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IMMIGRATION

Realities on the Border Demand a Reality Check by Our Politicians By Karen Vaughn

https://pjmedia.com/trending/realities-on-the-border-demand-a-reality-check-by-our-politicians/

Karen Vaughn is a Gold Star mother and advisory board member for Mom’s March for America, a project of Moms for America.

This past November Moms for America went “boots on the ground” in Hidalgo, Texas. Thirty-five women from across the nation left the comfort of our homes and chose to see for ourselves if the border crisis was manufactured or real. And trust me…it is very real.

What we saw and experienced was astoundingly difficult to take in. The first-hand accounts from mothers who actually live on the border not only made my skin crawl but stirred in me a righteous indignation for all who oppose helping those American families – women and children who’ve now been abandoned to be America’s first line of defense … women who sleep with shotguns in their bed and pistols in their nightstands because their lives have been threatened so many times by illegals congregating in their yard or attempting to enter the sanctity of their home.

At Moms for America, we stand with our president and urge him to never back down. Building the wall is the right thing to do. While we honor our brave and fearless border security agents, personal conversations with them revealed the truth that they can only do so much, and THEY NEED HELP.

During President Trump’s trip last week to McAllen, Texas, he spoke with a Border Patrol officer who offered a very chilling insight into the realities of apprehensions on the southern border. He explained that their sector alone had apprehended individuals from 41 different countries — 41! In fact, in just in one day (Monday of last week) there were 450 apprehensions on the border in south Texas… 133 of which were people from countries other than Central America and Mexico.

2,000 Muslim Child Marriage Immigration Cases in 10 Years 378 petitions were filed to marry 10-year-old girls and younger.Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272553/2000-muslim-child-marriage-immigration-cases-10-daniel-greenfield

Naila Amin was only thirteen years old when she was married off to her Pakistani first cousin twice her age who beat and raped her. “He dragged me about twenty feet – the whole length of the house – by my hair,” she relates. “He began kicking me in the head and it was so hard I saw stars.”

She described how, “My mother would watch my husband and my father kick me together in the head.”

Even though Nalia was a United States citizen, she was engaged to be married when she was eight years old. And at thirteen, her application to bring her rapist to the United States was approved by USCIS.

By the age of fifteen, she was being raped and beaten in Pakistan.

While Nalia is the youngest of the “child brides” in the Senate report, “How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages”, the young abused American citizen is one of thousands of young girls who are either trafficked into this country or who are used to bring their older “husbands” to America.

Between 2007 and 2017, there were 8,686 petitions for spousal or fiancé visas for or on behalf of minors. And during that same period, 4,749 minors on spousal or fiancé visas got green cards. Even while the United States was claiming to fight sex trafficking in underage girls, our own immigration system was rewarding and promoting the sexual trafficking of girls as young as thirteen.

Secure Borders Protect Immigrant Communities Immigrants are the most vulnerable to transnational gangs. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272539/secure-borders-protect-immigrant-communities-michael-cutler

The Democrats are determined to block the essential construction of a secure barrier on the dangerous U.S./Mexican border that would insure that all who enter the United States are vetted and that records of their entry into the United States are created.

Nancy Pelosi has declared that such a fortification would be “immoral” while her cohort Chuck Schumer stated that the symbol of America should not be a “Thirty foot wall, but the Statue of Liberty.”

Clearly there is a crisis on that border (along with other elements of the immigration system) but for the Democrats, the entry of millions of illegal aliens and tons of narcotics and other contraband is not a crisis but evidence of a success. For them, the entry of those aliens is the fruition of their policies’ goals.

As I have noted in several recent articles, there is certainly nothing immoral about preventing alien criminals and terrorists from entering the United States. There is nothing immoral about protecting American and lawful immigrant workers from being displaced by foreign workers or in having them suffer wage suppression because of the tsunami of a massive illegal alien Third World workforce.

New York State’s Governor Cuomo, who unbelievably referred to ICE agents as “Thugs,” decided to be publicly sworn in at Ellis Island to begin his third term in office. He selected Ellis Island to further his fraudulent claim that he is “pro-immigrant.” In reality, he is a staunch advocate for immigration anarchy and illegal immigration that most endangers the immigrant communities in his state.

President Trump has been accused of being “anti-immigrant” when, in point of fact, his actions and policies are the most “pro-immigrant” we have seen in many, many years.

New Migrant Caravan Heads North From Honduras to the Border By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-migrant-caravan-heads-north-from-honduras-to-the-border/

A new caravan of more than 500 migrants gathered at a bus station in a Honduran city Monday night to begin the perilous trek to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Members of the caravan, which left from the city of San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras, begged local shop keepers for food and water for their journey on their way out of town, Fox News reported.

President Trump cited the formation of new migrant caravans on Thursday to illustrate the necessity of the $5.7 billion in funding he has demanded Congress provide for the construction of a border wall.

“There is another major caravan forming right now in Honduras, and so far we’re trying to break it up, but so far it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen,” Trump said. “And a drone isn’t going to stop it and a sensor isn’t going to stop it, but you know what’s going to stop it in its tracks? A nice, powerful wall.”

The 6,000-person caravan that arrived in Tijuana, Mexico in the fall was organized by a number of pro-immigration activist groups but it remains unclear which, if any, organization orchestrated the latest mass movement. Many members of the last caravan are still waiting in Tijuana for their asylum claims to be processed.

The Mexican government recently vowed to work with the U.S. to ensure more migrants can claim asylum and find work in Mexico in order to reduce the burden on the overwhelmed U.S. asylum system. Mexican officials have announced that those migrants who enter Mexico lawfully will be allowed to keep traveling toward to the U.S. border while those that enter illegally will be deported.

