Two illegal immigrants residing in the Washington D.C. suburb and sanctuary county of Montgomery County, Maryland are accused of repeatedly raping an 11-year-old girl. Mauricio Barrera-Navidad, 29, of Damascus, and Carlos Palacios-Amaya, 28, of Gaithersburg, were arrested and each charged with second-degree rape. The two men knew the girl through a friendship with her older brother.
The child reported the rapes to a social worker at her school.
In September 2018, the victim was introduced to her older brother’s friend, Palacios-Amaya. Over the course of the next few months, the then 27-year-old man raped the middle schooler on multiple occasions, authorities allege. The victim recalled one instance where Palacios-Amaya “used his cell phone to video record the two of them having sex,” police noted in court documents.
The victim told the social worker that Palacios-Amaya would often pressure her not to attend school so that she could stay home while her parents were at work. That gave Palacios-Amaya unsupervised access to the girl.
Investigators say while reviewing the victim’s cell phone, they located numerous photographs of Palacios-Amaya with the girl.
The other suspect, Barrera-Navidad, reportedly attended the victim’s older brother’s birthday party on July 2018. The celebration took place at a mobile home park in Germantown.
At one point in the evening, Barrera-Navidad and the 11-year-old victim entered a bedroom. According to police, Barrera-Navidad raped the girl and then continued to communicate with her via cell phone for an undisclosed period of time thereafter.
Barrera-Navidad was born in El Salvador while less information is known about the other alleged rapist, Palacios-Amaya. ICE reports that a “final order of removal” was issued for Barrera-Navidad back in December of 2016. In 2014, authorities removed Palacios-Amaya from the U.S. but he returned at a later date.
Yesterday, WMAL’s Larry O’Connor interviewed Kevin Lewis, a reporter form WJLA, who broke this story. Lewis tells O’Connor that Montgomery County has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on immigration status and that County Executive Marc Elrich issued an executive order prohibiting any county employee from inquiring into the immigration status of any resident. Lewis also said that jail officials are not only forbidden from calling ICE officials regarding illegal alien inmates but also that ICE is forbidden from even entering the jail. There is no way of knowing whether these two monsters could have been removed from the U.S. before they raped this little girl.
Conor Friedersdorf fancies himself The Atlantic’s resident ethnic White Knight, galloping in to the aid of minorities terrorized by the handful of genuinely conservative pundits yet standing.
Naturally, Friedersdorf entered the fray on behalf of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) after she found herself in the crosshairs of one of Tucker Carlson’s recent monologues, which simply pointed out the obvious: Omar hates America. In her words: “We must confront that our nation was founded by genocide and we maintain global power through neocolonialism.”
Friedersdorf, armed with an interpretive decoder ring, explains that Omar is only innocently savaging “what she regards as the country’s failure to live up to its lofty values.”
Whether America has lived up to some “lofty values,” based on an entirely arbitrary definition of them by a naturalized foreigner, is irrelevant—Omar attacks America as it is, she therefore hates America as it is, and she will continue to hate it until, as Friedersdorf suggests, it conforms with the values she wants America to adopt. These may be summarized as: “This is not going to be the country of white people.”
According to Friedersdorf, Omar is merely fighting for supposed American principles such as equality and social justice; but how amazing is it that those principles are congruent with and adaptable to the political, economic, and social interests of her own particular ethno-cultural group, and that these interests conflict necessarily, as Omar suggests, with those of whites. She does not want peaceful coexistence, much less a melting pot. What she wants is submission.
But perhaps the most disheartening aspect of the Omar-Friedersdorf-Carlson debacle has developed on the Right, rather than on the Left.
Writing in defense of Tucker, David Harsanyi at The Federalistconcedes that Omar, as a “philosophical matter,” is not the kind of immigrant “we” should want. But though Harsanyi defends Tucker, he actually favors high levels of immigration and writes of Tucker, “he’s wrong about immigration.”
“When my parents came to the United States as refugees in 1968, for instance, they were asked to renounce communism—because collectivism, like Islamism or fascism or any authoritarianism, is antithetical to American principles,” writes Harsanyi. “This is one reason we still give newcomers citizenship tests. We want them not only to comprehend our foundational ideas, but to adopt them.”
That’s all well and good. But how can a nation that has convinced itself it is purely propositional—that is, where membership is given to all comers based strictly on their supposed adoption (or, most commonly, lip service given to) “foundational ideas” or “principles”—maintain itself against the whims of those who manage to power their way in and rise to power in spite of them? They, not “we,” will come to define citizenship, and define it out of existence. In questions of immigration, size matters. The numbers we admit—either legally or illegally—matter.
But who are we kidding? A nation that countenances the presence of some 22 million illegal aliens has effectively lost the will to live. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that there are no uniquely American ideas; but if, as America becomes increasingly “diverse” due to immigration, enough people can be convinced that those “foundational ideas” and “principles” include open borders, what good is the truth? The “philosophical matter” that defines membership in our national community, our very way of life, is gradually being redefined by the new “we.” Propositions will not hold against a wave of willful ignorance.
Moreover, and though it might turn the stomachs of well-meaning liberals—so, to be clear, that includes contemporary “conservatives”—discrimination is a vital and natural process that facilitates both peace and assimilation; that is, the adoption of the foundational Anglo-Saxon-Protestant fashions, customs, and habits that once made up the basis of our national fabric—the vestiges of those evil “white people” Omar wants to uproot.
But today discrimination has been outlawed in every concievable form. There is no natural mechanism to make the Omars among us adopt our way of life, and it is becoming increasingly difficult even to remove those who are here illegally—those who, by their rejection of our national sovereignty, essentially spit in our faces.
“Covenants without the sword,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all.” There was a time when people like Omar would have been denaturalized and deported, just as the subversive Emma Goldman was, and that would be the right thing to do. But it is not hard to imagine the bipartisan support that Omar—or even Goldman—would enjoy today from the “Right” and Left if such action even were suggested.
Incredibly, the best take on Omar and other militant practitioners of identity politics, the only take in keeping with sanity, came from President Trump. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” or from which their parents or ancestors came, if they hate America so much? Trump is on target here, and a people reasonably concerned with their own survival will see that he is.
No one, least of all Omar, Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), has a right to demand America undergo fundamental transformation to become the more “diverse,” un-American union of their dreams. They are not within their rights to demand America more closely resemble the backwaters from which they or their parents came. Republicans and Democrats entertain this fundamental transformation at the hands of foreigners and their ungrateful progeny, unworthy of their incidental citizenship. Why?
America wants to have its immigration cake and eat it, too, even as it chokes on every bite. A society that is only inviting is self-destructive, while a society that is only closed off looks like North Sentinel Island, where the odd Christian missionary is greeted with a volley of arrows. A civilized people who are too much one thing or the other cannot for long survive, for they will be consumed by foreign atavists or become themselves atavistic.
Immigrants who have come here legally and with the proper spirit thrive in America and are welcomed when they do. But identifying which immigrants are likely to do that and how many of them we can successfully assimilate is not something Americans can afford to take lightly.
Tucker Carlson, then, reminds us not only of how dangerous individuals like Omar are, but how dangerous it is to allow everyone from Conor Friedersdorf to David Harsanyi constantly to define and redefine the “philosophical matter” of membership in our society—even as we cannot bring ourselves to enforce existing laws or to assert one fundamental way of life over the many “diverse” options presented by newcomers.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1164166091-e1564094794133.jpg300534Pedro Gonzalezhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngPedro Gonzalez2019-07-26 07:00:012019-11-18 13:59:44Covenants Without the Sword
John Tanton, a pioneer in immigration reduction activism, died last week. He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and other similar groups, as well as pushed legislation that would make English the official language. The Washington Post decided the best way to honor his life would be to smear him.
“John H. Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who was the architect of a national anti-immigration movement that found expression in the policies of the administration of President Trump and who was labeled by watchdog groups as a thinly veiled white nationalist, died July 16 at a nursing center in Petoskey, Mich. He was 85,” read the opening paragraph of the Post’s obituary.
The obituary by Matt Schudel seemed interested only in airing opinions of Tanton from people who hated him. Schudel repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center’s slander that he was the “puppeteer” of the “anti-immigration movement.” The obit also mentioned that Tanton founded SPLC-designated “hate groups,” which include mainstream organizations such as FAIR and CIS.
Schudel quotes a random Republican saying in 1986 that Tanton’s groups “are a bunch of crazies . . . motivated by xenophobia and probably racism.” It quotes Carl Pope, a former head of the Sierra Club, denouncing him: “The whole idea of people trying to hijack an organization to advance their cause was outrageous,” Pope said in 2006. “And I found many of the things he had said since I had known him deplorable and unconscionable.” (In reality, Pope hijacked the Sierra Club and made it fanatically pro-immigration in order to please one megadonor.)
Tanton came to advocate immigration reduction out of conservationist concerns. He worked with the Sierra Club and other groups for many years before he was deemed a practitioner of “wrongthink” and purged. His immigration reductionism never caught on with the leadership of environmental groups.
It wasn’t just the SPLC and aggravated business-first Republicans who were quoted to trash Tanton.
“It’s sad,” Patrick Burns, former FAIR deputy director, told the Detroit News in 2017. “It’s like a dead cat in a well. It poisons a lot of good water. Tanton has been that cat for 30 years.”
No better way to mark a man’s passing than to evoke the image of a decaying feline corpse.
It is true that the SPLC and other groups have lambasted immigration reduction groups just because of Tanton’s comments. The Post notes that Tanton’s advocacy became controversial in the late 1980s after an internal memo was leaked. The memo asked provocative questions about what would happen if Hispanic immigration was left unchecked. Some of the questions asked in the memo included: “Do ethnic enclaves . . . constitute resegregation? As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?”
The Post published some of these questions to imply Tanton was a thinly veiled white nationalist. Most of the memo concerned itself with the economic and cultural effects of mass Hispanic immigration and how America would be able to assimilate these newcomers. The questions were asked in the spirit of anticipating problems, fostering debate, and finding solutions.
Tanton himself disputed claims he was a racist: “I believe in the melting pot. I don’t care what the pigment in your skin is or the slant of your eyes.”
Besides the memo, the SPLC claimed Tanton was a dangerous extremist because of his private correspondence. The left-wing group trawled through thousands of letters and documents in Tanton’s archives at the University of Michigan to find the most damning statements. They found such offensive comments as this: “I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”
This is hardly a radical position. The SPLC’s desire to uphold these views as proof Tanton was an extremist testifies more to their desperation than to his own beliefs.
Some conservatives have also attacked Tanton but from a different angle. They accuse him of being a eugenicist and an abortion supporter, thereby making the immigration groups he founded of also being eugenicists and abortion supporters. It is true that Tanton supported Planned Parenthood when he focused primarily on conservationist efforts. But his own views are not reflected by the immigration reduction groups. For instance, CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is staunchly pro-life.
And if conservatives got in the business of repudiating any person who was ever pro-abortion, they would have to denounce Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump.
Tanton’s legacy should be remembered for his courageous advocacy of immigration reduction and making English the official language. Whatever his unorthodox views, the man ensured that there would be pushback when the swamp wanted another amnesty. His groups were instrumental in stopping amnesty in the Bush and Obama years. The SPLC dubbed FAIR a hate group due to its effectiveness in the 2006 amnesty fight. FAIR’s policies influenced Trump and now shape the Republican Party’s immigration platform. Without Tanton and the groups he founded, America would be in far worse shape today. The crazy ideas of the 2020 Democrats would have been implemented a long time ago.
Tanton was a small-town doctor who decided to make this country a better place. Conservatives may not agree with his conservationism and they certainly would disagree with his support of Planned Parenthood, but they have to respect him as the archetypal concerned citizen. America is great because it allows ordinary citizens to impact our political process.
Tanton should be honored for the good he did. The Washington Post only saw fit to compare him to a dead cat. It’s clear the Post thinks the admonition against speaking ill of the dead applies only when the dead have the “correct” politics.
Photo Credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images
John Tanton, a pioneer in immigration reduction activism, died last week. He founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Center for Immigration Studies, and other similar groups, as well as pushed legislation that would make English the official language. The Washington Post decided the best way to honor his life would be to smear him.
“John H. Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who was the architect of a national anti-immigration movement that found expression in the policies of the administration of President Trump and who was labeled by watchdog groups as a thinly veiled white nationalist, died July 16 at a nursing center in Petoskey, Mich. He was 85,” read the opening paragraph of the Post’s obituary.
