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IMMIGRATION

Berlin Truck Massacre Shows the Soundness of Trump’s Views on Illegal-Alien Criminals Pro-sanctuary mayors and the New York Times are appalled by the suggestion there’s any connection between immigration and terror. By Heather Mac Donald

Donald Trump was asked on Wednesday if the Christmas-market truck massacre in Berlin had caused him to reevaluate his various proposals regarding immigration from terror-spawning regions. His answer sent the liberal media into another nervous breakdown: “I’ve been proven to be right,” Trump responded. “One hundred percent correct.”

And so he has. To the New York Times, however, Trump’s words were front-page news. “Trump Suggests Berlin Attack Affirms His Plan to Bar Muslims,” read the headline (even though Trump had not specifically addressed the temporary ban in his response to the reporter’s question). The Times assumes that its readers will be shocked by any suggested connection between Islamic terror attacks and immigration policy. The Times, for its part, treats the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” like the Ebola virus, inoculating itself from any misperception that it would independently pen such scandalous words by the liberal use of scare quotes. “One area where Mr. Trump and his advisers have been unswerving is their repeated denunciation of ‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” writes the Times incredulously.

Despite the Times’ protestation, the problem of Islamic terrorism in the West is, among other things, an immigration issue, whether an attack has been committed by first-generation immigrants or second. But the Berlin massacre does more than vindicate Trump’s planned reassessment of entry protocols. It also vindicates his intention to eliminate local sanctuary policies. The suspected Berlin attacker was, like many previous Islamic terrorists, a thug first, a terrorist second. Anis Amri had been arrested several times in his home country of Tunisia for various street crimes, including petty theft; he was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison for stealing a car. He committed arson in Italy. He assaulted fellow prisoners while jailed in Italy. He sold drugs in a Berlin park.

Such crimes, if committed by an illegal alien in San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, or the 300 other sanctuary jurisdictions in the U.S., would induce local jail authorities and police chiefs to hold that alien in order to protect him against any federal effort to deport him. Politicians in sanctuary cities work feverishly to bury this core fact: The sanctuary policies they have rushed to defend in the wake of Trump’s election are designed to shield street criminals and thugs from deportation. Such policies forbid jail authorities from honoring a federal request to hold an illegal-alien criminal beyond his release date so that federal agents can start removal proceedings against him.

On Friday, BBC Radio interviewed Seattle mayor Ed Murray about his city’s recently reaffirmed sanctuary policy. Murray ducked any question that would have clarified the fact that it was criminal law-breakers Seattle was shielding. Instead, Murray waxed self-righteous about his “moral obligation” to defeat immigration enforcement, with not a peep of acknowledgment that Seattle’s defiance of federal authority meant that law-abiding Seattle residents would be forced to pay the costs of illegal-alien crime.

The Suicide of Germany by Guy Millière

Of the 1.2 million migrants who arrived in Germany in 2014 and 2015, only 34,000 found work.

Angela Merkel went to lay white roses at the scene of the Christmas market attack in Berlin. Thousands of Germans did the same. Many brought candles and cried. But anger and the will to combat the threat remained largely absent.

Nothing better describes the present state of Germany than the sad fate of Maria Landenburger, a 19-year-old girl, murdered at the beginning of December. A member of a refugee relief organization, Landenburger was among those who welcomed migrants in 2015. She was raped and murdered by one of the people she was helping. Her family asked anyone who wanted to pay tribute to their daughter to give money to refugee associations, so that more refugees could come to Germany.

The law that condemns incitement to hatred, presumably intended to prevent a return to Nazi ideas, is held like a sword over whoever speaks too harshly of the growing Islamization of the country.

The great majority of the Germans do not want to see that Germany is at war, because a merciless enemy has declared war on them. They do not want to see that war has been declared on Western civilization. They accept defeat and docilely do what jihadists want them to do: they submit.

If Angela Merkel does not see the difference between Jews exterminated by the Nazis, and Muslims threatening to exterminate Christians, Jews and other Muslims, she is even more clueless than it seems.

The attack in Berlin on December 19, 2016 was predictable. German Chancellor Angela Merkel created the conditions that made it possible. She bears an overwhelming responsibility. Geert Wilders, a member of Parliament in the Netherlands and one of Europe’s only clear-sighted political leaders, accused her of having blood on her hands. He is right.

When she decided to open the doors of Germany to hundreds of thousands of Muslims from the Middle East and more distant countries, she must have known that jihadists were hidden among the people flooding in. She also must have known that the German police had no way of controlling the mass that entered and would be quickly overwhelmed by the number of people it would have to control. She did it anyway.

