RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/border-bollocks

U.S. Customs and Border Protection logged a record 269,735 migrants encountered in September. That figure came on the heels of a record-breaking fiscal year, in which CBP reported nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters. The numbers could have been much higher if not for the introduction of an app, CBP One, allowing unauthorized migrants to schedule their arrivals before claiming asylum, and new parole programs. (Parole, in the immigration context, refers to an exception in the law that lets some noncitizens who would otherwise be ineligible for such protections work and live in the United States without fear of deportation). Today, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and inquiries initiated by the House’s Homeland Security Committee, we know that these programs started earlier than the Biden administration admitted, and that they involve many more migrants and countries, including terrorism hotbeds, than it has revealed.

On January 5, the administration released a fact sheet detailing its efforts to manage the historic flow of asylum seekers with a new parole program. It advertised the program as being for citizens of four countries—Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti. President Biden spoke about it that day in the context of a surge of Venezuelan migrants. Then, in May, at a White House press briefing, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that CBP admitted about 740 people per day through the plan, mostly Haitians. He claimed that the number would soon rise to 1,000 per day; two months later, DHS announced that it would rise to 1,450 per day.

Here’s what we now know. The program wasn’t new when it was announced—the documents CIS obtained show that it existed 19 months before January’s public rollout. The administration paroled more than 10,000 migrants from 29 countries in 2021, most from Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala. It paroled over 13,011 migrants from 35 countries in 2022, including, curiously, more than 5,000 Russians.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-many-hamas-and-hezbollah-terrorists-have-crossed-the-southern-border/

When then-FBI Director Robert Mueller testified in the House Judiciary Committee on May 9, 2012, Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly of California asked him about the threat of terrorists entering the United States by crossing the Southern border.

“First of all, as it relates to our Southwest border,” said Gallegly, “do you see any growing evidence of al-Qaida or any other terrorist organization working to exploit our border with the attempt of launching another terrorist attack on our own soil?”

Mueller indicated he was more concerned about Hezbollah doing that than al-Qaeda.

“As to the Southwest border and al-Qaida, we have not seen an increase of effort by al-Qaida to come across the Southwest border,” said Mueller. “On the other hand, when you open the question up to other terrorist groups, I would say that we have a continuing concern about Iranian influence, actors and Hezbollah.”

In fact, Mueller had testified in the Senate Committee on Intelligence on Feb. 16, 2005, about a Hezbollah fundraiser from Lebanon who had been discovered in Michigan. “In 2004,” Mueller said in a statement to the committee, “we had some success in uncovering individuals providing material support to Hezbollah.

“In Detroit, Mahmoud Youssef Kourani was indicted in the Eastern District of Michigan on one count of Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to Hezbollah,” Mueller said. “Kourani was already in custody for entering the country illegally through Mexico and was involved in fundraising activities on behalf of Hezbollah.”

A staff report on “9/11 and Terrorist Travel” published in 2004 by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States provided information about a smuggler who smuggled “Lebanese nationals sympathetic to Hamas and Hezbollah into the United States.”

https://amgreatness.com/2023/10/26/premodern-diversity-vs-civilizational-unity/

Few Romans in the late decades of their 5th-century AD empire celebrated their newfound “diversity” of marauding Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals.

These tribes en masse had crossed the unsecured Rhine and Danube borders to harvest Roman bounty without a care about what had created it.

Their agendas were focused on destroying the civilization they overran rather than peacefully integrating into and perpetuating the Empire.

Ironically, Rome’s prior greatness had been due to the extension of citizenship to diverse people throughout Europe, North Africa, and Asia.

Millions had been assimilated, integrated, and intermarried and often superseded the original Italians of the early Roman Republic. Such fractious diversity had led to unity around the idea of Rome.

New citizens learned to enjoy the advantages of habeas corpus, sophisticated roads, aqueducts, and public architecture, and the security offered by the legions.

The unity of these diverse peoples fused into a single culture that empowered Rome. In contrast, the later disunity of hundreds of thousands of tribal people flooding into and dividing Rome doomed it.

To meet the challenge of a multiracial society, the only viable pathway to a stable civilization of racially and ethnically different people is a single, shared culture.

Some nations can find collective success as a single homogenous people like Japan or Switzerland.

Or equally, but with more difficulty, nations can prosper with heterodox peoples—but only if united by a single, inclusive culture as the American melting-pot once attested.

