Language Wars: The Road to Tyranny Is Paved with Language Censorship By Michael W. Cutler
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_28_1/tsc-28-1-cutler.shtml
The AP Stylebook on ‘Illegal Immigrants’
Anyone following the immigration debate over the years has noticed the mass media’s increased usage of “undocumented workers” in reference to illegal aliens. TSC contributor Michael Cutler draws attention to the influence of political correctness on language and rhetoric when it comes to the topic of illegal immigration. Accuracy in language usage and the stifling impact of euphemistic uniformity are legitimate concerns.
The Associate Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law* is the standard reference guide for journalists. It contains useful information on capitalization, abbreviation, spelling, numerals and usage, punctuation, privacy, access to government information, defamation, and libel.
The AP Stylebook uses the term “illegal immigrant” (not “illegal alien” or “undocumented worker”). It states that illegal immigrant is “used to describe someone who has entered the country illegally or who resides in the country illegally. It is the preferred term, notillegal alien or undocumented worker. Do not use the shortened term an illegal or illegals.”
Immigration and ethnic activists have pushed sympathetic journalists to use “undocumented worker” in their reportage over the years. In December 2010, on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation,”Washington Post columnist Esther Cepeda, mentioned the negative reaction that engulfed one newspaper in California when it used “illegal immigrant.”
“The Fresno Bee in California wrote this eight-day series, this beautifully reported series about all the issues surrounding illegal immigration in California’s Central Valley. And they’re talking about it from an economic perspective, a personal perspective, a bureaucratic perspective, political perspective. And yet what garnered the headlines is that some of the people reading the pieces were just inflamed because the newspaper took the Associated Press Stylebook’s standard of calling illegal immigrants illegal immigrants. And they were just inflamed. It was like the entire conversation went off of how this issue affects a particular community. And it became all about language.”
Truth and factual accuracy should be the benchmark standard when it comes to the use of language, not political pressure from organized interest groups.
– The Editors
We often hear that we are living in a “Politically Correct” era. This is treated as an annoyance when, in reality, the ever-accelerating widespread effort to expunge words and terminology from the vernacular should sound alarm bells.
“Political Correctness” has been viewed as a well-intentioned way of combating bigotry by eliminating words of hatred and politely expunging words that are defamatory, insulting, humiliating, or denigrating. Certainly the desire to be compassionate, fair, and considerate is laudable.
It is important to be clear, the true “curse words” are words that insult or humiliate other people. Decent and compassionate people want to be considerate and respectful in their interactions with others.
Reasonable individuals avoid hurtful language to describe other people.
It has been said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Too many decent people have fallen victim to con artists who swindle them out of their life savings, or otherwise take advantage by gaining their confidence.
Multiple scams run by pundits, pollsters, and politicians have produced the current immigration crisis.
When it comes to immigration, consider how effectively scammers with malevolent motives have cynically played the “compassion card.” They see vulnerabilities to exploit in the compassionate and charitable characteristics of Americans, turning virtues into veritable weapons to be used against Americans.
Never forget that Political Correctness is a form of censorship. It can be benign or as dangerous as a weapon, depending on those who are doing the censoring and what motivates them.
Humans generally construct thoughts with words. Eliminate words and the thoughts those words represent are eliminated. Control of language, therefore, results in control of thought.
This is why “The road to tyranny is paved with words (and thoughts) lost to censorship.”
The desire of the majority of people to be fair and polite has been perverted to obfuscate important issues. On border security, immigration, and sovereignty, globalists and other profiteers have resorted to this tactic.
When rebels overthrow a government they first seize control of the medium of mass communications and take control of the flow of information to the masses: television stations, radio stations, and newspapers. Since the human thought process is dependent upon words, censorship is an important tool of totalitarian regimes to maintain control of their citizens.
The Founding Fathers understood the nexus between freedom of speech and all of the other freedoms. This is precisely why the Founders considered Freedom of Speech important enough to enshrine as a protected right in the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Control of language (censorship) is the first step along the path to the destruction of the First Amendment, and subsequently all other freedoms. Without free speech no other freedoms are possible. Left unchecked, an attack on words may bring us to the precipice of totalitarianism.
