Displaying posts categorized under

IMMIGRATION

Sessions Threatens Sanctuary Cities With Subpoenas The Justice Department warns it may subpoena documents explaining illegal alien-shielding policies. Matthew Vadum

The Department of Justice threatened to subpoena 23 jurisdictions across the country if they fail to answer questions about their lawless “sanctuary” policies that shield illegal aliens, a move that prompted left-wing big city mayors to boycott a White House meeting.

“I continue to urge all jurisdictions under review to reconsider policies that place the safety of their communities and their residents at risk,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

“Protecting criminal aliens from federal immigration authorities defies common sense and undermines the rule of law. We have seen too many examples of the threat to public safety represented by jurisdictions that actively thwart the federal government’s immigration enforcement—enough is enough.”

The subpoena threat comes as federal prosecutors consider filing criminal charges against elected officials harboring illegal aliens in sanctuary cities.

“The Department of Justice is reviewing what avenues might be available,” Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a Senate panel Jan. 16. “The context of this is of course not only putting my ICE officers at risk but also finding an efficient and effective way to enforce our immigration laws,” Nielsen said.

The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers use the dreadful euphemism “civil liberties safe zones” to describe sanctuary jurisdictions. The phrase blurs the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

How to Manipulate Migration Data? Take Belgium… by Alain Destexhe

Alain Destexhe is a Senator in Belgium, Former Secretary General of Médecins Sans Frontières and Former President of the International Crisis Group.

An honest report for this demographic forecasting should be called, “We shall soon be a million more, most of whom will be Muslims”. But this kind of headline would invariably create a public debate on demography, population density and Muslim integration — and that would be out of the question for European elites: that would make people super-anxious and worried.

Tricky surveys are only used for migration numbers; never for unemployment rates, literacy rates or GDP growth.

Unless there is rapid awareness about the exponential consequences of chain migration and arrivals from across the Mediterranean, mass migration will continue. Concealing this fact is pursued everywhere in Europe.

It should probably not come as a shock that statistics can be, and often are, presented and manipulated by elites. In Belgium — and in all of Western Europe except Austria — they form an informal multiculturalist lobby, which dominates universities, NGOs, public institutions and the media, in order to promote a pro-migration agenda.

In a relatively short time, Belgium has changed dramatically. Without any public debate, it has become a massive migration state. In just 15 years, Belgium has seen an increase of one million in its population — from 10.2 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2015. These numbers represent a 10% rise over a very short period.

From 2000 to 2010, net immigration was nine times greater than in the Netherlands; four times greater than in France or Germany and even greater than in the United States, a country historically open to immigration.

Yet, this statistical reality has been hidden from the Belgian population. The elites and the media decide what people can talk about and what should be hidden. To force people to accept immigration as a given, data has to be hidden to avoid worrying the citizenry.

This is no grand conspiracy, no “Big Brother” masterpiece, but — at best — an honest enthusiasm for the multiculturalist ideology, or — at worst — the strong defensive mechanisms of Freudian psychology such as sublimation, denial or repression.
Information on flow but not on stock

Migration statistics are presented as annual flow. If this number goes down compared to the preceding year, it will be greatly emphasized; otherwise, it will be downplayed. A 10- or 20-year statistic would never be used. In looking at the scale of a country, annual flows are rarely subject to concern; but over a 10-year period, they could be alarming. We usually, for instance, talk about 40,000 naturalizations a year but none of these would remind us that there were also 200,000 naturalizations in three years and 608,322 in 12 years.

Those numbers represent 6% of Belgium’s population. Additionally, no one writes that in just a few years, a million migrants arrived in a country of ten million, from 10.2 million in 2000 to 11.3 million in 2015.
Europeans move back to their country of origin, the others stay

In Belgium, a small country, open to its neighbors and host to the “capital of Europe,” always has a procession of lobbyists and bureaucrats who have migrated from within Europe. This number is always larger, in terms of flow, than those arriving from other continents. The French and Dutch have the largest number of yearly migrants to Belgium, but after a few years they move back to their countries of origin. Turks, Moroccans and newcomers from other continents, do not.

