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February 2017

IMMIGRATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump Is Right: Sweden’s Embrace of Refugees Isn’t Working The country has accepted 275,000 asylum-seekers, many without passports—leading to riots and crime. By Jimmie Åkesson and Mattias Karlsson

By on February 23rd, 2017

When President Trump last week raised Sweden’s problematic experience with open-door immigration, skeptics were quick to dismiss his claims. Two days later an immigrant suburb of Stockholm was racked by another riot. No one was seriously injured, though the crowd burned cars and hurled stones at police officers.

Mr. Trump did not exaggerate Sweden’s current problems. If anything, he understated them. Sweden took in about 275,000 asylum-seekers from 2014-16—more per capita than any other European country. Eighty percent of those who came in 2015 lacked passports and identification, but a majority come from Muslim nations. Islam has become Sweden’s second-largest religion. In Malmö, our third-largest city, Mohamed is the most common name for baby boys.

The effects are palpable, starting with national security. An estimated 300 Swedish citizens with immigrant backgrounds have traveled to the Middle East to fight for Islamic State. Many are now returning to Sweden and are being welcomed back with open arms by our socialist government. In December 2010 we had our first suicide attack on Swedish soil, when an Islamic terrorist tried to blow up hundreds of civilians in central Stockholm while they were shopping for Christmas presents. Thankfully the bomber killed only himself.

Riots and social unrest have become a part of everyday life. Police officers, firefighters and ambulance personnel are regularly attacked. Serious riots in 2013, involving many suburbs with large immigrant populations, lasted for almost a week. Gang violence is booming. Despite very strict firearm laws, gun violence is five times as common in Sweden, in total, as in the capital cities of our three Nordic neighbors combined.

Anti-Semitism has risen. Jews in Malmö are threatened, harassed and assaulted in the streets. Many have left the city, becoming internal refugees in their country of birth.

The number of sex crimes nearly doubled from 2014-15, according to surveys by the Swedish government body for crime statistics. One-third of Swedish women report that they no longer feel secure in their own neighborhoods, and 12% say they don’t feel safe going out alone after dark. A 1996 report from the same government body found that immigrant men were far likelier to commit rape than Swedish men. Last year our party asked the minister of justice to conduct a new report on crime and immigration, and he replied: “In light of previous studies, I do not see that a further report on recorded crime and individuals’ origins would add knowledge with the potential to improve the Swedish society.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The Media Do Battle With a Pragmatic New President Trump talked policy in his Florida rally, but journalists thought it was about them.

By on February 23rd, 2017

During labor disputes at major newspapers, it’s not uncommon for reporters to withhold their bylines from stories to demonstrate frustration with management and win sympathy from readers. This can sometimes get management’s attention, but it’s unclear how many readers notice or care.

In recent weeks the Washington press corps’s coverage of its continuing personal feud with Donald Trump, which pits a supposedly tyrannical president against a supposedly noble Fourth Estate, has dominated the news. Does the public care about this standoff as much as the media believe?

“They have their own agenda,” Mr. Trump said of the national press at a rally in Florida Feb. 18, where he pitted the elite media against his supporters. “And their agenda is not your agenda.” The president is on firmer ground than his media foes.

Republican presidents have been accustomed to harsh criticism from the mostly left-wing Beltway journalists who cover them, but no one in memory has received as much sustained abuse as Mr. Trump. Most major news outlets showed nothing but contempt for him and his supporters throughout the campaign, and the disdain has only escalated since the election.

“They could not defeat us in the primaries and they could not defeat us in the general election,” Mr. Trump told supporters, referring not to his political opponents but to the press. “We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live, or what to believe. We are free and independent people, and we will make our own choices.”

It’s also becoming clearer that the media are more interested than Mr. Trump in maintaining this antagonistic relationship. Mr. Trump won the White House as an outsider who preached the sort of pragmatism on display in Florida, where he spoke at length about his administration’s intention to focus on jobs, crime, border security and economic growth.

“I know that you want safe neighborhoods where the streets belong to families and communities, not gang members and drug dealers,” he said. The president talked about reducing violent crime nationwide and assembling a task force that will focus on urban areas. He said “safety is a civil right.” The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that murder rates in Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Memphis have returned to record levels reached in the 1990s. For millions of Americans, that task force can’t come soon enough.

Mr. Trump’s approach to job creation is no less commonsensical. He wants to cut red tape and use our natural resources as safely and strategically as possible. “You want low-cost American energy also, which means lifting the restrictions on oil, on shale, on natural gas, on clean—very clean—coal,” he said at the Florida rally. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.” Mr. Trump pledged to reverse course at the Environmental Protection Agency, where regulatory activity increased dramatically during a previous administration that placed the concerns of environmentalists above those of blue-collar workers in Ohio and Michigan.