Political Correctness, either by design or by exploitation of those who saw that “golden opportunity” to exploit political correctness, has morphed into censorship to alter perceptions about broader issues. This is not unlike the device of “Newspeak,” a central component of 1984, George Orwell’s 1949 novel about a dystopian state.
“Newspeak” was the term Orwell used to describe a language that was created by the government to slowly but inexorably expunge ever more words from the vernacular of its hapless citizens. Essentially Newspeak was censorship on steroids, based on the idea that control of language would lead to control of thought.
Control of language, coupled with extreme surveillance of its citizens that included the installation of telescreens (television monitoring devices) in the citizens’ homes that broadcast a constant barrage of programming from the omnipresent “Big Brother” created the ultimate police state.
A detailed explanation of Newspeak is found in this paragraph from the Appendix to Orwell’s novel, under the title , The Principles of Newspeak:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc (English Socialist Party) but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but todiminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.
Today the elimination of words has certainly been expedited by the use of social media, such as Twitter, which limits the number of characters that can be transmitted. America has gone from having a highly literate population to a country where most people are unwilling to read more than the headlines of articles.
College campuses which used to be the bastions of free speech and debate now provide “Safe Spaces” to keep the ears and minds of the students from hearing alternative perspectives and, perish the thought, the Truth.
Certainly Democracy is anything but safe when “Safe Spaces” are imposed on college campuses.
Further undermining public access to facts and truth are the 24-hour news programs that generally spend no more than three or four minutes on important news reports that do little to truly inform the viewers. This is further exacerbated by “debates” between guests who are not real subject matter experts but are all too often willing to spout a position on important issues without any real background or understanding about the subject that they are discussing, often turning their discussions into “food fights” that don’t inform the viewers but actually obfuscate the truth.
Such debates and discussion could be helpful to educate the viewing audience and enable them to formulate worthwhile fact-based opinions, only if the on-air participants in those segments were true experts.
Real expertise would mean that these participants would qualify as expert witnesses in court proceedings about the issue of the debate they are participating in, the broadcast “court of public opinion.”
After the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, having testified before numerous congressional hearings, I was invited to participate in hundreds of news programs to discuss immigration-related issues, especially where immigration policies impacted national security and public safety.
In the beginning I was called by television news program producers who would simply call me up or send me an e-mail about the topic they planned to discuss on air, and ask if I was available and was interested in participating in the on-air discussion.
Over time, in addition to being asked if I was available to appear on the program, some producers subjected me to a “pre-interview.” If I expressed an opinion that did not march lockstep with the narrative that the producers of the program wanted to create, my invitation would be unceremoniously withdrawn, with the producer telling me that they were going to go in a “different direction” or made some other comparable excuse.
The phrase “going in another direction” was invoked by some news program producers if, for example, I drew a nexus between immigration failures and the findings of the 9/11 Commission, or otherwise raised issues that were clearly supposed to be off limits, including the way that “comprehensive immigration reform” would undermine the lives and livelihoods of Americans.
This is an insidious form of censorship because the viewers of that program have no idea that a true expert guest was prevented from appearing on the program to provide a viewpoint that went against that program’s contrived narrative.
Over time, discussions about immigration have come to involve fewer and fewer true subject-matter experts. Often those who do discuss immigration on camera have no direct knowledge or experience with immigration law enforcement.
Today, while news programs still call upon real experts to discuss certain issues, such as military officers and commandos to discuss military matters, retired police officers to discuss homicide patterns and other crime trends, or former astronauts to discuss the space program, immigration-related issues are generally discussed by pollsters, pundits, and political consultants with an occasional radio talk show host thrown in for good measure.
Furthermore, the audience may not be given any meaningful information about the true backgrounds of these “talking heads,” including how they may personally benefit from the position that they take on the issue they are debating.
In such cases the “news” program simply becomes an outlet for propaganda.
