RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-administration-failed-to-remove-99-percent-of-illegal-immigrants-released-into-u-s-gop-report-shows/

Since January 2021, the Biden administration has failed to remove more than 99 percent of the illegal immigrants who have been released into the U.S., according to a report led by House Republicans.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Immigration Subcommittee chairman Tom McClintock (R., Calif.) published new data that showed how the Biden administration and Department of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have been downplaying the border crisis despite the extraordinary numbers.

At least 2,148,738 illegal aliens were released into the country, from President Joe Biden’s inauguration to March 31 this year, according to their findings, and only 108,102 have been removed from the country by immigration authorities. Of those removals, DHS deported only 5,993 illegals through official immigration-court proceedings, accounting for less than 0.3 percent of the total number of aliens released.

Furthermore, of the more than 5.6 million illegal aliens encountered at the southern border during that 26-month period, at least 2,464,424 had no confirmed departure from the U.S. as of March.

“These data contradict Secretary Mayorkas’s statements that the southwest border is closed and that illegal aliens are ‘quickly’ removed,” the 61-page report reads. “Instead, with more than 99 percent of illegal aliens staying inside the United States after being released by the Biden administration, there is virtually no enforcement of our immigration laws.”

Notably, only 6 percent of illegal immigrants were found to have a legitimate fear of persecution in the past two years, debunking Mayorkas’s claim they are just asylum-seekers looking for a new home.

“The vast majority of those individuals have not sought to evade law enforcement but have actually surrendered themselves to law enforcement and made a claim for relief under our laws,” Mayorkas told CNN host Chris Wallace in February, the report notes.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/i-went-to-the-border-and-this-is-what-i-saw/

The Biden administration’s open border policy has invited the most violent and lawless to flock to America and enter our country with virtually no impediments.  The unvetted come here neither pledging allegiance to the United States nor relinquishing their citizenship and loyalties to foreign powers.  Our government is giving each at taxpayers’ expense cash, a cell phone, health care, legal help, transportation, and lodging.  NGOs operating almost exclusively on federal grants buy the illegal aliens’ bus, train, and plane tickets to wherever they wish to go across the country.  For upwards of eight months, their livelihood is financed by tax dollars.  Our tax dollars are literally paying for the invasion and destruction of own country.  This massive welfare to the world and without limit grows every second of every day indefinitely into the future.

I just came back from an eye-opening CBP tour of the U.S.-Mexico border (San Diego Sector).  CBP agents who formerly policed the border have been reassigned to human processing, leaving our nation largely defenseless.  Just one of the massive 132,000 square foot human processing centers cost taxpayers $32 million to construct (a huge white tent with detention pods inside) and $9 million monthly to operate.  Along the border, CBP drove me to areas of peculiar national security interest, all left unprotected.

In one, CBP showed me where water sometimes flows from Mexico to the United States.  To accommodate the flows, large drainage tunnels have been constructed out of concrete.  CBP welds onto the openings of the tunnels iron grates.  Cartel agents who carry diamond cutters on their belts regularly cut the grates to facilitate illegal entry of drugs and gangs.  As the clip of me at this border intersection reveals, the tunnels into the United States were open at the time of my visit.

In another area, you can see where the Biden administration ordered border wall construction halted.  That area, the Zone 18 border gap, is wide open.  On the Mexican side there are cartel dwellings.  Before my visit, two illegal aliens crossed onto American soil at Zone 18 between the Mexican side and the wall for the American side, an area CBP calls “no man’s land.”  Cartel members tracked the aliens into no man’s land and shot them for failing to pay their full ransom for entry into the U.S.  One died.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/dianne_feinsteins_forgotten_immigration_legacy.html

Once upon a time, in the days when sane Democrats ruled, Dianne Feinstein was an articulate and eloquent opponent of illegal immigration

As Washington D.C. mourns the loss of long-time California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, it’s worth looking back at her legacy on the issue of immigration.

Feinstein, the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history, died earlier this month at the age of 90. During her more than three decades in the U.S. Senate, Feinstein was a leader on a variety of different issues, including immigration. The late senator was once a strong, articulate opponent of illegal immigration. In the 1990s, Feinstein advocated for strong border controls and assailed the government of Mexico for facilitating the flow of illegal aliens into the U.S.

In a 1993 statement, Feinstein eloquently laid out how illegal immigration strains resources intended to serve Americans.

“It’s a competition for space, whether the space is a job, the space is a home, [or] a place in a classroom, it becomes a competition for space,” Feinstein said at the time. “You become so overtaxed you have to concentrate on saying, the people who should be here are those who come legally at this time.”

Feinstein also sounded the alarm about the growing number of children being born to illegal aliens during a 1994 appearance on Face the Nation with Federation for American Immigration Reform President Dan Stein.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/biden-is-lying-about-the-border-wall/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second

And Biden being Biden, no one on either side of the aisle believes a word he says.

Record numbers of illegal aliens continue to pour into the United States at the invitation of President Biden’s no-enforcement border policies. The administration is thus feeling the heat from blue-state and big-city Democrats on whom it had never dawned that preening as a “sanctuary” would require, you know, actually providing sanctuary. Their education, health-care, social-welfare, and law-enforcement resources are grossly inadequate to deal with the resulting crisis. It is that political reality, and nothing else, that has forced Biden’s grudging concession to the need for border-wall construction.