In the president’s view, these regulations have been “clogging up the veins of our country,” which “meant no jobs. It meant companies leaving our country and going to foreign countries to do things that they’d rather do here.” An Americans for Tax Reform report last year said EPA compliance costs had grown by more than $50 billion annually under President Obama and “ripple throughout the economy, impacting GDP, killing thousands of jobs, and increasing the cost of consumer goods.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Deportation Surge Bravo for sparing the ‘dreamers,’ but the rest is enforcement overkill.

By on February 23rd, 2017

President Trump campaigned on enforcing immigration law, and Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly plans to deliver. On Tuesday Mr. Kelly ordered a deportation surge that will cost billions of dollars and expand the size and intrusiveness of government in ways that should make conservatives wince.

In a pair of memos the Secretary fleshes out the Administration’s immigration priorities to protect public safety. By all means deport gangbangers and miscreants. But Mr. Kelly’s order is so sweeping that it could capture law-abiding immigrants whose only crime is using false documents to work. This policy may respond to the politics of the moment, but chasing down maids and meatpackers will not go down as America’s finest hour.
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Under Mr. Kelly’s guidelines, any undocumented immigrant who has committed even a misdemeanor could be “subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.” So a restaurant worker with an expired visa or driver without a license who is caught rolling a stop sign could be an expulsion target.

One question is whether all this effort is needed. More than 90% of the 65,000 undocumented immigrants removed last year from the U.S. interior were convicted criminals, and about 2,000 were affiliated with gangs. This suggests that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is already targeting and removing as many bad guys as it can locate.

To assist with removals, the memos call for hiring an additional 5,000 border patrol and 10,000 ICE agents, which represent a roughly 25% and 50% increase in their respective workforces. The increase in the agencies’ operating budgets would cost about $4 billion annually.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

KEEP QUIET- A REVIEW BY MARILYN PENN

By on February 23rd, 2017

When we watch a documentary film, we assume that we are seeing a true story and that there will be sufficient information for us to contemplate its veracity. In this film about a former leader of Hungary’s far-right, anti-semitic, holocaust- denying Jobbik party, there are huge blocks of missing information that would have helped to put the main character in better context. Csanad Szegedi is the protagonist whose life is upended by the discovery that his grandmother is a Jewish woman who was deported to Auschwitz and bears the tattoo which she has concealed until now. Not wanting to relive the horrors that she had already experienced, she married a non-Jew and raised her daughter without any reference to Judaism. Similarly the half-Jewish daughter followed in her mother’s footsteps and never mentioned it to her son, Csanad.

When he is kicked out of his political party because even a drop of Jewish blood can contaminate a barrel of water, Csanad seeks out Rabbi Oberlander, an ultra-orthodox rabbi who undertakes the task of bringing this anti-semite back to his religion – including circumcision, putting on tefilin, davening with the congregation and speaking out about his past transgressions in an effort to atone. Here are some of the myriad questions that occurred to me:

Why didn’t Csanad remain a secular Jew? Where is the family of this seemingly middle-aged man – wife, children, brother – and how does this orthodox conversion sit with them? We meet his mother and grandmother – is he single, divorced, gay? How many Jews are there in Hungary, where do they live and what is their demographic? Is the English-speaking rabbi an American sent to Hungary by Chabad? What is the current Hungarian attitude towards Israel? Are they one of the pro-Palestinian European countries who boycott Israeli products as well as their artists, scholars and athletes? The filmmakers follow Csanad to Auschwitz because the grandmother was imprisoned there. Bobby, another woman survivor who speaks Hungarian but seems to be American tells the chilling story of children forced to climb into the toilets and use their caps to clean out the contents, then put those caps on their heads. Just ponder this plan – no comment would be sufficient to characterize its cruelty.

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IMMIGRATION, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump’s Immigration Guidance: The Rule of Law Returns BY Andrew C. McCarthy

By on February 23rd, 2017

On Tuesday, John Kelly, President Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, published a six-page, single-spaced memorandum detailing new guidance on immigration enforcement. Thereupon, I spent about 1,500 words summarizing the guidance in a column at National Review. Brevity being the soul of wit, both the memo and my description of it could have been reduced to a single, easy-to-remember sentence:

Henceforth, the United States shall be governed by the laws of the United States.

That it was necessary for Secretary Kelly to say more than this — and, sadly, that such alarm has greeted a memo that merely announces the return of the rule of law in immigration enforcement — owes to the Obama administration abuses of three legal doctrines: prosecutorial discretion, preemption, and separation of powers (specifically, the executive usurpation of legislative power).

To the extent President Obama declined to enforce immigration law (notwithstanding his constitutional obligation to execute the laws faithfully), he did so under the guise of prosecutorial discretion. In the pre-Obama days, prosecutorial discretion was an unremarkable, uncontroversial resource-allocation doctrine. It simply meant that since resources are finite, and since it would be neither possible nor desirable to prosecute every crime, we target law-enforcement resources to get the most crime-fighting bang for the taxpayer buck. That means prioritizing enforcement action against (a) the worst offenders and (b) the unlawful causes of the activity.

