RUTHFULLY YOURS

“New and Improved” is a label often slapped on products to swindle consumers out of money.

Several years ago my local grocery store hung up banners declaring that they had permanently lowered the price of bags of sugar. I was impressed. I grabbed a couple of bags of sugar thinking I would save some money. Then I checked a bag and discovered that they no longer contained five pounds of sugar, but four pounds. Instead of saving money, the new bags cost more per pound.

Politicians employ similar tactics. They have elevated the use of Orwellian Newspeak to a true art form. Consider the con game known as “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

The issue of immigration reform reemerged after President Trump’s first speech before a joint session of Congress:

I believe that real and positive immigration reform is possible, as long as we focus on the following goals: to improve jobs and wages for Americans, to strengthen our nation’s security, and to restore respect for our laws.

If we are guided by the well-being of American citizens, then I believe Republicans and Democrats can work together to achieve an outcome that has eluded our country for decades.

President Trump’s statement and his views on true immigration reform — putting Americans first — contrasts significantly from “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” — a program that would put the interests of illegal aliens before the national interest, which politicians have attempted to foist on Americans for decades.

Politicians know that American citizens are adamantly opposed to any “amnesty.” They make the bogus claim that if illegal aliens pay back taxes and learn English, then it is not an amnesty program. Legalizing illegal aliens forgives them for violating the law and provides them with the authority to work legally.

Scamming politicians (forgive the redundancy) from both political parties, accompanied by pollsters, pundits, leaders of industries, and special interest groups, continually claim that our “immigration system is broken,” citing the presence of millions of illegal aliens in the United States, and the need for “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”

Essentially their “fix” would legalize nearly all of the illegal aliens and, in the short term, the U.S. would no longer have millions of illegal aliens. This isn’t a new approach to “fixing” the “broken immigration system.”

A massive amnesty program to provide unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status was tried by the Reagan Administration in 1986 when the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was enacted, with disastrous results. It incentivized the subsequent illegal entry of millions of illegal aliens.

The Reagan Administration estimated that roughly one million illegal aliens would come out of the “shadows.” This supposedly one-time measure provided more than 3.5 million illegal aliens with lawful status, including terrorists and criminals.

Before he left office, President Obama set a goal of accepting 110,000 refugees in the 2017 fiscal year (beginning Oct. 1st 2016), even though he was only president for four months of that fiscal year. Once Donald Trump became president, he set a revised limit of 50,000 for the 2017 fiscal year. However, a federal judge struck down the 50,000 limit.

As a result, Trump is admitting larger numbers of refugees.

The U.S. accepted 2,070 refugees in March, the lowest monthly total since 2013, according to State Department data. April ended with 3,316 refugees admitted….

That’s 160% higher than March.

Now here’s the tricky part:

While a federal judge has struck down Trump’s 50,000 limit, that does not mean that Trump is required to admit more than 50,000 refugees. He just can’t explicitly set a limit of 50,000. He could actually select fewer than 50,000, as long as he did not order a formal limit. No federal judge in the world can order President Trump to specifically select refugees to admit to America.

“As we have said repeatedly, Trump’s refugee admissions are not at the mercy of two rogue judges,” said longtime refugee watchdog Ann Corcoran in her blog post Thursday at Refugee Resettlement Watch. “He can bring in any number under the CEILING set either by Obama (110,000) or his reduced ceiling (50,000).”

So why is Trump admitting a larger number of refugees when he doesn’t have to? When he campaigned for the presidency, Trump promised to deport all Syrian refugees in America; now he is admitting more than ever, even taking in ones bound for Australia.

Trump supporters say we should be happy that Trump is admitting fewer refugees than Hillary would. But why not hold Trump to a higher standard–to his own promises? He can stop admitting any more refugees right now, not admit a single new one, and no federal judge can order him otherwise.

I guess we can file this away with other security promises that will never be fulfilled, like the wall that will be paid for by Mexico (or a wall at all), and the termination of the illegal “DREAMer” program. I just wonder, when a radical Islamic Syrian refugee that Trump admits into the country kills someone, who will Trump supporters blame? A federal judge? Paul Ryan? The Deep State? The Freedom Caucus? Ted Cruz’s father?

There were loud, violent, disruptive protests across America yesterday for International Workers’ Day, but American workers’ issues were barely discussed as they took a back seat to the Left’s current mania for illegal aliens and open borders.

This May Day comes after R. Alexander Acosta, 48, was sworn in as the 27th Secretary of Labor by Vice President Mike Pence last week. Acosta, whose nomination was endorsed by the Laborers’ International Union of North America and other unions, was a U.S. Attorney and dean of Florida International University College of Law. He was easily confirmed by the Senate on April 27 by a vote of 60 to 38.

In America, May Day is typically a violent observance. Its purpose is to serve as a rallying point for communists and socialists. Despite that, it hasn’t been that difficult to take the focus off the plight of American workers on May 1 over the years. Perhaps this is because America has never been a left-of-center country perpetually boiling over with class resentment. Americans don’t care much about labor issues or the labor movement because it hasn’t done anything for them.

Like every president since Dwight Eisenhower, President Trump declared May 1 Loyalty Day. In his proclamation, Trump said Loyalty Day is meant “to express our country’s loyalty to individual liberties, to limited government, and to the inherent dignity of every human being.” Last year President Obama used his Loyalty Day proclamation to blather on about “our diversity” and about the importance of delivering a “fairer Nation to the next generation.”

In the late 19th century, the Left hijacked May Day, a perfectly good ancient celebration of spring and fertility in the British Isles and elsewhere. It used to be a day of dancing around the maypole, singing, and eating cake.

May Day was celebrated in early America but today it is largely forgotten in this country. And so it was easy for the Left to fill this cultural vacuum and co-opt May Day for its own anti-American purposes.

And with Democrats and the rest of the Left in disarray after Hillary Clinton’s surprise defeat in November, radical immigration activists were seemingly able to wrest May Day away from organized labor this year.

This year’s May Day observances ranged from indifferent to conspicuously hostile to American workers as organizers used May 1 to largely ignore the plight of native workers pushed out of their jobs by cheaper illegal alien labor. The so-called rights of illegal alien workers took center stage yesterday.

On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Carlson mocked leftist campaigners for sounding like agents of the pro-open borders, pro-immigration amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and for refusing to condemn illegal alien workers for driving wages down and leaving legally present workers unemployed or underemployed.

Steven Choi, executive director of the George Soros-funded New York Immigration Coalition, wasted a valuable prime time spot on Carlson’s Fox News Channel show ducking questions about how immigrants put downward pressure on wages.