It’s time to defend the United States of America.

No, I’m not talking about invading Iran, though George Bush and his neoconservative cronies have done as much sabre-rattling as the Seventh Cavalry trotting off to the Little Big Horn River. I’m not talking about invading North Korea or China or even France.

I’m talking about defending the borders of our own country.

Each day regiments of foreigners cross our borders. Four thousand illegal aliens daily cross the Arizona border alone. Most of these illegals are Mexicans, though last year the border patrol apprehended nearly 56,000 non-Mexicans coming across our southern borders. Estimates are that 190,000 more non-Mexican illegals crossed our borders unapprehended and are currently living in the United States.

This daily invasion is changing the face of our country. Here in North Carolina, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Hispanic population in 1990 was 76,726. In 2000 that population had increased 500 percent, jumping to 378, 963 (Such a figure is undoubtedly higher, for we may assume that many illegal aliens didn’t participate in the census).

Here in Haywood County illegals are also having an impact. The 1990 census showed Haywood County with a Hispanic population of 240. Of a total population of 53,651 found in the 2000 census, 763 were Hispanic. The increase was again dramatic, making Hispanics the largest minority in the county.

Such an invasion brings with it enormous costs. Here we will look at just five of those costs:

1) The use of cheap, illegal labor has helped to keep the costs of certain goods and services low, it is true, but it has also helped to keep American salaries low. Statistics, drawn primarily from California, reveal that illegal workers have kept wages artificially low for the last 20 years for low-income workers, many of whom are legal immigrants from Mexico. Some estimates state that illegal workers have depressed American wages by as much as $200 billion dollars a year. Even Cesar Chavez, the champion of Hispanic farm workers in the 1960s, called for limited immigration. He knew that without restrictions the “demand for labor would fall, and with it the pressure to pay higher wages” (www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-immigration.29jul20.story). Big business supports this illegal immigration because of these low wages. Big unions support it, at the expense of their own membership, because they know that the immigrants will eventually join the unions and add money to their coffers.

Here in Western North Carolina we have paid a steep price for our government’s North American policies. Tens of thousands of people in the last 15 years lost their jobs because of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Have we so quickly forgotten the promises of NAFTA, promises made by George Bush I and by Bill Clinton? Have we forgotten that one justification given for this treaty was that it would help Mexicans find work at home? Are we not now forcing our displaced workers to compete with low-wage illegal workers?

2) Population growth in the United States continues to increase dramatically. We are approaching a population of 300 million people, with a growth of 13 percent since 1990 alone. Though native births have stabilized at around replacement levels, illegal immigrants continue to help drive the population higher at a rapid pace. It is this growth as much as any other factor that continues to drive our economy, and our government, particularly the Bush administration, continues to call for growth and development. But what is our final goal in terms of that growth? Do we really want unrestricted growth and its consequences: urban sprawl, more highways, more malls and shopping centers? Are Americans incapable of looking into the future and seeing what this growth will eventually do to our natural resources? Why then aren’t environmental groups calling loudly for restrictions on illegal immigration? (Here we are forced to speculate, but can only guess that theirs is partly a silence of shame and fear. They are afraid of being tarred with the nativist brush).

3) The strain on our social services system — our public health departments, our schools, our prisons — has been tremendous. Though statistics are weak for the state of North Carolina, we have only to look to our southwestern states to see a variety of public disasters. California spends hundreds of millions of dollars per years educating children who are in that state illegally. In Los Angeles County, 33 percent of the residents were either without health insurance or were underinsured. This is, quite possibly, the highest rate of uninsured people in the United States. Federal law prevents hospital officials from asking about citizenship, but we do know that even billion-dollar federal bailouts haven’t prevented two of L.A.’s big six hospitals from closing.

Locally, we also see the strain on resources. Several years ago, for example, Haywood County cut out language programs — French and Spanish — in our elementary schools, but now we now offer ESL programs (English as a Second Language) in all our schools. Our court dockets include more and more illegal aliens, and our county health department in the last 15 years has seen a large increase in illegals seeking medical treatment.

4) Illegal aliens are bringing diseases into our country which are either new here or were believed to be wiped out. Malaria, tuberculosis, polio, and even leprosy have reappeared within our borders, largely among illegal aliens. Chagas, a disease of Brazilian origin for which there is no cure, has now entered into our blood supply. West Nile Virus now infects thousands of people in 21 states.

5) National security, on which the Bush administration places so much emphasis, is a joke given our porous borders and the millions of undocumented workers. An Asheville banker tells of a Hispanic worker bringing in a social security card to open a bank account. The card proved fraudulent, the real owner of the card having died in Chicago some years ago. When told that the card didn’t work, the Hispanic worker left and returned the next day with nine other cards, all with different social security numbers, and urged the banker to find one that works. Common sense should tell us that our porous borders and the forgery or misuse of documents constitutes an enormous threat in terms of terrorism. What good does it do to frisk granny at the airport when on any given day a terrorist may easily slip from Mexico into Arizona?

People who raise their voices to oppose illegal immigration risk being labeled nativist or racist. Such attacks are false and misleading. Americans today are surely sophisticated enough to distinguish between legal and non-legal residents of the United States. Old-time nativists typically oppose all immigration, whereas the problem in this case is not with legal immigration, which remains at near record highs, but rather with the massive assault on our system by lawbreakers.

Some Americans are finally awakening to the dangers and pitfalls of condoning illegal immigration. On Election Day Arizona passed Proposition 200, which bars illegals aliens from state and local benefits. Forty-seven percent of Arizona’s Hispanic voters supported this bill, unwilling to give their tax dollars to those who couldn’t enter here by legal channels. U.S. News and World Report ran editorials earlier this year by Lou Dobbs calling for a closure of the borders and criticizing President Bush’s “guest-worker” program as a hidden form of amnesty. Every poll taken in recent years shows Americans not only opposed to more illegal immigration, but wanting the government to enforce the immigration laws as they now stand.

Although many members of Congress are finally realizing that a majority of Americans don’t want open borders or amnesty for illegal aliens, members of the Bush administration, including the president himself, keep pushing the idea of a guest worker program, which would grant legal status to the millions of illegal aliens living in the United States. Even while he is storming the media with his new plan to “save” Social Security, President Bush also wants Congress to enact a Social Security “totalization” allowing illegal immigrants to join our social security system with credit for time spent illegally working in the United States. Eleven states, including North Carolina, help boost this illegal immigration by granting driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; in other words, we are giving legitimate driver’s licenses to those who break our laws.

What can we do to halt this invasion? We can begin by raising our voices. We can write to our representatives, our senators, and our president to oppose these measures. We can inform President Bush in no uncertain terms that his amnesty plan is not acceptable. We can ask our representatives and our senators to refuse to support the president’s plan. Finally, we can urge our government to secure our borders, particularly our border with Mexico. If securing that border hurts the feelings of our neighbors to the south, then so be it. A nation that cannot control its own borders is, by definition, no longer a nation.

(Jeff Minick is a writer and teacher who lives in Waynesville. He can be reached at saintsbookco@aol.com.)