RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://unherd.com/2024/04/the-fantasy-of-open-borders/

Before entering today’s torturous immigration debate, we would do well to remember James Baldwin. “Power without morality is no longer power,” he observed. And the border question is fundamentally a moral one.

On one side, there is a growing belief that an open borders policy is a vital moral response to the economic inequality between countries. In these milieus, national citizenship within a bounded community in the Western world is increasingly seen not as a birth right but as just another unfair advantage. As the political theorist Joseph Carens puts it, Western citizenship is “the modern equivalent to feudal privilege — an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances [that] is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely”. And just like feudal privileges, they should be cast aside.

On the other side, meanwhile, the vox populi disagrees. Polling consistently shows that most Western citizens want less immigration, a sentiment that has risen in recent years in the US, UK, France and Germany. Faced with the elite-approved “human right” to unlimited free movement, popular opinion responds with an emphatic no.

With die-hards on both sides, it’s no wonder the Senate border bill has become such a point of contention. For Democrats, the problem is not that too many foreigners are abusing asylum claims in order to immigrate illegally; it’s more that, with an election coming up, news coverage of chaotic conditions at the border doesn’t paint Biden in a good light. For the rest of us, meanwhile, the problem is the assumption that everyone in the developing world has a moral right to claim asylum in the US.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/06/insane-asylum-the-policy-disaster-at-the-border/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

The Biden administration‘s choices have produced lawlessness and disorder

The ongoing crisis at the U.S.–Mexican border has one distinct virtue. It presents Americans with the opportunity to clarify various misconceptions about what is not merely the largest wave of migrants in our history, but also the most disorderly and disruptive. These misconceptions have distorted our rightful understanding of ourselves as the world’s preeminent nation of immigrants. And after more than five decades of evasion and outright policy failures, immigration is now at the core of the profound disaffection so many Americans express toward our elites and mainstream institutions. It therefore behooves us to stop and scrutinize the ill-founded assumptions on which various positions and policies — whether “pro-” or “anti-immigration” — have become not just based but entrenched.

But a funny thing happened on the way to this crisis. The size, relative suddenness, and sustained nature of the mass of humanity arriving at our southern border has rendered dramatically less salient what had long been the dominant frame of the ongoing national debate: the line between legal and illegal immigration. Our decades-long national preoccupation with illegal immigration has — at least for now — been eclipsed by the more pressing concern, among elected officials and citizens alike, of addressing the chaos not only along our southern border but also in our major metropolitan areas. Legality has been superseded by reality.

At least since 1994, when the thunderbolt of California’s Proposition 187 prohibited the provision of most public services to the undocumented (before being gutted by the federal courts), the national debate over immigration had been fixated on the presumptively bright line between legal and illegal immigration. Yet that line had always been rather blurred, and in recent months it has become almost invisible. Under the Biden administration’s disastrous policies, jurisdictions — not just along the border but across the nation — have been overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of migrants in need of basic services and support. State and local officials struggle to provide food, shelter, and medical care to hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention schooling for the tens of thousands of children accompanying them, all with minimal help from the federal government. We have as a nation come to focus not so much on the legal status of this crush of humanity as on the fiscal, logistical, social, and ethical challenges it poses.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-reality-of-migrant-crime/

There’s been an ongoing political debate lately about crimes committed by migrants who entered the United States illegally. Actually, there’s not much to debate about their first unlawful act — entering the United States without authorization — but much disagreement about how many illegal border crossers commit crimes after that.

In recent weeks, Republicans have publicized the murder of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who police say was abducted and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the United States illegally in September 2022, only to be quickly released into the country. Ibarra was one of millions of illegal crossers who rushed into the United States after the implementation of virtually open-border policies by President Joe Biden. In response to Republicans highlighting the murder, some Democrats argued that the “immigrant crime narrative is racist,” in the words of California Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia.

The issue popped up in the State of the Union address, when some Republicans tried to goad Biden into saying Riley’s name. Biden did say the name — although he got it wrong — and then referred to the alleged killer, Ibarra, as an “illegal.” Democratic activist groups reacted in anger, not at the murder but at the use of the word “illegal” to describe an illegal immigrant. Biden swiftly apologized, saying he should have called Ibarra “undocumented” instead.