When hundreds of rapes and sexual assaults took place in Cologne and other cities in Germany on last year’s New Year’s Eve, she said that the perpetrators should be punished “regardless of their origin”, but she did not change her policy. When attacks took place in Hanover, Essen, Wurzburg, and Munich, she delayed comments, then pronounced sanitized sentences on the “need” to fight crime and terror. But she still did not change policy.

She only changed her position recently, it seems because she wants to be a candidate again in 2017, and saw her popularity declining.

The comments she made immediately after the December 19 attacks were mind-numbing. She said that “if the perpetrator is a refugee”, it will be “very difficult to bear” and it will be “particularly repugnant for all Germans who help refugees on a daily basis.”

Such remarks could be considered simply naïve if someone were not informed, but Angela Merkel does not have that excuse. She could not ignore warnings from German and U.S. intelligence services saying that Islamic State terrorists hiding among refugees were planning to use trucks in Christmas-related attacks. The situation endured by Germans has been extremely difficult to bear for more than a year. Crime had “skyrocketed”; diseases extinct for decades have been brought in with no vaccines — long since discontinued — to treat them; second homes are seized by the government without compensation to shelter migrants, and so on. It did not take long to discover that the main suspect in the Berlin attack was an asylum seeker living in a refugee shelter.

Berlin Terror Attack and Immigration Law Violations What America should learn from this newest horrific lesson. Michael Cutler

On Monday, December 19th Berlin was rocked by a deadly terror attack that killed 12 innocent victims and injured 48. A December 21, 2016 CNN report, “Berlin attack: Police hunt Tunisian suspect after finding ID papers” named 24 year-old Tunisian, Anis Amri as the prime suspect who drove a stolen truck into pedestrians visiting a Berlin Christmas market.

The body of the truck’s driver was found in the truck. He was shot and stabbed, likely by Amri.

This attack is reminiscent of the terror attack carried out in Nice, France on July 14, 2016 by a 31 year-old Tunisian, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel.

According to the CNN report, Amri had entered Italy without documentation and was subsequently convicted of committing violent crimes in Italy and spent four years on prison.

Italian authorities attempted to deport him back to Tunisia but Tunisia refused to accept him because he had multiple identity documents in false at least six false names and Tunisian authorities claimed to not have any reliable records to identify him.

He is then believed to have entered Germany illegally. He unsuccessfully applied for political asylum in Germany, his application was reportedly denied, at least in part, because of his ongoing relationship with radical Islamic organizations.

Here is an excerpt from the CNN news report:

Before Amri was publicly named, Ralf Jaeger, interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, told reporters the suspect was known to German security services as someone in contact with radical Islamist groups, and had been assessed as posing a risk.

One German security official told CNN the suspect had been arrested in August with forged documents in the southern German town of Friedrichshafen, on his way to Italy, but a judge released him. The suspect also came onto the radar of German police because he was looking for a gun, the official said.

However, while Germany refused Amri’s asylum application because of known terror ties, they permitted him to remain at large where he continued to pose a threat, a threat that became all too clear when he mowed down his victims.

Given the string of successive deadly terror attacks across Europe, the United States and other regions of the world, you would have thought that German officials, including the judge who released Amri, would err on the side of caution to protect German citizens.

Model: Multiculturalism is Killing Germany

German model and journalist Anabel Schunke says she is afraid to walk the streets thanks to Angela Merkel’s migrant influx.

Please share this video! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Poa5h6xAvR8

http://www.infowars.com/model-multiculturalism-is-killing-germany/

Foreign Student Visas: Educating America’s Adversaries Guess who Obama’s State Department issues hundreds of thousands of student visas to? Michael Cutler

It has been said that if you give a man a fish you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. This simple saying illustrates how important training/education is.

Incredibly, the United States’ immigration policies formulated by the Obama administration welcome hundreds of thousands of Chinese STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students into our nation’s premier universities while it is clear that China demonstrates hostility to the United States acting not as a partner, but rather as an adversary.

Chinese computer hackers attack computers in the United States as a matter of routine. The obvious question is how many of those Chinese computer hackers may have been trained and educated in the United States.

China’s recent theft of a U.S. Navy drone in the South China Sea underscores this hostility as do the arrest of numerous spies operating on behalf of China to steal America’s military and industrial secrets.

Not surprisingly, China has offered to return the drone while President-Elect Donald Trump has been quoted as saying that China can keep that drone.

China may have had two reasons for its illegal action. It is clearly attempting to demonstrate that it has unilateral control over the strategically important South China Sea although this claim is not based on law or fact. Additionally, China has an obvious interest in America’s military technology. By now China’s engineers have had ample opportunity to study the design of the drone and, perhaps, has managed to embed technology within the drone that would continue to provide intelligence about the use of that drone.

