RUTHFULLY YOURS

Prior to World War II the U.S. Department of Labor was charged with enforcing and administering our immigration laws. It was understood that flooding the U.S. labor pool with foreign workers would force American workers to compete with those foreign workers who would be willing to work for much lower wages. This would depress wages and cost many Americans their jobs.

The enforcement of our immigration laws played an important role in creating America’s unusually large and upwardly mobile middle class, which in turn, gave rise to “The American Dream.”

The authority for the enforcement and administration of our immigration laws was shifted to the Department of Justice during the Second World War when concerns shifted to enemy spies and saboteurs entering the United States.

For our enemies, going behind the “enemy lines” meant the borders of the United States whether they existed along our northern or southern borders, along our tens of thousands of miles of meandering coastline or even by entering the United States through international airports.

In the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 the responsibility for the enforcement of our immigration laws was shifted from the Department of Justice to the newly created Department of Homeland Security- once again reaffirming the nexus between immigration and national security. However, under DHS the enforcement of our immigration laws was hobbled by splitting the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) into several unwieldy components and blending those components with other agencies.

Wiping away tears that eluded him when he spoke about the jihadist massacres in Paris and San Bernardino, President Obama condemned congressional inaction in the face of gun violence during remarks he delivered from the East Room of the White House on Tuesday morning. The president vowed to fill in the void through executive action. The most egregious of these measures is a wholesale re-writing of the definition of what constitutes a “seller” in order to extend the reach of federal government control over all gun owners. Obama listed this as his top priority action, ahead of what he described as “smart and effective enforcement of gun safety laws that are already on the books.”

Enforcing the laws already on the books is the responsibility of the executive branch. Making new laws or changing existing laws is the responsibility of the legislative branch.

Apparently, President Obama has learned nothing from the Supreme Court’s reversal of his unconstitutional recess appointments and the judicial stay issued against his unconstitutional immigration amnesty executive orders. Obama gave little comfort to skeptics when he claimed in his White House remarks that “I believe in the Second Amendment. It’s there written on the paper.”

The proble

As part of his effort to reduce gun violence, President Obama issued an executive order today that makes it easier to prohibit a small group of the most seriously mentally ill from owning firearms and provides $500 million in additional mental-health funding. The order’s mental-illness–focused gun-control provisions are smart and narrowly tailored to affect only the most seriously ill individuals. But its additional funding won’t go where it could make a difference.

The mental-health industry teaches the public­ that, as President Obama put it, ‘the mentally ill are not more violent than others.’ But that platitude does not apply to the most seriously ill when they are allowed to go untreated. Eighteen percent of the population has some form of “mental-health issue” and is not violent. But 4 percent of the population has serious mental illness, which, left untreated, causes them to be more violent than others. While gun violence is rare, and mass violence by the seriously ill is even rarer, no one outside the NRA and the politically correct mental-health industry believes the seriously mentally ill should have access to weapons.