Now there is another migrant crime in the news, this time in New York City. Last week police raided a house in the Bronx that had been taken over by migrant squatters who had entered the U.S. illegally. In addition to arresting eight of them, police confiscated several firearms, extended magazines, ammunition, plus the drugs ketamine and cocaine. The cops moved in, the New York Post reported, after one of the migrants “allegedly flashed a pistol at someone on the property March 27, leading to a 911 call and the discovery of the squatter gang.”

In true New York fashion, a judge quickly freed most of the suspects without bail. At that point, the Enforcement and Removal Operations office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested three of them. How did they do that? Officers just went back to the house in the Bronx, where the suspects had returned to keep doing what they were doing before their arrests. Now, it appears four others have also been picked up by ICE.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/04/denver_to_cut_police_and_firefighters_to_pay_for_illegals_what_could_go_wrong.html

Migrant-magnet Denver has announced a plan to pay for all its new arrivals — by cutting police, firefighting, sheriff, 911, transport, infrastructure and other services otherwise meant for its citizens. Their quality of life is about to go down.

According to the Daily Caller:

The Democratic-run city of Denver, Colorado, plans to defund its police department to pay for illegal immigrants.

Denver, which is commonly referred to as a “sanctuary city,” announced on Wednesday that it will spend $89.9 million on services for incoming illegal migrants, pulling some of the funding from roughly $45 million in public programs and services. Denver’s police department will be hit with an $8.4 million reduction — about 1.9% of its total operating budget, the city confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

According to Denver’s mayor, Mike Johnston, it’s about “shared sacrifice.”

Breitbart reported:

“We think it’s a balance. We want to be a welcoming city where you don’t have a woman with a 2-year-old and a 3-year-old sleeping outside in a tent in ten-degree weather in a snowstorm. That’s one of our values. And we also want to be able to provide high-quality public services to all the taxpayers. That’s also one of our values. And in this context, without any federal support, to do both of those things requires shared sacrifice, it requires compromise. So, we are both making cuts to city budgets to meet this financial need, and we are making cuts to the amount of services we can provide to the migrants that arrive and to the number of folks that we can serve.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2954997/the-reality-of-migrant-crime/

THE REALITY OF MIGRANT CRIME. There’s been a political debate lately about crimes committed by migrants who entered the United States illegally. Actually, there’s not much to debate about their first unlawful act, entering the U.S. without authorization, but much disagreement about how many illegal border crossers commit crimes after that. 

In recent weeks, Republicans have publicized the murder of Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who police say was allegedly abducted and killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan migrant who entered the U.S. illegally in September 2022, only to be quickly released into the country. Ibarra was one of millions of illegal crossers who rushed into the U.S. after the implementation of virtually open-border policies by President Joe Biden. In response to Republicans highlighting the murder, some Democrats argued that the “immigrant crime narrative is racist,” in the words of Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA).

The issue popped up in the State of the Union address, during which some Republicans tried to goad Biden into saying Riley’s name. Biden did say the name — although he got it wrong — and then referred to the alleged killer, Ibarra, as an “illegal.” Democratic activist groups reacted in anger, not at the murder but at the use of the word “illegal” to describe an illegal immigrant. Biden swiftly apologized, saying he should have called Ibarra “undocumented” instead.

Now, there is another migrant crime in the news, this time in New York City. This week, police raided a house in the Bronx that had been taken over by migrant squatters who had entered the U.S. illegally. In addition to arresting eight of them, police confiscated several firearms, extended magazines, ammunition, plus the drugs ketamine and cocaine. The officers moved in, the New York Post reported, after one of the migrants “allegedly flashed a pistol at someone on the property March 27, leading to a 911 call and the discovery of the squatter gang.”

