RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to figures released yesterday, the number of illegal aliens crossing the U.S. southwestern border has dropped by an astonishing 76% since President Trump took office.

More specifically, the number of minor children crossing the border with or without a parent has been cut even further.

Washington Times:

Illegal immigration across the southwestern border is down a stunning 76 percent since President Trump was elected, with the flow of children and families dropping even faster as analysts say the administration’s commitment to enforcing the law has changed the reality along the border.

Overall apprehensions by the Border Patrol dropped to just 11,129 in April, according to numbers released Tuesday, marking the lowest monthly total for any month in decades.

The number of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children nabbed at the border dropped below 1,000 – a level not seen since before the surge that bedeviled President Obama during most of his second term.

Even before a foot of Mr. Trump’s planned border wall is built or any more agents are hired, the threat of being sent home has forced would-be migrants to rethink making the journey, officials said.

“A lot of the discussion about changes in our enforcement policy and the way we are going about doing business, we believe that has deterred people,” said Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan. “When you get here, it is likely you are going to get caught. You are going to be returned to your country.”

That approach marks a major change from the Obama administration, which struggled to handle the flow of illegal immigrants from Central America.

Under Obama-era policies, hundreds of thousands of children and families from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were caught and then released into the interior of the U.S., where they often failed to show up for their deportations and instead disappeared into the shadows.

Mr. Trump has vowed quick deportations and has called for expanding detention facilities to hold illegal immigrants in the meantime, preventing them from slipping away.

“This is messaging, backed up by actual enforcement and policy changes that people are responding to,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “The continued drop suggests this is more than just a fluke.”

Border apprehensions are considered a rough yardstick for the overall flow of illegal immigration, so a drop in arrests is believed to reflect an overall drop in the flow of people.

No matter how carefully you tread, leftists tend to lump all immigrants together. If you advocate cracking down on illegal immigration, progressives screech about how immigrants built this country or recount some sob story about an immigrant they knew who fled to the U.S. for a better life. They can’t seem to grasp that there’s a difference between legal immigration and illegal immigration, and that no one really takes issue with those who came here legally.

Leftists in Howard County, Maryland, were surprised to learn that some of those who oppose their efforts to make the county a sanctuary community are … immigrants.

At first blush, making Howard County a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants had seemed a natural move: The county has twice as many Democrats as Republicans and a highly educated population, full of scientists and engineers. One in five residents was born abroad.

But the bill met stout opposition from an unlikely source: some of those very same foreign-born residents.

In passionate testimony before county legislators, and in tense debates with liberal neighbors born in the United States, legal immigrants argued that offering sanctuary to people who came to the country illegally devalued their own past struggles to gain citizenship.

Some even felt it threatened their hard-won hold on the American dream.

Their objections stunned Democratic supporters of sanctuary here and helped bring about the bill’s demise in March. A similar proposal for the state collapsed this month in the Maryland Senate, where Democrats also hold a two-to-one advantage. Some of the same immigrants spoke out against it.

It’s unlikely that Democrats learned the important lesson here — the lesson that not all immigrants are the same.

Illegal immigrants sneak across the border, ignoring immigration law. Legal immigrants had to jump through numerous costly hoops in the hopes of being permitted to enter the United States.

By acting as if all immigrants are in the same boat (no pun intended), Democrats have devalued the experiences of legal immigrants. They’ve revealed a profound naivety about the struggles of legal immigrants, struggles that took place on foreign shores, in order to hold up those who have ignored those same struggles and took the easy road but now want protection from the ramifications of their actions.

Delivering on a long-held objective, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday signed a bill that effectively bans sanctuary cities, counties, and universities in the state of Texas. The law, which opponents plan to challenge in the courts, allows police to inquire about the immigration status of persons they detain and requires officials to comply with federal requests to hold criminal suspects for possible deportation.

The Texas law, which will go into effect Sept. 1, will create a criminal charge for law enforcement officials who violate federal immigration laws. Defiant elected or appointed officials could be removed from office and local jurisdictions will be charged up to $25,000 for each day they are in violation. It is the first law of its kind in the nation.

Via the Dallas Morning News:

“Texans expect us to keep them safe, and that is exactly what we are going to do by me signing this law,” Abbott said before inking his signature during a Facebook Live video Sunday night — the first time a Texas governor has signed a bill through an Internet live stream.

Abbott, who designated the ban as an emergency item in January, signed the bill just four days after both chambers of the Legislature gave it final approval. Its passage is a major victory for Abbott and Republicans who advocate for stricter enforcement of immigration law. The Legislature has tried to pass a ban every session since 2011.

The first day of May is also known as “May Day” a day that brings out demonstrators around the world to ostensibly support workers around the world.

On May 1, 2017 supposedly pro-labor demonstrations were carried out around the United States purportedly to defend workers’ rights, wages and working conditions. In some instances the May Day demonstrations became “Mayhem” demonstrations with participants rioting and destroying property.

Incredibly, in addition to demanding better wages and working conditions, these same demonstrators and rioters demanded an end to the Trump administration’s immigration policies and efforts to effectively and fairly enforce our immigration laws.

In point of fact, President Trump’s immigration policies are pro-labor and pro-American.

The demonstrators apparently don’t understand the principle of “Supply and Demand” and that flooding the labor pool with millions of foreign workers suppresses wages and working conditions and also results in American and lawful immigrant workers being displaced by foreign workers.

Today all too many Americans have fallen victim to the massive fraud campaign that has been foisted on Americans by politicians and a laundry list of special interest groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and labor unions such as the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). that are literally and figuratively “making out like bandits” by exploiting the immigration system.

These unions are betraying America and their members, seeking to flood America with foreign workers whom they seek to enroll as dues paying members. More members provides unions with more political leverage and more money in the form of dues.

As for the notion that “immigrants” need protection from federal immigration law enforcement personnel is utterly fatuous and is part and parcel of the Orwellian Newspeak tactic of the open-borders / immigration anarchists begun when President Jimmy Carter insisted that illegal aliens be referred to as “undocumented immigrants.”

Demanding protection for immigrants is not unlike the rhetoric of President George W. Bush who attempted to create a Guest Worker Amnesty program for illegal aliens to provide them with lawful status. Back then I said that Bush’s offer to make immigrants legal was as absurd as offering to make water wet.

Water is already wet and immigrants are already legal.

Simply stated, Bush wanted to legalize illegal aliens through an amnesty program even though he knew that the Reagan amnesty that was an integral part of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 was a disaster that ultimately led to the greatest influx of illegal aliens in the history of the United States.

Today President Trump’s immigration policies which stand out in stark contrast to the policies of Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, employers are whining that they have to “resort” to hiring Americans.

Under our immigration laws Americans are supposed to get first crack at jobs and not be the employees of last resort.

By now most Americans have heard about the H-1B Visa Program that enables highly skilled nonimmigrant workers to be employed in the United States. Another category of temporary work visa is the H-2B visa for Temporary Non-Agricultural Workers.

These visas are issued to aliens to work at non-agricultural jobs such as cooks, waiters/waitresses and hotel workers provided that these foreign workers don’t displace American workers or harm the wages and working conditions of Americans who are similarly employed.

On April 28, 2017 the Bangor Daily News reported, Amid foreign worker shortage, Bar Harbor businesses turn to local labor.

Consider this excerpt from the article:

“There are people who have come here year after year after year and worked in the same restaurants as cooks, as waiters, as whatever is needed, and they’re like family. And now for the first time, it’s uncertain that they’ll be able to come back,” says Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Martha says that’s why the chamber is holding a job fair Saturday, hoping to attract significant numbers of workers from the area and the region to fill a long list of openings.