There are many fine anti-illegal immigration websites and organizations out there and if you’ve made it here, we are confident that you know who and where they are, and we urge you to support them.
The founders of Alamo Alliance will remain dedicated to the cause of secure borders and interior immigration law enforcement and we thank you all for your past support.
AlamoAlliance.org is an information site that informs people for past actions and things.The articles and thoughts are quotation from past alliances.
This website is only for information for visitors who wants to research and wants to gather for information about Alamo Alliance.
This website is not for an political campaign or illegal activities.
1 “Politics by Other Means: The ?Why? of Immigration to the United States,” Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder, December 2003, http://www.cis.org/articles/2003/back1703.html .
2 “See Elite vs. Public Opinion: An Examination of Divergent Views on Immigration,” by Roy Beck and Steven A. Camarota, Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder, December 2002, http://www.cis.org/articles/2002/back1402.html .
3 Maybe this is where immigration policy differs from trade policy. At least the elites that promote free trade with other countries do genuinely believe it benefits the U.S. economy and the average person, and the evidence proves them right.
4 The Federalist Papers, No. 57.
5 Jefferson wrote “I wish I could give better hopes of our southern brethren. ? what will then become of them? Ignorance and bigotry, like other insanities, are incapable of self-government. They will fall under military despotism ?” Jefferson letter to Marquis de Lafayette, 4 May 1817, in http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl249.htm .
6 “Bill Richardson?s Story,” The Economist, 29 May 2004, p. 34.
7 S 1992 (vote No. 177, 97th Cong.).
8 An analyst actually argued that allegations of corruption and abuse have a positive impact on a politician?s career throughout Latin America. Andr?s Oppenheimer, “Los m?s denunciados, los m?s votados,” Reforma, 17 September 2002, p. 33A.
9 Surveys indeed reveal a distrust of institutions by the citizenry, but also a distrust of each other?55 percent thought “most people in Mexico are corrupt,” whereas 25 percent believed most other Mexicans are honest. See the Reforma survey focused on corruption, in “La cultura del soborno,” Reforma, 29 August 2002, 8A. Moreover, social status and education seem to be positively correlated with corruption. Another survey by Transparency International revealed that the younger and more educated Mexicans are actually more likely to engage in corruption, and that most people believe public officials are entitled to gain financially from their positions. See Leonardo Valero, “Son m?s corruptos los j?venes, revelan,” Reforma, 5 April 2002, 7A.
10 The survey was conducted in 18 Latin American countries by Latinobar?metro. The question was if the respondent knew of someone who had received privileges for sympathizing with the party in power. The average for Latin America was 18 percent, whereas the Mexican figure was 34 percent. “Lidera M?xico en clientelismo,” Reforma, 30 October 2005, A1.
11 CNN Headline News, 4 August 1998.
12 This is the theory of Fintan O?Toole, The Lie of the Land: Irish Identities (London: Verso, 1997). O?Toole?s writings on Yugoslavia include “Serbian aim to kill all Kosovans is nothing new,” The Irish Times, 5 May 1999.
13 See Stephan Hedlund, “Russia and the IMF: A Sordid Tale of Moral Hazard,” Demokratizatsiya, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2001), http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3996/is_200101/ai_n8944035 .
14 See my article “Mexico?s Wasted Chance,” The National Interest, Winter 2005-6.
15 Steve Sailer, “Latino Magazine Probes Bushes? Mexican Contacts,” United Press International, 23 February 2001. See also Alan Zarembo, “Bush Family Ties,” Newsweek International, 26 February 2001.
16 Samuel Huntington, “The Hispanic Challenge,” Foreign Policy, March/April 2004.
17 See “Mexico?s Glass House: How the Mexican constitution treats foreign residents, workers and naturalized citizens,” by J. Michael Waller, Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper No. 7, April 2006, http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Mexicos_Glass_House.pdf , and “Mexico?s Immigration Law: Let?s Try it Here at Home,” by J. Michael Waller, Center for Security Policy Occasional Paper No. 8, April 2006, http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/Mexicos_Immigration_Law.pdf .