The obituary by Matt Schudel seemed interested only in airing opinions of Tanton from people who hated him. Schudel repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center’s slander that he was the “puppeteer” of the “anti-immigration movement.” The obit also mentioned that Tanton founded SPLC-designated “hate groups,” which include mainstream organizations such as FAIR and CIS.
Schudel quotes a random Republican saying in 1986 that Tanton’s groups “are a bunch of crazies . . . motivated by xenophobia and probably racism.” It quotes Carl Pope, a former head of the Sierra Club, denouncing him: “The whole idea of people trying to hijack an organization to advance their cause was outrageous,” Pope said in 2006. “And I found many of the things he had said since I had known him deplorable and unconscionable.” (In reality, Pope hijacked the Sierra Club and made it fanatically pro-immigration in order to please one megadonor.)
Tanton came to advocate immigration reduction out of conservationist concerns. He worked with the Sierra Club and other groups for many years before he was deemed a practitioner of “wrongthink” and purged. His immigration reductionism never caught on with the leadership of environmental groups.
It wasn’t just the SPLC and aggravated business-first Republicans who were quoted to trash Tanton.
“It’s sad,” Patrick Burns, former FAIR deputy director, told the Detroit News in 2017. “It’s like a dead cat in a well. It poisons a lot of good water. Tanton has been that cat for 30 years.”
No better way to mark a man’s passing than to evoke the image of a decaying feline corpse.
It is true that the SPLC and other groups have lambasted immigration reduction groups just because of Tanton’s comments. The Post notes that Tanton’s advocacy became controversial in the late 1980s after an internal memo was leaked. The memo asked provocative questions about what would happen if Hispanic immigration was left unchecked. Some of the questions asked in the memo included: “Do ethnic enclaves . . . constitute resegregation? As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?”
The Post published some of these questions to imply Tanton was a thinly veiled white nationalist. Most of the memo concerned itself with the economic and cultural effects of mass Hispanic immigration and how America would be able to assimilate these newcomers. The questions were asked in the spirit of anticipating problems, fostering debate, and finding solutions.
Tanton himself disputed claims he was a racist: “I believe in the melting pot. I don’t care what the pigment in your skin is or the slant of your eyes.”
Besides the memo, the SPLC claimed Tanton was a dangerous extremist because of his private correspondence. The left-wing group trawled through thousands of letters and documents in Tanton’s archives at the University of Michigan to find the most damning statements. They found such offensive comments as this: “I have no doubt that individual minority persons can assimilate to the culture necessary to run an advanced society but if through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America.”
This is hardly a radical position. The SPLC’s desire to uphold these views as proof Tanton was an extremist testifies more to their desperation than to his own beliefs.
Some conservatives have also attacked Tanton but from a different angle. They accuse him of being a eugenicist and an abortion supporter, thereby making the immigration groups he founded of also being eugenicists and abortion supporters. It is true that Tanton supported Planned Parenthood when he focused primarily on conservationist efforts. But his own views are not reflected by the immigration reduction groups. For instance, CIS executive director Mark Krikorian is staunchly pro-life.
And if conservatives got in the business of repudiating any person who was ever pro-abortion, they would have to denounce Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump.
Tanton’s legacy should be remembered for his courageous advocacy of immigration reduction and making English the official language. Whatever his unorthodox views, the man ensured that there would be pushback when the swamp wanted another amnesty. His groups were instrumental in stopping amnesty in the Bush and Obama years. The SPLC dubbed FAIR a hate group due to its effectiveness in the 2006 amnesty fight. FAIR’s policies influenced Trump and now shape the Republican Party’s immigration platform. Without Tanton and the groups he founded, America would be in far worse shape today. The crazy ideas of the 2020 Democrats would have been implemented a long time ago.
Tanton was a small-town doctor who decided to make this country a better place. Conservatives may not agree with his conservationism and they certainly would disagree with his support of Planned Parenthood, but they have to respect him as the archetypal concerned citizen. America is great because it allows ordinary citizens to impact our political process.
Tanton should be honored for the good he did. The Washington Post only saw fit to compare him to a dead cat. It’s clear the Post thinks the admonition against speaking ill of the dead applies only when the dead have the “correct” politics.
Photo Credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images
Radical Somali-American and left-wing Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) argues that U.S. foreign policy is the cause of the global refugee crisis. Without question, excessive aggression from the United States in Latin America and the Middle East has exacerbated the pre-existing pathologies that pervade their political, social, and economic systems.
Whether America made some unique contribution to these horrors, however, is an open question. Still, in this way, Omar has stumbled her way into an undeniable truth: U.S. foreign policy is too aggressive far too often, and it has caused some disruptions—and this leads to some unwanted migration.
Very often, migrants are seeking entry into the United States or Europe not out of an urgent need for safety, but for easy access to generous welfare systems and jobs. As a result, migrants tend to amass a good deal of money that they can then remit back to their families in their homelands. The fact that neither Europe nor the United States require true assimilation of these migrants into the larger culture makes migration even more attractive since the migrants will get money and protection without having to abandon their own cultures.
The longer the West tolerates this flocking of “refugees” in ever larger numbers and does not require them to assimilate, the more reverse-assimilation becomes likely.
Already migrants in Europe and the United States are offered legal protections that few native-born citizens are offered. A faux sense of cultural sensitivity enforced by the “elites” of their host governments, causes them to go out of their way to make people who have no intention of returning the favor feel comfortable.
It explains why in the United States, Spanish is no longer viewed as a second language but as a language to be respected as co-equal to the language of the land (and, in certain parts of the country, the lingua franca). It’s also why some European governments are willing to abandon their own free speech laws in order to placate violent Muslim migrants who become offended by cartoons that depict their religious prophet, Mohammed.
Foreign Policy Plays a Role There is little doubt that incessant bombings of the Middle East or an endless cavalcade of covert U.S. action directed against disliked governments in Latin America can cause instability which, in turn, can create mass migration. But Omar and her socialist Suicide Squad in Congress are attempting to craft a rather languid U.S. foreign policy in response—one that undoubtedly entails the United States turning the other cheek in response to each terrorist provocation or kneeling before a tinpot, Latin American Communist dictator (a lá Barack Obama’s approach).
This is not the appropriate response to previous missteps and it will not even ameliorate the illegal immigration problem. And, beating our warplanes into plowshares or bringing all the troops home from the Greater Middle East tomorrow—as gratifying as that may be—will not prevent the flood of refugees and migrants into Europe either. These moves would likely make us weaker while not addressing the real problem of our current immigration policies. In fact, it’s galling to hear Omar and her comrades suggest they want to fix the ongoing immigration crisis given that they disagree with the suggestion that mass migration is even a problem! Forgive me for not trusting their solution to a problem they don’t see as a problem.
It’s Immigration Policy, Not Foreign Policy When Omar and her fellow members of the socialist Suicide Squad argue that U.S. foreign policy is the cause of the present immigration crisis, they are not being serious. Instead, they are using these claims to distract Americans and deflect attention away from the fact that the type of lax immigration policies they support are the real cause of the present immigration crises, both in Europe and the United States. After all, Ilhan Omar is a proponent of the status quo for U.S. immigration policies. Like so many of her fellow “democratic-socialists” in the United States, she likely looks with favor on Europe’s current open borders immigration policies.
In the United States, these open borders immigration policies have damaged many of the communities that supported Donald Trump. Similar concerns are spurring nationalist-populist movements that are destabilizing the European Union. So long as the borders of the United States and Europe remain open for anyone to walk through, we will not see any semblance of general stability, security, or sustainable prosperity in the West. The longer this paradigm persists, the less hope there will be for the West to survive in its present form.
They Hate You, Folks . . . Make no mistake: destroying the West in its present form is precisely the intent of the socialist Suicide Squad.
Whatever kernel of truth there may be in Omar’s criticism of the past excesses of U.S. foreign policy, it is not the cause of our immigration crisis. Omar is deliberately misleading people when she makes such claims. By appealing to the general unpopularity of U.S. foreign policy (unpopular everywhere but within Washington, D.C., of course) Omar avoids having to address the uncomfortable realities of mass migration which are really to blame for the current crisis.
More dastardly, though, is the fact that Omar is essentially scapegoating the American people; in effect, blaming the victims of illegal immigration, for the problem of illegal immigration. The only people responsible for illegal immigration are the bureaucrats who allow for it to occur, the business leaders who encourage it, and the migrants themselves who benefit from it.
Until President Trump not only builds his wall but gets Congress on board with a complete revision of every aspect of U.S. immigration policy, the United States will continue to decline in disturbingly similar ways that Europe has declined.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1155807152-e1564015026103.jpg300534Brandon J. Weicherthttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngBrandon J. Weichert2019-07-24 21:02:332019-07-31 14:22:51Ilhan Omar Blames America for Illegal Immigration
Center for American Greatness • Donald Trump • Foreign Policy • Immigration • Post
As we close in to just a little over a year away from the 2020 elections, there is no clearer difference between Democrats and Donald Trump when it comes to law and order than illegal immigration. Take, for example, the Democrats’ outrage at recent “raids” by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service. If you were just listening to Democrats’ rhetoric, you would have thought masked storm troopers were breaking into the homes of American citizens in the dead of night, ripping families apart, sending people away never to be seen again.
Of course that’s not even close to what happened.
In reality, law enforcement agents are simply apprehending illegal aliens who have received their final deportation notices and yet remain in the country. That means that these illegals have had the full array of due process, have gone before judges who have heard their cases, and have had their claims rejected.
ICE is also removing illegals with criminal records, yet Democrats would have you think we’re dealing with the leading lights of the immigrant community. We’re not, but that’s hardly the point. If our government does not enforce these final deportation orders, what’s the point in pretending we have immigration laws?
The good news about the debate surrounding immigration is that Democrats have dropped all pretense of supporting the rule of law or favoring American citizens. From healthcare for illegals to decriminalizing illegal entry, Democrats are advocating the loss of national sovereignty through open-border policies while giving the green light for more people to enter the country illegally. One would be forgiven for thinking the Democrats running in 2020 are running to represent illegals and not the American people.
What’s troubling is that these Democrats, and let’s face it, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans are doing exactly what the northern triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala want. As Bloomberg News reported last month, those countries have been slashing their social welfare programs for years in an effort to balance budgets, reduce crime, and drive out their poorest citizens. These countries have encouraged the poor to leave and have even helped facilitate it. People involved in foreign aid to Central America have confirmed this to me, saying that this behavior has been going on for over a decade. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that “Guatemala is now the largest source of illegal immigrants coming to the U.S.” with many coming for purely economic reasons.
By some accounts, due to our broken asylum laws, upwards of one million Central Americans will come to this country this year, the overwhelming majority of them illegally. Why? Beyond the economic reasons and our loophole-riddled system, it’s because we have a major political party promising them healthcare, social welfare services, and encouraging them to come all while the other major party stands by, feckless and doing nothing.
With our current approach we are endorsing and empowering the northern triangle countries to continue with their bad behavior. But we’re also telling the cartels, human smugglers, and sex traffickers that this country doesn’t enforce laws designed to combat their abuse of children, their violations of human rights, or, for that matter, laws meant to protect the American people.
There is no doubt that the southern border should be controlled, that the American people have a right to national sovereignty and have the right to decide who comes into our country. There is absolutely a need for a physical wall in as many places as possible. The visa program should be reformed, our asylum loopholes fixed, and we should have e-verify along with all the other reforms needed to address illegal immigration.
But we must also address why this is happening; all these reforms, border security and a border wall are really just addressing the effects, not the cause. Until we address the northern triangle’s economic model and encourage economic opportunity in those countries we will never fully succeed in addressing the flow of illegal immigrants into this country.
Trump is on the right track in stopping doing the things that don’t work—for example cutting foreign aid, which only exacerbates the problem. There are those who say we must keep giving foreign aid to these countries and that all of this financial support will eventually fix these problems. That’s absurd. It is the very definition of insanity to continue doing the same thing and expect different results. We have plowed billions of dollars into Central America over the last decade. For what? To see a massive increase in illegal immigration.
Even this week, Trump is threatening to crack down on Guatemala, tweeting:
….Tariffs, Remittance Fees, or all of the above. Guatemala has not been good. Big U.S. taxpayer dollars going to them was cut off by me 9 months ago.
Unlike Guatemala, El Salvador’s leaders appear to realize they can and must be better. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele this month said: “Folks don’t flee their houses as a result of they wish to. They flee their houses as a result of they really feel they should. They fled El Salvador, they fled our nation. It’s our fault.”
Trump must tell these countries that if they are interested in real economic growth and giving their people a reason to stay, he will work with them if that’s what they truly want. He will work to bring private investment if these countries will make themselves attractive by enforcing the rule of law, ensuring secure contracts, and truly cracking down on corruption and graft.
