Sealing America's Border with Mexico Requires Urgency

Conservative leader and writer Michael Johns, a former White House speechwriter and Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst, said last night that the United States needs to act with great urgency to secure its southern border with Mexico if it hopes to protect the nation's security interests and begin reversing the many economic and other crises spurred by the nation's apparent unwillingness to enforce federal immigration laws by fully securing its southern border.

Replays of Johns' interview with the Grizzly Groundswell Network on Blog Talk Radio are available globally for replay from the 61.30 to 120 minute mark of the network's June 30, 2008 show, available at:

http://grizzlygroundswell.com/archives/2849

In the interview, Johns challenges the conventional wisdom that Mexico's illegal aliens in the U.S. are only filling jobs that Americans do not want, stating that nearly half of them--10.5 million of the 21.6 million illegal Mexicans in this nation--are illegally filling skilled jobs that almost certainly would be appealing to Americans at a time when unemployment is standing at 5.5 percent nationally. Johns stated further that the failure of the U.S. to seal its southern border from illegals represents one of the greatest ongoing security threats to the nation at a time when the U.S. continues to be embroiled in a global conflict against al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism.

Johns stated that the 21.6 million illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. are ill-serving the U.S. economy, costing the nation approximately $397 billion annually in education, health care and other social services. Meanwhile, Johns says, Mexican illegals are returning large sums of their earnings--approximately $33 billion annually to Mexico and $283 billion annually to all of Latin America. He also said that the U.S. has spent approximately $1.5 billion since 2001 in costs associated with the incarceration of approximately 370,000 illegal aliens in the U.S.

As President of Phoenix's Coalition for a Conservative Majority (CCM), Johns and his organization are actively supporting two Arizona ballot initiatives that would strengthen the state's illegal immigration enforcement capabilities by empowering Arizona's law enforcement officials to enforce federal immigration laws and make the state's criminal trespass statutes applicable to illegal aliens in the state. The deadline for the submission of signatures for these two ballot initiatives is this Thursday, July 3, 2008.