All too often the parent company of the news program may also have a vested interest in the issues being discussed. Consider, for example, how broadcast networks that have second language subsidiaries benefit from the increase in viewers who are literate in that other language. Broadcasting is a business. Airtime is expensive, and the amount of money that advertisers pay for airtime is directly proportionate to the size of the viewing audience.
What network executives would want immigration laws enforced if this could lead to a reduction in the size of the viewing audience upon which they base their charges for air time for advertisers?
This could easily impact the editorial policies of the networks they run, yet this is never publicly discussed. Many viewers have no idea what constitutes objective and fair reporting.
In totalitarian regimes, political leaders and “journalists,” who are actually thinly disguised propagandists, become the arbiters of acceptable language, not only by the crime of commission, by reporting on false “facts,” controlling the language that the citizens of their countries use, but by the crime ofomission, by expunging words from the public lexicon. Today this practice is becoming all too commonplace in the U.S. Leading the charge are journalists.
You are probably familiar with the rhetorical question that asks, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to witness its fall, does that tree make a sound?”
Perhaps the more appropriate question that should be asked is, “If a tree falls in the forest, will anyone know about it if reporters don’t report about it?”
That question has a clear and obvious and resounding answer: “No!”
This is a matter of common sense. However, what happens when those decisions are not based on honest pragmatism but on political bias? What happens when journalists decide to use language that is based on their prejudice, bias, or political orientation? I am concerned that all reporters have been coerced, in one way or another, to use language that is anything but balanced and/or objective.
In Orwell’s 1984 the “Ministry of Truth” was empowered to erase problematic words from the public lexicon, deciding what words should be expunged and, in some cases, what words or terms should be created. There is a similar arbiter of language control today. This contrivance actually exists today and it reaches into all newsrooms for broadcasters and newspapers alike. It has a firm grip on the publishing industry and on language used on college classrooms across the U.S. It even reaches into corporate boardrooms and corporate and governmental headquarters across our nation.
Today control of language is implemented via a number of mechanisms. One of them is the highly influential Associated Press (AP) Stylebook that is widely used in all of the above-noted venues and even more. AP actually describes its stylebook as “The Journalist’s Bible.” It could have been published by the Ministry of Truth.
Stylebooks are reference books that lay out how written words are to be punctuated and how, for example, footnotes are to be used to reference sources quoted in books and articles.
The use of stylebooks is not new, and in fact many colleges require that students use those stylebooks as a sort of “Bible” to make certain that reports and articles they write adhere to certain standards.
Today that widely used reference book has become the guide to censorship in that it also instructs writers about what words are acceptable and what words are not acceptable. Furthermore, the AP Stylebook itself is a “work in progress,” where words may be added or removed at the whim of its faceless editors, who receive their marching orders from others.
What is not known is who those “others” are. There is a total lack of transparency and accountability in this process that has such a profound impact on our First Amendment rights and hence our freedoms.
Here is an excerpt from the online version of the AP Stylebook* that should send shivers up your spine and cause our nation’s Founding Fathers to spin in their graves:
At more than 600 pages, the AP Stylebook is widely used as a writing and editing reference in newsrooms, classrooms and corporate offices worldwide. Updated regularly since its initial publication in 1953, the AP Stylebook is a must-have reference for writers, editors, students and professionals. It provides fundamental guidelines for spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style. It is the definitive resource for journalists.
Let’s focus on how this is playing out in regard to the issue of immigration. Elimination of certain words, such as “alien,” under the guise of being “Politically Correct,” is actually Orwellian in its nature and purpose. Words are being excised from the current language in much the way that Newspeak, the language that Orwell invented for 1984, excised or replaced words to control the thoughts of the masses.
President Jimmy Carter took the first steps to start America on its journey to the implementation of Newspeak, at least when discussing immigration. Carter ordered all INS employees, under penalty of severe adverse action by the agency, to eliminate the term “illegal alien” and instead use the preferred term “Undocumented Immigrant.”