In the meantime, Trump should use every tool at his disposal to make it clear to these countries that they are no longer going to send their people here for us to provide the social welfare programs and economic opportunities that they refuse to secure for their citizenry. Those days are over.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1060408412-e1563926592763.jpg300534Ned Ryunhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngNed Ryun2019-07-23 21:02:372019-07-23 17:03:50Address the Real Cause of Central American Migration
Big Media • Democrats • Donald Trump • Immigration • Post
Recently we had confirmation of what every sensible observer has long known: the media narrative about a Trumpian reign of terror at the border is absolute nonsense.
Statistics from the Border Patrol confirm that the number of deaths of border-crossers in 2017 and 2018 were close to an all-time low. This comes despite intense mainstream media attention paid to each and every border death in recent weeks and months, and especially the deaths of a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande. The press has been covering these deaths as though they were unprecedented. In reality, many more illegal immigrants died during the Obama years—provoking complete media indifference. Odd, no?
In addition, while the press has focused on internal government documents and eyewitness reports indicating problems in detention facilities caused by overcrowding, it has failed to put these allegations of poor treatment—sometimes blown out of proportion, as when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called them “concentration camps”—into proper context.
Whenever the border is inundated with migrants, the resources of ICE, Border Patrol, and the Department of Health and Human Services inevitably are stretched thin. Some agency standards are therefore not met. This was true under Obama no less than under Trump. The difference? The failures and missteps of government agencies under Obama were a nonissue for the media. Today, they are treated as a travesty, proof of President Trump’s alleged racism, and a national disgrace—despite the improvements in migrant services that the Trump Administration has achieved.
What changed? The insurgent attitude of the media changed, of course. Now its mission is to topple Trump’s presidency, by any means necessary.
Likewise, the separation of migrant children from their parents or guardians after their apprehension by U.S. authorities received little media attention when it occurred regularly during Obama’s tenure. In addition, the constant and ongoing separation of incarcerated U.S. citizens from their children is of no interest to our corporate leftist press. The occasional and temporary separation of illegal immigrant parents from their children under Trump is, by contrast, treated as a human rights emergency.
In the same vein, the brisk pace of deportations under President Obama elicited little outrage from the media, while deportations under President Trump, which are occurring at a lower rate, are pitched as an all-encompassing, indiscriminate dragnet ensnaring all “immigrants.”
This counterfactual—or, to put it more succinctly, “fake”—reportage, indicating a massive increase in U.S. government-sponsored inhumanity at the border and in immigration enforcement, is paralleled in its sheer disingenuousness by the media’s faulty analysis of “Russiagate.” Despite the lack of evidence to indicate any illegal or nefarious connections between the 2016 Trump campaign, the Trump Administration, and Russia, the press repeated unconfirmed rumors and idle speculation so incessantly that it convinced a significant portion of the American people that their president is, in fact, an agent of a hostile foreign power. A neat trick.
The truth, of course, is that the only thing remarkable about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia is that there were exceedingly few of them. In fact, the Trump campaign was the least compromised, in terms of foreign connections and entanglements, of any major party presidential campaign in recent memory.
Trump, after all, was an outsider, as were many of his campaign staff. An insider campaign like that of Hillary Clinton, by contrast, of necessity included numerous officials with a long history of Russian, and other foreign, connections. And yet the media never disclosed this important context, so that its false narrative of “Trump-Russia ties” would seem more credible.
At the border, in terms of Russiagate, and with respect to a litany of other domestic and foreign policy issues, the media has chosen to forfeit its credibility and to report the news deceptively—all in an effort to foment support for the impeachment of Donald Trump, or, as a fallback, his decisive defeat in 2020.
One is tempted to say that the gentlemen (and ladies) of the press must be “lying” about Trump and the news in general. Lying, however, requires conscious and intentional falsehoods, whereas the reality, in a depressing number of cases, appears to be that the media believes its own “spin.” That is, reporters and news editors are so profoundly debilitated by Trump Derangement Syndrome that their capacity to distinguish truth from falsities has all but evaporated. They believe every distortion and fabrication about Trump, in other words, for no better reason than because they want to.
Whether the media is “lying” or not, however, is irrelevant in two senses: either way, their reportage is false, and in addition it is worse than useless, because it is doing permanent damage to American democracy and to the image of this country abroad.
The only remedy? The American people must switch off CNN and MSNBC, and cancel their subscriptions to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Only abject commercial failure can kill off these journalistic abominations, which is what they so richly deserve.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/Waddy-e1563841000100.png300534Nicholas L. Waddyhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngNicholas L. Waddy2019-07-22 21:02:142019-07-22 17:17:08Smoke and Mirrors at the Border
America • Center for American Greatness • Congress • Donald Trump • Immigration • Post
Illegal immigration numbers remain at levels triple that of previous years, and Congress continues to bicker, foot stomp, other otherwise ignore the problem. In the face of this, the Trump Administration released its latest attempt to bring the border crisis under control.
Under new rules issued last week, migrants will now be required to seek asylum in at least one country they pass through on their way north. In other words, to qualify for asylum in the United States, Hondurans and Salvadorans would first have to apply for—and be denied—asylum in Guatemala or Mexico.
The response from critics was predictable. “These new regulations are illegal and flout our asylum laws,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted on Tuesday. In a press release, the ACLU stated that the “Trump Administration is trying to unilaterally reverse our country’s legal and moral commitment to protect those fleeing danger,” right after they vowed to file a lawsuit to fight the change. U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, described the regulations as “xenophobic and racist.”
None of them, however, acknowledged a key feature of the new rules: they put the United States in compliance with exactly the way the rest of the world handles the flow of refugees between borders.
Under international law, the Dublin Regulation stipulates that migrants seeking asylum are required to claim it in the first safe country they enter. The basis of this rule prevents migrants from using the asylum process simply to shop for a preferred destination, because it assumes that if migrants truly are seeking shelter from persecution, they will stop in the first place they find relief.
Passing through another country without seeking asylum undercuts any claim made upon arrival at the U.S. border. For example, a Honduran who claims he was forced to flee due to political persecution has no compelling reason to go further than Mexico. He obviously has no credible reason to fear he will be persecuted by the Mexican government. Thus, ignoring Mexico’s asylum process is prima facie evidence that a claim for asylum in the U.S. is bogus.
If this rule is racist and xenophobic, then so apparently is the prevailing legal standard in Europe. And so is our similar agreement with Canada, which has been in place since 2004.
Why Are These Rules Necessary? A key feature of this ongoing border crisis is the exploitation of the asylum process by thousands of illegal crossers, which has resulted in a backlog of over 900,000 immigration cases and years of wait time.
Under federal law, to be granted asylum an alien must prove that he faces persecution, or has a “well-founded fear of persecution,” in his native country “on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Migrants claiming asylum are given an initial screen by Customs and Border Patrol agents, but then their claim must be heard by a judge. Given the years-long wait time, migrants are generally released into the country. By the time they show up for their hearing—if they do—many of them have been in the United States for years.
Migrants increasingly have figured out how to make this dysfunctional system work for them. Show up, claim asylum, get released. Come with a child, and the process is further expedited due to federal rules that prevent the detention of children for more than 20 days.
Border interviews confirm that while many migrants are fleeing violence, their primary goal in getting to the United States is economic. Many male migrants say they intend to secure work in the United States to send money back home, and in many cases have family already in the country and jobs lined up. At the same time, many don’t intend to stay in the United States permanently; they plan to work for a time before returning home.
In other words, these are largely economic migrants using the asylum process—designed to protect people fleeing persecution—to gain entry to the United States to make money.
Migrants exploiting the system in this way create huge backlogs that prevent true asylees from having the expedited access to necessary relief. But even that definition has been stretched by judges.
With such a loose standard and nearly guaranteed release into the country, is it any wonder asylum claims have increased 1,700 percent in the last decade?
Congress Could Change All of This Democrats are seething with indignation and immigration groups have already sued the administration over the new rule.
As with the furor over the immigration crisis, however, Congress has the power to change the situation. Congress could change the asylum laws, to make them more restrictive, or more generous. Congress could give Border Patrol and the Department of Health and Human Services more resources to address conditions in the squalid detention facilities. Congress could also beef up enforcement resources to go after the cartels who are reaping billions of dollars from trafficking in drugs and people.
Instead, the House Democrats spent last week passing a resolution to condemn a tweet, voting to hold Trump Administration officials in contempt, and trying (and failing) to pass a resolution of impeachment. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in the Senate spent last week voting on tax treaties that would largely benefit corporations.
The same people who vilify the Trump Administration are, through their own inaction, leaving the White House to try and manage a daily overwhelmed and drastically under-resourced southern border.
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The immigration problem today demands a serious debate about how to remedy the situation for the good of the country and its citizens. What we get instead are misleading images and scandalous, politically-motivated allegations. Not surprisingly, the problems continue to worsen.
The rhetoric boiled over recently when Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) visited a border detention facility in Texas and proclaimed that migrants were being abused there. Among her more sensational claims was that migrants were being forced to drink water from toilets.
The charge was quickly debunked by Border Patrol agents who explained that the facilities use a combination toilet-and-sink fixture that provides potable water to those in custody. No matter, the perception was established among those who wanted to believe the charge: border agents are no better than the guards of Abu Ghraib, sadistic goons who mistreat the less fortunate for their own amusement. This is what passes for policy debate in the 21st century.
Ocasio-Cortez is correct that children are being abused at the border, but it has nothing to do with the Border Patrol or the Trump Administration.
In a recent interview, Mark Morgan, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, detailed how cartels are “renting children” to “fake families” who use the children to gain entry into the United States. The children are then returned to Mexico or Central America to be “recycled” and used to get more foreign nationals across the border.
The response to this news from anti-borders advocates is cold indifference, presumably because it doesn’t advance their agenda. Fake photos of migrant children in cages provoke outrage, but a criminal syndicate using children as immigration mules is of no great importance.
Our border is being overrun because Central Americans have received the message from anti-borders politicians, advocacy groups, and the media: get to the U.S. border with a child in tow and you’re as good as in. Detention facilities are overflowing and after three weeks you will be released into the interior of the country. A hearing date will be set months or years in the future, and there will be no penalty if you fail to appear. Find your way to one of America’s numerous sanctuary cities and you will be shielded from accountability.
Our leaders refuse to address the problem in a serious way because the status quo helps them politically.
For Democrats, endless migration means the bolstering of a permanent underclass. Poor, low-skilled migrants from developing countries, the theory goes, will make reliable voters for generous welfare programs and the kind of big government largesse that Democrats favor. It is a path to an infinite electoral majority.
For some Republicans, there is no problem to fix because mass migration means more bodies willing to work for low wages. The fact that flooding the zone with cheap labor will displace American workers is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all. Businesses will return the favor to anti-borders Republicans in the form of generous campaign donations. In Washington, that’s what’s known as a win-win. The only people who lose in both parties’ machinations are Americans seeking safe communities and the opportunity to earn a living.
If mass migration advocates were truly concerned about the plight of children as they claim, they would reexamine U.S. policies that incentivize foreign nationals to arrive at our border. They would demand a war on the cartels that traffic human beings as commodities and exploit children on a grand scale.
That neither of these things is happening speaks volumes about the true agenda of those who point their fingers at the purported cruelty of America, while the real humanitarian crisis is ignored. Americans and our neighbors to the south deserve better.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1159806888-e1563664982362.jpg300534Brian Lonerganhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngBrian Lonergan2019-07-20 21:01:422019-07-31 14:44:24After AOC’s Toilet Hysteria, Real Abuse at the Border Is Ignored
America • Identity Politics • Immigration • Post • The Left
Few issues so clearly separate those who care about America from those who do not like immigration.
In recent days, Democrats have advised illegal immigrants to defy the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service, suggested decriminalizing illegal entry, and even embraced free healthcare for illegal immigrants. Democrats applauded the Trump Administration’s decision to abandon the citizenship question on the 2020 census—calling it vindication for “democracy” —but denounced the ICE raids on illegal aliens with deportation orders.
While claiming fealty to the United States, the Democrats have all but proudly declared they are for open borders and against the rights and interests of American citizens. They have reached a consensus that American citizenship is a meaningless abstraction and an unearned privilege that effectively must be abolished—if not by law, then by ignoring the existence and unique rights of American citizens qua citizens.