In true New York fashion, a judge quickly freed most of the suspects without bail. At that point, the Enforcement and Removal Operations office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested three of them. How did they do that? Officers just went back to the house in the Bronx, where the suspects had returned to keep doing what they were doing before their arrests. Now, it appears four others have also been picked up by ICE.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/desantis-responds-after-learning-biden-has-flown-300000-migrants-to-florida-they-dont-give-us-information/

Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R) spoke out against the Biden administration’s migrant-flight program on Wednesday in response to the release of new data showing 300,000 migrants have been flown into the sunshine state on the taxpayer’s dime.

DeSantis addressed the migrant flights in a speech after new data from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found nearly 326,000 migrants have been flown from abroad to Florida through a parole program expanded by the Biden administration.

“They don’t tell us anytime somebody comes in,” DeSantis said. “We can’t verify that, they don’t give us information on it, we have not seen though large numbers in our communities all of the sudden.”

“It may be the case [Biden] is bringing people in under this illegal parole program, and then they’re migrating to sanctuary jurisdictions,” he added. “We’re not a sanctuary state. We don’t have sanctuary cities. We took action to where you’re not getting a driver’s license. You’re not getting ID cards.”

https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/01/the-many-ways-a-porous-border-means-crime-without-boundaries/

It’s undeniable that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

When President Biden’s supporters attacked him for describing the man who allegedly murdered Georgia co-ed Laken Riley as an “illegal,” they shined a light on one of the most contested words in American politics.

The progressive push to describe border crossers as undocumented or unauthorized can also serve to downplay and obscure the massive issue of crime perpetrated and spawned by the influx of millions of migrants since Biden was elected — often in ways that leave the migrants themselves as victims.

While migrant advocates argue that illegal arrivals commit crimes at lower rates than Americans, the claim is unverifiable because the federal government and most states do not break down crimes by immigration status.

Criminologists also note that it ignores the vast web of statutory crimes concurrent with illegal immigration — drug smuggling, human trafficking, child labor violations, prostitution, the black market in employment, and so on.

What remains undeniable by the law of averages is that the massive surge in immigration since the Biden administration relaxed border policies — a surge it puts at more than 4 million people, but other sources put at millions more — has been accompanied by much more crime, however unquantifiable.

Millions of migrants, though not all, run afoul of laws by their situation more than by overtly malign criminal intent. But their first step across the border is a lawbreaking one, and it is often followed by life on the law’s margins: living in the U.S. without insurance or proper work papers, providing illicit labor for unscrupulous or blasé employers, turning to black markets for counterfeit Social Security cards, and often becoming targets for robbers or extortionists. Their desire to come to America creates a vast pool of criminality involving them or those illegally profiting from them.

“On some criminal matters, like homicides, we’ve got a good sense of the scale there whether we solve them all or not,” said Alex Nowrasteh, a vice president at the Cato Institute who studies the economic impact of immigration. “But some of this other stuff is like all black markets in that it is opaque behavior. We don’t know how much crime there might be and in a sense I think it’s sort of unknowable.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/political-stability-requires-a-secure-border-chaos-invites-illiberal-policies-4b09f74b?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

As the 2024 presidential campaign heats up, American attitudes toward migrants and migration are turning more negative. A March 2024 Gallup survey found that immigration was the issue voters most frequently mentioned spontaneously as the top problem facing the country. An Associated Press-NORC poll conducted last month found that 64% of respondents supported hiring more Border Patrol agents, 53% wanted to reduce the number of asylum applicants, and 42% wanted a wall.

The U.S. isn’t the only place where border security is a hot political issue. The Dominican Republic is building a 250-mile wall across the island of Hispaniola to seal off its border with Haiti. Migrants crossing the English Channel have become a political challenge for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s beleaguered Conservatives in Britain. From Sweden to Spain, far-right anti-immigrant parties appear poised to make big gains in June’s elections to the European Parliament.

Since 1970, when only 4.7% of the U.S. population was born outside the country, the percentage of foreign-born residents has grown. In 2022 the Census Bureau estimated that 13.9% of the population is foreign-born, and that share continues to rise. The last time the foreign-born percentage reached comparable levels, Congress ultimately passed the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act and immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere plunged by more than 90%.