At that time I was a special agent of the INS and shared my colleagues’ rage at this edict. I began referring to illegal aliens as “Pre-Citizens.” Soon many other INS employees adopted my nomenclature. One day a Border Patrol agent called to tell me that he had arrested a “Pre-Citizen” who was attempting to enter the U.S. without inspection. That alien had been previously arrested and deported from New York City and his Alien File was located in the file room of the NYC District Office.
Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the all-encompassing body of immigration laws enforced by the DHS, the term “Alien” is described simply as “any person, not a citizen or national of the United States.”
There is absolutely no insult in that definition or that term. This is certainly not the equivalent of the “N-Word.”
The elimination of “alien” from the vernacular has had an overwhelming impact on the immigration debate. Because of the elimination of that one word, over time Americans have been utterly misled about the entire issue of immigration.
In the decades that followed, this bit of Orwellian semantics has created a massive deception, convincing millions of Americans to believe that calls for immigration law enforcement and secure borders are based on racism and bigotry, even though our immigration laws have absolutely nothing to do with race, religion, ethnicity, or other such factors.
The deceptions and lies that have been woven around Carter’s tactics distort the immigration debate to this very day. Carter’s goal to manipulate the immigration system for political purposes did not end with his censoring the language of INS employees.
Carter also ordered INS agents not to arrest illegal aliens during the Census. The word from INS Headquarters was that all people needed to be counted during the Census, irrespective of their immigration status. This was done in an effort to gerrymander Congressional Districts and votes in the Electoral College. Most illegal aliens lived in cities that tended to support Democratic Party candidates. By increasing the number of residents of those districts by encouraging illegal aliens to be counted during the Census, Democratic Party strongholds would likely gain representatives in the wake of the Census.
Consequently illegal aliens were provided with political representation even though their mere presence in the U.S. was a violation of some of our nation’s most fundamental laws.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 created a massive amnesty program for more than 3.5 million illegal aliens during the Reagan administration; however, the idea of an amnesty program began during the Carter administration.
That ill-conceived program was supposedly balanced by including in that revision of the immigration laws a provision that, for the very first time, created “employer sanctions,” a series of penalties, including criminal penalties, for employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens.
This was a typical Washington “compromise.” It created the illusion that all of the issues were being addressed. However, while it had been estimated that roughly one million illegal aliens would “emerge from the shadows” (how often do we hear that phrase today?), in reality more than 3.5 million aliens acquired lawful immigrant status.
It was widely known that a lack of resources was a major factor in the growth of the illegal alien population. Yet few additional INS agents were hired, not only to deter illegal immigration but to enforce what were referred to as employer sanctions laws that were part of IRCA, even as that new enforcement imperative requires many agents to enforce those laws.
Nature’s laws are immutable. The speed of light is determined by the laws of physics and hence need not be enforced by a police officer wielding a radar gun and summons book. The speed laws that govern motor vehicle speed on our nation’s roads, however, certainly require such law enforcement efforts, if those speed laws are to be meaningful.
The same pragmatic approach needs to be applied to all legislated laws. Laws that are unenforced may as well be erased from the law books if violators of those laws are not identified, apprehended, and face consequences.
The Border Patrol has always been seen as the key to immigration law enforcement efforts. While it is essential that our borders are as secure as possible, of at least equal if not greater concern is the ability to effectivelyenforce U.S. immigration laws.
This is the third leg of what I have come to refer to as the “immigration law enforcement tripod,” in which the Border Patrol enforces our immigration laws along our nation’s borders between ports of entry, the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Inspectors enforce our immigration laws at ports of entry, and the Special Agents and other enforcement personnel enforce our immigration laws within the interior of the U.S.
However, politicians and the media portray effective immigration law enforcement as simply a matter of beefing up the Border Patrol, especially along the U.S./Mexico border, and preventing the endless entry of illegal aliens.
Over the years, all of this has convinced many people that our immigration laws are primarily designed to keep out citizens of Mexico. The U.S./Mexico border is roughly two thousand miles long and is unique in that it separates a Third World country from the most powerful and wealthiest nation on earth, the U.S., thereby creating huge economic pressure and a push/pull effect that attracts poverty-stricken Mexicans to enter the U.S. by any means possible.