Peel back the sentimental platitudes (does anyone really think families shouldn’t stay together?) and the Democrats’ take on immigration reveals a profound betrayal. They are more concerned with the welfare of illegal immigrants than with that of the citizens of the country they were elected to serve. By seeking to abolish American citizenship, Democrats are withdrawing from the most fundamental commitment of politics: to secure the good of the people.
Democrats have been blurring the line between citizens and non-citizens for a long time, but their opposition to the citizenship question put their true view in rather stark terms. Throughout the census battle, Democrats accused the White House of having political, “racist” motivations, as if citizenship is only distinguished from alien status in fascist regimes.
The citizenship question was political, of course, but only in the most rudimentary way. It was political in the sense that nations are political entities comprised of citizens. It was political in the sense that politics is about justice, and justice is about the common good.
It’s not surprising that a majority of Americans support the citizenship question. Americans know that discounting citizenship would be to their detriment. This is not “white supremacy,” it’s Plato and Aristotle. The Left is spurning Politics 101: the end of politics is the virtue and prosperity of citizens, a good which is impossible to pursue without first recognizing that there exists a citizenry for whom it is the purpose of politics to seek their good.
If counting citizenship is racist, then politics serves no purpose. The Left’s rejection of American citizenship, therefore, is a retreat from any obligation to care for America, its people, and its future.
Who Benefits? Take a second to consider what a perverse, profoundly awful idea this is: people have no right to know who lives in their nation. By the same token, since there is no citizenry, the nation has no duty to care for its people. The logical consequence of abolishing citizenship is that America is an abstraction, not a real place, that its citizens are owed nothing, least of all the protection of their government.
Who might benefit from the abolition of citizenship? Certainly not the majority of citizens. Democrats say that counting citizenship is a political ploy by the Right, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Democrats are the ones throwing their countrymen under the bus for political power.
The Left insists that the real purpose of counting citizenship on the census is to intimidate immigrants, resulting in a skewed count in liberal, urban areas, the same ones where Democrats just so happen to concentrate. But what is this, if not a candid admission that Democrats no longer care to hide that they attract illegal immigrants for political reasons? The assumption is that illegal immigrants are here, and they’re here to stay, and that’s final.
This is all about power for the Democrats. But their cynical power grab intersects with the interests of America’s ruling class, to the great detriment of Americans. America’s elites are in a hurry to drop the mess their failed leadership created. Instead of listening to Americans demanding an end to illegal immigration, they plan to immiserate them more.
Rejecting citizenship allows the ruling class to relinquish responsibility for the ruled. If citizens don’t count, then America’s leaders have no particular obligation to care for them. If there is no difference between a naturalized citizen and an immigrant who has the sheer luck to avoid a court order, then Americans are owed no protection, least of all from the ravages of mass migration itself.
Americans Last
This retreat only formalizes and legitimizes the decades of neglectful leadership that led to the election of Donald Trump. But rather than address the suffering of Americans on the decline in an age of runaway globalization, industrial decline, and open borders, Democrats want to accelerate these trends.
Democrats say that not enforcing immigration law makes “everyone safer,” but this is a brazen lie. Mass migration is great for Democrats seeking political capital, billionaires seeking cheap labor, and poor families from Central America seeking opportunity, but not for most Americans. The Left is not suggesting any practical limitations on immigration. This is no mystery: liberal elites know that illegal immigrants aren’t coming to their ZIP codes or competing for their jobs.
Then comes the inevitable objection: America is a land of plenty, with more than enough to take care of every American citizen and illegal migrant alike. But on a practical level, it is not possible to prioritize the competing interests of America’s declining middle class and an endless stream of poor laborers from around the world. As a matter of principle, it can hardly be in the national interest for Americans to be denied the distinction of national belonging.
Rejecting citizenship undermines national identity, cultural cohesion, and democracy at a core level. Americans are placed last, before a numberless multitude from around the world. Not all of the Left’s policy goals are, by definition, set up to work against American citizens—aspects of the left’s interventionist economics have grown more appealing to conservatives of Tucker Carlson’s variety—but their rejection of citizenship denies the existence of American citizens and their unique rights qua citizens.
To secure the good of American citizens, it is right and just that the law protect them from exploitation. To do that, the law is obligated to distinguish those who it exists to protect.
Remarkably, Democrats cheer the abolition of citizenship as an advance for “democracy,” but this is an absurd inversion of the truth: abolishing citizenship disenfranchises Americans in the most treacherous way.
Democrats are very good at making their own losing of power sound like a crime against humanity. Counting citizenship is “white supremacy.” Not abolishing the Electoral College is “voter suppression.” But here is a real attempt to quash democracy in the open.
Like the drive to abolish the Electoral College and the more theoretical question of eliminating the Senate, the leftist drive to do away with citizenship is motivated by a desire to drop already disenfranchised Americans, namely, “bigots” who still believe that America is a distinct nation. The liberal elite wants to suppress these Americans for good, to strip them of political representation so they are powerless to protest the brazen theft of their country.
Erasing Sovereignty Without citizenship, American democracy has no meaning. But the Left understands “democracy” to mean the tyranny of the mob, the revolutionary progress of an abstracted, universal humanity. If there is any principle other than power that drives the Left’s abolition of citizenship, it is a dogmatic loyalty to this universal humanity and its “human rights.”
Rallying behind a founding myth which brands America an evil and undeveloped place, the left saddles Americans with a generational debt to be paid by accepting limitless migrants who, it is imagined, will improve the nation and bring it closer to its true destiny as a “nation of immigrants.”
Immigrants are imagined to have a universal human right to entry that erases the rights and sovereignty of Americans. By this same token, Americans have an obligation to care for the citizens of other countries, but not their own. The suffering multitudes of the world are owed health care, a job, every right and accommodation, but downwardly mobile Americans suffering the consequences of having their nation stolen deserve nothing.
There are no nations or citizens, only an abstracted universal hodge podge, mere “people” living within arbitrary borders. America is just a big shopping mall with a fire sale. There is nothing more to tie the nation together than shaggy abstractions, misty-eyed cliches about the Statue of Liberty and, more troubling, a compulsory hatred of America and its past. If this is all there is to unite the nation, then the country is lost. How could a country that resents its own history, that subordinates its citizens to claimants from half-way across the earth, that welcomes people who hate it and sends them to the halls of power, expect to last?
A Stunning Betrayal
The argument in favor of counting citizenship is simple and robust: every nation has an obligation to take care of its citizens. Counting citizenship is about securing the common good, about seeking justice for the people of the United States. Only the most cynical person would reject the political purpose of nations, or even the notion that nations exist. But that is what the Left is doing.
The Right opposes what follows from the Left’s sentimental platitudes about family unity: that the welfare of illegal immigrant families should trump the national interest.
Families belong together, and so do nations.
If Democrats really want to help America’s middle class, they can start by acknowledging that the American people are sovereign, that they have a right to enjoy the protection of their own government, and that they are owed a responsive government that listens when they speak. Americans voted to end illegal immigration, so why are Democrats enabling it?
The Left’s rejection of citizenship is a stunning betrayal whose long-term implications should trouble all Americans. Their position is not just absurd, it’s unjust. If they won’t support their own citizens, what are they doing in government?
Photo Credit: Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
In January, three new telegenic, outspoken, and self-proclaimed “progressive” congresswomen took their seats: Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Omar, a former refugee from Somalia who has maintained political connections there, brought to Capitol Hill her baggage of Islamist political affiliations and credible claims of immigration fraud; Tlaib, born to Palestinian immigrant parents in Dearborn, Michigan, proved so devoted to Israel’s destruction as to be dumped even by J-Street. Ocasio-Cortez, born to Puerto Rican parents in the Bronx and raised in sheltered Westchester, is a political novice who won a thin primary that her opponent, the incumbent congressman, basically failed to contest.
None of these women represents the mainstream of the Democratic party of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama as Americans knew it prior to 2016. On July 14, Mike Allen published on the news website Axiosdata from a May 2019 poll that showed that only 22 percent of voters in the poll had a favorable view of AOC, and 9 percent (“not a typo,” Allen notes) has a favorable view of Rep. Omar.
Unsurprisingly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), with a clearer view and more concern for what wins national elections, has tried to marginalize them together with Rep. Ayanna Presley (D-Mass.), who up until now was not nationally notorious. As might have been expected, AOC responded with charges that Pelosi was “dogwhistling” racism.
Into this struggle, which the licensed journalists at Salon have instructed us is “not a catfight,” President Trump has inserted himself:
So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly……
….and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how….
….it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!
The man from Mars might be astonished at how many commentators who previously reveled in calling the president “Drumpf” rushed to levy charges of racism, but we Earthlings are more inured. Some even among Republicans or other clearer thinkers are sure that by weighing in, Trump “stupidly” reunited the quarreling Democrats.
The picture of politics these pundits have in mind is something like this:
Everybody is already either a Democrat or Republican, an opponent or a supporter of the president’s reelection.
There are no voters whom some Democrats can appeal to precisely by distancing themselves from other Democrats.
There are no voters whom some Republicans can appeal to precisely by distancing themselves from other Republicans.
One wonders what these pundits think Pelosi was trying to do by criticizing the “squad” of four progressive representatives. In the real world of politics, politicians usually win elections by appealing not just to committed partisans, but by playing to the less committed and unaffiliated and by distancing themselves from the less popular elements in their own parties.
Trump won in 2016 by distancing himself from Chamber of Commerce Republicans and the neoconservatives of the George W. Bush Administration, thus attracting working-class Americans, including more Hispanics and African-Americans than Romney could. Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996 in part thanks to his Sister Souljah moment, appealing to moderates by distancing himself from the race hustlers, and, as president, making inner cities safer and more prosperous by cracking down on “superpredators.”
Now if national mainstream Democrats such as Pelosi have to try to distance themselves from the extremists in their own party, national Republicans such as Trump compete for swing voters by saddling national Democrats with the burden of supporting them. If Pelosi had refused Trump’s latest tweet gambit, she might have forfeited the partisan base and the extremist donors who helped send the squad to Congress in the first place.
This is the shallow politics of Trump’s tweets. I call it “shallow” because this analysis focuses on the targeting rather than the content. But the content, which of course the virtue-signallers on the Left and the self-proclaimed right-wing NeverTrumpers, distracted as they are by “racist” mantras don’t bother to read carefully. All of this points to deep issues in U.S. domestic and foreign affairs that ought to be on the table.
Immigrants to the Americas have always brought with them their old-world feuds and ideologies, and have passed them down, diluted by intermarriage and acculturation, to their children and grandchildren.
John Jay, of Huguenot origin, could not help but see Louis XVI and his courtiers as the heirs of the bigots who had driven his family to the New World. In negotiating with Britain and France, Jay acted in 1782-83 out of suspicions that his fellow American diplomats in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, themselves of transplanted English stock, never thought to entertain. Elected and responsible politicians have no choice but to take account of those passions, sometimes exploiting them, sometimes mitigating them, sometimes suppressing them, and sometimes simply calling them by name, as the prudent pursuit of the common good and the political survival of the individual leader demand.
But there is another side to that storm of troubles from faraway shores. As my Tel Aviv colleague Yossi Shain showed in his 1999 book, Marketing the American Creed Abroad, diaspora activists and politicians are part of networks that help export American ideals to their home countries.
This, too, is an old tradition. William Cobbett, an English immigrant to America who was one of the loudest voices among Federalists for prosecuting Jeffersonian Republicans for sedition and treason, upon returning to England was transformed by his American experience into a radical reformer who served two years in Newgate Prison for protesting Hanoverian repression.
Why, then, is it absurd in 2019 to imagine, as President Trump asks us in these three tweets to imagine, that Omar could become an inspiration for enlightened reform in Somalia, that Tlaib could have some beneficial effect among Palestinians in her parents’ native Ramallah, or that Ocasio-Cortez could help bring genuinely progressive government to an indebted and scandal-dogged Puerto Rico?
Those of us who cherish American ideals and institutions know exactly why it is absurd: because these three members of Congress were educated in American schools and universities to have contempt for Americans and American traditions. To their ethnic homelands, Omar, Tlaib, and Ocasio-Cortez would only export more hatred and derision of America as well as guaranteed-to-fail green socialism, but no worthy ideals or estimable practices.
For that corruption, virtually invisible when Shain was doing his research two decades ago, both unhyphenated and hyphenated Americans are to blame. It is the teachers of these representatives, and the parents and taxpayers who fund those teachers’ salaries, who have to answer for that failure to Americanize these otherwise impressive women.
