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Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee says that if he’s elected, you can count on him to send all illegal immigrants packing. According to the Washington Times, the former governor has "signed a pledge to enforce immigration laws and to make all illegal aliens go home," and he reportedly plans to accomplish this through "attrition by law enforcement."

So let me get this straight. The guy who as governor of Arkansas fought for welfare benefits like college tuition breaks and advocated pathways to citizenship for illegal aliens, now all of a sudden believes in sending them all back from whence they came? Well, at least he’s not pandering!

Assuming Huckabee remains true to his word (even though he can’t win a general election, but that’s another story), rounding up at least 12 million illegals would be an extraordinary undertaking. Ultimately, it is one that would fail — not for lack of trying, mind you, but because it would eventually alienate virtually every American citizen in the process, as well.

In no uncertain terms, an adventure of this magnitude — one relying on the use of government law enforcement agencies to accomplish desired ends — would require a near-complete militarization of our cities from coast to coast. Police officers, ICE and border control agents, and (most likely) military units would be tasked with patrolling our streets night and day in order to track down these lawbreakers — we are going to remove all of them, right Mike? — the vast majority of whom are non-violent workers who have aggressed against no one.

To say this would be a messy affair would be an understatement of magnificent proportion. SWAT-style assaults and home invasions would be the order of the day. Today’s ruthless, tyrannical drug raids would actually look tame in comparison as government thugs went door to door seeking out suspected illegal aliens. The right to privacy of citizens and non-citizens alike would consequently evaporate as property rights became a thing of the past. Chaos would ensue. Racial tensions would intensify as primarily brown targets would be ensnared by their primarily white captors. Protests and riots would erupt, the merits of which would be hard to dispute.

Children born as American citizens would be seized from their parents, automatically rendered homeless and converted into wards of the state as a result of such totalitarian behavior (Huckabee once seemed to understand the demerits of such atrocious behavior). Human beings who have come to this country to make a better life for themselves and their families would be treated like animals as they were hunted, captured, incarcerated, and eventually deported. And this would merely be the fate of those who complied.

Those who resisted, on the other hand, would not fare nearly as well. They would end up beaten, maimed, tortured, and even killed. If Americans can be electrocuted and shot by the roadside simply for arguing with the police nowadays, just what type of treatment would befall the illegal immigrant suddenly rendered persona non grata via this new Soviet-style diktat?

Sadly, this issue says much less about Mike Huckabee than it does about countless American citizens, with whom the candidate simply seeks to curry favor this election year. Huckabee is a sleazy politician and thus to an extent can be forgiven for behaving like one. This doesn't excuse his most recent stance, but it's very telling that he can get away with it. After all, he's just posturing for an American electorate whose mainstream values are reflected in its president, in whose office we unfortunately place so much influence that one man can be empowered on our behalf to commit wholesale acts of violence against fellow humans. And if we can identify enemies abroad, so too can we apparently identify local "enemies" living within our borders.

But make no mistake. A mission literally to cleanse our land of unwanted immigrants would more or less amount to a rogue experiment in state-sanctioned domestic terrorism scarcely seen before in the United States, and one that would almost certainly result in civil war.

All in response to a hot-button political issue that essentially could be eliminated by doing little more than putting an end to those attractive welfare subsidies Mike Huckabee and so many of his fellow Americans seem to love so much in the first place.

January 21, 2008

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