The widespread official corruption and extreme violence perpetrated by the Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs) exacerbates this already volatile situation that resulted in Mexico becoming the source country for the greatest number of illegal aliens.
However, what is almost never discussed is that illegal aliens also enter the U.S. without inspection along the much longer U.S./Canadian border, stow away on ships, and then leave those ships covertly or come ashore, without detection along America’s 95,000 miles of coastline.
Furthermore, nearly half of all illegal aliens enter through America’s 325 ports of entry, perhaps by committing visa fraud or by lying to the CBP inspector about their intentions, and then, in one way or another, violate the terms of their admissions determined by the category of visas under which they were admitted.
I compare the interior enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws to the necessity of outfielders in a baseball game who chase down balls in the outfield.
The following examples will inevitably occur: first, a given percentage of aliens will successfully evade detection by entering the U.S. without inspection; second, a given percentage of aliens who are lawfully admitted into the country will violate the terms of admission; third, some aliens, prior to their entry, will be convicted of serious crimes; fourth, some aliens will commit fraud in applying for various immigration benefits, such as political asylum, lawful immigrant status, and even U.S. citizenship.
Not unlike the outfielders of baseball who shag balls that are hit over the infielders’ heads or run down line drives that also wind up in the outfield, ICE enforcement personnel need to be able to address the aliens I have described above and conduct vital field investigations. Such investigations are needed to imbue the immigration system with meaningful integrity to prevent aliens from getting away with violating our laws, and also to deter even more aspiring illegal aliens and fraudsters from attempting to violate the law.
I refer to this as “deterrence through enforcement.”
For decades the entire enforcement mission has been all but ignored. President Donald Trump, with able assistance and insight from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, has called for hiring more than ten thousand additional enforcement personnel for the vital mission of enforcing our immigration laws. The vulnerability of the immigration system to incursions was clearly identified by the 9/11 Commission, yet it has been essentially ignored until President Trump took office.
The 9/11 Commission Staff Report on Terrorist Travel detailed numerous examples of instances where terrorists made use of visa and immigration benefit fraud, including political asylum fraud, to enter and embed themselves in the U.S. See this excerpt from page 54 of the Report, “3.2 Terrorist Travel Tactics by Plot”:
Although there is evidence that some land and sea border entries (of terrorists) without inspection occurred, these conspirators mainly subverted the legal entry system by entering at airports.
In doing so, they relied on a wide variety of fraudulent documents, on aliases, and on government corruption. Because terrorist operations were not suicide missions in the early to mid-1990s, once in the United States terrorists and their supporters tried to get legal immigration status that would permit them to remain here, primarily by committing serial, or repeated, immigration fraud, by claiming political asylum, and by marrying Americans. Many of these tactics would remain largely unchanged and undetected throughout the 1990s and up to the 9/11 attack.
Thus, abuse of the immigration system and a lack of interior immigration enforcement were unwittingly working together to support terrorist activity. It would remain largely unknown, since no agency of the United States government analyzed terrorist travel patterns until after 9/11. This lack of attention meant that critical opportunities to disrupt terrorist travel and, therefore, deadly terrorist operations were missed.
It is remarkable that the blatantly bogus argument that immigration enforcement is about Latinos in general, and Mexican citizens in particular, persists to this very day.
By referring to all aliens as “immigrants,” as Carter demanded, it became easier to accuse anyone of being “anti-immigrant” who suggests that illegals should be arrested or that our borders should be secured against the entry of “immigrants.”
If proponents of immigration law enforcement and secure borders were to be labeled “anti-immigrant,” it would follow that their opponents should be referred to as “pro-immigrant.”
Over time this has gathered momentum and acceptance, so that today the very word “alien” causes most people to wince, not because the term “alien” is a pejorative, but because of the concerted effort of globalists to condition Americans to believe that it is a pejorative.
