RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&

“Vile.” “Repugnant to the American dream.” “Cruel.” “Callous and despicable.” “An abhorrent act of moral terrorism.” These are just a few of the comments that have been uttered in the past few weeks with respect to a policy change recently announced by the federal government. (These comments come, respectively, from Attorney General Xavier Bacerra of California, U.S. District Judge George Daniels, Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-NY), Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-CA), and Families USA.)

I know what you are thinking: What completely sensible thing has the Trump administration done now?

The quoted comments all relate to a so-called “final rule” issued by the Department of Homeland Security in the Federal Register on August 14, scheduled to take effect on October 15, on the subject of “Inadmissibility [for immigration] Based on Public Charge Grounds.”

So what is this new rule, and what about it has caused the progressive left to go completely berserk?

Here’s my take: Since Immigration Act of 1882, the U.S. immigration statutes have in clear terms explicitly instructed that entry be denied to any person deemed “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” Despite the rather explicit language of Congress, the Clinton administration, in “guidance” issued in 1999, found a way to effectively read this provision out of the statute and admit large numbers of immigrants without regard to whether they were likely to become, or even were already, public charges. The Trump administration has now specified a basis on which the statute can and will be enforced as written and intended. Cue the outrage!

Let’s go through this in some more detail. The Immigration Act of 1882 was the very first general immigration statute in the U.S., so the “public charge” basis for exclusion of an applicant for a visa has existed for as long as we have had immigration laws. The relevant language has changed somewhat over the years, as extensive amendments and updates to immigration laws have been enacted; however, as far as I can determine, none of the changes have been material. Here is the current version of the “public charge” provision, as codified at 8 U.S.C. Section 1182(a)(4):

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/immigration-enforcement-mexico-cooperating-with-us/

‘No one will come to trample our country, our land!’

One of the reasons border apprehensions have dropped from their alarming peak in May is that Mexico has been pretty aggressive in stopping third-country nationals from traversing its territory on their way north to make bogus asylum claims so they can be released into the U.S.

But why has Mexico been willing to work with us like this? It’s especially curious because in the past, Mexico was not at all eager to help us limit illegal immigration, a pattern we might have expected to intensify with last year’s election as president of left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (commonly known as AMLO, pronounced as a word rather than initials).

No doubt President Trump’s tariff threats had some effect. Three-quarters of Mexico’s exports go to the U.S., and despite increased integration of our economies over the past couple of decades, they still need us a lot more than we need them. Also, Trump’s mercurial temperament clearly has the Mexicans worried that he could do something rash (similar to Iran’s fears about Reagan if the hostages weren’t released before he was inaugurated).

But it’s unlikely that these things would be enough to move a sometimes touchy nationalist like AMLO. Rather, I think a big part of the explanation is that the current flow of illegals is mainly made up of foreigners, not Mexicans. Earlier waves of mass infiltration across our southern border consisted mainly of Mexicans, and while Mexico quickly took back its people who had been nabbed by the Border Patrol, it did little if anything to reduce the flow. They did establish a police-like unit of the country’s immigration agency called Grupo Beta, which worked on Mexico’s northern border (opposite our southern border), but its remit was to help potential illegals with water and first aid and protect them from criminals.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/nyc-term-illegal-alien-can-cost-you-25000000-michael-cutler/

The September 26, 2019 edition of the Washington Times included an article, NYC bans calling someone an ‘illegal alien’ or threatening to contact ICE that began with the following excerpt:

New York City has made it against the law to call someone an “illegal alien” or threaten them by calling immigration officials on them.

City Hall’s Commission on Human Rights released the new measures this week that could pose up to a $250,000 fine.

The restrictions say the term “alien” — typically used to refer to a noncitizen — is a loaded phrase meant to categorize migrants as “other” and dehumanize them.

Before we consider the attack on the First Amendment that protects our freedoms of expression to guarantee freedom of thought by the increasingly radicalized Democrats of New York City, we must consider how we have come to this point where our political “leaders” and the mainstream media have, in essence, become the “Ministry of Truth” that is found in Orwell’s novel, “1984.”   In that novel of a terrifying dystopia future, the Ministry of Truth formulated propaganda and administered the expansion of Newspeak, and was backed up by the Thought Police.