Italian Leader Warns Muslim Migration Might Erase ‘Centuries of History’ By Tyler O’Neil

A political leader in Italy warned that the influx of migrants into the country might wipe away the country’s iconic and historic culture and society. Immigration has become a central issue in the national elections on March 4.

“We are under attack. Our culture, society, traditions, and way of life are at risk,” Northern League leader Matteo Salvini, an ally of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, declared in a statement last week.

Salvini defended the gist of controversial comments from Attilio Fontana, the League’s candidate to become the head of the Lombary region. “We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if our society will be rubbed out,” Fontana told Radio Padania, Reuters reported.

After the comments unleashed a storm of controversy, Fontana admitted they had been a “lapse.” Salvini defended the gist of the comments, while down-playing the potentially racist angle.

“The color of one’s skin has nothing to do with it, but the risk is very real,” Salvini said. “Centuries of history risk disappearing if Islamization, which up until now has been underestimated, gains the upper hand.”

More than 600,000 migrants have come to Italy from across the Mediterranean Sea over the past four years. Last November, the Pew Research Center estimated that Muslims made up 4.8 percent of the population in 2016 — compared to 3.7 percent in 2010.

Pew presented three separate scenarios involving various levels of immigration. Even if Muslim migration levels dropped to zero, Italy’s Muslim population would still rise to 8.3 percent by 2050. Under a “medium migration” scenario, the number would rise to 12.4 percent. Even if the country experienced “high migration,” Muslims would still only make up 14.1 percent of the population in 2050, Pew reported.

The Humanitarian Hoax of DACA: Killing America With Kindness – hoax 20 by Linda Goudsmit

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Obama, the humanitarian huckster-in-chief, weakened the United States for eight years presenting his crippling Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) advocacy as altruistic when in fact it was designed for destruction. His legacy, the Leftist Democrat Party with its ongoing Resistance movement, is the party of the Humanitarian Hoax attempting to destroy the capitalist infrastructure of American democracy through deceitful immigration reforms. This is how it works.

DACA Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals was the 2012 product of Obama’s illegal executive overreach. The lesser known DAPA Deferred Action for Parents of Americans was Obama’s 2014 expansion program that legalized illegal alien parents whose children became legal American citizens through birthright citizenship.

Amnesty programs for illegal immigrants guaranteed Democrat votes but Obama had a problem selling the idea to Congress even though Democrats had control of both Houses. Illegal aliens needed a new image. No problem for Obama – his Leftist image-makers went to work.

Soon illegal aliens became undocumented aliens, then undocumented workers, then unauthorized immigrants, then undocumented immigrants, and finally the loftiest brand of them all – Dreamers. Obama’s rebranded illegal aliens were transformed into Dreamers and protecting them was merchandised as the humanitarian imperative for America. Millennials signed on in droves but here is the problem.

Rebranding is a marketing tool used by advertisers to sell products that don’t sell. Rebranding changes the name but it does not change the product. Dreamers are still illegal aliens. So why would Obama resort to executive overreach to sell rebranded illegal immigration?? Because Obama needed the positive image of Dreamers to sell DACA and DAPA as altruistic programs when they were actually deceitful Democrat power-grabs designed to tip red states blue. It was always about the votes.

Illegals in California with Driver’s Licenses Eligible to Vote After April 1 By Peter Barry Chowka

Starting on April 1, 2018, illegal aliens in California who have recently obtained state driver’s licenses legally, or obtained them previously by lying about their immigration status, will automatically be registered to vote. Since January 2015, according to the California DMV, A.B. 60, a law passed by the California Assembly, “allows illegal immigrants to the United States to apply for a California driver’s license with the CA Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)” [emphasis original]. As of December 2016, more than 800,000 California driver’s licenses were issued to illegal aliens under the A.B. 60 law. Additional thousands of illegals may have been granted licenses prior to 2015 because they lied on their driver’s license application forms and claimed they were in the country legally. (No proof of legal residence has been required by the California DMV in recent years.)

