Some colleges and universities may be getting way too close to the debate over U. S. border security. “When officials at Indiana’s Ivy Tech Community College allowed the Mexican consulate to use their East Chicago campus as a satellite office for three days last month, they unknowingly plunged headlong into the nation’s red-hot immigration debate,” Ben Leubsdorf reported in the June 23rd Chronicle of Higher Education. “J. Guadalupe Valtierra, chancellor of Ivy Tech’s northwest region, says the mobile consulate is operated by the Mexican consulate in Chicago to serve Mexican citizins in Illinois, Indiana, and other neighboring states.”
“In 2000, the population of East Chicago was almost 15 percent foreign-born and 52 percent Hispanic, according to the U. S. Census Bureau.”
There are a couple of pitfalls to this type of public service. “About 1,500 Mexicans showed up at Ivy Tech and at least one woman in attendance told the Associated Press she was undocumented,” Leubsdorf writes. “Critics of the temporary consulate said it is inappropriate to use a government-financed building to provide documents that illegal aliens could use to obtain services such as bank loans.”
Meanwhile, a group called Nafsa: Association of International Educators, wants the U. S. to lift the caps it puts on the number of international students it will admit into the country. They may have a point.
On the one hand, some of the 9/11 terrorists did enter the U. S. on student visas. On the other hand, information from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that the U. S. is on a downward spiral in spawning math and science majors and in maintaining rigorous standards in those academic disciplines.
Here’s a history lesson relevant to the current debate that is not likely to make it into any classroom. “Fifty-three years ago, when newly elected Dwight Eisenhower moved into the White House, America’s southern frontier was as porous as a spaghetti sieve,” John Dillin reports in the Christian Science Monitor. “As many as 3 million illegal migrants had walked and waded northward over a period of several years for jobs in California, Arizona, Texas and points beyond.”
“President Eisenhower cut this illegal traffic.” He did so with 1,075 border patrol agents who either used “buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free” or put them aboard ships that sailed hundreds of miles south of the border.
“Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio,” according to Dillin. “The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.”
“The sea voyage was ‘a rough trip, and they did not like it,’ says Don Croppack, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.”
But even if this idea gets revived, don’t expect it to go by the same name. It was originally called “Operation Wetback.” Ironically, Ike was thought to be far more moderate, and is treated much more charitably, by academics than the current occupant of the White House whose immigration policies contrast starkly with those of the World War II hero.
“U. S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected Christian parents’ protest against student ‘role playing activities,” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council points out. “A California elementary school taught students to fight a ‘jihad’ against Christian crusaders and ‘praise Allah’ for their victories.”
“The Ninth Circuit approved such activities, affirming a lower court order that said they did not constitute an establishment of religion.”
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