Photo credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-803546522-e1563567234119.jpg300534Michael S. Kochinhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngMichael S. Kochin2019-07-19 13:16:382019-07-19 13:16:38Shallow Politics and Deep Politics
America • Democrats • Identity Politics • Immigration • Post • The Left
Many prominent liberals have ripped into Democratic candidates for sponsoring ideas too far from mainstream America. Their advice? Stop being so honest and start lying.
“Candidates are campaigning in an America of their own imagination—a bit to the left of Sweden,” columnist Richard Cohen said recently.
It is important, as Cohen understands, for Democrats to find a winning platform and a plan to win back the White House. Right now, their positions come off as extreme and probably make them unelectable.
He’s right. Only 13 percent of Americans want to make private health insurance illegal, while 55 percentof Californians think free healthcare for illegal immigrants would be going too far. Both of these positions have been endorsed by the Democratic Party.
And these radical positions raise more questions.
Would Democratic candidates raise their hands in support of illegal immigrants, or foreign nationals, voting in American elections? Will it ever be a good idea to enforce border policies?
What’s chilling is how ambiguous liberal commentators are. Should Democrats oppose extreme policies or should they just hide their extremism? It isn’t clear.
Writing for Mother Jones, Kevin Drum spends a lot of time explaining to Democrats what the people are seeing: “it’s hard to see much daylight between [Elizabeth] Warren’s plan and de facto open borders.”
But what should they do about it?
If Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) admits that his “new vision for America” requires increasing taxes on the middle class, that’s true enough. But is the advice that he should lie about this or that he should find a better way to promise the cake without the calories? It’s certainly never that he should moderate his position.
Most Democrats pledge to offer illegal immigrants government provided health care. And South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg thinks it’s sensible that the 11 million illegal aliens (by extremely conservative estimates) in our country should have the same access as American citizens.
But would Cohen and Drum have Mayor Pete lie about that in order to get the votes who don’t support it, or would they scale back and recommend real limits?
Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) thinks enforcing our immigration laws “is not reflective of America and our values, and it’s got to end.”
Would Cohen and Drum have her be dishonest about how she would change immigration? Or should she actually implement something even more generous than open borders when in office? Perhaps we should pay for their passage?
Anyone with eyes to see knows that today’s Democrats see no enemies to their left—they have removed any pretense of cloaking themselves in moderation and are showing voters their true plans for the country.
After all, if President Trump really is “Hitler,” as commentators like Cohen and Drum have recklessly suggested in the past, then no candidate could be too extreme to dampen their support. Not even the Bolsheviks.
Since the only change in the Democratic Party is a push toward further left-wing extremism, Liberals had better recommend that these candidates start lying now. If they wait till later, the mean orange man will make them pay.
Democrats have renewed their vows to unwavering support of open borders. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tussled last week with former Immigration and Customs Enforcement director Thomas Homan. After she described fence-hoppers as asylum seekers, Homan reminded her that they all have the option of presenting their asylum claims at the ports of entry. Her attempt at “gotcha” backfired.
Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) got tongue tied on “The View,” saying that she didn’t want to “decriminalize” illegal immigration, but that “we’re not going to treat people who are undocumented [and] cross the borders as criminals, that is correct.”
Most dramatically, the entire lot of Democrats running for president raised their hands in support of giving free healthcare to anyone who makes it into the country, legally or otherwise.
Is There a Crisis on the Border? Only a few short months ago, the Democrats mocked Trump for suggesting there was a crisis on the border. Now they agree there is a crisis, but they’re chiefly concerned with the conditions of the detainees. While kids every day are separated from parents who are caught with a bag of weed, and our prisons are chaotic nightmare worlds for nonviolent offenders, substantially better confinement conditions for illegal aliens are supposed to raise an alarm.
The problem does not end at the border. Dubious asylum claims benefit from our overly solicitous immigration courts, the purpose of which seems to be multiplying procedures and expending resources to keep every illegal immigrant here indefinitely. Many are released pending a final adjudication of their asylum claims. When they do show up after being released, their asylum claims rarely pass the straight face test. These people are desperate and poor, but they’re not Andrei Sakharov.
The Accident of Geography The fact that so many people are fighting to get into our country is not that surprising. We have an abundance of jobs, wealth, peace, stability, and technology largely absent from the Third World. Our “poor” are rich by global standards, and our lax interior enforcement ensures that many jobs are available for those who happen to break in.
While Europe is starting to deal with a similar problem, part of the reason America is particularly burdened arises from geography. Whereas Europe has the Mediterranean Sea acting as a natural moat from its Third World neighbors to the south, America and Mexico share the largest frontier on Earth between a First World and Third World country. Mexico itself has even poorer neighbors in Central America, who can blend in as they make their way north. All of these countries have deficient institutions that guarantee a great many of their inhabitants will live impoverished lives and seek a better life elsewhere.
The diverging fortunes of the United States and its Latin American neighbors is a cautionary tale. English colonization of North America began over 100 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, but the United States soon surpassed its neighbors to the South. The Anglo-Protestant, individualist, and liberty-oriented United States has always been very different from the Hispano-Catholic, hierarchical, and authoritarian world of Latin America. We can drink the water.
The two systems and peoples are now being thrown together through a mixture of legal and illegal immigration. More than 600 million people live in Latin America, and 150 million people in the rest of the world have expressed an interest in migrating to the United States. The ethnic mix, as well as social and political culture of the United States, is changing in the process. At first denied by defenders of mass immigration, the change to our demographics was then acknowledged, and finally employed as a triumphant boast against those uneasy with the scope and pace of the change.
The only reason America is wealthier, safer, and more powerful than its neighbors is because of our people, our culture, and our laws. But these things are not frozen in amber. Change the people, and the laws and culture will change too. Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar would not have been elected in the America of yesteryear, nor would their socialist and resentful, anti-white politics have been popular. Yet they are the archetype of America’s political future and a product of the new American people.
The Conservative Impulse One does not have to believe that the mix of people in America before 1965 was perfect to be uneasy with a massive and sudden changes to those numbers. One simply must be a conservative. The sheer number of legal and illegal immigrants has caused an impact that would not be present if there were only 10,000 or 100,000 immigrants per year. Instead, as we have seen, a rapid demographic revolution is fraught with risk and promises changes in culture, expectations, and other dimensions of a “way of life.” While the land, laws, history, and institutions are all important to our national character, people ultimately make the country.
The 1924 immigration restrictions are often maligned as hateful and prejudiced, but the formula made a lot of sense: it was designed to match the proportions of the people already living in the country. In other words, the pre-1965 immigration regime did not disrupt the basic nature of the country and its people by design. One does not have to be a white supremacist to want one’s country to remain more or less the same; it is a natural and conservative impulse.
While Republicans were arguing about marginal tax rates and school choice, the future was being remade under the steady influence of the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration law. Come 1990 the diversity visa began being awarded to completely random people, typically from impoverished Third World states. Massive numbers of relatives of immigrants were allowed through chain migration without regard to those relatives’ skills.
This is a revolution and, unlike earlier waves of immigrants, the highest proportion come from a single, impoverished region: Latin America.
Who? How Many? Before Trump, no one seemed to ask, “Who should come?” And, if they should come, how many? Again, 150 million worldwide would immigrate to the United States if permitted. This would be 50 percent of our current population. There is little reason to think the current rate of immigration is the right number (it’s too much) or that a much larger number guaranteed by the de facto open borders policy of the Democrats would be superior.
Setting aside the stresses on our culture and social capital, an artificially growing population is not good for the people already here. There are costs to growth uncaptured by the free market, such as congestion costs and rising real estate prices, as exemplified by the Dickensian “pod living” of workers in San Francisco.
Unlike earlier periods of migration, we also bear the burden of a large and generous welfare state, a system that is supposed to benefit our fellow citizens—that is, our struggling brothers and sisters. While the Democrats caused scandal at their debate by raising their hands for giving illegal immigrants free healthcare, a great many receive exactly that today by showing up at emergency rooms. This costs all of us a lot of money, as do the burdens of a large and non-English speaking population in our public schools. We cannot take care of everyone, and the situation is unsustainable.
The Democrats’ drive to decriminalize illegal entry suggests they think Americans are clamoring for more immigrants. But the 2016 election, as well as numerous surveys, show that Americans are uneasy with this state of affairs, and this becomes more pronounced when Americans have exposure to large immigrant populations. At some point demographics may provide the Democrats a permanent majority, but this is a dynamic situation, and legacy America is starting to act more like a bloc as its destiny becomes more imperiled.
The current immigration debate is mired in slogans and sentimentality. We are told that we are a nation of immigrants, as if that settles the matter for all time. The media and prominent Democrats complain that people who broke the law are treated like everyone else who breaks the law. These are not serious arguments.
The immigration problem and the immigration debate changes dramatically when the number is 100,000 a year, 1 million a year, or extended to the 150 million likely immigrants. As the saying goes, “quantity has a quality all its own.” Today, the total population of foreign born and their children is at least 70 million, or 1-in-5 people. Enough is enough.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1144141617-e1563323053447.jpg300534Christopher Roachhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngChristopher Roach2019-07-16 21:02:482019-07-17 09:00:08Immigration by the Numbers
America • Center for American Greatness • Democrats • Donald Trump • Identity Politics • Immigration • Post • The Left
I want Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu) to go back to the shithole country she came from.
And I want her to stay there.
I spent some time on the Internet looking for even one positive thing that Omar has said about America—but my search was in vain. Omar hates and despises her adoptive country unequivocally and unconditionally. She hates everything about America today, and she hates everything about the America of yesterday.
Maybe I missed a public statement where Omar praised America. But after looking through countless webpages and many gigabytes, I think I am on solid ground when I say: Ilhan Omar hates everything and everyone around her, except possibly her brother, whom she married, and perhaps the 9/11 terrorists who killed 3,000 people (“some people did something”—no biggie).
As an immigrant from the no-longer-with-us USSR, I believe I have as much moral authority as anyone to tell Omar: you should return to the country you represent and take up permanent residence there.
America can never measure up to Omar’s high standards—but no doubt Somalia will. Omar need not suffer in our land of toxic xenophobia, Islamophobia, racism, sexism, lookism and speciesism—because she can live out the rest of her life amidst the tolerance, understanding, and mutual respect that Somalis are famous for.
(For those interested, Somalia today is still a land mostly of anarchy, fundamentally not all that different from what you probably saw in “Black Hawk Down,” with a civil war, Islamic terrorists slaughtering civilians, corruption, hunger, poverty, torture, rape, refugee camps, and all the other usual things associated with that jewel of East Africa.)
This past week, President Trump once again detonated the brains of the Left, when he tweeted (without even naming names) that those who came here and enjoyed all the benefits of this country, but had nothing good to say about America, can go back to their original countries. The reaction from the Left was instantaneous and explosive: Racist! Sexist! Nativist! Islamophobe! Bad Man! Really Bad! Trump is Hitler! Trump is Mussolini! Trump is a Dictator! Trump is Satan! We hate Trump!
As an immigrant, I would like to tell Ilhan Omar: I love America. America gave my family and me opportunities I never would have had anywhere else. Unlike you, I am proud to call myself an American. America is incredible and special. My family has never asked for a handout—but what my parents and I have, we have because we grasped the opportunities offered and protected in our new country. For these opportunities, we are eternally grateful.
Twenty years ago, I went to the Vietnam War Memorial for the first time. Even though I didn’t immigrate to this country until 1978, five years after the Vietnam War ended, and even though I have no personal connection to any of the 58,212 names listed on the memorial, I felt the specialness of that place. The sacrifice of the men and women who fought and died for my country was worthy of the deepest respect and contemplation. I have no doubt that Omar, were she ever to go to the Vietnam War Memorial, would feel nothing.
As an immigrant, I can assure native-born Americans that Ilhan Omar does not speak for immigrants. Not for Russian-Jewish ones like me, not for (I am quite confident) Latinos, Asians or Europeans. Omar and the vitriol she constantly spews is not typical of immigrants who come here legally. So I salute President Trump for once again sticking a fork in the eye of the leftist PC crowd, and saying publicly what millions of people are thinking privately. Republicans agree with him. Independents agree with him. In fact, Trump just gave us all even more reasons to vote for him in 2020. And if Democrats don’t agree—who cares?
It is worth describing here a peculiar phenomenon that most Americans have never heard of, known to Jewish immigrants from the USSR by a mocking Russian word razocharovanty—“the disappointed ones.” These were people who had difficulty fitting in at the social level they were once used to—without passable English, the “careers” that were open to them were mostly at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. And so the razocharovanty wanted to go back to the USSR. As Joe Biden would say, “no joke.”
They didn’t hate America, but they didn’t see themselves as part of the American future, either. They missed their motherland, warts and all—and with rose-colored glasses, the warts didn’t look so warty. Nostalgia isn’t rational—it’s an emotion that exists outside rationality.