18 See “Zogby Poll: Americans, Mexicans Want Closer Ties, But Suspicion Abounds,” 19 March 2006, http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1082 .
Samuel Huntington speculated that the American “creed” (values and beliefs) cannot be used to openly oppose mass immigration.16 That may change. So far, the immigration debate has centered on the immigrants themselves?whether they are worthy or unworthy. This debate is a red herring, since average Americans are unusually kind and restrained in the face of mass immigration, something that cannot be said about other nations (including Mexico).17 Recent poll findings from Zogby challenge the popular belief that the average American somehow has negative or overtly prejudicial feelings toward Mexicans in particular.18 However, Huntington did not take into account the possibility that the debate could yet be framed in terms of potential usurpation from the political class using immigration as a tool. If an organizeable mass of Americans comes to suspect that mass immigration from Latin America is being used by the political class to undermine their democracy and as a tool to liberate the political elites from the Jeffersonian and Madisonian constraints, then indeed we may witness a reaction?but hopefully not against the immigrants themselves, as they are also objects of elite manipulations in more than one country.
The Founding Fathers also prescribed a cure for usurpation. Hopefully the American people will not apply it so literally, for the sake of those legislators.
My campaign headquarters received a package in the mail today from an unknown sender, where the return address should be, was a sticker of the Mexican flag. Inside was a Mexican flag and three pages of propaganda. The first page said the whites will soon go back to Europe, the blacks must go back to Africa and scribbled on the bottom was ‘and f*** Asians
too. We will take our land back through RECONQUISTA!’
The next two pages are El Plan de Aztlan. It starts off ‘be warned Gringos’ and goes into how the La Raza de Bronze will drive out the
exploiters and declares independence of their mestizo nation. Under their economy goals is ‘Land and realty ownership will be acquired by the community for the people’s welfare.’
This movement is without a doubt racist and communist. Is this the same La Raza that Bill Clinton & Karl Rove spoke at?”
Art Olivier.
We then contacted Art and asked to post these documents on this site. Below is the cover page of what Art provided us.
We at AlamoAlliance.org assert that the traditions, customs and language of the United States of America represent a distinctive American culture that is unique to the United States.
We believe that the American culture is a product of the fundamental principles of self-government, self-reliance, liberty and justice as set forth by our founders in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.
These guiding principles and the shared experience of the American people over two centuries, in war and peace and in times of hardship and plenty, have created the uniquely American Heritage.
We assert that it is the duty of the government of the United States to protect and preserve the common heritage, traditions, and language of America.
We further assert that the United States of America is a Sovereign Nation with the absolute sovereign right to accept or reject any application for citizenship.
Written into the Constitution of the United States, in Article IV, Section 4, the government of the United States guarantees to protect the States from invasion.
It is our belief that in the United States today, are 20 to 30 million illegal aliens. Our government has willfully neglected and completely failed in its Constitutional duty to protect the States from invasion and has willfully neglected and completely failed in it’s duty to enforce the duly enacted laws of the United States Congress.
We demand that the government of the United States abide by the established laws of the United States Congress and the United States Constitution and secures our borders NOW!
Americans are aware that their political class may not always act in their best interest. This belief is enshrined in the American character, its laws, and the very philosophy underpinning the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers crafted things so that the “knaves” will be forced to abide by the will of the people, but they warned that their “natural progress” is to find ways to remain in power and increase that power at the people?s expense. They therefore also urged eternal vigilance, spiritedness, and the occasional revolt of the people.
Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and others got it right?the knaves have, by and large, behaved, and their actions largely reflect in some way the will of the American people. Americans do not need to engage their politicians in an uncivil way?as happens most elsewhere?since the ballot box, the media, and other constitutional tools largely suffice. Indeed, the American political system works remarkably well. However, there are a handful of topics where the elites do not act in the interests of those they govern. Of these, the most notorious is the contentious issue of immigration. Why are politicians so keen on mass immigration while the common American is not? This has perplexed analysts.
