The Houston Chronicle reports the Border Patrol is on a recruiting drive—supposedly as a

"[K]ey component of the Bush administration's renewed efforts to broker a pending immigration-reform law by ramping up security at the border.

'''We're pulling out all the stops,' said Todd Fraser, a Border Patrol spokesman in Washington, D.C."

[Border patrol races to sign up thousands, By James Pinkerton, Houston Chronicle June 25, 2007]

This may sound like good news. But it should make anyone concerned about the National Question and the chicanery of the Bush administration and its Congressional open-borders co-conspirators very nervous.  The quote above gives the game away: Bush and his assorted brains are pushing a Potemkin-village non-solution to our border problems in yet another attempt to con Americans into supporting, or at least accepting, their amnesty/"guest" worker giveaway of American citizenship and abolition of our borders. 

We can't fall for it.  (Not that any regular VDARE.COM readers are likely to.)

Expect any recruiting under this program to be purely for political consumption.  Expect it to be rushed and thoughtless—as Border Patrol mouthpiece Fraser admits in the quote above.  Expect affirmative action favoritism to rule the recruiting and selection.

Which brings me to my major concern about this whole fraudulent enterprise: the institutionalizing of dual, or at best divided, loyalty in federal employees whose sole allegiance should be to the United States, and whose sole concern in carrying out their duties should be the interests of Americans and the United States. 

Affirmative action in this case means aggressively recruiting Hispanics.

Undivided loyalty is very far from the case in the U.S. Border Patrol today.  The Border Patrol recruits heavily in areas along the Mexican border—it's an easier sell as Border Patrol agents from near the border don't have to go far from home to be on station. And of course our "diversity"-obsessed Federal Government likes it because these areas now have heavily Mexican and Mexican-American populations from which to make affirmative-action hires. 

But since the major purpose of the Border Patrol along the Mexican border (when the Administration allows it to do its job, that is) is to keep Mexicans from entering the United States illegally and to return expeditiously those who make it across, does it make any sense to have the ranks of those who are fighting America's real war be full of people with strong national and familial ties to Mexico—often people themselves born in Mexico? 

(As an aside, how many of today's Border Patrol agents are only here and in their jobs because a Mexican relative was amnestied in 1986, allowing the future agent to come to America?  Forbidden question, I know—but perhaps worth asking.)

Border Patrol agents Ramos and Compean seem to be worthy exceptions to my concern about divided loyalty—and maybe that's why the Bush administration, at the Mexican government's behest, is making sure they languish in the federal pen for a long time to come, pour encourager les autres not to get too  serious about keeping all those potential George P. Bush voters from bringing their family values across the Rio Grande river.

What to make, though, of Rene Sanchez, Mexican-born Border Patrol agent and intimate of Mexican drug smuggler and regular border-jumper, Osbaldo Aldrete-Davila, whose wounding became the pretext for incarcerating Ramos and Compean? 

Sanchez, who took extraordinary steps to help build a case against his Border Patrol colleagues, on all evidence seems to feel far greater solidarity with a Mexican narcotraficante than with his Mexican-American comrades.  Is this the sort of man we want patrolling the Mexican border? 

The back pages of newspapers are now replete with stories (for the most part the major media are studiously uninterested) of Border Patrol agents who have broken their oaths and helped smuggle illegal aliens into the United States.  While not all of the surnames in the papers are Spanish, most are.

Recently the National Guard has been sent in to beef up the border patrols—and three men from the Texas National Guard have been charged with smuggling aliens. Two of them were Hispanic.

Nevertheless, the Bush Administration makes it clear as can be that it will do nothing to address this prudential concern.  Quite the contrary.  In addition to slashing standards and training requirements across the board, it is recklessly courting the risk of dual loyalty—or even primary loyalty to Mexico and other Latin American countries—in its Border Patrol high-speed recruiting drive:

"The Border Patrol recently has conducted recruiting fairs in cities including Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Detroit and Edinburg in the Rio Grande Valley.

"To draw more interest, the age limit for recruits has been raised to 40 from 37.

"To get recruits into the field more quickly, the Border Patrol is cutting its training schedule at its New Mexico academy from 91 to 81 days.

"In October, a new Spanish test will allow those who pass it to shave 30 more days from their academy training, Fraser said. According to Border Patrol officials, this test could benefit about half of all recruits, because the agency is heavily recruiting Hispanic trainees." [emphasis added]

Not only will Hispanics—those most likely to have divided loyalties about securing our southern border—be preferred over other candidates for affirmative-action reasons, they will be preferred on the basis of Spanish language skills.  To the extent Spanish is made a prerequisite for Border Patrol service, ordinary Americans will be made ineligible for jobs working for their own government. 

(Another aside: Why is Spanish proficiency necessary for border patrolling in the first place?)  As Peter Brimelow has documented, the forced national bilingualism of Canada has operated to create enormous preferences in government employment for French-speaking Quebecois.  Do we want the same sort of divisive preference regimes here?  Especially since Spanish is not an American national language, as French is in Canada.

This Bush Border Patrol recruiting drive has two purposes. 

The short term purpose is to provide political cover for an illegal alien amnesty and "guest" worker (read American-displacement) program that would dwarf our 1986 mistake, massive as that was.

The second, long-term purpose is to Hispanicize the Border Patrol even more—with no thought about what that does to the Border Patrol's effectiveness.  (Maybe, though, given President Bush's emotional Mexicanism, it is very well thought out.)

Of course, if the Bush Administration succeeds in using the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America to draw the United States into a North American Union, the Border Patrol will be irrelevant.

Our politicos will have succeeded in abolishing America's borders—by abolishing America, period.

Henry McCulloch (email him) blogs frequently for VDARE.COM.