An editorial in the Victorville Daily Press on January 22 summarized the situation:

According to the [s]ecretary of [s]tate’s website, in order to vote in California one must be at least 18 years old, a United States citizen[,] and a resident of California.

But a court settlement Jan. 10 in response to a suit filed by the League of Women Voters [and several other groups including The National Council of La Raza] may have pushed open the door to rampant voter fraud in this state. That’s because under the settlement, starting in April the Department of Motor Vehicles will automatically register to vote all those who renew their driver’s licenses unless they opt out.

California Political Review and Courthouse News first broke the story of illegals being allowed to vote starting this spring on January 18 in an article titled “Alert: Starting April 1 California DMV Will AUTOMATICALLY Register Illegal Aliens to Vote – by COURT ORDER:”

Cory Booker Meets Ted Kennedy’s ‘Racist’ Ghost By Pedro Gonzalez

According to the those on the political Left, America has always been a nation of, by, and for immigrants, in terms undefined, unregulated, and unlimited. But inclusive rhetoric is a recent development in U.S. immigration policy, one that stands in stark contrast with our nation’s former longstanding practice of prudent, selective immigration.

Progressives seem to forget it was Democrat Ted Kennedy, on the eve of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, who assured an uneasy Congress that “our streets will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.” Turns out there were 1.8 million immigrants in 2016 alone. That line didn’t age well, did it?

Kennedy promised the bill “will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.”

Some might say Kennedy was tacitly mollifying a concern about America being overwhelmed with immigrants from what, based on desperately impoverished conditions therein, might be considered “shithole” countries. There’s nothing inherently wrong with what Kennedy said. Nations have the right to regulate immigration, after all.

“Complicit” With What Now?
But how would Senator Cory Booker react to those remarks today? I can’t see Booker slamming Kennedy like he did Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, whom he likened to a Nazi enabler when she failed to rebuke President Trump’s remark that she didn’t hear, because she wasn’t in the room.

Neilsen, the consummate professional, remained calm against Booker’s tirade. “I decline to spend any more of my time responding other than to say the obvious—I did not and will not lie under oath and say I heard something I didn’t,” Nielsen said.

How principled, genuine even, of Nielsen—Lindsey Graham could learn a thing or two from her. Booker was left with his “tears of rage” at Neilsen’s “complicity” in enabling a racist America wherein we do the unthinkable: control our borders, enforce immigration laws, dictate who may immigrate, and upon which conditions they may remain.

Mythologies of Illegal Immigration By Victor Davis Hanson

The illegal immigration debate has come to a head once again. Congress remains at an impasse over a temporary spending bill that Senate Democrats refuse to support unless it includes a provision that would allow several hundred thousand illegal aliens to remain in the United States without fear of deportation. It’s a tiresome ploy by the Democrats, abetted by their allies in the media, using deceptive language to paint a false picture that blurs the distinction between legal and illegal, citizen and foreigner, justice and injustice.

Enough obfuscation. Here are some of the most pernicious myths of illegal immigration, debunked.

The System is “Broken”
Broken for whom exactly? Not for Mexico and Latin America. Together they garner $50 billion in annual remittances. The majority of such transfers are likely sent from illegal aliens.

Some of that largess is also subsidized by the entitlements American taxpayers pay that free up this disposable cash for sending abroad. In the eyes of Mexico and Latin America, the only thing that would make our system appear “broken” would be enforcing existing U.S. immigration law.

Or perhaps “broken” would be defined as novel ways of paying for Trump’s wall—by either taxing remittances or so discouraging illegal immigration that a reduction of dollar outflows could be counted (at least rhetorically) as down payments on border construction.

The immigration system is also clearly not broken for the Democratic Party. It has turned California blue. It soon will do the same to Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, and someday may flip Arizona and Texas.