When I aided the foreign relations of presidential candidate and president-elect Vicente Fox back in 1999 and 2000, I met with almost 80 U.S. congressmen and senators during numerous trips and at several events. With just over 50 of them, my colleagues and I spoke about immigration in some depth, as it is one of the important bilateral topics. My findings were reported in a Backgrounder published by the Center for Immigration Studies called “Politics by Other Means.”1 It is a dense and academic paper, but the basic finding was: Indeed, American politicians are overwhelmingly pro-immigration, for a variety of reasons, and they do not always admit this to their constituents. Of those 50 legislators, 45 were unambiguously pro-immigration, even asking us at times to “send more.” This was true of both Democrats and Republicans.
These empirical findings seemed to confirm what some analysts without that level of access termed as a political “perfect storm” of widespread political-elite support for immigration despite its general unpopularity with the average American. The paradox is that immigration is the only issue (perhaps besides trade policy) that represents a notorious discrepancy between elite and popular opinion in the United States.2 But this contradicts the established conventional wisdom of a representative democracy such as the United States. If mass immigration from Latin America has debatable benefits for the United States as a whole, if a majority of the American people is against it, and if immigrants cannot vote until they become naturalized (which can take years after their arrival), why would nine-tenths of the legislators we spoke with be so keen on increasing
immigration?
Before these encounters, I believed that it was a problem of either diffusion of responsibility, “creeping non-decision,” or collective rationalization with those legislators, but that was dispelled the more of them we met. Most of them seemed to be aware of the negative or at least doubtful consequences of mass immigration from Latin America, while still advocating mass immigration.3
The familiar reasons usually discussed by the critics were there: Democrats wanted increased immigration because Latin American immigrants tend to vote Democrat once naturalized (we did not meet a single Democrat that was openly against mass immigration); and Republicans like immigration because their sponsors (businesses and churches) do. But there were other, more nuanced reasons that we came upon, usually not discussed by the critics, and probably more difficult to detect without the type of access that we, as a Mexican delegation, had.
A group of Argentine statesmen in the 19th century sought to populate their country with immigrants from certain parts of Europe, believing that they were more politically mature and more propitious for a stable state than the criollo and mestizo populations in their country at the time. One of those statesmen, President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, had a slogan: “To govern is to populate,” perhaps because Argentina traditionally has been both under-populated and ungovernable.
What could be motivating U.S. legislators to do the opposite, that is, to see their constituents?already politically mature and proven as responsible and civic-minded?as an obstacle needing replacement? In other words, why would they want to replace a nation that works remarkably well (that Sarmiento was hoping to emulate), with another that has trouble forming stable, normal countries?
Mexicans are kind and hardworking, with a legendary hospitality, and unlike some European nations, harbor little popular ambitions to impose models or ideologies on others. However, Mexicans are seemingly unable to produce anything but corrupt and tyrannical rulers, oftentimes even accepting them as the norm, unaffected by allegations of graft or abuse.8 Mexico, and Latin American societies in general, seem to suffer from what an observer called “moral relativism,” accepting the “natural progress” of the political class rather than challenging it, and also appearing more susceptible to “miracle solutions” and demagogic political appeals. Mexican intellectuals speak of the corrosive effects of Mexican culture on the institutions needed to make democracy work, and surveys reveal that most of the population accepts and expects corruption from the political class.9 A sociological study conducted throughout the region found that Latin Americans are indeed highly susceptible to clientelismo, or partaking in patron-client relations, and that Mexico was high even by regional standards.10
In a Latin environment, there are fewer costs to behaving “like a knave,” which explains the relative failure of most Spanish-speaking countries in the Hemisphere: Pauperized populations with rich and entrenched knaves. Montesquieu?s separation-of-powers model breaks down in Latin America (though essentially all constitutions are based on it) since elites do not take their responsibilities seriously and easily reach extra-legal “understandings” with their colleagues across the branches of government, oftentimes willingly making the judicial and legislative powers subservient to a generous executive, and giving the population little recourse and little choice but to challenge the system in its entirety.