And then, miraculously, they got their wish! As a propaganda ploy, the Soviet government permitted the razocharovanty to return! They even chartered a plane to take them back—all roughly 200 of them. The Soviet state restored their pensions (maybe $50 a month in those days) and gave them apartments to live in (no small thing, in a land of socialist scarcity where the government devoted all its energies to building tanks and missiles).
Within months, almost all of the razocharovanty were back in Brooklyn. Spending time in the Soviet Union was the single best way to cure nostalgia. America, suddenly, looked better than ever.
And this brings us back to the heroine of our current events. I want to add my voice to President Trump’s recommendation: Dear Ilhan Omar, you should go back to Somalia. Forever. America’s freedoms are my freedoms—but you care nothing for them. America’s enemies are my enemies—but you think more highly of them than you think of your fellow citizens. America’s allies are my allies—but you hate our allies. America’s heroes are my heroes—but nothing they ever fought and died for, you find heroic or even worthy of a mention. America’s history is something I read and study—but you find nothing there to be proud of.
Ilhan Omar, when you go back to Somalia, we won’t miss you.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1130744895-e1563324128673.jpg300534George S. Bardmesserhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngGeorge S. Bardmesser2019-07-16 20:31:082019-07-17 19:41:08The Congresswoman Representing Somalia
America • Center for American Greatness • Democrats • Immigration • Political Parties • Post • Republicans
The late Edward Abbey, an irascible and irreverent American environmentalist, took aim at the immigration ideologues in terms still relevant for our time: “The conservatives love their cheap labor; the liberals love their cheap cause.” In other words, if the Republican Party and the Democratic Party can silently agree on one thing, it is that immigration is good, and more is often better. But the latest report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform reveals just how costly inviting the world can be.
The FAIR report reveals that “our economy is hemorrhaging much-needed cash each year as a result of money sent to other countries”—that is, remittances—“primarily by foreign-born workers in the United States,” to the tune of $150 billion. “The $150 billion a year sent out of the country each year is money that does not circulate through our own economy, support local businesses, create new jobs, or generate revenues for local, state, and federal governments.”
But that massive figure, combined with the $50.1 billion in taxpayer dollars doled out as foreign aid by the U.S. government, is just the tip of the Third World iceberg. The line between charity and masochism has been long since crossed.
In my hometown of San Diego, California, untold thousands of illegal aliens live in public housing. San Diego is home to the nation’s largest population of homeless veterans; and, while homelessness in general continues to grow, the Golden State spends $23 billion in tax dollars on services consumed by illegal aliens annually. Meanwhile, across the country, hundreds of thousands of American citizens are forced to wait months or years for a room. The loss of tax revenue in remittances could be used to pay for the public services consumed by aliens in the United States, the total cost of which FAIR estimates to be $116 billion. Oklahoma taxes remittances at 1 percent—the only state to do so—generating a revenue of $13 million. But this is chump change compared to what foreign countries are taking to the bank on the backs of Americans.
Remittances account for between 11 and 20 percent of the GDP of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—the countries sending caravans of their own to the United States. Indeed, radio advertisements in Central America encourage locals to flee to the United States illegally. Long before then, the Mexican government published pamphlets with instructions for locals on how to enter the U.S. illegally and live here without being detected.
For banana republics whose chief export is cheap labor, remittances mean never having to say you’re sorry for their dysfunctional political, social, and economic systems. “Rather than remaining at home and invigorating local economies,” FAIR notes, “these citizens put their expertise and labor to use in other countries, like the United States.” But unsavory types, too, benefit from this scheme.
Human smugglers transporting people from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras also do well for themselves, raking in between $200 million to $2.3 billion in 2017. The only people not cashing in, of course, are the American people.
Abbey’s shot at “liberals and conservatives,” of course, was not aimed at everyday Middle Americans, but at the ideologues of political parties, for whom immigration is merely a means to an end. The “American Dream” cannot come to immigrants at the expense of existing Americans and their dreams; immigration should benefit the American people first and foremost. And yet clearly not everyone agrees.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson took up the issue in his typically salient way in a recent monologue. “The overwhelming majority of Republicans want a secure border and less immigration. That’s why they voted for Donald Trump,” he said. “Two and a half years later, the border is more porous than ever. A tide of humanity is flooding in illegally. Republicans in Congress have done almost nothing to help. Why?”
The obvious culprit here might be the Democratic Party that has, to be sure, undermined every attempt to secure the border and enforce immigration laws. After all, Democrats have just introduced of the Homeland Security Appropriations Act, that, if enacted, will cut border security funding, reduce detention capacity, and eliminate the procedure of detaining “family” units. Carlson, however, sets his sights on big capitalism and its Republican Party enablers who, in reality, have reached a consensus with the Democratic Party when it comes to immigration.
It was big business that provided the driving force behind Senate Bill 1747, nicknamed the “Green Light Bill,” that will require the New York Department of Motor Vehicles to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens. Polls repeatedly have shown that many in the Empire State oppose issuing licenses to illegal aliens, and now some clerks in upstate New York are refusing to do it, even though Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed SB 1747 into law. The Business Council, a corporate special interest group, was among the bill’s most powerful supporters.
On the other side of the aisle and on the national level, about 140 Republicans co-sponsored H.R. 1044, the “Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019.” H.R. 1044 is a green card giveaway for roughly 300,000 Indian contract workers; who will, of course, take those jobs from middle-class Americans. Though the bill is Democratic Party legislation and backed by Silicon Valley—not exactly a region known for smiling on Middle America—congressional Republicans don’t seem too bothered about lining up to put their names on it.
Carlson specifically called out Charles and David Koch, the GOP’s wealthiest powerbrokers. Amnesty, Carlson notes, is a top legislative priority for the Kochs, and a policy that they consistently pressure Republicans in Congress to enact—against the will of the majority of Republican voters. “America first? The Kochs find the very notion absurd, if not fascist,” says Carlson of the libertarian duo. But if congressional Republicans and Democrats have achieved a pro-immigration consensus, who, then, is for Middle America?
The economic hemorrhaging incurred by remittances, the immense cost of foreign aid, the burden of services consumed by non-citizens, and green card giveaways that hurt American workers, all these things help us put a number on the otherwise unquantifiable damage that is being done to our communities, towns, cities, and country by immigration. But these staggering figures are ultimately symptoms of a political environment in which regular Americans have lost control of their own country—this is the real cost of immigration. There is no better visual cue of this fact than the tearing down of the American flag by militants at an ICE detention facility, and the hoisting of the Mexican flag on American soil.
The reality is, as long as we place ourselves beneath the yoke of “cheap labor” and the “cheap cause” of ideologues, the immigration status quo will continue to hollow out what little already remains of our way of life.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/Gonzalez-e1563233787352.png300534Pedro Gonzalezhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngPedro Gonzalez2019-07-15 21:00:282019-07-16 20:30:57Who Is for Middle America?
America • Center for American Greatness • Congress • Democrats • Immigration • Post • Republicans
In a rare moment of bipartisanship last week, Democrats and Republicans joined hands to make a small, but fundamental change to our immigration system. Not to provide critically needed updates or wholesale reforms, but, rather, to toss a sop to the billionaires of Big Tech.
Thanks to furious lobbying from Microsoft, Amazon, Hewlett Packard, Equifax, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, IBM, Cisco, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Eric Schmidt of Google’s group FWD.us, among others, the House this week passed H.R. 1044, the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019.
The bill, which was supported by 140 Republicans and 224 Democrats, removes the per-country cap for employment-based immigration visas. In other words, it makes it easier for the tech giants and billionaires of Silicon Valley to hire cheap foreign labor over highly skilled Americans.
Current law requires that no country receive more than 7 percent of the employment-based green cards issued each year. This ensures that employment-based visas are limited to a global pool of talent in a wide variety of occupational sectors—and prevents one or two countries from dominating the distribution.
The practical effect is that individuals from countries with high demand for U.S. green cards—primarily China and India—can end up waiting years for their turn.
The wait is exacerbated by the fact that chain migration (which allows legal permanent residents to sponsor immediate and extended family members) accounts for about half of each country’s numerical limit being used each year. According to Department of Homeland Security data, in 2017 the family and employment-based country cap amounted to 25,620 slots from any single country.
H.R. 1044 seeks to address this by scrapping the caps for employment visas and raising the cap for family visas to 15 percent, without changing the total number of green cards available.
Tech companies may be celebrating that they can now more easily lay off American workers (though not before making sure they train their cheaper, foreign replacements), but there are other serious problems with this approach.
First among them is this is exactly the opposite of the goals President Trump touted during his campaign. “America First” requires a deference to domestic employment. The jobs in question are not the low-skilled labor jobs that Americans supposedly “will not do.”
Rather, these are the highly skilled tech jobs that current students are being told they can obtain, if only they take advantage of government programs promoting degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Why is one area of the government funding domestic STEM degrees with the promise of tech jobs, while the other is making it easier to undermine those positions with foreign labor?
Second, this change to our immigration system is hardly taken up on behalf of the interests of all Americans. The bill is a sop to Big Tech. Consider that Silicon Valley and their associates are those waiting for the green cards from China and India—with India getting about 25 percent of all the professional employment green cards each year.
Under the provisions of this bill, India would get more than 90 percent of the professional employment green cards, for at least the next 10 years. In other words, green cards would be unavailable to individuals from all other parts of the world, in every other occupation, for at least a decade. This is hardly fair, nor is it reflective of the American approach of welcoming immigrants from everywhere—not just one or two countries.
Finally, this entire debate is reflective of the blissful ignorance Congress chooses to live in when it comes to immigration. The entire system—how we handle both legal and illegal immigration—is in dire need of reform. But rather than focus on these major issues, Congress is content to pass tiny, rifle shot approaches that make small tweaks while doing nothing to solve the bigger issue, and in truth, they only complicate it.
This is all the more frustrating considering that the Trump administration has proposed a substantive, merit-based reform system that, if adopted, would eliminate the need for a per country cap system altogether—and, as Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies has put it, “would not reward the exploitative employers who thrive on the existing system.”
But all of this has not stopped the House of Representatives from stupidly patting themselves on the back for the bill’s passage, despite how wildly out of touch it makes them look.
This is the swamp President Trump promised to drain—where Big Tech can shell out dump trucks of money to make the immigration system work for them, but where the American people have no one who seems interested in making it work for us.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-491847034-e1563052054317.jpg300534Rachel Bovardhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngRachel Bovard2019-07-13 21:01:052019-07-13 14:26:22High-Skilled Immigrants Act Is a Sop to Big Tech
Center for American Greatness • Democrats • Immigration • Post • The Left
The woke social media over the Fourth of July was something to behold. On America’s birthday, posts were full Trump-baby angst, references to illegal militias, treasonous criminality, and concentration camps, and carefully styled photos of summer desserts that spelled out “close the camps” on top of seasonal fruit.
Because you know what you do if you think child migrants are actually being tortured by your government and dying in concentration camps? You channel all your first-world, virtue signaling rage into the creation of artsy and seasonally appropriate desserts that are just perfect for that People photoshoot.
But the misplaced rage was not limited to social media. In the annals of Wokes versus People Living in Reality, this week was one for the books. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), the avatar of lefty rage-emotes everywhere, visited the border and had a complete meltdown.
Ocasio-Cortez told reporters she “was not safe from the officers,” and that migrants were forced to drink out of toilets while being subject to “psychological warfare.”
“This has been horrifying so far,” she tweeted. “It is hard to understate the enormity of the problem. We’re talking systemic cruelty w/ a dehumanizing culture that treats them like animals.”
If what she’s saying is true—members of Congress being threatened for asking questions, migrants housed in World War II-style detention camps with only toilet water to drink, “mass atrocities” being perpetuated by the government—then we are indeed in a crisis.
But none of this is true. None of the migrants housed on the border are being held against their will. While Ocasio-Cortez provided no photos of the toilets from which she claims migrants are forced to drink, those familiar with border detention facilities suggest she is referring to this type of drinking facility which is connected to a toilet—but does not dispense actual toilet water from the faucet, as she claims. And, as former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson pointed out this week, the practice of holding migrants in “cages” after detention started under President Obama.
In fact, the entire statutory regime under which the Trump Administration is handling the border crisis is the same as it was under President Obama. Because, despite years of reasons to act, Congress has refused to change the laws governing immigration, the agencies in charge of handling it, or the resources available to them. The conditions at the border remain largely the same as they have been for years, and Border Patrol remains overwhelmed and undermined.