If the statist, redistributionist, and identity politics principles of the Democrats no longer appeal to 51 percent of the electorate, then why would they give up on the annual investment in nearly hundreds of thousands of new arrivals that by some means, and in the not too distant future, would translate into loyal, politically predictable voters for whom this approach to politics is second nature?

Employers believe the system is anything but broken. Any good news for the country about skyrocketing minority employment numbers is likely to be bad news for them if it means declining numbers of cheaper illegal aliens to hire. Open borders have ensured the hiring of industrious workers at cheap wages while passing on the accruing health, educational, legal, and criminal justice costs to the taxpayer. The present system is “working” well enough for this crowd; its possible replacement instead would be defined as “broken.”

Ethnic tribunes support illegal immigration. If the border were closed and the melting pot allowed to work, the façade of identity politics would vanish in a generation.

Recently added accents would be dropped. Hyphenated names would disappear. Trilled r’s would become rare. La Raza/Chicano/Latino Studies programs would become about as popular as Basque or Portuguese. If immigrants from Mexico came in measured numbers, legally, with high-school diplomas, and along with diverse immigrants from all over the world, then rapid assimilation and integration would soon render them politically individuals, not tribes. Someone like California Senate Leader Kevin de León (born Kevin Alexander Leon) would never have needed a preposition and an accent mark.

Broken? More likely, most welcomed.

DACA: Trump and Congress Must Look Before They Leap 800,000 DACA aliens just became 3.6 million. Michael Cutler

There is a bit of sage advice that warns, “Look before you leap.”

Motorists are also warned to not attempt to drive through a flooded street because it may be impossible to know the depth of the water.

Those warnings certainly apply to any politician, President Trump included, who may be inclined to reach a compromise on DACA.

It has been estimated by the DHS that about 800,000 illegal aliens have enrolled in DACA. The media and advocates for legalizing these aliens repeatedly describe them as having been brought here as children who, supposedly, had no control over their situation.

Most folks are not aware that in order to qualify, these aliens had to claim that they entered the United States prior to their 16th birthdays but could have applied to participate in this program if they did so prior to their 31st birthday. Today those aliens may be as old as 36 years of age.

Now, reportedly, the administration is seeking a compromise to deal with these aliens who will begin losing their temporary protection from deportation on March 5th.

However, in the parallel world of Washington, DC, what you see may not be what you get.

On January 18, 2018 USA Today reported, “There are 3.6M ‘DREAMers’ — a number far greater than commonly known.”

That estimate, according to USA Today, was provided by the Migration Policy Institute.

Advocates for legalization of DACA aliens, who enrolled in the Obama program, are also now demanding that any aliens who claim they would have qualified as “DREAMERS” and claim they entered the United States before their 18th birthdays be granted lawful status as well.

Durbin is seeking a massive legalization program through extortion, holding the U.S. government and Americans hostage.

The December 4, 2018 Chicago Tribune report, Durbin rallying support for Dream Act, included this sentence:

The Dream Act would grant “conditional permanent residency” to an estimated 1.8 million immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before age 18 and can meet requirements similar to those under the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

GOP Won’t Negotiate Immigration Until Shutdown Ends By Rick Moran

Republicans just blew up Democratic hopes for using DACA for leverage in shutdown talks. Both House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and White House Legislative Director Marc Short confirmed that there would be no DACA negotiations while the government remained without funding.

Politico:

“I think it’s more difficult to get any agreement on DACA in a shutdown,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy heading into a meeting with GOP leaders Saturday. He was referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, shielding hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation, known as Dreamers.

White House Legislative Director Marc Short, who attended a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, echoed that stance.

“I think the administration’s position is that as soon as they reopen the government, we’ll resume negotiations on DACA,” Short told reporters. “It’s hard to negotiate on that when they’re keeping our border agents unpaid, our troops unpaid, not paying for American services.”

Trump, who canceled a weekend trip to Florida to celebrate his first anniversary in office, spoke with Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday morning, aides said.

