RUTHFULLY YOURS

.https://www.city-journal.org/html/truth-behind-trump-storm-15676.html

…..”The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors. 

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.

Today’s unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/acting-dhs-secretary-border-crossings-down-43-percent-since-may/

Acting DHS secretary Kevin McAleenan said Wednesday that border crossings have declined 43 percent since May, when arrests between ports of entry at the southern border increased for the fourth straight month to 132,887, up from 99,304 arrests in April.

“So those efforts are making progress, 43 percent reduction in crossings since May,” McAleenan said. “We’re hoping to continue the progress in August.”

McAleenan said DHS is working with Central American countries to protect migrants who need asylum as well as conduct an “aggressive effort against human smugglers,” a project he said “could really change the game.”

“I’ll be going back to Central America next week to try to build on that with El Salvador and Panama and really address this problem as a regional effort,” he said.

The number of immigrants being held at border stations is also down significantly from its June high of 20,000, McAleenan said. “This morning we have less than 4,000, and they’re not staying with us very long. We’re able to repatriate the single adults quickly. The unaccompanied children are going to a better situation with Health and Human Services.”

The acting DHS chief went on to take a shot at what he sees as a toxic political environment “where we’re demonizing law enforcement for doing their jobs,” calling it “concerning.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274576/ice-field-operation-helps-american-workers-michael-cutler

On August 7, 2019 ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) issued a press release that announced, ICE executes federal search warrants at multiple Mississippi locations.  Fox News also reported on that massive field operation in its report, ICE raids on Mississippi food processing plants result in 680 arrests.

The mainstream media, in reporting on the ICE field operation, immediately sought to paint the most disturbing picture it could about the nature of the ICE operation and along the way, the children of illegal aliens who had been arrested were interviewed on camera, hysterically crying that they wanted their mother/father or both to come home to take care of them.

However, I doubt the media will show the lines of American workers lining up to take the jobs that have been liberated by the ICE agents.

While it is admittedly heart-wrenching to see a child in distress, it is remarkable that the media totally ignores that children are frequently separated from the parents whenever their parents are arrested for a wide spectrum of violations of law that include administrative motor vehicle violations.

Every year as the dreaded “Tax Day” approaches, the IRS frequently arrests tax cheats and fraudsters and publicizes their law enforcement actions to remind tax payers that they should not defraud the IRS.  This is a clear tactic of intimidation that creates a “climate of fear.”  Yet Nancy Pelosi who frequently lambasted immigration law enforcement efforts for creating such a climate of fear, I have never seen her or any other politician complaining about the tactics of the IRS.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/12/sorry-but-its-not-racist-to-screen-out-migrants-wholl-be-a-burden/

Last week’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has sent public discourse about immigration off the rails.

It has allowed radicals to frame as racist normal law enforcement activities and immigration rules. We saw this in New York recently, with anti-ICE protesters stopping traffic on the West Side Highway and holding sit-ins at an Amazon store to protest the company’s compliance with immigration rules.

In the left’s telling — and it’s increasingly hard to distinguish the hard left from the soft — the administration and those who support it are no better than the insane white nationalist who committed the El Paso atrocity.

Similar hysteria has greeted a new Trump administration regulation governing legal immigrants’ access to public welfare. The New York Times depicted the new rule as part of an effort by the president and his hard-line immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, to “shift” the demographic makeup of newcomers to the country.

Under the new rule, those who are in the country legally will have a more difficult time obtaining green cards or gaining citizenship if they received food stamps, housing assistance, Medicare or other public benefits.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/14/youre-not-grateful-united-states/

Rather than ridicule America’s past, as if the travesties of U.S. history nullify its soaring glories, immigrants and longtime Americans should be grateful for America and its political and cultural traditions.

Earlier this month, the Washington Post featured an op-ed entitled “I am an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be ‘grateful,’” by New York University professor Suketu Mehta, an author who recently published a book arguing that “immigration is a form of reparations” for past American crimes.

In the article, Mehta accuses America of stealing “the futures of the people who are now arriving at its borders,” of causing many immigrants “to move in the first place,” and of “despoil[ing] their homelands and mak[ing] them unsafe and unlivable.” He censures the West for “despoil[ing] country after country through colonialism, illegal wars, rapacious corporations and unchecked carbon emissions.”

Mehta asserts, for such reasons, that he’s “entitled” to live in the United States. Yet a few brief historical reflections will demonstrate that immigration as reparations is a bit more complicated than Mehta lets on. Moreover, no one, whether first-generation immigrants or direct descendants of voyagers on the Mayflower, deserves to be here. Being American is a gift for which every citizen should be inordinately grateful.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/another_ungrateful_migrant_creates_a_new_narrative_for_ingratitude.html

Rep. Ilhan Omar was just an opening act. Now, another ungrateful migrant has come out of the woodwork to tell us how awful we are and how ingratitude for being allowed to come here is the rightful state for migrants.