This is Pavlovian conditioning at its worst. Over time, perceptions become reality. The term “alien” is problematic for open-borders immigration anarchists because it provides clarity to the immigration issue, and thus runs contrary to the goals of the globalists to eradicate the distinction between not only lawful immigrants and illegal aliens, but ultimately between citizens and aliens.
This is of critical significance because under our nation’s immigration laws, U.S. citizens may never, ever, for any reason whatsoever, be prevented from entering their country. Aliens, on the other hand, have no inherent right to enter the U.S.
By eliminating this critically important distinction, a huge step has been taken to dismantle our borders, which are, in point of fact, America’s first and last line of defense. However, to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a long, long list of other organizations that represent a wide variety of industries and special interest groups, our borders are not viewed as our first and last line of defense, but as impediments to greatly increasing their wealth and power, no matter the cost to the vast majority of Americans.
Criminal aliens and violent transnational gangs from acoss the planet have entered the U.S. and set up shop in small towns and major cities.
Terrorists have been able to enter undetected and carry out deadly attacks.
Foreign workers who take the economic bottom-rung jobs have displaced American workers, particularly among America’s minority communities, preventing young Americans from ever setting foot on the economic ladder that is essential to become successful. This crisis is particularly acute among members of America’s minority communities.
This influx of Third World workers has also driven down wages. Labor is a commodity. Flooding the marketplace with any commodity generally depresses the value of that commodity.
Politicians who have accepted the thinly disguised bribes known as “campaign contributions” are quick to say that these aliens are “taking the jobs Americans won’t do,” leaving out, of course, the second part of the sentence — for thewages and working conditions that desperate illegal aliens are willing to accept.
High-tech jobs that highly educated and highly experienced Americans had been doing for decades are now being done by foreign workers, who have replaced their American counterparts through such programs as the infamous H-1B visa program, which the Trump administration is seeking to curtail to favor American and lawful immigrant workers.
Meanwhile politicians ignore the truth and claim that America has a shortage of high-tech workers, even as hundreds of thousands of American workers who have been successfully doing these jobs for years, sometimes decades, are fired and replaced by foreign workers, whom they are ordered to train if they want their severance packages.
Continuing failures to secure our borders and combat fraud in the visa process and immigration benefits program leave America vulnerable to future attacks, but for those supremely wealthy and powerful individuals, organizations, and special interest groups who benefit from these failures, those vulnerabilities are the “price of doing business.”
They are far more concerned with “head counts” to fill airliners, sports stadiums, cruise ships, universities, and work sites than body counts at the morgue.
They have employed a strategy that can be thought of as a massive marketing campaign, aided and abetted by politicians who have been “bought and paid for.”
Advertising campaigns involve repetition of simple slogans of usually fewer than ten words.
Another tactic involves the “branding” or labeling of people who take a position that runs contrary to the narrative created by the politicians and/or “journalists.”
Today nearly every news program or publication refers to advocates for fair and effective immigration law enforcement and for secure borders as being “anti-immigrant.”
On the other hand, anyone who calls for massive amnesty programs for illegal aliens, including foreign criminals, is rewarded by being referred to as “pro-immigrant.”
There is, however, one unique situation where the term “Alien” is an entirely acceptable term.
When the DREAM Act failed to be approved by Congress, President Obama bemoaned “the failure of the Congress to act” when it voted against terrible legislation. In reality, Congress did act; it just did not act the way that Mr. Obama wanted it to act. Consequently he cobbled together the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program to provide hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens who claimed that they entered the U.S. before their 16th birthdays with temporary lawful status. They had until age 31 to file their applications.
With no resources and no desire to uncover immigration fraud (the 9/11 Commission identified immigration fraud as a threat to national security) there were no interviews of applicants for this immigration nor field investigations conducted of hundreds of thousands of applications.
Today such illegal aliens are commonly referred to as “DREAMERS” because they would have been the beneficiaries of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief, and Education for A lien Minors.)
