Big illegal immigration news day

A big news day on the immigration front:

A thousand suspected illegal workers are netted in a roundup of one company building wooden pallets in the United States. You can't really call them undocumented because many had documents - it's just that the documents were forged or used "borrowed" Social Security numbers.

Law enforcement officials will "use all the tools we have, whether it be criminal enforcement or immigration laws to break the back" of businesses that exploit undocumented immigrants, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a news conference.

"We're looking at them in the same way we look at criminal organizations," he said.

Federal immigration authorities arrested nine people linked to IFCO Systems and rounded up more than 1,000 illegal immigrants in multistate raids, federal law enforcement officials said.

Would like to believe that the feds are getting serious, but extremely doubt it. It's window dressing for the masses, we suspect. As soon as other issues are making headlines the feds will go back to their benign neglect of immigration enforcement. Just watch.

The Minutemen proclaim that if Uncle Sam doesn't build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, they will.

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- If the government doesn't build security fencing along the Mexico border, Minuteman border watch leader Chris Simcox says he and his supporters will.

Simcox, whose civilian watch group opposes illegal immigration, said Wednesday he was sending an ultimatum to President Bush to deploy military reserves to the Arizona border by May 25 or his supporters will break ground for their own building project.

"We're going to show the federal government how easy it is to build these security fences, how inexpensively they can be built when built by private people and free enterprise," Simcox said.

Considering the state of the budget, maybe the private enterprise route is the way to go.

Ummm, it must be asked. Is building a fence along the border a legal activity? You would think so.

The "coyotes," the smugglers of humans over the border in what is estimated to be a $10 billion a year business, are plying their trade in plain view of Mexican officials, the same people who only recently assured President Bush that they would crack down on their side of the border.

Sidling up to migrants who arrive at the Tijuana airport and cruising the streets in border towns, "coyotes" in gold chains and dark sunglasses openly find customers for nightly scrambles across the U.S. border.

Mexico's president offered to crack down on smuggling at a recent summit with President Bush. But close to 100 smuggling gangs are still operating, government officials say, in plain sight of Mexican law enforcement.

"While drug smugglers are invisible for the most part, people smugglers are visible, working right in front of authorities," said Tijuana border expert Victor Clark, who has studied the illegal trade for decades.

...

Border experts say the price for Mexican migrants has quadrupled from $300 to more than $1,200 since 1994, when the U.S. last tightened the rules. One migrant told The Associated Press he recently paid $1,300 to get across.

To reflect back on last week's thoughts, do the Catholic bishops really want to align themselves with drug and people smugglers?