I love several elements of the Burkhardt Opportunity Zone Agenda (BOZA), a 68-page study, report, and agenda for Seymour’s future growth and development: enhancing career opportunities and supporting small business development, connecting Seymour residents to work and play options, tackling the affordability of housing, and creating new places for recreation and socializing.

These are all outstanding ideas contained in BOZA.

But I don’t understand why we needed to collaborate with Washington, D.C., elites, The Brookings Institution, to come up with such fundamental ideas. Our capable mayor and city department heads, our schools and excellent local industries have been working on these matters for years, and as Ms. Franke notes in her thoughtful column, with some success.

Such community development needs are not rocket science and we have other smart folks working hard for Seymour such as Mr. (Jim) Plump, Mr. (Dan) Davis, Mr. (Dan Robison) and a host of other solid folks.

But the Brookings Institution is the top public policy research and education institution in the country. Number One. The cream of the cream. They are the whiz kids of public policy.

And these whiz kids came up with agenda recommendations that smart, community-conscious sophomores in high school might have generated.

Consequently, Brookings’s involvement strikes me as really peculiar.

And why did the Indiana Economic Development Corporation refer us to them in the first place??

(Please, somebody, tell us.)

So, I plead more than ignorance and remain bewildered the smartest people in America at Brookings recommended what every sensible leader already knows regarding the critical needs for small town advancement.

Except that BOZA does have another part to it, and maybe that’s why these Washington whiz kids showed up.

Here’s the deal.

Okay. So, I have a friend who thinks the whole point of the Brookings agenda process has to do, not with the common-sense recommendations listed above, but with our huge (and enlarging by the day) immigrant presence. He points to the Immigrant Welcome Center and the imagined huge housing projects around the bypass, where BOZA pre-imagines that nearly 1,800 built units be considered.

Wow! he says.

He goes on to say if this is the projected housing need over the next six years, it’s not population growth, it’s a population deluge and an expectation that our national border will stay wide-open.

And if this view is accurate, then BOZA looks more like an immigration magnet strategy tucked into community and workforce development elements.

I think Brookings, then, has the role of bringing the open-borders DC agenda down to the local level, the Seymour level.

Perhaps, then, the more honest title should have been, “The Burkhardt Opportunity and Resettlement Zone Agenda.”

Further, the Brookings’ report states upfront it is to be “a reflection of the dreams and desires of the people of Seymour.”

And the dreams proved to be a nightmare for the people of Seymour attending the March 25th council meeting. BOZA was voted down by the city council and is now in some kind of an unknown or mystery status.

Now, there are very normal, sensible elements to BOZA, as noted. But the immigrant-focused aspects of BOZA is not normal.

It is radical.

And, at this point, may I stop using euphemisms. Every aspect of BOZA and the words of those supporting BOZA have euphemized a very serious source of American disorder.

To illustrate my point, I ask my readers to trade places with Eagle Pass, Texas, nestled on the Rio Grande. Have you ever seen such disorder short of war or natural catastrophe? Disorder brought on by a continuous human tsunami.

Now, Eagle Pass is no less America than is Seymour. In Eagle Pass immigrants are called illegal aliens. Eagle Pass is in disorder and we in Seymour are not because we have a great geographical luxury, distance from the border. And those who want to develop Seymour with the full BOZA end up promoting more illegal immigration and more inundation for Eagle Pass.

If you incentivize a behavior, you get more of it. And pretty clearly, full BOZA is an invitation to more unlawful non-citizens to populate Seymour.

At this point, in my estimation, we have welcomed four to five thousand unlawful non-citizens to our locale. And BOZA, disdaining Eagle Pass, provides incentives for four to five thousand more illegals to bring further disorder to our fellow Americans in Eagle Pass.

It has been expressed by people wiser than I, that the reason we have such illegality is because of our outdated immigration laws. I humbly beg to differ. We have 30 million illegals In America because foreign individuals chose to violate our border laws. We have 30 million unlawful non-citizens because Americans have chosen not to enforce valid laws.

If we had more up-to-date laws it would not reduce one illegal entry. Just as with criminal law, getting just the right laws will not influence the criminally-minded to become law-abiding.

No, illegal aliens are far from criminals, but they are violating our homeland border.

Rest assured, there will never be satisfactory laws ever passed by Congress. One party is not interested in border security (hence the six to eight million illegal entries since January of 2021) and the other party is presently interested in border security plus a rational immigration program. And there is no compromise between the two anymore.

The proof: In the 1980s a compromise was established in which illegals were given, with conditions, some form of legal status in exchange for border security. While the former indeed resulted, the latter was thwarted and still is.

That is where we stand today. One of our parties will never agree to enforcing border laws. The other party will never agree to legal status for border violators prior to lasting, effective border security.

And as one fine writer noted in a column, today Seymour is in the cross-hairs. If so, what metaphor shall we use for Eagle Pass?

And if you wouldn’t want Seymour to be Eagle Pass, then you must make decisions that protect Eagle Pass from greater disorder: No incentivizing illegal entry into America.

Now, my own view for dealing with our serious immigration plight comes from the late Charles Krauthammer. It is simple.

Close the border effectively including a monitored wall, then work on a plan to legalize all illegal aliens who have been productive and are contributing to their communities and who have no criminal record. If these folks later wish to become citizens, then out of fairness, they should have to wait their turn, meet standards and fees that our current legal immigration program requires, and then commit full loyalty to America.

Final thoughts:

Seymour is a welcoming community. It has been hospitable to those who are here illegally. Certainly, my church has been, and I’m actually proud of that even though I oppose the illegality. To be honest, If I were younger and living in the third-world, I would break my neck to get to America. And I would be in the wrong the minute I stole across America’s wide-open border.

So, even for the likes of me, we must have a firm border.

A home without a border (a lockable door) cannot safely raise a family. A church lacking a border (a secure door) will have its sanctuary desecrated. A school without a secure border (locked doors) fails to protect students.

And a nation that chooses not to secure its borders is simultaneously self-erasing plus promoting growing threats to the general welfare of its citizens.

Truly, with BOZA, radicalism has breached Seymour’s own border.

And thank you, Brookings Institution, for gifting us this perverse agenda that is a part of the dissolving of our nation from within. Please get back to DC to your globalist friends who pride themselves on their malignant contempt for normal America.

And please take your acid ideas with you.

Alan Winslow, a resident of Seymour, occasionally writes a column for The Tribune. Send comments to [email protected].