Naturally, reality is not welcomed by the Democrats’ transnational-progressive base, which does not believe the United States should have borders or be a nation, and which is used to having its way with our senescent chief executive. (See, e.g., Biden’s joining hard leftists Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Justin Trudeau, respectively the president of Mexico and the prime minister of Canada, in the “Declaration of North America,” which, among other post-sovereign tripe, celebrates how “North America” has now “welcomed record numbers of migrants and refugees from the Western Hemisphere under new and expanded labor and humanitarian programs.”)

The Left is in revolt over Biden’s sudden conversion to border-wall construction. So, as is wont to happen on those rare occasions when reality intrudes on utopia, Biden is lying. While seeking credit from the country at large for building some (but not nearly enough) border barrier, Biden is telling his base that he had no choice.

“The money was appropriated for the border wall,” he mewled at the White House on Thursday. He really, really tried to get Congress to redirect it, but those bad Republicans wouldn’t hear of it. This from the same man who continues to try to cancel student loans that Congress has not authorized him to cancel, even after the Supreme Court (in June’s Biden v. Nebraska decision) ruled that doing so violates the Constitution he is sworn to uphold.

So now, pouts the president, “there’s nothing under the law other than [for my administration] to use that money for what it was appropriated for.” But the wall-construction funding was appropriated four years ago. Why hasn’t he “had to” build any border wall until now? And if he “had to” do it, then why immediately upon taking office did he order a cessation of border-wall construction? Why did he proclaim during the 2020 campaign, “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration”?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/bidens-intentional-crisis/

The continuing incursion of illegal border crossers into the United States is the most astonishing story in American politics. There have been days recently in which 10,000 people crossed illegally into the country — and remember, in a long-ago era, when Barack Obama was president, a tenth of that was considered a crisis.

The current emergency can be attributed entirely to President Joe Biden. In word and deed, from the 2020 campaign on, Biden sent a message to would-be illegal border crossers around the world: If you come to the United States, you will be allowed to stay. And millions have.

Lately, though, Biden’s welcome-to-illegal-crossers policy has become a burden on some important Democrats. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is screaming about the arrival of an estimated 110,000 new asylum seekers in his city. The cost of caring for the new residents will “destroy New York City,” Adams said. And even though Adams tried to blame Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott for sending illegal border crossers to New York, the fact is that Abbott has sent just 13,000. In any event, the presence of all 110,000 in New York is the result of Biden policies.

Now that some Democrats are complaining, news reports say Biden is beginning to feel some pressure. Can he do something to lower the heat? In response, Biden has come up with a way to address the problem: Rush more inadmissible migrants into the United States.

It seems crazy, and it is. But it is more than that. It is also perhaps the best indicator we have of Biden’s intentions in the border crisis. Look at the 10,000-a-day flow of illegal crossers over the border. The president of the United States has the authority and means to protect the U.S. border. The only way a president would allow this to go on for years is if the president wanted this to happen. And it appears that Biden does, in fact, want this to happen.

Early in the border crisis, I wrote, “The president is not trying to stop the flow of illegal crossers. Instead, he is trying to accommodate the flow, scrambling to find housing and living arrangements for those coming in. The message has gotten out to the world, and the world is coming.”

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

“No nation in history has survived once its borders were destroyed, once its citizenship was rendered

no different from mere residence, and once its neighbors with impunity undermined its sovereignty.”

                    Victor Davis Hanson (1953-)                                                                                                                                             

Over two and a half million illegal migrants have crossed our southern border this fiscal year. Last week, 10,000 crossed into Eagle Pass, Texas, a city of fewer than 30,000. The United States is not alone in being inundated by swarms of migrants. On Italy’s island of Lampedusa, where 6,000 locals reside, 11,000 migrants arrived in five days last week. In the UK’s The Spectator, on the same date, Douglas Murray wrote: “Keep allowing people with no discernible asylum claims to land by the thousands, from a continent with hundreds of millions more to come, and you will be fêted. Stop the law-breaking and you will find yourself prosecuted.” Today, the problem of illegal immigration appears insoluble. It seems to be, as Churchill once said about Russia: “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” It is neither a mystery nor insoluble. But it is a problem political leaders in Washington and Brussels refuse to address honestly.

On one side, there are those who despair a humanitarian crisis – people living in utter poverty and under dictatorial regimes. These people are willing to accommodate victims (perceived or real) without reserve. On the other side are those willing to exercise any measure to keep out all illegal immigrants – a wall, armed guards, barbed wire, refusals to let over-crowded boats dock. It is a problem in need of the common sense of a Jeeves, when too much of the West is led by well-intentioned, feeble-minded Bertie Woosters.

Migration has been a factor in human evolution for at least 200,000 years – since homo sapiens began leaving Africa. For the first 180,000-190,000 years our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, migrating from one area to another, depending on weather and food availability. They first populated the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. Around 15,000 years ago they sailed to Australia, and crossed the Bering Sea to the Americas, Sometime about 12,000 to 13,000 years ago our ancestors began to transition from nomads to farmers, raising crops and animals for food, and around 3,000 BCE city states were created, to satisfy a need for laws to govern society and commerce.