Puerto Rico has an illegal immigrant problem.

Many Puerto Ricans, particularly those of the bilingual and better-educated middle classes, the skilled workers, administrators and professionals, are moving to the US mainland, particularly Florida. They are US citizens and have every right to do so.

They are coming here to escape a deteriorating economy and an exploding crime rate. I lived in Puerto Rico for about a year in the early 1970s, and those were already disturbing issues back then, but my conversations with Puerto Ricans now living here in South Florida tell me that the situation has now become intolerable. They come here not only for the relative stability and prosperity, but because there is already an established Spanish-speaking community in Florida and they feel more at home.

Puerto Rico has become a magnet for immigrants, both legal and illegal, from all Latin America. Once there, the undocumented can vanish into the population. They are difficult to identify and the culture and language is compatible. They fit right in. And there is work for them. As in the US, businessmen take advantage of this source of docile and cheap non-union labor, which has exerted a downward pressure on wages that affects everyone, both the natives and the naturalized citizens. Capital has created a financial incentive for illegal immigration that feeds on itself, and lobbies effectively against any true solution to the problem. Sound familiar?

Most of the immigrants are just plain, decent people, desperate to escape poverty and injustice in their own countries, but a large number are also criminals, or are turned to crime when they find that PR may be better than their homelands but is certainly not a land of milk and honey. Crime, of both the street and organized gang variety, is rampant. There are drugs and random violence everywhere, and the situation appears to be getting worse by the day. My perusal of Puerto Rican newspaper and TV station websites only corroborates the testimony I hear from my Puerto Rican acquaintances.

Maybe the next Republican President will re-establish border security by building a wall around the island to keep the illegals out. You know. One just like the one they’re proposing to erect across the border with Mexico. It is clear the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea haven’t worked.