These pathologies are already evident across the border. For example, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, when even President Clinton?s strongest backers such as Rep. Richard Gephardt were distancing themselves from him and calling on the president to “tell the truth,” the Hispanic Caucus in the U.S. Congress lent its support to the president. Rep. Esteban Torres stated “We?re going to stand by him to the end ? no matter what!”11 The case of the “unconditional support” by the Hispanics in Congress to their patron demonstrated why the Montesquieu-Madisonian model had difficulty functioning in the Latin American context. This type of unconditional support seems to be what professional politicians of both parties expect from their Hispanic constituents and allies.
Some American and Mexican pundits argue that the outcome of the amnesty debate will affect the way Mexicans view the United States and their own democracy. The argument goes that if the U.S. Congress does not pass a law favorable to the undocumented workers, there will be a Mexican backlash against the United States that could ensure the victory of the illiberal, anti-American Left. However, this argument assumes that Mexico (through its population and political elites) acts in a rational way, and that these American overtures will be understood and appreciated (much the same way that France also understood and appreciated the American role in its liberation from Nazi Germany). However, the same argument was made by Russian elites and their American sympathizers during the debate on expanding NATO, with the argument that if America pursued its interests (expanding NATO), this would cause an irreversible collapse of Russian democracy and a backlash from the Kremlin. This argument held sway for years at the Clinton White House. In the end, NATO expanded and Moscow?s relations with its former imperial colonies and with NATO itself actually improved.
Rather than rational and mutually beneficial, U.S. bilateral relations with Mexico (as it was with Russia in the 1990s before NATO expansion) can instead be called “codependence,” which is defined by the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology as “silent or even cheerful tolerance of unreasonable behavior from others,” or even a pathology of trying to fix things for other people and rescue them, which in turn encourages a certain behavior from the object to be rescued. These sacrifices and concessions (with countries as with people) produce a sense of entitlement and an unending string of additional unreasonable demands. The IMF also engaged in a form of codependence with Moscow in the 1990s?the more money that was lent to the Kremlin, the fewer reforms it implemented, and the more anti-U.S. and anti-Western rhetoric it engaged in, with much of that money going to finance the war in Chechnya, for its weapons industries, and for its political class.13
During the 18 months when I aided Fox?s foreign relations, in those meetings with what became the new Mexican elite I do not recall so many discussions about “what can we do to make tough decisions to reform Mexico,” but rather more “how can we get more concessions from the United States.” Indeed, Fox largely continued governing the country as his predecessors did, even appointing as head of the federal police agency an Echeverr?a loyalist who was allegedly involved in a deadly extortion attempt against a museum owner in 1972. According to several leading world rankings on corruption, quality of government, development, and competitiveness, Mexico actually worsened during Fox?s presidency.14 Lacking internal or external pressure, the Mexican elites have taken the path of least resistance, which is not the best outcome for the country. Paradoxically, as happens in co-dependent relations, a firm but polite defense of American interests by Washington would force the Mexican elites to act and in the end (surely after a brief period of acrimonious recriminations) would be beneficial for Mexico, much as the European Union?s tough accession laws force elites in lesser-developed aspiring members (Spain in the 1980s and Central European countries in the 1990s) to adopt painful and otherwise politically unfeasible reforms that affect special interests but that benefit average citizens. After all, the gap between elite and popular aspirations in these countries is wider than in the United States, and on a broader range of issues.
This co-dependence is perhaps nowhere more evident than the personal relations of the political classes of Mexico and the United States. When speaking to these congressmen, we noticed an affinity toward the corrupt party we were attempting to overthrow in Mexico. Several had visited Mexico and apparently enjoyed lavish treatment from their hosts, even mentioning how some of the things they enjoyed in Mexico would not be possible at home.
Powered by WordPress