The urge to somehow link a massive amnesty program to the “American Dream” was so strong that its proponents apparently decided that no one would notice the hypocrisy in this acronym, and for the most part they were completely correct.
Immigration law enforcement officers are vilified by politicians who have created “Sanctuary Cities,” openly boasting that they will not cooperate with federal agents. The use of the term “Sanctuary” to describe cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities, whose job is to secure America’s borders against illegal entry, while these cities commit violations of immigration laws is an incredible example of Newspeak.
As a noun, “Sanctuary” is defined as a “place of refuge or safety where…people automatically sought a sanctuary in time of trouble.”
How safe are the residents of a city or town that protects illegal aliens whose identities, backgrounds, and intentions are unknown and unknowable?
How safe are the jobs of lawful immigrants and U.S. citizen workers, who have to compete with illegal alien workers, and who will settle for substandard wages under substandard, indeed, illegally dangerous working conditions?
One of the key sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which guides our decisions about the admissibility of aliens seeking entry, is Title 8, United States Code, Section 1182, which enumerates the categories of aliens who are to be excluded. Among these classes of aliens are those who suffer from dangerous communicable diseases or extreme mental illness.
Additionally, convicted felons, human rights violators, war criminals, terrorists, and spies are to be excluded, as well as aliens who would seek unlawful employment — thus displacing American workers or driving down the wages of American workers who are similarly employed — and aliens who would likely become public charges.
Note that our current immigration laws make absolutely no distinction in any way, shape, or form as to the race, religion, or ethnicity of any alien who seeks entry into or is present in the U.S.
Those who utter the overused phrase that “the U.S. is a nation of immigrants” to justify attacks on those who support effective immigration law enforcement need to be told that the difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien is comparable to the difference between a house-guest and a burglar. America is most certainly not a nation of trespassers.
Finally, much has been made in the news of President Trump’s Executive Orders that were issued shortly after he took office to keep his campaign promises to protect America and Americans from international terrorists and criminal aliens. Trump’s Executive Order regarding eligibility of immigrants for admission to the U.S. is entirely consistent with the provision of Section (f) ofTitle 8 U.S. Code § 1182 — Inadmissible aliens. This statute has been used by previous presidents to prevent the entry of aliens whose presence would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” Terrorists certainly fall into that category.
Here is the relevant paragraph:
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.
President Trump’s Executive Order, because of the news reports, became widely known as the “Travel Ban” for citizens of “Muslim majority countries.”
The Executive Order was not a travel ban and it certainly did not contain a single word about the religion of any aliens who would be impacted. In fact, Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population but its citizens were not impacted by that Executive Order. Citizens of other Muslim majority countries were similarly not impacted by the Executive Order.
By comparison, when President Obama issued his immigration Executive Order known as DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the title of that order was faithfully reported in the media.
In point of fact, most Americans have never seen the actual name of the Trump Executive Order that was promulgated to protect America and Americans. The media apparently refused to provide it, perhaps, because publishing the actual name of that Executive Order would end that manufactured controversy that, because of recent court rulings, including the ruling of the Supreme Court, has weakened national security immeasurably and created a legal precedent that will hobble every future U.S. president.
“Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the U.S.” is the actual name of President Trump’s supposedly controversial Executive Order.
Today “journalists” are not just content to expunge words they deem troublesome from the public lexicon. Now entire sentences such as the title of a Presidential Executive Order are to be excised, lest the public reject and oppose the globalist agenda being ever more aggressively marketed to the American public.
Back when I attended high school, too many decades ago, George Orwell’s important novel, 1984, was required reading. Today few schools require their students to read that prescient novel.
Whether you have never read 1984 or perhaps read it many years ago, I strongly suggest that you read Orwell’s classic tale of totalitarian control. It will open your eyes to the subversive tactics that are whittling away at our freedoms, thereby undermining our democratic republic.
Americans must always have access to the truth, and the truth begins with honest and clear and uncensored language. Anything less undermines the First Amendment and, with that, the very foundation of our cherished democracy.
Perhaps signs should be posted that read, “Newspeak not spoken here!”
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