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Misguided Immigration Policy Kills Eleven in Iowa
By Doug Patton
October 21, 2002

It must have been a horrible way to die. Eleven adults, crammed into a railroad grain car and shipped from Mexico to the Midwest in the sweltering summer heat. No food. No light. No ventilation. And no way out.

What was left of their bodies was discovered last week at a rail yard in Dennison, Iowa, when the grain car was opened for cleaning prior to the fall harvest. Four months after they left Mexico, these eleven undocumented souls were finally removed from the oven that became their tomb. No one knows who they were.

U.S. Rep. Greg Ganske, R-Iowa, says his opponent, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, is at least partially responsible for the deaths. Politically, it's a risky accusation, and predictably Harkin's campaign has expressed its obligatory outrage by demanding to know, "How low will Ganske go?" But Ganske, a four-term congressman from Des Moines, simply points to Harkin's consistent support of welfare payments to illegal aliens as a cause of such tragedies as the one in Dennison.

Regardless of the political consequences, Ganske makes a valid point. It was Harkin and his ilk that gave us the policies that created this invasion of immigrants willing to risk everything - even death - for the treasure that awaits them on this side of the border. When you are poor, your children are hungry and your rich neighbor dangles a carrot in front of your nose, human nature dictates that you will lunge for it. How much more enthusiastically will you lunge for beefsteak and caviar?

For far too many years, our tax dollars provided an enticement too strong to resist. What did we expect? Frankly, I'm surprised tragedies like this haven't happened more often. And when a 1996 Republican bill stopped the Democrat-created flow of welfare payments to illegal aliens, Harkin, of course, opposed this common-sense bill.

Fresh out of ideas and with no plan for the future of America, Democrats are anxious to produce a new generation of voters who are dependent upon government. That's not to say that Mexican immigrants are not hard workers; quite the contrary. They take the jobs Americans won't take. But the fact remains that Democrats are trying desperately to turn another group into a helpless constituency.

It is time for a sensible immigration policy, one that does not reward lawlessness. For example, why not end the practice of allowing the children of illegals to automatically become American citizens simply by virtue of having been born on American soil?

And why are there not stiffer penalties for those who perpetrate the kind of fraud that pronounced a death sentence on the desperate individuals who were tricked into believing that someone actually had their best interests at heart when they were loaded into that grain car?

Now, before I get hate mail telling me I'm a racist who should be more respectful of the fact that America is a nation of immigrants and it's our diversity that gives us our greatness and strength, let me hasten to point out that the immigrants of a century ago came here legally. They stood in line, waited their turn and came here on overcrowded ships from all over Europe. They worked hard at learning English and becoming Americans. Under those terms, I have no objection to anyone coming to America and becoming my neighbor.