RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/democracy-dies-in-diverse-societies/

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations, governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in Western democracies and the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-28-forcing-the-us-to-accept-immigrants-who-will-become-public-charges-2

Who runs the federal government of the United States? Is it the elected President and members of Congress? Or is it a permanent bureaucracy committed to expansion of its own size and power, together with a critical mass (potentially well less than a majority) of sympathetic federal judges who can be called upon as necessary to strike down any disfavored policy initiative from the elected branches? Or, in an even more cynical formulation, is it that the elected officeholders can run policy when they are Democrats, but when Republicans are elected the bureaucrats get to rule with the assistance of select members of the judiciary?

To view the dynamics of this process at work, there is perhaps no more striking example than what has occurred on the question of the extent to which the U.S. can exclude immigrants on the ground that they are likely to become “public charges.” We last visited this subject back in October 2019, in a post titled “Maneuvering To Force The U.S. To Accept Immigrants Who Will Become Public Charges.” This post is a sequel to that one.

The relevant context is that the U.S. immigration law as passed by Congress, since the enactment of the first statute on the subject back in the 1880s, has explicitly sought to preclude the admission as immigrants of individuals likely to become “public charges.” Although the statutory language has changed somewhat over the years in immaterial ways, one provision of the current statute ( 8 U.S.C. Section 1182(a)(4)) contains the following language:

Aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States: . . . (4) Any alien who, in the opinion of the consular officer at the time of application for a visa, or in the opinion of the Attorney General at the time of application for admission or adjustment of status, is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/01/trump-take-birth-tourism-daniel-greenfield/

Immigration abuse isn’t a single problem. It’s really a series of problems, sometimes overlapping, but not necessarily.

It’s not just, “These guys are crossing the border illegally”, though that’s obviously a big problem. Birth tourism is one of the more obscure and infuriating problems that comes about as a consequence of the terrible idea that anyone who is born in the United States (unless they’re the children of a foreign diplomat) are automatically Americans. Or, birthright citizenship.

There’s no serious basis that just being born in America, regardless of the legal status of your parents, should immediately convey citizenship. It’s an aberration, internationally, where things just don’t work this way. (Much like voting without any ID.)

And the industry of birth tourism has sprung up around the birthright citizenship loophole with, often, Chinese nationals coming to the United States to give birth, and coming away with instant citizenship for their son or daughter.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/18/trumps-blind-spot-on-immigration/

A more moderate level of immigration is both good policy and good politics. Cheap foreign labor is cheap foreign labor, whether it’s legal or illegal, permanent or temporary, blue-collar or white-collar. 

President Trump’s recent interview with Laura Ingraham highlighted an aspect of his views on immigration that doesn’t get enough attention: He wants to increase immigration.

High-skilled or low-skilled, temporary or permanent, the president’s desire has been consistent: “We need people!” Apparently, 1.1 million new permanent immigrants a year—plus hundreds of thousands of “temporary” workers—just isn’t enough.

There’s no doubt that the president is committed to better enforcement of immigration laws, and his administration has made some modest progress in that regard, in the face of savage, Battle-of-Stalingrad opposition.

But when it comes to legal immigration, Trump’s approach is little different from that of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and John McCain, Mike Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg.

Ingraham is a fan of the president, so the half-hour interview, ranging across a variety of topics, was generally friendly. But Ingraham is also no sycophant, so when she brought up the issue of foreign workers, she didn’t pull her punch.

“We don’t have a tight labor market,” she said (about halfway through the linked clip). “If we had a tight labor market, we’d be seeing real increases in wages. I hear that your team is planning on advocating more foreign workers coming in for some of these high-tech companies. I’m very concerned about that, as are a lot of your supporters.“