But a baleful third option—a multicultural society of diverse, unassimilated, and often rival tribes—historically is a prescription for collective suicide.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/21/biden-shatters-records-worst-border-32-million-ill/

The Biden administration just tallied the worst year in border security history, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s final numbers for fiscal 2023, which showed record numbers of illegal immigrants, terrorism suspects and fentanyl detected.

Customs and Border Protection delivered the numbers in a highly unusual Saturday morning news release.

Border Patrol agents detected 2.1 million illegal immigrants, which was down slightly from 2020, when it reported 2.2 million. But the real action was at official ports of entry — land border crossings and, increasingly, airports, where officers encountered 1.1 million unauthorized migrants.

That’s double the rate of 2022, and it reflects Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ attempt to try to convince illegal immigrants to schedule their arrivals in order to be let in. He had said it would take pressure off the Border Patrol agents, who patrol the boundaries between the crossings, but the numbers suggest the overall flow of people continues to rise unabated.

Troy Miller, acting commissioner at CBP, insisted his agency is on top of things.

“CBP will continue to remain vigilant, making operational adjustments as necessary and enforcing consequences under U.S. immigration law,” he said in a statement announcing the grim new numbers.

The numbers will likely fuel a push among House Republicans to impeach Mr. Mayorkas, who along with Mr. Biden erased most of the previous administration’s get-tough policies, with the resulting surge in illegal activity.

https://media5.manhattan-institute.org/iiif/2/wp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F5%2FAsylum-seekers-and-illegal-immigrants-sleeping-on-the-sidewalk-outside-the-Roosevelt-Hotel-in-Manhattan.jpg/full/!99999,960/0/default.jpg

When Florida governor Ron DeSantis tapped local funds late last year to start flying undocumented immigrants out of his state and into blue states, Democrats blasted him for trying to score “political points” with taxpayer money. DeSantis countered that the $12 million fund that financed the flights represented only a tiny portion of the money that Florida was spending on asylum seekers, after the federal government briefly detains them at the border, releases them, and they wind up in the Sunshine State. Florida hospitals alone had racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in costs for uncompensated care to migrants, DeSantis noted—and the state had to subsidize those services. And it was largely progressive-led municipalities declaring themselves immigrant “sanctuaries” that helped attract record recent numbers of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, DeSantis argued, so it was only fair that those cities and states pay for sheltering them. “If the policy is to have an open border, I think the sanctuary cities should be the ones that have to bear that,” said DeSantis.

For many Democrat-led cities and states, those flights, and similar migrant trips to blue locales that Texas officials had arranged, have made much clearer the full price of dealing with the flood of immigrants released into the country by federal officials over the last several years. Because of their distance from America’s southern border, these governments had felt insulated from such pressures, but no longer. New York, a sanctuary city since 1989, spent $8 million a day throughout much of this year to care for migrants, including housing some 3,000 families in hotels for hundreds of dollars a night. Massachusetts—where liberal cities like Boston and Cambridge have also proclaimed themselves sanctuaries—scrambled last year to expand its shelter system to meet the influx. The projected bill for taxpayers: nearly $140 million, thanks to “the federal government’s inability to address our country’s immigration challenges,” then-governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, charged. Several Democratic states, including California, Illinois, and New York, have expanded access for illegal immigrants to social programs like Medicaid, deeming it humane. They now face eye-watering unanticipated bills, as illegals deluge the system.

The northward flight of migrants has changed the immigration conversation. New York City was being “destroyed by the migrant crisis,” warned Mayor Eric Adams. He complained that President Biden had “failed” the city and demanded federal aid to ease the crisis. Adams has tried to offload some arriving immigrants to suburban New York communities. A Democratic governor, Colorado’s Jared Polis, ignited his own controversy early in 2023 when he joined Republicans in transporting migrants to out-of-state cities, including Democrat-run New York and Chicago, after Denver declared a state of emergency because of an illegal immigrant influx.

Even if the southern border were completely secured, the costs of the massive movement of migrants into the U.S. over the last few years will reverberate for decades on city and state budgets. That price will include not merely the short-term burden of housing and feeding asylum seekers, but the longer-term expenditures of providing the newcomers with basic services like health care and education. Just how much these undocumented migrants will contribute, in turn, to America’s economy, given that many are largely unskilled and poorly educated, remains to be seen—though it’s unlikely to be enough to help balance municipal and state books anytime soon. Meantime, Congress and the White House neglect sensible reforms to the legal immigration system that would open doors to the skilled workers our economy needs.