RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-immigrants-and-the-best-job-market-ever-11550013358?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=poptarget&cx_artPos=6#cxrecs_s

Today brought more news of a historically tight job market, as businesses have continued to respond to President Trump’s tax and regulatory reforms by going on a hiring binge. The problem is that they can’t find enough workers. Fortunately, today also brought more comments from President Trump suggesting that he knows how to fix it.

The government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that on the last day of December the number of job openings in the United States hit a record high of 7.3 million.

The Associated Press adds that the total of 7.3 million open positions is “far greater than the number of unemployed, which stood at 6.3 million.” AP reports:

Businesses have shrugged off a variety of potential troubles for the economy in the past two months and kept on hiring. The 35-day partial government shutdown began Dec. 22, and growth in China, Europe and Japan has weakened, threatening U.S. exports. Still, employers added 304,000 jobs in January, the government said earlier this month, the most in nearly a year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/its-not-just-the-wall-democrats-hate-interior-enforcement-too/

My post below on border funding assumes that there is a deal, which isn’t a guarantee. The sticking point at the moment is the interior:

But throughout the talks, Democrats had also been focused on limiting ICE’s ability to detain unauthorized immigrants, which has become a major issue for the party because of their opposition to the Trump administration’s aggressive detention tactics. The Democrats’ proposal included a new limit on detention beds for immigrants picked up not at the border but in the interior of the country.

Democrats wanted to cap that number at 16,500, which they said is around the level of interior detentions in the final years of the Obama administration. Republicans proposed excluding immigrants with criminal records from the cap. But Democrats said that would make the cap toothless, because it would amount to giving ICE free rein to round up thousands of immigrants without criminal records, on top of unlimited numbers of immigrants with criminal convictions.

http://thefederalist.com/2019/02/06/the-nyt-is-lying-to-readers-about-immigration-threats-from-muslim-world/

Much of the noise accompanying President Trump’s partial justification for a wall concerns the veracity of a general threat: that Islamist terror travelers in the flow of “special interest aliens” (SIAs) might easier breach the southern border without one.

Critics in the media vehemently argue that the administration is trafficking in ridiculous, baseless fearmongering. After President Trump said Muslim prayer rugs were intercepted at the border, one Vox article said migration from Muslim-majority countries only happened at “vanishingly small rates.” Another, in The Washington Post, called southern border migration from Muslim countries a “conspiracy theory.”

But perhaps the most influentially misleading article on the subject came from The New York Times. On January 18, The Times published a “Fact Check” column by Linda Qiu titled “Trump’s Baseless Claim About Prayer Rugs Found at the Border.” It essentially concluded that migration from Muslim-majority countries is an unproven conspiracy theory and, even if it did happen, no one could consider it a security threat.

The column contained numerous errors and inaccurately cited two government reports to support the story’s weak contentions. This sort of recurring problem in the media must finally be called out.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/immigration-politics-pitfalls/

An advance press briefing last week teased that at tonight’s State of the Union address the president would move beyond the current border-security wrangling and offer a grand, new vision for moving forward on immigration, involving something Trump has not said before.

That could just be marketing hype, but there’s reason to be worried. That’s because the formulation of this new — dare I say “comprehensive” — thrust on immigration is apparently not being overseen by Stephen Miller, but by Jared Kushner. This has raised alarm bells because of Kushner’s Manhattan millionaire liberal instincts, but I’m not sure that that’s the main problem.

Rather, I fear that the combination of Kushner’s unfamiliarity with the past 30 years of immigration politics, combined with overconfidence in his powers stemming from his success in brokering criminal-justice reform, will lead the White House astray. Jared could end up like Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons, stepping on one rake after another, because the immigration issue is strewn with rakes just waiting to smack the unsuspecting policy entrepreneur in the face. As a service to those in the White House who are new to the immigration issue, here are a few of those rakes, just waiting to be stepped on:

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mexico-deploys-militarized-police-to-block-2-000-migrants-from-entering-texas?utm_source=

Hundreds of militarized Mexican police officers were standing guard Tuesday at the border between Piedras Negras, Coahuila, and Eagle Pass, Texas, to prevent nearly 2,000 Central American migrants from illegally crossing into the U.S.

Buses dropped off the migrants in Piedras Negras, a city of around 250,000 residents, late Monday. By Tuesday morning, federal police in full military gear were lined up in two long parallel rows outside of the facility to keep them from leaving the country, according to tweets from Mexican officials.

The Rio Grande separates both countries in that area, and due to the landscape, portions of the border do not have a physical barrier, making it easier for people to try to enter the U.S.

Starting Tuesday, the state’s governor, Miguel Riquelme, plans to begin deporting migrants who illegally entered Mexico on their way to America.

Coahuila officials will ask those staying at the temporary shelter to show humanitarian visas they would have received if they tried to travel through the country legally from Guatemala. Those who do not have the documents will be removed as soon as Tuesday.

Meanwhile, American, Mexican, and Central American officials are in talks about how to handle this new caravan, one of a handful in the past year. Officials from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Border Patrol, the Guatemalan consulate in South Texas, the Mexican consulate in South Texas, Mexican government, Coahuila state government, and others met again Monday to talk about how to care for and process the group.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272739/world-wide-threat-assessment-makes-powerful-case-michael-cutler

Timing is everything. Congress is currently in the midst of debating the construction of a “border wall” or “border barrier” to protect the dangerous U.S./Mexican border as the clock ticks down to another possible partial shutdown of our government if an agreement cannot be reached.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, January 29, 2019 the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a hearing on Worldwide Threats that was predicated on a just-released paper, “World-Wide Threat Assessment,” that was issued by Daniel Coats, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, which oversees the U.S. intelligence community.

As we will see, elements of that report addressed issues that have a clear nexus to border security and immigration law enforcement.

However, the leaders of the Democratic Party have thus far made it clear that they will oppose any and all efforts to construct a barrier to block the uninspected entry of aliens and cargo into the United States while simultaneously claiming that they don’t oppose border security — even as some Democrats call for disbanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272746/trump-wall-getting-done-one-way-or-other-matthew-vadum

President Trump is growing impatient over the lack of progress bipartisan negotiators in Congress have been making in talks over funding a desperately needed wall on the nation’s porous multi-state border with Mexico – and this continuing failure makes another government shutdown increasingly likely this Feb. 15.

The GOP-controlled House of Representatives voted 217 to 185 on Dec. 20 for a spending bill with $5.7 billion for the wall. The measure floundered in the Senate and the partial shutdown got underway Dec. 22. The Senate remains in Republican hands but the House is now controlled by Democrats.

Trump engaged in what his handlers characterized as a strategic temporary retreat when he signed a bill Jan. 25 to reopen the government for a three-week period after the longest federal shutdown on record, dropping his demand that Congress appropriate funding for the wall before restoring the government to full functionality until Feb. 15 after which the government could partially shut down again. Trump said he’ll use the time to continue to push lawmakers for money for the wall and is perfectly willing to shut the government down again if he doesn’t secure appropriations for construction of the project.