Why Christians Should Support Building a Wall – Part I

“Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.” ~Leviticus 19:16

Written by Jonathan Clay de Hale

Another murder by an illegal alien fails to rouse the nation

What is it going to take for Americans to overthrow the inertia of their political masters in Washington with regard to keeping illegal aliens out of the country? Apparently, more than the cold-blooded murder of its citizens by foreign trespassers.

In July, Mollie Tibbetts’ mutilated body was found after a month-long search, dumped in a cornfield in Brooklyn, Iowa. Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a Mexican national living and working here illegally for the last four to seven years, confessed to the crime. Mollie’s murder came exactly three years after Kate Steinle was shot and killed in San Francisco by illegal alien Jose Ines Garcia Zarate (another Mexican national), who had seven felony convictions and had previously been deported five times.

Simple logic tells us that if the foreigners weren’t here, they wouldn’t have crossed paths with these two young women, and both would still be alive. But instead of unified shock and horror over aliens murdering our citizens, we find hostile apologists among us.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), fake Native American but authentic socialist, typified the progressive response, offering token sympathy but immediately pivoting to, in her words, “real problems” such as “children [who] had been taken away from their mothers” at the border. The crass irony of her statement is staggering.

In a stunning display of unrestrained vitriol, someone challenged Jenna Lynn Ellis to a debate, writing, “Instead of covering the Manafort and Cohen cases, [Fox News] used the death of that cornfed Iowa bitch to pick on poor illegal immigrants again.” Compounding the offense of referring to a young woman who was chased down, repeatedly stabbed, thrown in a car trunk, driven to the middle of a cornfield where her body was hidden as a “bitch” was the writer’s description of the murderer as a “poor illegal” immigrant.

Even Mollie’s father seemed to defend illegal aliens, telling us that, “The person who is accused of taking Mollie’s life is no more a reflection of the Hispanic community as white supremacists are of all white people. To suggest otherwise is a lie.”

While that’s true, it’s also beside the point, which is that it’s not just Mollie and Kate. There are thousands of other American citizens who have been killed, maimed or violated by people squatting in our country illegally. Here is a sampling of stories you may have missed:

An illegal alien failed to yield the right of way while driving his car and killed a motorcyclist.

An illegal alien caused an accident and fled the scene, leaving a truck driver to die in the resulting fire.

An illegal alien beat and raped three women after officials failed to enforce a 2012 ICE detainer.

An illegal alien who had previously been deported twice hit and killed the NFL Colts’ Edwin Jackson and his Uber driver while driving drunk.

Ten illegal alien MS-13 gang members were charged in the kidnappings and deaths of two teens.

An illegal alien without a driver’s license hit another car head on and killed a father and two of his small children.

An illegal alien shot and killed a store clerk over a pack of cigarettes.

An illegal alien raped a 13-year-old girl after luring her into his car.

An illegal alien gang member who had been previously deported shot and killed a man standing with a friend in his driveway.

An illegal alien hit and killed two law enforcement officers on a highway after overstaying his work visa by eight years.

An illegal alien who was street racing rear-ended an SUV and killed a 21-year-old woman who had just graduated from college the day before.

An illegal alien drove at 100 mph the wrong way down a highway, causing a head-on collision that killed an 18-year-old University of North Carolina-Charlotte student.

Two illegal aliens murdered a 90-year-old Minnesota man whom they beat and tied up while robbing his home, leaving him to bleed to death.

An illegal alien severely beat and raped a 93-year-old woman, who died of her injuries.

A pair of illegal aliens severely beat and sexually abused a 64-year-old woman while committing robbery. She later died of her injuries.

You can find more lists here and here.

A central concern of our government is to secure our borders and protect our citizens. Not one of the illegal aliens mentioned above should have been in the U.S., but, as the stories show, illegal aliens are here and pose a direct threat to public safety.

The size of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. is hard to quantify, but most governmental and advocacy organizations concerned about illegal immigrants (both for and against) are remarkably consistent in their projections.

The reason the numbers are so similar is that they all rely on numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, which significantly undercounts illegal aliens. Their reported number is called “the remainder,” an estimate derived “after the legally resident foreign-born population… is subtracted from the total foreign-born population.”

In her best-selling book on immigration, Ann Coulter makes a case that the number is closer to 30 million. First, the Census Bureau assumed illegal aliens will fill out census forms and admit their status—a faulty assumption for obvious reasons. Second, the bureau added 10 percent to their estimate, which not only implies they know they are undercounting but also represents a number from a different survey of illegal aliens using the same assumption.

Third, in 2005, a pair of Bears Stearns analysts studied remittances from the U.S. to Mexico. They found that “while the number of Mexicans living in the United States was supposed to have grown by only 56 percent from 1995 to 2003, remittances from the United States to Mexico grew by almost 200 percent, even as the median weekly wage increased by just 10 percent.” They also found that during the same period, housing permits in immigrant enclaves were vastly different from official figures.

While some might argue that these numbers from more than a decade ago are outdated, it’s not like the number of foreigners crashing our border has slowed down. In what’s been described as a surge, “people arrested or stopped at the border totaled 46,560, up from 39,953 in July and 30,567 in August 2017. Arrests have risen from July to August four of the previous five years, indicating seasonal factors may be an influence.” And these are just the people we’ve caught.

The actual number of illegal immigrants is important because, while it’s true that not all illegal immigrants cause mayhem on our highways and commit egregious crimes as illustrated above, their presence is detrimental to our way of life and culture in other ways.

