El Cenizo

Last night as I was flipping channels I caught a quick news report on a little town in Texas called El Cenizo. The town has about 6000 residents, pretty much all of which are Hispanic. Now, they claim that everyone is there legally. Ok, I can buy that (even if I don’t quite believe it).

But the really unique thing about this town is that they have made the official language of the town (that is, all business conducted and recorded by the government) Spanish. Not English, but Spanish. They are no longer doing any record keeping in English.

While there is no Federal mandate on this, I found this to be a little disturbing. Legally they have every “right” to do so considering that there is no official language of the U.S. What bothers me, though, is that it is a clear indication that we are:
1 – losing the war on immigration (thanks Bush and Kennedy!)
2 – losing our sovereignty.

I think that it is a bad idea to continue down this path as what we will ultimately do is continue to divide our country and create confusion amongst its citizens (hopefully legal ones).

The other thing that really got me is that in this town it is outright illegal to turn in an illegal immigrant! That’s right! Even though federal law has decreed it is against the law to be in the United States without going through the “process” this town has usurped federal law by making it illegal to do anything about it.

It’s hard for me to believe that a city can get away with this type of behavior. This is not unlike other cities that have thumbed their noses at federal law on other issues. Why are we not enforcing our laws? Why are we allowing cities to write into law ordinances that conflict with federal law?

I really have to blame Clinton and Bush on this one. Neither president has done anything to ensure enforcement of our immigration laws. Especially Bush.

I get the impression that there aren’t any lawyers that read my blog, but if there are I’d love to hear the legal argument of how this is possible and permissible.

Maybe Texas succeeding from the U.S. isn’t such a bad idea after all.