RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.thefp.com/p/immigration-is-a-mess-heres-how-to

In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction. Having closely followed how countries around the world had handled, and more often mishandled, immigration, I laid out a road map for Making Immigration Great Again. Among other things, I called for rebalancing immigrant admissions toward the young and skilled; rejecting identitarian ideologies that undermined immigrant assimilation and sowed racial resentment; embracing labor-saving automation as an imperfect substitute for low-wage migrant labor; and investing in low-income youth.    

If this sounds like a boringly centrist Davos Man manifesto, I don’t disagree.

Keep in mind, though, that I wrote the book in the thick of the Donald Trump–era immigration wars, when the rhetorical temperature was high and public opinion was as pro-immigration as it had ever been. Against a backdrop of family separations, attempted Muslim bans, and anxious Dreamers, it felt taboo to even suggest that Steve Bannon and friends might be half-right about the wisdom of opening our borders, especially in my small, hyper-educated, blue state–parody world. 

As I was labeled a fascist by anonymous trolls, and my arguments were called “completely off the rails,” a vocal minority on the right was growing ever more extreme in its opposition to immigration. By making a moderate case, my arguments weren’t restrictionist enough for the hardcore restrictionists or cosmopolitan enough to satisfy enlightened opinion.

But I came by my position honestly. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. They were part of a larger wave of newcomers that helped revitalize New York and other cities that had fallen on hard times. I had seen all that immigration can do to enrich urban neighborhoods up close. Yet I also recognized that mass immigration wasn’t a free lunch, and that open borders romantics were inviting a backlash that risked slamming our borders shut for a generation. 

By offering a middle course, my hope was that some number of moderates would read my book and be convinced that the reaction to Trump’s shock-and-awe restrictionism must not be to heedlessly dismantle immigration enforcement altogether.

Instead, a few years later, the Biden administration came in and did just about everything I warned against, torching Democrats’ credibility on the most important issue facing the country. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/tren_de_aragua_gang_terrorizes_american_cities.html

Joe Biden’s border policies are disastrous for communities nationwide, including cities that are nowhere near United States borders.  There have been at least 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens nationwide since the start of Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021), according to Rep. Mark Green’s September “Startling Stats” report on the border crisis.  The same report indicates that 2 million more aliens have entered as “known gotaways.”  According to former chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz, the total number of gotaways “could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”  

The devastating numbers fail to tell the whole story, however. Embedded in those historic numbers are criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua, whose members have taken root in communities nationwide.  Tren de Aragua is terrorizing communities, forcing the Biden administration’s U.S. Treasury to label the gang as a U.S.-designated transnational criminal organization (TCO).

The Treasury’s announcement states that the gang has “opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies.”

From its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years. With a particular focus on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants, the organization has developed additional revenue sources through a range of criminal activities, such as illegal mining, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, and the trafficking of illicit drugs such as cocaine and MDMA.

Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region. For example, Tren de Aragua leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage. When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/biden_harris_team_still_flying_haitians_into_the_united_states.html

(The information in this essay comes from first-hand interviews.)

Last April, the Republican-led House Committee on Homeland Security caught the Harris-Biden administration spending your taxpayer dollars to fly military-age Hattian men into America. Charter flights would land in the middle of the night and discharge tens of thousands of illegals. Once caught, it stopped for a while. Now, Mumbles and Giggles have resumed the program in a way that costs you more, and all the illegal passengers are approved by the gangs running Haiti.

The overnight flights of the “slip them in at 2:00 AM when no one is watching” program were easy to track. Websites such as Flight Aware allowed anyone to follow the planes all the way to their landings at more than 50 U.S. airports. Knowing they were busted, Biden-Harris changed their M.O. They stopped the charters on the Fly by Night Airlines. They now pay traditional U.S. airlines to slip them in with their regular passengers.

At the microscale, the process is a bit complicated for young Hattian men. First, they must get to the airport in Port-au-Prince. In the aftermath of hurricanes and an earthquake, it isn’t easy to get there from remote villages. Despite billions of dollars funneled through the Clinton-Bush Initiative, many rural roads are still impassable. What else would you expect when the donated dollars went to a country rated by Transparency International as one of the most corrupt in the world? But no roads – no problem. Since the roads don’t work, U.S. taxpayer-paid helicopters fly the young men to Toussaint Louverture International Airport. With its 9900-foot runways, Toussaint can accommodate even the biggest airliners.

One might think U.S. airlines would stop service to a country where the terms “government” and “gangs” are synonymous. But there is money to be made flying the illegals into the U.S., so three of our airlines still serve the Haitian capital.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/canada-to-significantly-reduce-immigration-as-trudeau-caves-to-public-pressure/

Canada plans to “significantly reduce” the number of immigrants it allows into the country over the next two years, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reverses course amid falling public support for immigration.

Canada previously set a target of 500,000 new permanent residents in 2025. Under the new immigration plan, Canada will decrease that target by 21 percent, to 395,000. After 2025, the limit will shrink by roughly 4 percent each year as the government looks to set a target of 365,000 new permanent residents by 2027.

And for the first time ever, Canada will set a target for temporary immigrants. The new limitations, which will impact international students and foreign workers, will see admittance of non-permanent residents drop by roughly 445,000 in 2025 and 2026. By comparison, the country allowed in 800,000 temporary immigrants in 2023.

“This is temporary — to pause our population growth and let our economy catch up,” Trudeau said Thursday. “We have to get the system working right for all Canadians.”

The prime minister said during a news conference that the new plan is being put into place because the country “didn’t get the balance quite right” as it responded to the “tumultuous times” that followed the Covid-19 pandemic.