This is easily illustrated by federal drug enforcement. There are comparatively few federal narcotics agents, compared, say, to police in a major city. But while both feds and cops have authority to arrest traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs, only federal jurisdiction is interstate and international. Consequently, the best use of finite federal enforcement resources is to limit them to prosecutions of significant felony importation and distribution offenses, leaving it to the states and municipalities to handle street pushers and misdemeanor violations involving the use of drugs.

Significantly, the fact that federal enforcement policy, which is made by the executive branch, does not target lesser felons or users does not mean this policy effectively repeals federal drug laws, which are written by Congress.

The non-targeted crimes are still crimes, and the feds reserve the right to prosecute them in appropriate cases (e.g., if they encounter these offenses in the course of carrying out other criminal enforcement missions).

In the area of immigration enforcement, Obama contorted this resource allocation doctrine into a de facto immunity scheme. That is, the Obama Homeland Security Department announced what it labeled enforcement “priorities.” If an illegal alien did not fit into the priorities, it was as if the alien were insulated against prosecution — effectively, it was as if there was nothing illegal about being an alien unlawfully present in the United States; it was as if Obama’s policies were a legal defense against Congress’s duly enacted laws.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The “Adults” Resume Control View all posts from this blog By:Srdja Trifkovic

By on February 23rd, 2017

At the security conference in Munich over the weekend and at the EU headquarters in Brussels on Monday, VP Mike Pence offered profuse assurances to the European elite class that the Trump administration supports unity and cohesion in the face of various threats allegedly facing the Western alliance. His remarks amounted to an explicit repudiation of Trump’s campaign statements and promises.

“The United States strongly supports NATO and will not waver in our commitment to our transatlantic alliance,” Pence said, in contrast to Trump’s repeated (and reasonable) remarks before the election that NATO was “obsolete.” In a conference dominated by the narrative of the “Russian threat,” hacks and other fake news (Sen. Lindsey Graham warned France and Germany that the Russians were coming after them, vowing to “kick Russia in the ass in Congress”), Pence did not sound a single discordant note. He paid tribute to “our shared values,” our “noble ideals—freedom, democracy, justice and the rule of law.” “As you keep faith with us,” he went on, “under President Trump we will always keep faith with you.”

Defense Secretary James Mattis—who also attended the Munich conference—made similar points in a speech last Saturday—points which until recently would have been considered distinctly un-Trumpian. President Trump has “thrown his full support behind NATO,” Mattis declared, and warned of threats “on multiple fronts as the arc of instability builds on NATO’s periphery and beyond.” Earlier last week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went to Germany for the Group of 20 foreign ministers’ meeting. According to The Washington Post, as he left the meeting “there was a palpable sense of relief” among the Europeans, which “stemmed in part from a sense that Tillerson is a serious man who came to Bonn willing to hear their viewpoints.” According to the Post, after Tillerson’s meeting with Russian’s FM Lavrov,

Diplomats said they got the sense that there would be no radical shift in the U.S. stance toward Russia . . . One diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the participants were encouraged when Tillerson said the administration believes that before it can consider any lifting sanctions against Russia, Moscow must meet its commitments to help end the fighting in the Russian-speaking, separatist region of eastern Ukraine.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Democracy v. Republic By Herbert London

By on February 23rd, 2017

Herbert London is President of the London Center for Policy Research}

Published in: https://spectator.org/democracy-v-republic/

Plato argued that democracy by its very nature cannot work. The direct involvement of the people in the affairs of state will lead to a situation where takers outnumber givers thereby rendering the economy precarious. But that isn’t the only issue the demos introduces. Direct participation can lead to the belief a majority rules denying the rights of minorities or there is justification for “the people” to take matters into their own hands.

Since the beginning of democracy in Athens, the greatest danger to democratic institutions has been the demos, the people themselves. Each person in a democracy is an individual. But when individuals become “the people,” trouble may be on the horizon.

The Founders of this new nation, having immersed themselves in the classics, created a system that is a republic, with the will of the people manifest through the election of representatives and in which taking matters into constituent hands is both unnecessary and counterproductive. The problem facing the United States is that the Trump presidency has resulted in the belief on the part of many that this is a democracy demanding direct public intervention in the affairs of the nation. Hence, students justify violence at the University of California as a form of democratic action. Street demonstrations calling for overturning the president’s limited ban on immigration are rationalized as democracy at work. Alas, it is democracy at work, but Americans live in a republic.

That distinction is lost on a public uneducated in the difference. Rabble rousers discuss the right to assemble, but assembly doesn’t infer violence. Freedom of expression is a First Amendment right, but even that right is limited by “clear and present danger.” A republic recognizes constraints overlooked by the flock of direct involvement.

Having stretched the idea of democracy into new and unexplored avenues of public participation, the republic itself is imperiled. The Ferguson effect, in which people believe they were wrongfully treated by the police, justifies taking to the streets. The republic, that relied on the seamless transition from one government to the next, is facing a new and relentless challenge that is based on a misconception.

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