The misuse language to confound understanding, at least where immigration is concerned, can be traced back decades to the administration of Jimmy Carter, who began process of expunging the term “illegal alien” and even the term alien from the official lexicon that pertains to immigration.

The Carter administration coercively mandated that all INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) employees substitute the term “Undocumented Immigrant) for the term “Illegal Alien.”  Under his outrageous edict, recalcitrant  INS employees who continued use the legally accurate term illegal aliens would face extreme disciplinary punishment for using that proscribed term.

Indeed, the term “Alien” is a legal term that is defined in section, 8 USC §1101 of the Immigration And Nationality Act (INA) as simply being, “Any person, not a citizen or national of the United States.”

There is certainly no insult in that term or its definition- only clarity.  However, con artists seek to obfuscate the truth in order to swindle their intended victims.

amgreatness.com/2019/10/02/democrat-cities-are-sanctuary-nightmares/

In the age of 24-hour news cycles where virtually everything has been politicized, a strange phenomenon has developed. Propaganda—described more accurately as “lies”—believed by many and challenged by few, is carrying the day. Only after a preponderance of evidence to the contrary accumulates over time does the public begin to question whether, let alone realize they have been sold a bill of goods.

Examples of this are ubiquitous, and nowhere seen more clearly than on the immigration issue.

Anti-borders politicians loudly proclaimed that there was no crisis at our southern border, until the undeniable facts caused them to reverse course and admit the obvious. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) once suggested that even members of the notoriously violent Central American gang MS-13 have “the spark of divinity” in them and hence deserve a chance here. We haven’t heard that talking point in a while, as details of the gang’s penchant for rape, drug trafficking, and murder have become known.

The latest talking point to wither and die in the light of truth is that sanctuary policies make communities safer, and that they protect immigrant communities. This can no longer be stated with any credibility. Sanctuary laws are poison for communities, and immigrants disproportionately are suffering as a result of them.

The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) recently compiled a list of America’s Worst Sanctuary Communities, and the details that emerged should act as a disturbing wakeup call to all Americans. Illegal aliens given “sanctuary” and protected from deportation have been charged with heinous acts.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/01/virginia-police-officer-suspended-after-turning-over-suspected-illegal-alien-to-ice/

A Virginia police officer was suspended after he turned over a suspected illegal alien to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following a traffic accident last month.

In Fairfax County, Va., that’s a no-no—even if the suspected illegal immigrant got into the accident while driving without a license. The officer—who has been on the job for several years—will now have to undergo remedial training so he doesn’t make this mistake again.

“This is an unfortunate issue where the officer was confused,” Fairfax County Police Chief Edwin Roessler Jr. said. “We have trained on this issue a lot. This is the first time we’ve had a lapse in judgment, and the officer is being punished.”

The incident occurred in Alexandria on Sept. 21, according to Fox News.

The officer discovered one of the drivers didn’t have a Virginia driver’s license and ran a check with the state Department of Motor Vehicles, police said. The check revealed the driver had a violation for failing to appear for a deportation hearing.

The officer verified the warrant and alerted ICE, who quickly sent an agent to the scene of the accident.

After citing the driver for not having a driver’s license, the officer turned him over to the ICE agent.

Fairfax County PD enacted a policy in 2007 that prohibits officers from taking individuals into custody based on civil violations of immigration law.

Roessler apologized for the officer’s “lapse in judgement,” according to Fox, and ordered an internal investigation to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

“Our county is one of the most diverse counties in the nation and no one should have the perception that FCPD is acting as a civil immigration agent for ICE,” he said. The law abiding residents of Fairfax Country were not asked for comment.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/ice-targets-illegals-sanctuary-city-raids-matthew-vadum/

In a weeklong sweep U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took close to 1,300 illegal aliens into custody, many of whom were arrested in so-called sanctuary cities that harbor illegals and shield them from federal immigration enforcement efforts.