The new policy marks an about-face from Trudeau’s previous support for immigration that had allowed for a record increase of immigration to the country since he took office in 2015. Trudeau’s government raised annual permanent resident targets from 272,000 when he took office to 485,000 this year.

Immigration has driven 97 percent of the country’s population growth as it contends with worsened housing shortages, inflated rent prices, strained public services and rising unemployment. The country’s unemployment rate is particularly high among young people — 14 percent compared to 6.5 percent unemployment overall.

Fifty-eight percent of Canadians now feel that immigration levels are too high, according to a poll by the Environics Institute, which found public opinion on immigration levels has “effectively flipped from being acceptable (if not valuable) to problematic”.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-youre-not-imagining-a-migrant-crime-spree

The arrest of an illegal immigrant for the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley a few weeks before President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address ignited a political firestorm. “Laken’s death is the direct result of policies on the federal level and an unwillingness by this White House to secure the southern border,” Georgia’s Republican governor Brian Kemp charged, after reports emerged that the border patrol had grabbed Venezuelan Jose Ibarra back in 2022, but that he was quickly paroled and released into the United States. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, reacting to the controversy, warned of an illegal-alien crime wave; at the State of the Union itself, Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted Biden, calling out for the president to “say her name”—a reference to Riley. When Biden did mention her name, he acknowledged that she died at the hands of an illegal migrant; further controversy ensued when he later apologized for using the term “illegal,” and not the politically correct “undocumented.”

The elite press rode to Biden’s defense. The idea of a migrant crime wave was a myth, media outlets proclaimed, noting studies of Texas incarceration data from years ago, which seemed to suggest that illegals commit crimes at low rates. This ignored other surveys, based on federal multistate data, which show a far more troubling reality. And after years of a migrant border “surge”—with countless asylum-seekers inadequately vetted and then allowed to enter the U.S.—state law-enforcement agencies now warn that immigrant gangs have seized control of many drug- and human-trafficking networks and have unleashed robbery sprees across the nation. With polls showing Americans alarmed about illegal immigration—a majority even backing mass deportations—Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin reflected public anger when he charged that “every state” is now “a border state.”

Underlying the escalating controversy is the sheer number of migrants entering America during the Biden administration. In a 2020 debate with Trump, Biden seemed to encourage an immigration surge, and it followed soon after his election, with about 8 million people, on some estimates, flocking to the U.S. border without applying first for legal entry. The administration has released up to 3.3 million of them into the U.S. to await immigration hearings, many of which won’t occur for years. At the same time, the number of immigrants who enter by avoiding border security and remain fraudulently in America has also skyrocketed, to an estimated 1.6 million to 1.7 million since Biden’s election, compared with about 1.4 million over the entire previous decade.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/harris-has-no-credibility-on-immigration/

She can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

Kamala Harris isn’t great at answering questions but is perhaps at her very worst in addressing the border.

This isn’t because she can’t string sentences together (she can, although the results are always mixed) or she doesn’t know what she’s saying (she’s quite deliberate in sticking to her talking points). No, she can’t answer for the administration’s failures at the border because there simply is no good answer.

What is she going to say? Yes, we completely screwed this up and, I regret to say, did it on purpose. I’ve learned my lesson, though, and want to reverse field on this issue going forward.

An answer like that wouldn’t be sincere, but since when has that been an obstacle?

Since she and her team obviously believe that a confession is not in her interests, her only alternative is to deceive, obfuscate, and evade, and hope it’s enough to see her through to November 5.

She tries to sound like she’s always wanted to be a border hawk — if only she’d been able to get her way.

“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system,” she said on 60 Minutes a week or so ago, “knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up.”

Every single word of this, with the possible exception of the prepositions, is misleading. The proposal was a massive amnesty bill. It was intended “to fix” the system only if you believe the real problem is that illegal immigrants in the United States haven’t yet been legalized. The bill had no meaningful border provisions, not even more Border Patrol agents.

By complaining that the legislation wasn’t taken up, Harris clearly wanted to create the impression that GOP obstruction stymied the bill. Yet Democrats had unified control of Congress at the time and chose to ignore the proposal because everyone understood it was an absurd nonstarter.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/border-bait-and-switch

During the vice presidential debate, Tim Walz claimed, “Look, [border] crossings are down compared to when Donald Trump left office.” Similarly, CNN reports, “Migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border remain at their lowest levels since 2020,” while a USA Today headline reads, “Illegal migration at the US border drops to lowest level since 2020.” These claims are true only if one doesn’t count it as a “crossing” when an illegal alien arrives at a port of entry along the border and is subsequently released into the United States.

Because the Biden administration is now funneling huge numbers of illegal aliens towards ports of entry with the help of its CBP One app, encounters elsewhere along the border are down. Yet, there are still far more aliens entering the country each month than there were under Trump—or even Barack Obama. The Biden administration continues to perpetuate the border crisis while simultaneously trying to mask that crisis with subtle policy changes and deceptive phrasing.

The primary reason we’ve had a border crisis for more than three and a half years is that the Biden administration—in a marked departure from every prior presidency—has refused to enforce federal immigration laws. Specifically, it has refused to enforce the requirement that asylum seekers be detained until their claims have been adjudicated. Instead, it has simply released them into the U.S. Knowing this, millions of migrants have arrived at our border, uttered the password “asylum,” and reaped the benefits of this administration’s failure to execute the laws.

The Immigration and Nationality Act declares that “if an alien asserts a credible fear of persecution, he or she shall be detained for further consideration of the application for asylum.” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito writes that such detention “requirements, as we have held, are mandatory.” Yet the Biden administration has treated these requirements as discretionary, continually releasing aliens into the interior of the country. As U.S. District Court Judge T. Kent Wetherell observes, this has been “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border.”