The overall cost to the American taxpayer

According to the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s (FAIR) most recent report, the annual cost of illegal immigration to taxpayers is $135 billion. While some of that is offset by an estimated $19 billion in taxes that illegal immigrants pay, they are ultimately net consumers, leaving American citizens to cover a $116 billion deficit. Taxpayers at the state and local levels bear the brunt of the costs with school taxes, local tolls, sales and excise taxes. Additionally, “FAIR estimates that nearly 20 percent of the average household income of illegal immigrants is remitted back to their home nations. Annually, this totals approximately $7,200 per illegal immigrant household that is not spent in the United States, and therefore is not subject to the sales or excise taxes that fund state treasuries.” Imagine the numbers if Coulter’s claim of 30 million is correct.

The cost of health care

Current federal policy prohibits federal tax funding of health care to illegal immigrants (i.e., Medicaid or Obamacare), but according to one study, “Americans cross-subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year.” That includes about $7.4 billion in combined federal, state and local taxes, another $3 billion through “cost shifting” (insured patients paying higher costs to cover uncompensated care), another $1.5 billion in charity care, and about $6.6 billion in “implicit federal subsidies” due to tax exemptions and exclusions. The report explains that federal taxes are included despite federal policy because “most of this occurs indirectly through various federal programs that fund institutions rather than individuals. These include hospitals (Medicaid/Medicare DSH payments) and community health centers/free clinics.” In other words, our policy may say illegal aliens aren’t eligible for federal support, but they benefit from it anyway.

The erosion of the rule of law

It’s rightly said that “we’re a nation of laws,” which makes it possible to treat everyone as equals. But a foreigner’s first act when crossing the border between ports of entry is a criminal one. By definition, illegal aliens are fugitives from justice. That’s why so many are “living in the shadows.” They know they’ve broken the law and they hide as much as possible so that they won’t be caught and deported.

To ignore lawbreakers weakens our system of justice because we do not take enforcement seriously. Note what has happened in response to the presence of illegal aliens: activists have called for the elimination of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which is specifically tasked with enforcing immigration law; and so-called “sanctuary” cities and states have sprung up across the country to protect illegal aliens from arrest and deportation.

In Iowa, where Tibbetts was murdered, the Democratic Party’s platform states that they oppose “locally enforcing federal immigration laws.” They also oppose detaining undocumented minors, detention/deportation quotas, and mass raids and related enforcement practices. If you’re an illegal alien living in Iowa, you’ve got a friend in the Democrat Party.

The states and cities enacting sanctuary policies are not only obstructing federal law but are also actively undermining it.

Interference in our elections

A stunning 2017 report concluded that “as many as 5.7 million noncitizens may have voted in the 2008 election.” While the lower number is as few as 594,000, making the range of possibility gulf-sized, the numbers for the 2012 election were between 1.2 million to 3.6 million noncitizen voters.

The original study was conducted by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia, “who attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the Harvard data, called the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.” They concluded that “in 2008 as few as 38,000 and as many as 2.8 million noncitizens voted.”

The claim that illegal aliens vote in our elections is credible. For instance, an investigation by the Public Interest Legal Foundation found that more than 5,500 non-citizens were removed from voter lists in 120 of Virginia’s 133 voting districts, including 1,852 people who had cast nearly 7,500 ballots in elections dating back to 1988.

As FAIR reported, in “East Chicago, Indiana, a city with 30,000 residents, voting fraud was so systemic in 2003 that the State Supreme Court ordered a new election with heightened verification. When unlawful voters were prohibited from casting a ballot the outcome of the election changed.” And in November 2016, San Francisco became the first city to California city to give noncitizens the right to vote in any election after passing Prop. N.

Polls show noncitizens vote overwhelmingly Democratic. If 3.6 million noncitizen voters participated in our elections, that is more than enough to swing a national election. As we all know, the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election was decided by less than 3 million ballots.

The cost of illegal immigration to America is substantial. First and foremost, illegal aliens are lawbreakers. To prosecute them requires an investment of resources to find, charge and deport them—a herculean task given the millions who live here illegally. Those who escape deportation are subsidized by the American taxpayer with billions of dollars. A meaningful segment of the illegal foreign population commits acts of murder, rape, theft, voter fraud and other crimes against American citizens. Some even brazenly denounce our immigration laws by openly protesting and demanding we grant them amnesty, rewarding their disregard for the law.

That’s our situation, and it’s a problem in need of a solution. Right now, we’re engaged in a national discussion about building a wall on our southern border.

Up Next:  Part II will examine the proposed border wall and the arguments for and against it, including the reasons Christians give for opposing it.

Take ACTION: Please call the U.S. Capitol switchboard number at (202) 224-3121. Simply call and give the operator your zip code, and he/she will connect you with your elected officials’ office.  Urge your U.S. Representative’s office to “build the wall.”  Congress has the authority to fund the border wall and other measures for immigration enforcement, and they must act now. The primary job of the federal government is to protect its citizens.

Simply put, a border wall is critically important to the national security of the United States.

You can also Tweet @ your Senators/Representatives with a similar message regarding border security using hashtags like #BuildTheWall, #TrumpWall, #BorderWall, #BorderSecurity, etc.

Read Part 2 HERE

Jonathon is a disciple of Jesus Christ, a husband, a father and a longtime Illinois resident. He’s been in the business world for more than 20 years, has an earned MDiv., and is an astute critic of political and cultural trends.

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