The U.S. Navy’s underwater drones seem to have drawn particular interest by China’s military. In fact, on April 22, 2016 Newsweek reported, “Chines Spy In Florida Sent Drone Parts To China For Military.”

On April 14, 2016 Newsweek published a report about a naturalized United States citizen, Edward Lin, who had joined the U.S. Navy only, allegedly, to be able to spy on the Navy. I cannot help but wonder if his application for citizenship had been more effectively scrutinized if his alleged disloyalty to the United States could have been uncovered sooner.

A Year of Slaughter & Mayhem in Germany Berlin Christmas massacre follows a long list of attacks. Ari Lieberman

At least 12 people were killed and 48 more injured when a lorry driven by an unnamed assailant plowed his 18-wheeler truck into a crowd at a Christmas market in Berlin. According to witnesses, the vehicle was traveling at high speed and traveled the entire length of the market before coming to a halt.

Berlin police have reportedly arrested the driver and believe that the act was intentional. The man’s identity has not been released, but German media is reporting he was an asylum seeker from Pakistan or Afghanistan who arrived in February. A dead passenger was found in the cab of the truck. The circumstances of his death have not been revealed.

The attack bore the hallmarks of Islamic terrorism and was eerily reminiscent of an attack carried out by a Muslim terrorist on July 14 in the French city of Nice. That horrific truck attack left 84 dead and more than 300 injured.

The Express reports that German officials had been warned by various intelligence agencies that terrorists would attempt to carry out an attack during the holiday season. The British Foreign Office warned its citizens traveling to Germany to “remain vigilant.”

On November 26, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy attempted to place a bomb in the Christmas market near the Ludwigshafen municipality. The bomb failed to detonate. He tried to execute his plan again on December 5, but alert passersby noticed the suspicious bag and notified authorities who neutralized the bomb. The boy, who under German law cannot be prosecuted because of his age, told authorities that he was working on behalf of ISIS and plans to join the terror group. Absurdly, the boy is currently in the custody child welfare.

Germany has been wracked by a spate of Islamist violence directly linked to irresponsible migrant policies pursued by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Under Merkel’s stewardship, more than 1 million mostly male, Muslim migrants have been allowed entry into Germany and the result has been catastrophic for Germany.

On July 18, 2016 a Muslim immigrant of Afghan nationality boarded a train in Wuerzburg and attacked passengers with an axe, seriously injuring five.

On July 22, 2016, an Iranian shot and killed nine people in a Munich shopping mall.

On July 24, 2016, A Syrian refugee attacked a pregnant woman with a machete in the German city of Reutlingen, murdering her and wounding three others.

On July 24, 2016, A Syrian refugee detonated a bomb at an open-air music festival in the southern city of Ansbach, wounding 12.

On October 16, 2016, a 19-year old medical student and part-time volunteer at a refugee center was raped and murdered by a 17-year-old Afghan refugee. Her corpse was found in a river in Freiburg, Germany.

Voters Not Fooled by Democrats’ Dangerous Immigration Agenda There’s a new sheriff in town. Michael Cutler

One of the most treasured hallmarks of America’s democratic electoral process is that following every election the transference of political power is done peacefully. It is also expected that the candidate that loses an election will concede the results of the election and congratulate his/her opponent and wish that person success.

However, members of the Democratic Party and others, such as Presidential candidate Jill Stein, were so upset with the outcome of the election that they have made a series of false, outrageous accusations.

In so doing they not only attacked Donald Trump but our most prized democratic traditions.

The inflammatory and vitriolic statements made by various Democratic politicians, on all levels of government, were followed by violent demonstrations around the United States and on college campuses spurred on by the false accusations.

FBI Director Comey was blamed for causing Hillary to lose the election because he had made public statements about Hillary’s missing e-mails and illegal use of a private e-mail server to receive and transmit highly classified national security information.

Stein sought a recount of the votes in three key states. This costly effort failed to disclose any voting irregularities committed on behalf of Trump.

Now the most recent claim of the Democrats is that Russia hacked the U.S. electoral process to insure that Trump would win the election.

It is impossible to discuss computer security and not raise the issue of Hillary and her outrageous national security transgressions, through the use of her private and non-secure server as well as her non-secure digital devices, that created huge national security vulnerabilities for the United States.

Our government may not ever fully discover the extent of the damage this may have done to America’s intelligence gathering operations and may well continue to hobble those efforts for years to come.