House Republicans scoffed at a tentative framework to reopen the government being discussed by a bipartisan group of senators.

Under the proposal — conceived by GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake — Senate Democrats would agree to re-open the government and fund agencies until Feb. 8. In exchange, they would secure a vote on a bipartisan Dreamers bill. While McConnell signaled that he might go along, Senate Democrats also wanted a commitment from Ryan to include the bill in must-pass legislation in the House.

But McConnell would not agree to that demand, senators said, because he cannot bind the House to a Senate deal.

And Ryan insisted that the Senate needed to approve the House bill to fund the government until Feb. 16 as a starting point for any broader agreement.

“We were not party to any negotiations, and our only message to the Senate all day yesterday was pass our bill to keep the government open,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The government shut down because Senate Democrats decided to hold the entire federal government and children’s health insurance hostage. It’s pretty straight forward.”

So what if the President Trump did use that word? By Marion DS Dreyfus ****

Who really isn’t sick to death of people being ungrateful nitpicks who cannot say thank you for all the benisons bestowed by this president, no matter his alleged blue tongue? So what if he said one word you don’t like?

I have been to Haiti, the poorest of all the nations in this hemisphere. I have been to El Salvador, a corrupt, ungovernable country with rampant crime and gangs. I have been to over ten countries in Africa, none of them star performers in the GDP and modern conveniences and mindset sweepstakes.

They are indeed horrible places, where corruption and citizens’ fear are the order of the day, where their alleged governments are rife with unloving, greedy, small-minded, and power-lusting so-called leaders.

These are countries whose human products are not, in the main, people we need here – not because they are this shade or that, but because their average standard of skills, education, integrity, and civic virtue is at tremendous variance from what we have for 241 years essayed to raise and keep elevated.

We are not, in the main, uncharitable. But if your home comfortably seats twenty, if you push the limits of your beds, sofas, carpeting and easy chairs, what happens when an unexpected troupe of fifty more uninvited decide you have a real nice view, and they like your fixin’s?

Ever had a party? The work of the party isn’t so much the prep and the cooking and shopping for comestibles and beverages. The real angst of the party is the clean-up. The guests rarely stick around for the empties and no-ashtray-won’t-stop-their-smoking butts, the wrappers and pizza crusts, or the half-eaten messes on the cake trays.

That’s the U.S. But we aren’t a night-and-day party, though the uninvited “guests” keep slavering after our table, sleeping on the new couch covers, using up the toilet tissue, leaving an unidentifiable restroom aroma, and wolfing down the leftovers you’d hoped to serve your spouse the next day.

But even if the president did drop that one word, a word and a concept, I wager, that 99% of regular folks in this country use, though they will deny it strenuously – we are not born yesterday – he was not stating a “racist” sentiment. He was being factual. These are abysmal states that create citizens who are not prizes we need here.

Ironically, when I professored in the People’s Republic of China, my very best students asked me for letters of recommendation so they could apply to the U.S. for graduate school in their chosen fields. I was delighted to write these letters. The whey-faced PRC government, however, had other ideas. They turned down all applicants: why would China choose to release its foremost scholars and most promising professionals to help the United States?

And why, then, it follows, do we need to import a cadre of the low in terms of skills and smarts, longevity, and overall health to lower our achievement, our life stats, our job numbers? What sane country does that? And don’t give us those anecdotal tales of one Ph.D. subliming his way into nuclear physics or one earnest striver finishing Johns Hopkins with his specialty of forensic anthropology.

Anecdotes are cute. They mean close to nothing in the broader picture of overall excellence. We all know this, even if we’re Democrats and learn to elide common sense whenever at all possible.

But no one is stopping these undaunted invaders from many countries. (OTMs means Other Than Mexicans, a handy capsule reminder that Central and South America are not the sole-source contributors to our festering Hoovervilles of undocumenteds and skill-frees.)

When I taught in China, I had about 1,000 students among the four colleges at which I was privileged to teach. All of them, all my college students, male and female, wanted to come to live here.