Calcutta-born Suketu Mehta, a bitter revanchist who would have been ripped to shreds as a fourth-rate, fourth world ‘intellectual’ by V.S. Naipaul (too bad he’s not alive) puts forth the argument in the Washington Post that immigration is a reparation. His piece is titled ‘I am an uppity immigrant. Don’t expect me to be grateful.” Based on what he says, it’s clear he views migration to the U.S. as an entitlement solely because America is so very, very bad — and as a lagniappe, because he’s so very, very good. He writes:

I’ve been told to “go back” ever since 1977, when I enrolled in an extravagantly racist all-boys Catholic school in Queens, N.Y. — birthplace of President Trump, who recently became the biggest, loudest mouthpiece for this line of rhetoric when he tweeted that four congresswomen of color should “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The idea is: White Americans get to decide who is allowed to come in and what rules we are to follow. If you come here, don’t complain. Be grateful we took you in. “Go back” is a line that’s intended to put immigrants in our place — or rather, to remind us that our place in this country is contingent, that we are beholden to those who came here earlier.

To this I say: No, we are not. I take my place in America — an imperfect place — and I make it my own; there’s a Constitution that protects my right to do so. I will not genuflect at the white American altar. I will not bow and scrape before my supposed benefactors. I understand the soul of this nation just as well, if not better, than they do: a country that stole the futures of the people who are now arriving at its borders, a cacophonous country, an exceptional country, but one that seems determined to continually sabotage its journey towards a more perfect union. Nobody powerful ever gave the powerless anything just because they asked politely, and immigrants don’t come hat-in-hand. I am an uppity immigrant. I am entitled to be here. Deal with it.

https://www.city-journal.org/american-citizenship

Civis Romanus sum: “I am a Roman citizen!” Two thousand years ago, those words protected one throughout the Roman Empire, imposing strict limits on the punishments that public authorities might inflict. Today, we’re seeing a powerful conflict between the national and the foreign in the Western hemisphere. At the United States southern border, a father and daughter lost their lives attempting to cross the Rio Grande. Along the shores of Italy and Spain, meantime, boatloads of migrants risk their lives sailing across the Mediterranean. 

More than 1 billion people would improve their lives by moving to a relatively small number of countries—namely, those of Western Europe and North America. Polls confirm the desire of citizens of poor countries to move to the West. These people do not merely seek material advantage, though that’s certainly a factor. They also want protection from violent elements of their society, from criminals, and even from their own governments. In many parts of the world, declaring one’s citizenship offers no such protection. Chinese citizenship doesn’t save the Uighurs, for example, from the abuses they have suffered. Even Rome’s decaying republic and corrupt empire had better protections for citizens than do some contemporary countries.

Citizenship, like monetary currency, operates on a principle of trust. Currencies are valued highly if one can be assured that others will exchange goods and services for them at face value. Similarly, advanced countries acknowledge one another’s passports virtually as tickets to entry. Citizenship is treasured when one’s rights can be assumed—but worthless when one cannot leave a country or reenter it, when a government doesn’t protect property or individuals, or when one must take desperate measures to escape.

Just as government policies can undermine currencies, so, too, can they degrade citizenship. Cancelling debt is one way to devalue a currency; printing too much money is another. The Democratic presidential hopefuls seem set on similar policies for American citizenship. Most have, in one form or another, suggested decriminalizing illegal entry to the United States. “That is tantamount to declaring publicly that we have open borders,” said Jeh Johnson, former head of Homeland Security under Barack Obama. Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have also endorsed providing illegal immigrants medical insurance, even as millions of American citizens lack coverage. With these measures in place, what would remain of American citizenship?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/border-patrol-chief-5800-fake-families-discovered-at-the-border/

Acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Mark Morgan told a Senate committee on Tuesday that 5,800 “fake families” have been discovered trying to enter the U.S. illegally this year.

“Our laws prevent us from holding people more than 20 days and because we can’t get the information we’re probably releasing them even sooner than that in many cases, correct?” Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) asked Morgan during a Senate Homeland Security hearing on the border crisis.

“With respect to family units, since March of this year, United States Border Patrol has been releasing family units directly so in some cases they’re being released in under 48 hours into the interior of the United States,” Morgan said.

Johnson replied, “Because it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to try and find facilities to hold them for 20 days with this overwhelming flow so instead of border patrol turning them over to ICE for a more thorough vetting process and then ICE releasing them, border patrol is doing it directly?”

“That’s correct,” Morgan, who also served in the Obama administration, responded.