RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270622/democrats-bow-lefts-demands-abolish-ice-joseph-klein

Left wing open borders activists are demanding the dismantling or defunding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which was established in 2003 under the Department of Homeland Security to enforce federal laws governing border control, customs, trade and immigration. The whole purpose for establishing ICE was to promote a more coordinated approach to homeland security and public safety than had existed prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The leftist base of the Democratic Party could not care less about Americans’ safety, however. They are pushing a radical anti-law enforcement agenda on immigration, mirroring the Black Lives Matter movement that reviled the police. The left’s rallying cry is “Abolish ICE.” It is reminiscent of the call by a Black Lives Matter activist during a Fox News interview two years ago to “abolish the police, period.”

The left’s rhetoric is becoming increasingly insane, as they live in a world where up is down and down is up. For example, according to Cynthia Nixon, the Sex and the City actress who is challenging Governor Andrew Cuomo in the New York gubernatorial primary this year, ICE, which was granted civil and criminal authority to better protect national security and public safety in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11, is itself a “terrorist organization.” She launched her very own “Abolish ICE” petition.

A protestor in Los Angeles from a “woman’s peace organization” felt that simply calling ICE a terrorist organization did not go far enough. She told MSNBC on Saturday, as protests against President Trump’s zero-tolerance law enforcement policies took place across the country, that ICE is “beyond a terrorist organization.” Then she blamed the whole immigration problem on U.S. economic and foreign policies. “We’re a woman’s peace organization,” she exclaimed, “and it is the violence of the United States government, and it is the 60% of the tax dollars that’s spent on the weapons and war that creates the immigration and refugees and our, you know, economic policies. So we have to be responsible. We have to bring them in and hold them and, not violate them farther than our policies have violated them.” Under this “reasoning,” the vicious animals of MS-13 who have illegally infiltrated our country became that way because of the U.S. government’s policies. Therefore, we are asked to make sure we do “not violate them farther than our policies have violated them.” Such is the thinking of the looney left.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/02/america-is-not-the-common-

Sometimes fate tosses you a softball.

Recently, I drafted an op-ed asking whether the United States actually needs more people. Is 320 million—give or take, given the birthrates of those already here—enough? If not, why not? If we need more people, why? What do we need them to do? The editorial process being what it is, it took a few days for the piece to appear.

And it just so happens that, when it did, Bret Stephens published a column in the New York Times purporting to answer precisely the question I had asked. The United States needs more immigrants, he claims. A lot more.

Much of what Stephens wrote, I had already “pre-butted,” as it were. Open borders arguments are all so old and stale that they’re easy to anticipate. Still, to give Stephens some credit, he did come up with some new ones. Or rather, he stated more openly than I am used to seeing certain implicit arguments that the open borders crowd until recently used to be more cagey about expressing.

I don’t know what explains their greater boldness now. It could be that they think they are on the cusp of victory, so caution is no longer necessary. I doubt this, however, given the 2016 election and moving of the Overton Window on the topic. A more likely explanation is that the open borders crowd is panicking. Before Trump’s stunning victory, mass amnesty coupled with even laxer border enforcement (if such were even possible) seemed likely to tip the country blue permanently. Now they sense that may be slipping away—or, at a minimum, may be delayed.

The populace is roused. For the first time in a generation, it actually has political leaders trying to act in their interest. That is intolerable to the open borders crowd, which is reacting with fury and hysteria. Witness the disgraceful Red Guard heckling of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen out of a public restaurant—and the restaurant’s management doing nothing about it. Another restaurant’s owner kicked out the president’s press secretary. And there is the far more disgraceful—downright evil—doxing of federal immigration agents by a university professor, to encourage left-wing brownshirts to harm civil servants and their families.

Who Should Go?
It is fair to ask what role the increasingly extreme rhetoric of Bret Stephens (and of others who share his views) has contributed to this. For instance, one of Stephens’ previous columns recommended expelling native-born American citizens to make room for more immigrants. He declined to say exactly which American citizens need to go; presumably not himself nor any of his friends and associates.

Who then? In a grotesque-yet-clever bit of sophistry, Stephens unfavorably compares the native-born to immigrants across a range of pathologies and finds us wanting. For instance, the native-born “are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants.” What accounts for that? Stephens doesn’t specify, but surely knows, that crime rates vary widely by race. The rate among blacks, for instance, is eight or nine times the rate among whites, depending on the offense. The white rate is much lower than the illegal immigrant rate (and the Asian rate is lower still). Hence that “nearly twice the rate” that Stephens cites is very largely driven by black Americans. Who, whatever one may say about the tragic problems afflicting their communities, are unquestionably Americans, whose roots in this land stretch back to 1619 and whose experience includes, in Lincoln’s poignant phrase, “two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”