Why Building the Wall Should Not Be Trump’s No. 1 Immigration Priority Mandating E-Verify and ending visa overstays will do more good, more quickly. By Mark Krikorian

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article first appeared in the December 19, 2016, issue of National Review.

Ironically, Donald Trump’s marquee immigration proposal — a border wall, which Mexico will pay for — is the part of his immigration platform least likely to make much difference. This is not to say it’s infeasible or even ill advised. Only about one-third of the border with Mexico has any kind of fencing, and half of that consists merely of low-rise vehicle barriers intended to stop truck traffic; anyone can easily climb over or under them (as I myself have done on many occasions). And the president doesn’t need further authorization from Congress to build a physical barrier, although he would eventually need additional funding.

As to Mexico providing that funding, the campaign said this could happen through higher visa fees or a tax on remittances. The latter is long overdue regardless and already in place in Oklahoma, which taxes all personal out-of-state wire transfers but refunds 100 percent of the tax to those who file their annual tax returns, thus levying the tax only on illegal aliens. A national version of this fully refundable payment would be a fitting way of making illegal aliens help pay for immigration enforcement.

All that said, the problem at the border isn’t so much physical as political. While incremental improvements are needed in infrastructure, technology, and personnel, the Obama administration has rendered the long buildup at the border through the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations moot by simply waving illegal aliens across and letting them stay. This is no exaggeration; Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol agents’ union, testified before Congress last year that 80 percent of apprehended illegal aliens are being released into the United States. Ending this catch-and-release approach to border enforcement (item No. 2 on Trump’s ten-point list) is probably more important than the wall, and quicker to implement.

The other immigration initiative on the incoming administration’s to-do list that has drawn a lot of attention is Trump’s pledge to deport 2 to 3 million criminal aliens. This represented a move toward realism, away from his comments early in the campaign that all illegal aliens would have to be deported; Trump realized that, as Andrew C. McCarthy has written regarding immigration violations: “Our goal is never to extirpate crime problems. . . . Crime problems are managed, not eradicated.”

But deporting criminal aliens neglected under President Obama’s laxity is an essential part of such management. And the figure of 3 million is probably an undercount: Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself estimated several years ago that there were 1.9 million deportable aliens with criminal convictions. Add to that close to a million people who were ordered deported but absconded, plus other alien criminals who weren’t convicted only because they jumped bail or were released by sanctuary cities, and there will be plenty to do with the enforcement resources now underutilized because of the huge decline in interior deportations under Obama.

There are two parts of any effective immigration-enforcement plan that are more important than either the Mexican border or criminal-alien removals: turning off the jobs magnet and ensuring that lawful foreign visitors actually go home when their authorized time is up. Both are included in the president-elect’s enforcement outline, but they need more attention — and administrative focus — than they have received.

Making legal status a labor standard, through rules such as those that provide overtime pay and prohibit employing child labor, is the most important single thing that can be done to reduce the incentive to immigrate illegally. Practically, that means requiring use of the free online system E-Verify for all new hires. E-Verify enables employers to check whether the ID information provided by their new hire is authentic. It is now voluntary; about half of last year’s new hires were screened through E-Verify. Making it mandatory will require an act of Congress. E-Verify is not a silver bullet — despite continuous improvements, some illegals still slip through, and a significant share (though a minority) of illegals work off the books. But any immigration-enforcement overhaul must include mandatory nationwide use of E-Verify if it is to have any chance of success.

The second enforcement initiative, policing visas and the visitors who use them, isn’t the arcane issue some may think. The old rule of thumb used to be that 60 percent of the illegal population snuck across the border and 40 percent overstayed visas, making visa-tracking important but secondary. New research from the Center for Migration Studies (no relation to my Center for Immigration Studies) found the reverse — now close to 60 percent of the 1,000 new illegal aliens settling in the U.S. each day are believed to be visa overstayers.

This needs to be addressed at both the front end and the back end. That is to say, the State Department needs to reduce its issuing of “nonimmigrant” (i.e., temporary) visas to people who are likely to stay here illegally in the first place, and the Department of Homeland Security needs to implement a check-out system for foreign visitors so we can know in real time who didn’t leave when he was supposed to.

