Who will Watch Over Ya?

What a perfect metaphor for what illegal immigration is doing to this country:

Federal prosecutors are investigating Wachovia Corp. as part of a broad probe of alleged laundering of drug proceeds by Mexican and Colombian money-transfer companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

The first lesson we can draw from this is that if you stick your toe into the seductive world of lawlessness, you're only going to be drawn in deeper. And that's exactly what Wachovia did.

Lured by the prospect of handling all those millions illegal immigrants wired annually from the US to Mexico, Wachovia cozied up to the casas de cambio, or money-exchange houses near the US-Mexican border that specialize in remitting money to Mexicans.

Problem was, those casas were also involved in laundering drug money. Oopsies.

But what did these financial geniuses expect? Illegality breeds illigality. We already know that illegal immigration spawns identity theft, gang crime, and routine tax evasion as employers pay illegal immigrant labor under the table. And the same routes used by human smugglers are used to bring in illegal drugs, as documented in this National Public Radio story:

"Ice" is a crystallized form of meth also known as crystal. It is produced in relatively larger quantities in so-called "superlabs." Most are based in Mexico; they ship drugs to the United States by UPS, FEDEX and Greyhound bus, as well as in cars and trucks with secret compartments. For more than a year, a two-story Victorian home in Aurora, one of the nicest in the neighborhood, was at the receiving end of one trafficking route. "This individual had the direct contact in Mexico," Batson noted. "[He] brought the crystal meth from Mexico to this location
and dispersed it from here." The Mexican dealer in Aurora distributed 100 pounds throughout southwest Missouri. That's as much as 180,000 doses, with a street value of as much as $4.5 million. Southwest Missouri and northwest Arkansas are home to poultry farms and processing plants that hire Mexican workers. "The Hispanic population in town here is a hardworking bunch of people," Batson said. But "there are those in the group who go in the other direction. They have access to [meth] in Mexico, so they take advantage of that."

Notice that report didn't come from those terrible nativists at VDARE or the League of the South, but from the liberal NPR.

So you have to wonder -- what ELSE is coming across that border we're not supposed to monitor, since to do so would be "xenophobic"?

But we're not supposed to ask questions like that. Instead, we're supposed to focus on all the money we're saving by importing cheap immigrant labor, and how all these illegal immigrants are going to finance Social Security for retiring Baby Boomers. Now when I hear that, I wonder who's going to finance all those immigrants when they retire -- but then, I'm not a financial genius like the management of Wachovia.