Sanctuary jurisdictions defy U.S. law by, among other things, refusing to honor detainer requests in which ICE asks local jailers to notify the agency before an inmate wanted on immigration charges is released. A detainer request also asks the jailer to hold the individual for up to 48 hours after when the individual would otherwise be released so ICE can take him or her into custody for processing and possible deportation.

“To be clear, the concept of sanctuary cities is perhaps the most ridiculous and outrageous idea I’ve ever encountered in my almost 40 years of law enforcement,” Sheriff Wayne Ivey of Brevard County, Florida, told reporters at the White House Sept. 26.

“To think that there are those in power who took the same oath of office that we did to uphold the Constitution, who would be willing to oppose the rule of law, is completely insane and unacceptable.”

The sanctuary movement gave illegal aliens permission to rob, rape, and murder Americans by, among other things, stigmatizing immigration enforcement. Some left-wingers call sanctuary jurisdictions “civil liberties safe zones” to blur the distinction between citizens and non-citizens by implying illegal aliens somehow possess a civil right to be present in the U.S.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/09/the-epochal-challenge-of-mass-immigration/

Wolfgang Kasper is an emeritus Professor of Economics. This is an edited version of an address to a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society in Fort Worth, Texas, in May. Professor Kasper thanks Regine Kasper, Jeff Bennett (Canberra), Václav Klaus (Prague), Stefan Markowski (Warsaw and Canberra), Tom Sowell (Stanford) and many attendants at the Fort Worth gathering for their comments, but of course retains all responsibility for judgments and errors. 

Allow me to begin on a personal note. When I was a child, my family was “ethnically cleansed” and, soon after that, we became refugees because my father had to flee for his liberty from the Soviet effort to “harvest” German engineers for the post-war reconstruction of the Russian Fatherland. Later, we became migrants. As an adult, I have been a guest worker in half a dozen countries. And over the past forty-six years I have lived in Australia, the country with the biggest share of foreign-born residents, bar Israel.

I therefore claim to know a thing or two about migration.

Migration and integration

The most important thing I know is that one cannot and must not discuss the act of migration without considering the subsequent process of integration. To me, integration means that the newcomers must make every effort to learn the host community’s rules of conduct in the public domain, and obey them. What meals they cook at home, to what gods they pray—that is left to their own private choice. Integration, though personally gratifying and potentially rewarding, is a huge challenge. It touches on deeply held feelings of personal identity and demands the adaptation of normally persistent cultural norms[1].

Insisting on the newcomers adopting the habits and modes of public behaviour of the host community is not racist. Racism is abhorrent, because it amounts to discrimination according to what we have been given by nature, characteristics which we cannot change. By contrast, habits and modes of behaviour come from nurture; they are cultural features, which are learnt and can be relearnt.

In this article I shall use the shorthand “the West” to describe the countries of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, which are the three pillars of Western civilisation. By and large, they are democratic and have capitalist market economies. I shall speak summarily of “the South” when I refer to Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America, namely the regions that are the main sources of the new mass migration.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-death-of-american-citizenship/

Open borders and sanctuary cities are blurring the distinction between illegal immigrants and Americans, and activist judges are eroding the Bill of Rights.

The American Founders institutionalized the best of a long Western tradition of representative government, with the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. These contracts outlined the rare privileges and responsibilities of new American citizens.

Yet the concept of citizenship is being assaulted on the premodern side by the legal blending of mere residency with citizenship.

Estimates on the number of undocumented American residents range from 11 million to more than 20 million. The undocumented are becoming legally indistinguishable from citizens and enjoy exemption from federal immigration law in some 500 sanctuary jurisdictions. An illegal resident of California will pay substantially less tuition at a California public university than will a U.S. citizen of another state.

Multiculturalism has reduced the idea of e pluribus unum to a regressive tribalism. Americans often seem to owe their first allegiance to those who look like they do. Citizens cannot even agree over once-hallowed and shared national holidays such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July.

It is eerie how such current American retribalization resembles the collapse of Rome, as Goths, Huns, and Vandals all squabbled among themselves over what was left of 1,200 years of Roman citizenship — eager to destroy what they could neither create nor emulate.

Citizenship has always been protected by the middle classes — on the idea that they are more independent and self-reliant than the poor but can stand up to the influence and power of the elite.