Our nation’s visa officers abroad are America’s other Border Patrol, but State Department leadership views them more as travel agents. As with the actual Border Patrol, this is a problem mainly of management and policy, not resources. The relevant law clearly says that every applicant for a temporary visa is to be assumed to be an intended illegal alien until he proves otherwise. In practice, the burden of proof is often reversed. Since 9/11, security screening has been taken more seriously, but preventing non-terrorist or non-national-security-related visa overstays is simply not a priority. In fact, an earlier version of the Foreign Affairs Manual, the body of regulations that govern the State Department, included this quote from a Truman-era immigration commission:

Merkel Backtracks Amidst Refugee Crisis A too little, too late response to the consequences of a reckless open door immigration policy. Joseph Klein

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other like-minded Western European leaders have allowed an unprecedented number of “refugees” into their countries from the most terrorist-prone countries in the world, such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. To save their own necks, these reckless leaders are finally beginning to listen, at least half-heartedly, to their own citizens, who are recoiling from the disastrous consequences of the prevalent European Union open door “refugee” policy. The leaders have only themselves to blame for the crisis they have created for their people.

Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, in that order, are at the top of the list of origins of people applying for asylum in the European Union. All three of these countries are also among the top 5 on the 2015 Global Terrorism Index prepared by the Institute of Economics and Peace. It should not have been a surprise that, over the last two years, as the number of asylum-seekers originally from terrorist-prone Muslim-majority countries has risen dramatically, acts of terrorism committed by jihadists in Western Europe have risen dramatically as well. Yet Chancellor Merkel and her European Union pals either could not connect the dots or willfully turned a blind eye.

Crimes against females have also risen in Western Europe as carriers of Islamic cultural norms denigrating women and girls have entered Western Europe in large numbers. Afghanistan is at the top of the list of the most dangerous countries to be a woman.

Germany has been the most welcoming of Western European countries to asylum-seekers from Afghanistan and other terrorist-prone, Muslim-majority countries. Afghanistan, which was second on both the refugee origin and terrorist country lists, was the country of origin of an Afghan teenage “refugee” last July who carried out an attack in Germany that resulted in several serious injuries. The Islamic State claimed responsibility. Afghanistan was also the origin country of the so-called “unaccompanied underage refugee” who allegedly raped and murdered the daughter of a high level European Union official in October. The victim was a 19 year old medical student, whom had also worked as a volunteer in one of the local refugee shelters. The 17 year old alleged murderer, who entered Germany illegally in 2015, had applied for asylum as an unaccompanied minor and was living with a German family.

The Coming Sanctuary Cities Crackdown Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel begs President-elect Trump for leniency. Matthew Vadum

Chicago is one of the best places to live in America if you’re one of the millions of illegal aliens present in the country — and free-spending, lawbreaking Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying his best to keep it that way.

Emanuel (D), who used to be a congressman and then President Obama’s chief of staff, dropped by Trump Tower in New York on Wednesday to urge President-elect Donald Trump to abandon his campaign promise to crack down on sanctuary cities.

“I also spoke out strongly about what it means to be a sanctuary city who will support and secure the people who are here, like my grandfather who came to the city of Chicago as a 13-year old 100 years ago,” said Emanuel who actually has no real bargaining power in the equation because he’s on the wrong side of the law.

“Chicago was a sanctuary city for my grandfather. His grandson today is the mayor of this city, which is a testament to the strength of the values and ideals of America.”

Emanuel, of course, is leaving out the values that make Americans inclined to support the rule of law and therefore oppose illegal entry and visa-overstaying by foreigners.

Emanuel is a strident, in-your-face supporter of the sanctuary city movement that gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans. Cheered on by the Left, sanctuary cities hinder immigration enforcement and shield illegal aliens from federal officials as a matter of policy. They ignore immigration detainer forms which ask them to retain illegals in their custody after they would otherwise release them so Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can take custody of them.

These sanctuary cities really ought to be called traitor cities because they are in open rebellion against the United States. Cities are creatures of the states in which they reside and under the Guarantee Clause of the Constitution the U.S. government is required to make sure that states maintain a “Republican Form of Government.” (The same clause also requires the U.S. to “protect each of them [i.e. the states] against Invasion[.]” Perhaps Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions could have his staff look into invoking the “Invasion” portion of the clause.)

These sanctuary cities may as well be flying the Confederate battle flag at city hall in their modern-day campaign of massive resistance against federal immigration law.

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Confederates who resisted federal authority and declared war on the United States 155 years ago, or the neo-Confederates in Southern states who resisted federal authority during the civil rights era, Democratic lawmakers and left-wing activists have been working together for decades to create large pockets of immigration anarchy in the United States where the law cannot easily be enforced.

The three criteria for a republican form of government as described in the Guarantee Clause are popular rule, absence of a monarch, and the rule of law. Immigration is a federal responsibility and sanctuary city policies undermine legitimate federal authority and are contrary to the rule of law.

Moreover, actively interfering with immigration enforcement could constitute obstruction of justice and could violate the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act which contains provisions making it unlawful to “harbor” an illegal alien.