For almost a year, a rapist terrorized Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem, assaulting eight women. In a February case, he raped a woman after holding a gun to the head of her three-year old.
After Gilberto Cruz Hernandez, a 24-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, was arrested for the crimes, the Greensboro News & Record began digging into his background and uncovered a few facts that no doubt had some readers gritting their teeth in outrage.
Cruz tried three times to settle in this country, and was deported by the federal government in 1997 and 2002. On his third try, the same federal government that had deported him two years earlier rewarded him with the $123,000 Housing and Urban Development loan he used to buy a house in Winston-Salem, the paper reported.
Using fake documents, he also got a job with a print company making $44,000 a year. Now he's claiming he is indigent and can't afford an attorney, so taxpayers will be paying the tab for his public defense team, too.
At the rate he was going, Cruz could have gotten a job at a fertilizer plant and studied bomb making in his spare time and the federal government would have been none the wiser.
To some, merely pointing out in print that this man is an illegal from Mexico makes me a racist, because American citizens rape people, too. To others, this incident is an outrage because Cruz is here illegally. If our government was willing to protect the nation's border, Cruz wouldn't have been here and the rapes he allegedly committed wouldn't have happened.
Neither side completely gets what is really going on here.
It's a statistical fact that if you scooped up five million random people -- let's say Europeans -- whose identities you do not know, and you turned them loose in this country, among them would be about 3,900 sex offenders, 40 serial rapists, at least two serial killers and an unknown number of drug dealers, thugs and drunk drivers. God knows how many would have terrorist inclinations. These people would inevitably do permanent damage to the lives of thousands of citizens, or even millions in the case of the terrorists.
It has become obvious our federal leaders, in particular our president, have made a calculated choice that this is the price they are willing to pay to allow business owners to save money on cheap labor and avoid paying the taxes the politicians don't have the gonads to cut.
Congress asked for 10,000 border guards in five years. Bush's budget allocated 200 until overwhelming outrage in the Senate forced him to bump up the number to 2,000. Immigration enforcement at work sites under Bush has become non-existent. Yet he and his cronies would have us believe they can secure Iraq tightly enough for eight million people to vote -- a feat, to their credit, that they have accomplished three times -- and create a stable democracy there, but that they cannot secure our own borders.
What it really comes down to is that the politicians can't take the ripping they'd get if they closed the border and did the federal equivalent of illegal immigration -- eliminating all the federal taxes employers pay on employees, loosening labor laws that apply to all but the most skilled employees and then importing whatever labor we still need.
Instead, these politicians are willing to risk another 9/11, even one with a nuclear twist. They are willing to subject the eight women in the Triad and thousands more around the country to brutalization that didn't have to happen.
But we aren't the only ones paying the price. In November, the Washington Times reported that mass rape and sodomizing of Mexican women by the men they pay to ferry them over the border is becoming common practice.
"I thought the wailings we heard at night were the coyotes barking at the moon," Tim Donnelly, who headed the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps border vigil, told the Washington Times. "I didn't know until later that those sounds were the cries of women being raped in the Mexican desert, some less than 100 yards away from the border.
"There was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it," Donnelly told the Times reporter, who wrote that Donnelly "grimaced as he turned away to hide his emotions."
This is George Bush's legacy of "tolerance" for the Latino community that he claims he wants to embrace. Whether they intend it or not, Latino activists who advocate for acceptance of illegals by our society without simultaneously demanding we close our border are little more than cheap shills for Bush and his cronies.
Those who waste their venom on illegals after the latest drunk driving fatality need to turn it back on Bush, Congress and our local leaders. Think about it from an illegal immigrant's perspective. If we weren't serious about enforcing our immigration laws, why should we expect anyone to believe we are serious about enforcing our drunk driving laws?