Reality Check: 2014 vs. 2019 This is not to say that conditions at the border aren’t terrible. They are. The Border Patrol is out of space and rapidly running out of money, and Health and Human Services, the department responsible for taking care of unaccompanied minors, is underfunded. It’s why the president declared a humanitarian crisis and asked Congress for more resources to house the current influx of migrants. (For over two months, the Democrats called the crisis fake, and blocked humanitarian funding—including more beds—17 times.)
The problem with the Democrats’ current outrage is not necessarily the subject matter. It’s fine to call out terrible conditions where they exist. But the problem arises when the outrage appears politically expedient. And it’s compounded when Democrats refuse to act on any viable solutions.
Representative Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) joined Ocasio-Cortez on last week’s visit, and expressed the same levels of outrage as she did. However, Castro also visited an Obama-era facility in 2015, with very similar conditions. He called the visit “very emotional,” and joined more than 100 other Democrats in sending a letter to Jeh Johnson, asking him to end the use of family detention facilities.
But missing were the Trump-derangement levels of rage seen from the same Democrats this week, the comparisons to concentration camps, the claims about treating migrants as “animals.”
Nor was there any appreciation for the sheer drastic increase in numbers with which Border Patrol now must contend because of the agitation among immigrant activists who have pushed people to throng our border.
In fiscal year 2014, when President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis, the Border Patrol in the Southwest border sectors apprehended 136,986 migrant families and children. In just the first eight months of fiscal year 2019, Border Patrol agents have apprehended a total of 389,259 families and children—a 184 percent increase.
Moreover, the 2019 total includes adults falsely claiming to be the parents of children who aren’t theirs, or migrants over the age of 18 posing as children. In April, Border Patrol officials said they had identified more than 3,000 of these “fake families,” and the trend is growing.
In Tijuana, groups of men are attempting to purchase or steal children to accompany them to the United States—where entry with a child will facilitate an earlier release into the country where they are supposed to wait for a court date they will never attend. The going rate for a child is reportedly $350.
What Solution Do Democrats Want? While Democrats howl about conditions at the border and the detention of migrants, it’s worth asking, what is their preferred solution?
Federal law, sensibly, does not allow an immigration official to turn migrants loose as soon as they are apprehended. This is particularly true with unaccompanied children. The law requires detained migrants to be processed, asylum claims adjudicated, and, when it comes to children, a determination of whether or not the adult they are traveling with is, in fact, the child’s parent.
All of this takes time, and more of it when the Border Patrol is overwhelmed with thousands more migrants arriving each day. Many times, adults and families claiming asylum are released into the interior of the country to await a court date years in the future. Unaccompanied children are handed over to Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, where agency officials work to reunite children with family they already have in the United States, or place them in foster care.
In a bizarre twist during the debate over funding humanitarian resources at the border, House Democrats demanded that HHS not be able to share information with Immigration and Customs Enforcement when it came to placing children—thereby reducing the ability of HHS to know if it was placing children with safe families.
Everything CBP, HHS, and ICE are doing complies with existing federal law. The agencies, as they have been for years, are underfunded, understaffed, and undermined by the selective outrage of Democrats who apparently have just awakened to these problems and would rather virtue signal than address them meaningfully.
But the underlying question in all of this is, “What policies would Democrats prefer?” Letting unaccompanied children loose into the streets? Releasing everyone who is apprehended coming across the border, with little regard for who they are and what they’re really doing here?
Based on their responses in the last debate, the answer is yes. Democrats either have no solutions to the border crisis, or offer inexplicable ones like “fixing climate change.”
If this is the best they have to offer, Democrats are not a serious or credible participant in addressing conditions at the border—or the statutory regime they’ve had the ability to alter for years. They can scream about Trump all they want, but the reality is, the fault doesn’t lie with his administration or even with previous ones. It sits squarely on the shoulders of the lawmakers who would rather tweet and name-call than reform the law or secure the border.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1159808166-e1562458263518.jpg300534Rachel Bovardhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngRachel Bovard2019-07-06 20:21:302019-07-07 20:28:21Angry About Border Conditions? Blame Congress
America • Center for American Greatness • Donald Trump • Immigration • Law and Order • Post • The Courts
American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp last week called for Chief Justice John Roberts’ impeachment over his vote with four liberal justices to deny the Trump Administration a total victory on whether the Census could include a question on citizenship.
Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes is the Trump White House communications director, goes too far—though he may have tapped into an understandable conservative sentiment. I don’t believe Roberts is quite the Jim Comey of the Supreme Court, yet he seems to be asking for the label. Comey’s troubles surfaced when he tried both to condemn and absolve Hillary Clinton of criminal security breaches. All the while, he self-righteously claimed to cleave to a higher loyalty. But that loyalty seems to have ensnared him in an even more insidious conspiracy, which the Justice Department is now investigating.
For his part—and the comparison with Comey goes only so far—Roberts in trying to depoliticize a case ended up protecting partisanship within the government, that is to say within the bureaucracy. He had done something similar in his 2012 opinion on the Affordable Care Act—finding its mandate a constitutional tax after declaring the law unconstitutional based on the main commerce clause arguments presented. In allegedly taking politics out of his opinion Roberts also removes the Constitution. (To be fair, he also enabled Republicans to gain majorities in Congress that should have repealed the ACA, but those majorities failed to it.)
As President Trump blasted the partisan actions of various judges, the chief justice shot back, claiming there are “not Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” Trump replied, “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.”
In the current case, the court unanimously agreed that a question concerning citizenship could be asked in the 2020 census. Against the liberal justices, it also brushed aside the lower court’s mischief in weighing the musings of Commerce Department bureaucrats over Secretary Wilbur Ross. But the crucial part of Roberts’ opinion in Department of Commerce v. New York contended that the secretary of commerce, who oversees the Census Bureau, had presented “pretextual,”—that is, deceptive—reasons for adding the citizenship question. Thus the lower court should reconsider its decision in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Critics had charged political motives for adding the citizenship question and thereby lowering the count of noncitizen, largely minority persons. The idea is that asking, for example, Central American immigrants about citizenship would discourage them from answering and thus produce an undercount of such persons, and the Constitution in Article I, section 2 calls for a count of all persons, not just citizens. Defenders of the citizenship question point out that suspicion of census counters is not confined to immigrants or minorities.
While Roberts doesn’t buy this bureaucrat’s argument, he also accepts the argument that the Commerce Department’s Voting Rights Act enforcement is a pretext—a dishonest claim that covers up another, possibly illegitimate claim. His argument, endorsed by four liberal justices, makes the reform of the administrative state all the more difficult. The arguments in this case rest on whether we should assume the legitimacy of the administrative state.
Fortunately, Justice Clarence Thomas explains the court’s error—and more important its implications for containing bureaucracy, unelected government, and government by elites. His incisive opinion justifies the citizenship question and defends the ability of the government to control its bureaucrats and to prevent control of the government by whim, partisanship, corruption, or bureaucratic inertia.
Thomas shows how the chief justice’s opinion borders on surrendering to the worst of the administrative state. As Thomas observes, “the Court’s decision enables partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction. The Court’s decision could even implicate separation-of-powers concerns insofar as it enables judicial interference with the enforcement of the laws.”
Roberts unnecessarily complicated the issue—how can counting the number of citizens cause a dispute? Just as a nation can’t exist without borders, no more can it know itself without having a count of citizens.
“Our only role in this case,” Thomas maintains, “is to decide whether the Secretary complied with the law and gave a reasoned explanation for his decision . . . . The Court, however, goes further. For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale.”
Unless the mischief is contained to this decision, Thomas fears, it will spread with disastrous consequences.
“Opponents of future executive actions can be expected to make full use of the Court’s new approach,” Thomas writes. “Now that the Court has opened up this avenue of attack, opponents of executive actions have strong incentives to craft narratives that would derail them.”
Moreover, even if the elite’s plot to prevent a count of citizens, a part of the left’s open-borders strategy, is ultimately beaten back, “the Court’s decision enables partisans to use the courts to harangue executive officers through depositions, discovery, delay, and distraction. The Court’s decision could even implicate separation-of-powers concerns insofar as it enables judicial interference with the enforcement of the laws.”
The court’s census decision is not only, as Thomas charges, “a departure from traditional principles of administrative law.” By shrinking from confronting the charge of political bias, the chief justice affirms the power of the administrative state. For only political fury of informed citizens can corner this savage beast. Thomas has raised these points in many opinions throughout his career and in particular in the last few weeks. These opinions will require further elaboration.
For calling out the ineptitude of lower court, the Post fumed “Mr. Thomas’s ill-considered language undermined the defense of the judiciary that the chief justice had previously attempted to mount. And to what end?”
The smarminess went even further. “For Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Gorsuch to join such an opinion was a lapse in self-awareness on their part, given how readily Democratic partisans accuse them of bias in favor of the president who appointed them—Mr. Trump.” It’s hard to tell which justices should be more insulted by such tripe.
The Post would thereby recruit the chief justice to its own partisanship. Roberts should take care to legitimate such calls, which he avoided doing in the partisan reapportionment case.
As the court has been in truth politicized for so much of its history, it is impossible to keep politics out of it. Can the chief justice be naïve about this? Is he so steeped in legal mechanics that he doesn’t appreciate the democratic context of the judicial system, and the abuse the courts have dealt the principle of government by consent?
In this crisis, which Trump clearly recognizes, only the clarity of political division will give judicial decisions their republican legitimacy. That is the point of Lincoln’s great speech on Dred Scott. The Constitution is too important to leave to justices.
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https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/07/GettyImages-1068141242-e1562022775693.jpg300534Ken Masugihttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngKen Masugi2019-07-01 20:10:092019-07-02 20:00:18Is Chief Justice Roberts the Jim Comey of the Supreme Court?
Democrats • Donald Trump • Elections • Identity Politics • Immigration • Post • The Left
They say insanity is not contagious. Medical professionals insist that you can’t catch it merely by being near insane people. After watching the second evening of the Democratic presidential primary debates, I have my doubts.
Anthropologists like to study the subjects they write about from up close and personal. Researchers go to Africa, or the South American jungle, or Samoa to watch the natives, trying to decipher their culture. And so, on night two of the debate, I became Margaret Mead. I went to a Joe Biden debate watch house party. Yes, for real.
While everyone there was very pleasant, friendly and gracious, the Biden campaign organizational aspect of it was decidedly underwhelming. I am in a deep blue suburban part of Maryland, and yet the nearest Biden party was 40 miles away—one of only three in the entire state. No Biden campaign organization is evident in my state, possibly because it is late on the primary calendar, or maybe because the Biden camp figures it will all be over, one way or another, by the time the primaries get to Maryland.
The number of people who showed up could be counted on the fingers of one hand. (And if you lost a finger in a prior industrial accident, that’s fine—I didn’t need them all.) Nationwide, there were more than 800 Bernie debate watch parties, more than 500 Elizabeth Warren parties, and—at the other extreme—22 Kirsten Gillibrand parties. Biden had 170 such parties nationwide—not awful, but not terribly impressive either, for a supposed frontrunner.
Are watch parties a relevant metric of “enthusiasm,” or even a predictive metric at all? I don’t know how many people showed up to a typical Bernie debate watch party, or a typical Warren party. Still, it’s hard to see this particular Biden party—and yes, it’s only one party—as evidence of a vast pro-Biden movement.
Watching the actual debate made me feel like a baseball-sized tumor in my brain was about to explode. Under normal circumstances, after 10 minutes, I’d be reaching for the remote. Heck, I am not sure I’d last even 10 minutes. Did the people on that stage (except Bernie, obviously) know that they were signing onto utterly insane proposals that the absolute majority of the American electorate flatly rejects? Did they know right there and then that they are writing Republican attack ads for them? Did they know that Nancy Pelosi was turning over in her grave (well, OK, technically she is still alive—in the coffin she usually sleeps in), wondering how she was going to keep her House majority?
But I wasn’t there to watch the debate. I was there because I wanted to know what genuine Biden supporters thought of it. And from a few casual questions about what the group thought of Biden’s performance, and from their less-than-cheerful answers, my suspicion is they knew in their hearts that the USS Biden was destined to run aground. Speaking for myself, it didn’t feel like Biden’s debate shakiness was inherently fatal—but he certainly didn’t cover himself in glory, either.
Biden’s uninspired performance didn’t help the “electability” or the “inevitability” narrative—and “my” Biden voters knew it.
