars and inasmuch as some would like to outlaw guns, it would simply mean that only bad people would have them and the good people would be unsuspecting prey.
So in this circular argument we are back to the one thing we can control somewhat and that is the people who drive the cars or pull the trigger. In the case of this young 14-year-old honor student in Montgomery County Maryland, he was guilty of riding a bus. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time, when a 20-year old MS-13 gangbanger and his buddies decided to kill someone. The man, Hector M. Hernandez, an illegal alien from El Salvador and two other gang members, executed Tai while he was on a bus, returning home from an outing with friends. No particular reason. They just wanted to kill something.
Now back to the argument: Suppose Hernandez and his two accomplices weren’t here? They couldn’t get here in fact because our government used as much of it’s nearly limitless resources to ensure its borders were secure and its citizens were protected. What then? Simple. Tai would be preparing for his next wrestling match or the high school dance instead of lying dead in the cemetery, a permanent resident of a County with Sanctuary policies for illegal aliens. Hernandez was in police custody a month earlier for possession of an illegal switchblade but was released when the authorities were prevented by these same sanctuary policies from checking on his immigration status. He was a murder, waiting to happen.
Lily Clark, a legal immigrant from Chile and a vibrant young mother of two had just finished buckling the boys into their car seats preparing for a short ride home on Superbowl Sunday 2008. As she came around the back of her vehicle, a car, driven by a drunk driver, hit her at approximately 35 miles per hour and pinned her between her car and his. Her legs were severed off above the knee and her torso was unceremoniously dumped into her now open trunk. Thanks to quick thinking by her husband John and neighbors she survived, though today a double amputee. Ironically, John Clark is the founder of the NORCAL Minutemen, a group that protests illegal alien presence in this country. This was the fourth drunk driving event for which the driver, Francisco Pacheco, an illegal alien from Mexico, was to be charged. He had been deported three times previously but returned to his old drinking buddies in Napa each time across an open border. He’d been arrested in San Francisco but sanctuary city policies allowed his release. Pacheco got eight years in jail after which he will be deported, just like he was the last three times. Small consultation for Lily and family and a tragic story but unfortunately not the first time an illegal alien drunk driver has taken the limbs from a vibrant young woman. In 2002, serial drunk driver and illegal alien Jose Carcamo hit eighteen-year old Tricia Ann Taylor. She too lost both her legs but survived to live a lifetime of pain. Carcamo had 17 violations beginning in 1995. The Ecuadoran man was demonstrating his ability to drive drunk in a drag race when he hit Taylor and a friend Noah Menard, while they were walking. Noah too survived but with numerous injuries. Though arrested many times Carcamo managed to be released and NOT deported by an INS Agency that obviously wasn’t doing its job.
Every day in America, people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place kill citizens like Tai Lam or maim people like Clark, Taylor or Menard. America’s Most Forgotten—The Victims of illegal Alien Crime. Whether it’s the Tail Lams or the families of the four children killed in Minnesota when their school bus was hit by a van driven by an illegal alien woman, we, and they are all victims of sanctuary city policies that not only allow but promote illegal alien crimes against citizens.
In a 2006 controversial report issued by Congressman Steve King of Iowa entitled: "Biting The Hand That Feeds You” he took extrapolated data from a number of different resources to conclude that on average 12 Americans are murdered everyday by illegal aliens and another 13 are killed by illegal alien drunk drivers. These numbers have been widely reported by media as inaccurate but as there are no federal or state statistics that specifically identify illegal aliens as the perpetrators (or not) it is almost impossible to come up with a hard number or verify either claim with government stats. In the last eight years though, there have been some 132,000 alcohol related fatalities on American roads and another 132,000 murders. The number of illegal aliens in this country is between 4% and 10%. Even at the highest numbers it seems unlikely that illegal aliens could be responsible for one third of the murders and traffic deaths but anecdotal data does suggest an inordinately high number. According to various reports like the one conducted in North Carolina, Hispanics, representing the vast majority of illegal aliens, are six times more likely to be involved in a drunk driving accident than other racial or ethnic counterparts. In the report “Dark Side of Illegal Immigration" the author goes on to say:
"In 2003 and 2004, 128 of the 395 people, 32.4%, arrested {on the East Coast} on DUI charges were Hispanic, a rate six times greater than the Hispanic portion of the population."
If Congressman King's calculations are remotely accurate we’re looking at tens of thousands of Americans who have been killed by Illegal aliens in the US since September 11th 2001 to say nothing of the Lily Clarks or Noah Menards that were maimed for life; every last tragedy … avoidable. Yet for some reason in a world where a billion doesn’t mean much anymore, these Americans are lost not only by their families and friends but by a society that just writes them off for political expediency. It would after all be "racist" to pin their deaths on the men and women that killed them.
Try and find a picture of the perpetrators on the web. Good luck. Most are media ghosts. Murderers with names but no real identities. The victims were all real and every tragic life ended way before their time. Were we to show a picture of every victim on a screen for only five seconds each, it would take several days to get through all the faces. Ditto, on the criminals.
No, all illegal aliens are NOT murderous thugs or drunk drivers. Most are good people; the identity theft and illegal border crossing notwithstanding. Let’s face it, were the tables turned and Mexico was Valhalla, many of us would likely do the same. But would we be murderers and felons? The Border Patrol estimates that one in five illegal border crossers is a convicted felon and those numbers are going up as criminals find it more difficult to enter the US and law enforcement apprehensions increase. Less and less of the “good” people are trying to cross, while more and more of the criminals are making the attempt. Earlier this year a group of twenty-six men were captured entering the US illegally in East County San Diego. All twenty-six of them were felons. Every one of them is a crime in progress. It only takes one however to ruin a families dream, one gangbanger or child molester to destroy a promising life.
Critics and illegal alien sympathizers call these statistics incendiary and racist. Whatever. The website Victims of Illegal Immigration is a registry of some of the crimes committed by people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place. Read it. When you’re finished, here is a link to the FBI’s Most Wanted list for violent crimes. Draw your own conclusions.
Read Part 1 of the Series
Read Part 2 of the Series
Read Part 3 of the Series
Carl Braun is an analyst for the Homeland Security Policy Institute Group and he's logged 5,000-plus hours on the border. He has written several books including his most recent on Border Insecurity, “Above All Else”
. Contact Carl at Carl.Braun@BPAUX.org.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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