An interesting moment came when Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) tore a chunk out of Biden’s hide on the issue of his trafficking with segregationists and busing. Biden’s unpreparedness was peculiar and his response strange. Why did he want to re-fight the battles of 40 years ago, today? But the Biden supporters around me didn’t react to it with “That Harris bitch! How dare she attack our Joe?!” Their reaction was more “Yeah! There is somebody who knows how to fight! I like her!” These Biden supporters sounded ready to switch to Harris, should Biden stumble—and they were more impressed with Harris than with their own standard-bearer.
More interesting moments came when the candidates all signed on to open borders (re-named as “decriminalizing illegal entry”). The reaction in the room? Glum. Did they know it was a loser, electorally speaking? Did they understand the consequences for the country, even aside from the implications for the 2020 election? Or, being Biden voters (and presumably somewhat more centrist), they just weren’t hard-left enough to swallow it?
Nor did I sense any great enthusiasm for “Medicare For All” that Bernie was peddling, and that all the others more or less got on board with. “My” Biden supporters probably knew this was a loser in the general election. No one spoke up in support of free medical insurance for illegals.
None of this means that Trump can convert these people. They may be privately disappointed in Biden, but what unites them is their hatred for Trump. These people will not vote for Trump even if he were to walk on water and feed all the hungry. But Trump doesn’t need to convert them to win—indirectly, these Biden voters pointed the way.
And so, after the Joe Biden Debate Watch House Party experience, I will offer President Trump advice that he hasn’t officially asked for (yet): Mr. President, your enemies gave you a detailed road map to victory in 2020.
First, forget Robert Mueller and his report. It’s yesterday’s news, nobody cares anymore. Don’t mention him again. Ever.
Second, forget Hillary Clinton, her emails, and her corruption. Yes, she is a rancid, toxic, corrupt, greedy old hag. Yes, she is a criminal. Yes, she should be wearing orange, and yes, her very existence is a travesty. But Hillary is last year’s news. You are not going to win Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania based on Hillary’s emails or her shady Uranium One deals or her poisonous complicity in the Russia collusion Hoax. If you want to win, forget her, too, because nobody cares about Hillary anymore. The 2020 election will be about the future, not about the past. The good news is: Democrats just gave you something much better to work with.
Third, it doesn’t matter which particular Democrat proposed which particular insanity—they’re all the same. All of them are infected. And all of them are insane. Whether they privately believe in it or not, they all raised their hands. That image is priceless—use it over and over. It doesn’t matter if Biden manages to out-woke the hard-core crazies, or if he sinks into oblivion by October. It doesn’t matter if Harris, or Warren or Mayor Pete is the nominee—there is no difference. You stand between the American voters and the madness. You are the guy on that wall, facing the demon horde. Find the words to convey how apocalyptic electing a Democrat—any Democrat—would be. They just gave you all the ammunition you need.
Fourth, Democrats are now officially the open borders party. There are 7.5 billion people on Earth and roughly 6 billion of them want to crawl, swim, climb over, or burrow under, the border, to be here. All the Democrats raised their hands because they want those 6 billion people to come here. But this is our house and we did not invite them. Our house is getting overrun by mobs of illegal aliens swarming over the border, while the Democrats dither and sabotage enforcement. Your voters did not invite them in. Independents did not invite them in. Voters in the Midwest did not invite them in—and they will vote for you, once the choice is clear.
Fifth, don’t buy the Democrats’ manufactured outrage about “border detention conditions” or “children in cages” or people drowning in the Rio Grande while attempting an illegal entry. Your voters don’t care because those people shouldn’t be there in the first place. Democrats fabricate this nonsense and pretend that all Americans care. We don’t—certainly not enough to let in millions of illegals from shithole countries, who will then live on welfare for generations, at our expense. Do not fall for the Democrats’ baloney.
Sixth, Democrats want to take away private health insurance from hundreds of millions of Americans, and replace it with a government bureaucracy. This is a loser of a proposal—so beat them to death with it. “Democrats are trying to steal your medical insurance!”—say it over and over. Americans do not support this folly. You’re on “the right side of history” there.
Seventh—and this one is a beauty—Democrats want to give free medical insurance to illegal aliens. This is the very definition of insanity. Americans do not support this lunacy, so make sure everyone understands that every Democrat raised their hand in favor of this. This will not sell in Michigan, or in Florida, or in Arizona—regardless of who they nominate.
Eighth, reparations. The Che Guevara-Leon Trotsky wing of the Democratic Party loves the idea, but find me even one white or Latino single mother working her ass off as a waitress, who thinks she owes reparations to star athletes or Hollywood celebrities, just because their distant ancestors were slaves two centuries ago. Find me a single autoworker in Michigan who wants his tax dollars to go to those multimillionaire black athletes or to narcissistic movie stars living in Beverly Hills mansions. This proposal was born a loser, and it should die a loser. But Democrats support it. You should be out there telling voters why this is an absurd, grotesquely unfair plan. You are on the side of the working men and women. They are on the side of the multimillionaire athletes and entitled, condescending Hollywoodsters. This is how you keep the working-class voting Republican in this election.
Ninth, the economy. Every time you feel tempted to talk about Mueller or Hillary or Nadler or Schiff (and I know you’re tempted!), talk about jobs, raises, better job security, and low unemployment. Democrats offer some unspecified B.S. about how the economy “isn’t working for everyone.” But it’s working just fine for your voters—make sure to remind them of that.
Tenth, taxes. Democrats officially want to raise taxes. How many candidates got elected by promising to raise taxes? So every time your lips start forming the word “Mue….”, say instead “Democrats want to raise your raises to pay for 20 million illegals living on welfare! And I want to lower them!” You won’t convert life-long Democrats, but you will motivate the Republicans, while many wavering independents will vote “R”.
Eleventh, climate. Don’t argue details or science with them—you can’t argue science with religious fanatics. Your argument is simple—with their insane climate plans, Democrats want to take away your jobs, your cars, your vacations and raise your utility bills by 500 percent. That’s your argument.
Twelfth, Twitter. Mr. President, I’m begging you, please don’t tweet so much. I’ll vote for you regardless. But trust me: less is more. Even a little less Twitter will go a long way towards sealing your 2020 victory. Please, just 20 percent less tweeting. Please.
Mr. President, the Democrats have gone insane and they want to infect everyone with their insanity. You must be the man who stops them—that’s what the 2020 election is about.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/06/GettyImages-1158728912-e1561947086273.jpg300534George S. Bardmesserhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngGeorge S. Bardmesser2019-06-30 21:02:592019-07-01 10:49:20This Is What Insanity Looks Like
Donald Trump • Immigration • Law and Order • Post • The Courts
The difficulties President Trump faces in carrying out his agenda are massive and were underscored again by the last case decided this term by the United States Supreme Court. That case, Department of Commerce v. New York, presented a challenge to the Trump Administration’s plan to add a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census form.
The U.S. Constitution requires an “Enumeration” of the population every 10 years, to be made “in such Manner” as Congress “shall by Law direct.” These days, the census has at least two important effects. One is that the enumeration of persons residing in the United States determines the apportionment of representatives in the House, and the other is that it determines, to a great extent, the amount of federal funds that will be expended in each state.
The census, then, is a means of allocating political power and federal government resources. If there is an undercount, a state may end up losing power and wealth. Fearing that asking about citizenship status will result in an undercount of people living here illegally, Democrats challenged the right of the government to secure that information as part of the census. It is no secret that undocumented foreign nationals tend to cluster in urban areas, most often under Democratic Party control. So blue states feared the results of returning the citizenship question to the census.
As they have done with many policies of this administration, a coalition of progressives formed and brought actions challenging the citizenship question, alleging, among other things that it was an attempt at unlawful discrimination on the part of Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Finding a judge sympathetic to their views, as they are too frequently able, they were successful in a federal trial court in one of the bluest of the states, New York. Similar actions are underway in other federal courts, but it was hoped that the Supreme Court would resolve the issue one way or the other before the printing of the 2020 census forms, which could take place later this year.
It was not to be. In an opinion of Byzantine complexity by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court acknowledged there was actually no legal impediment to asking the citizenship question in the census questionnaire. But because the Administrative Procedure Act enabled judicial review of the decisions of the secretary of commerce, and because the court suspected Ross had not been candid with regard to his motives for seeking the citizenship question, “meaningful judicial review” could not be had. Therefore, wrote Roberts, it was necessary to forbid the addition of a citizenship question to the census until further examination of the secretary’s motives could be accomplished in the lower courts.
Ross, whose department was charged with conducting the census, maintained that the citizenship question was added at the request of the Department of Justice, so that that that department might better enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA)—the notion being, apparently, that if the census revealed many citizens were not exercising their right to vote, this might be corrected by appropriate action.
This, according to the Supreme Court (and the lower court) was a “pretext” (a nice way of saying “a lie”), since Ross had declared soon after assuming his office that he would add that question to the census, presumably because he believed it would aid in determining the actual scope of the nation’s problem of illegal immigration.
The “pretextual” nature of Ross’s motives, for the Supreme Court majority, precluded effective judicial review. That this result was outrageous was brilliantly communicated in a dissenting opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, further solidifying his reputation as the greatest defender of the Constitution and the rule of law currently sitting on the court. The key provisions of Thomas’s opinion are worth quoting in full:
For the first time ever, the Court invalidates an agency action solely because it questions the sincerity of the agency’s otherwise adequate rationale. Echoing the din of suspicion and distrust that seems to typify modern discourse, the Court declares the Secretary’s memorandum “pretextual” because, “viewing the evidence as a whole,” his explanation that including a citizenship question on the census would help enforce the Voting Rights Act (VRA) “seems to have been contrived.” . . . The Court does not hold that the Secretary merely had additional, unstated reasons for reinstating the citizenship question. Rather, it holds that the Secretary’s stated rationale did not factor at all into his decision.
The Court’s holding reflects an unprecedented departure from our deferential review of discretionary agency decisions. And, if taken seriously as a rule of decision, this holding would transform administrative law. It is not difficult for political opponents of executive actions to generate controversy with accusations of pretext, deceit, and illicit motives. Significant policy decisions are regularly criticized as products of partisan influence, interest-group pressure, corruption, and animus. Crediting these accusations on evidence as thin as the evidence here could lead judicial review of administrative proceedings to devolve into an endless morass of discovery and policy disputes not contemplated by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
Elaborating, Thomas observed that Roberts’s majority opinion, joined by the Supreme Court’s four liberals, “engages in an unauthorized inquiry into evidence not properly before us to reach an unsupported conclusion. Moreover, each step of the inquiry offends the presumption of regularity we owe the Executive.”
There is a chance this case will return eventually to the Supreme Court, and the citizenship question will be added to the census, but it may not happen in time for the next count. What Thomas reminds us, however, is that somehow John Roberts has been persuaded to join progressives and the enemies of this administration in erecting hurdles no other president has had to surmount.
Just as the Russia hoax involved an unprecedented attempt by the Obama Administration to employ our intelligence services wrongly to conduct political surveillance and seek to undermine candidate and later President Trump, so the Roberts Court has now made the president’s task of implementing policy more precarious in an unprecedented manner.
No wonder, then, that following this decision President Trump tweeted “Seems totally ridiculous that our government, and indeed Country, cannot ask a basic question of Citizenship in a very expensive, detailed and important Census, in this case for 2020.” He’s right, of course.
John Roberts, who, in his confirmation hearings, boldly claimed that justices were apolitical “umpires,” belied this notion in his majority opinion, just as he did in upholding Obamacare in 2012, with an equally contrived opinion declaring that law—which clearly violated Congress’s commerce clause powers (as Roberts himself admitted)—could be sustained as a constitutional exercise of Congress’s taxing power. In the Obamacare case, Roberts seriously undermined the 10th Amendment, which was thought to guarantee that the federal government remain one of limited and enumerated powers. Thomas’s dissent in the census case, just as he had in the Obamacare case, makes clear that Roberts engaged in judicial legislation, and, in effect, put the federal courts in a position to frustrate countless policies of the executive.
I have written at length elsewhere about how our law schools for two generations have encouraged the development of courts that make it up as they go along, and how that behavior has endangered the sovereignty of the American people themselves. We now have one more jarring example of this behavior that is so detrimental to the rule of law. Only if President Trump succeeds in putting more true conservatives like Thomas on the court is there any hope of returning us to self-rule and the framers’ conception of the judicial role.
https://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2019/06/GettyImages-961134920-e1561932385770.jpg300534Stephen B. Presserhttps://amgreatness.com/app/uploads/2020/01/american-greatness-logo_201x37.pngStephen B. Presser2019-06-30 21:01:242019-07-01 07:16:51Roberts vs. Trump: The Supreme Court Piles on the President
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