More than 300,000 Central Americans entered Mexico illegally last year, 80 percent of whom were headed for the U.S. border, according to Mexico’s interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero.

Do the Math: Trump’s Wall Is $25 Billion, Illegals Cost $165 Billion By Spencer P. Morrison

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/13/do-the

Scott Adams, the creator of the popular cartoon “Dilbert,” transformed himself into a persona non grata in 2016 by exposing how Donald Trump manipulated the media by using sophisticated persuasion techniques. History proved Adams was correct and Trump won the election. As it turns out, Trump was not the bumbling blowhard of CNN’s fever dreams. He was a marketing mastermind whose words went far beyond “resonating” with ordinary Americans—they stuck. Epithets like crooked, lyin’, and low-energy were not just insults, they were silver bullets spoken by a silver tongue. Hillary, Ted, and Jeb didn’t know what hit ’em.

Two years on and Trump’s word-wizardry is as potent as ever—Pocahontas‘s racial fraud is now common knowledge, and Trump’s little rocket man jab arguably set the stage for North Korea’s denuclearization summit. At this point, Trump’s language is indistinguishable from political magic. For example, Trump’s push for “the wall” has turned ardent socialists into laissez-faire economists on the issue of illegal immigration—who cares if migration hurts America’s most vulnerable? We need aliens to grow the economy!

This flip-flop has made it clear to ordinary Americans: the Democratic Party cares more about illegal aliens than it does the common citizen.

Another Brick in the Wall
The Democratic Party shut down the government to avoid funding President Trump’s border wall with Mexico. In the meantime, the media has harped incessantly on the wall’s futility. The wall is too expensive, they claim. And in any event, the wall won’t work!

Nonsense. Illegal aliens cost American citizens more in three months than the wall will cost to build in its entirety. What’s more, the available evidence suggests that walls are fantastically effective at arresting migrant flows.

To begin with: how much will Trump’s wall cost to build?

In her informative piece, statistician Liberty Vittert estimates that Trump’s wall will cost some $25 billion to build. Vittert breaks her estimate down as follows:

Size of the wall: 1,150 miles long; 40 feet high; 10 feet deep into the ground; 1 foot wide

Total volume of material: 11.2 million cubic yards

Materials: Approximately $8.7 billion in concrete (97 percent of the materials); approximately $3.6 billion in steel (3 percent of the materials)

Labor: Approximately $12.3 billion (given the labor costs on the original 654 miles of barriers we can assume a conservative 1:1 ratio of materials to labor)

Land acquisition: About 60 percent of the border is privately owned land. While the federal government has the power to take privately owned property for public purposes, it must provide “just compensation.” Based on previous purchases from the 2006-2009 wall construction, the cost at most would be $300,000 per mile acquired, or approximately $200 million altogether.

In total, the actual physical cost of the wall would be about $25 billion.

Dump The National Emergencies Act By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/12/dump-the-nationa

One of the more revelatory aspects of the Trump era is how the national media, after taking an extended nap between 2009 and 2017, now are very worried about constitutional overreach by the executive branch. Presidential power-grabs—which were super cool just five years ago when Barack Obama threatened to use “a pen and a phone” to work around a Republican-controlled legislative branch—suddenly went out of style in January 2017. Obama needed to take unilateral action as a last resort, the media argued, because of those big, bad Republicans.

“Blocked for most of his presidency by Congress, Obama has sought to act however he could,” lamented the New York Times in August 2016. “In the process he created the kind of government neither he nor the Republicans wanted—one that depended on bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.”

But it was for our own good, insisted the Times. “An army of lawyers working under Obama’s authority has sought to restructure the nation’s health care and financial industries, limit pollution, bolster workplace protections and extend equal rights to minorities. Under Obama, the government has literally placed a higher value on human life.”

Thanks, Obama!

The former president often defended himself to sympathetic journalists. “I am not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing,” he boasted to George Stephanopoulos in a June 2014 interview on ABC News.

To what was Obama referring? Immigration. “The majority of the American people want to see immigration reform done. We had a bipartisan bill through the Senate, and you’re going to squawk if I try to fix some parts of it administratively that are within my authority while you are not doing anything?”

National Emergencies and the Long-Lost Legislative Veto By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-national-emergency-declaration-constitutional-twilight-zone/

The prospect of Trump declaring a national emergency to fund construction of a border fence puts us in a constitutional twilight zone.

When the subject of the president’s potential declaration of a national emergency arose during our recording of The McCarthy Report on Wednesday, Rich Lowry rightly chuckled in mock amazement when I observed that there was a difference between what should happen and what will happen. He’s right — isn’t there always?

We were discussing the position ardently held by several smart commentators, not least our friend David French, that such a declaration would be illegal: the manufacture of an emergency in order to justify — or, if you prefer, as a pretext for — repurposing Defense Department funds for the construction of physical barriers (are we still calling it “the wall”?) along the southern border.

National Emergencies and Congress

As I hope I made clear in my post on Tuesday about executive legislating through the hocus-pocus of national emergency declarations, I am with David, Charlie Cooke, Jonah Goldberg, and the rest of my fellow editors on the “ought” question. In our constitutional system, Congress is supposed to do the legislating, which includes determining the conditions — emergency or otherwise — that call for legislation. Unfortunately, that fundamental “ought” question is not the one on the table today.

The presumption in our law, whether we agree with it or not, is that this power to declare emergencies and, in effect, legislate measures to deal with them has been delegated to the president by Congress in numerous statutes. With the rise of progressivism and the consequent expansion of executive power in the 20th century, this wayward practice became such a staple of federal law that Congress eventually enacted a regulatory scheme for it: the 1976 National Emergencies Act (codified in Chapter 34 of Title 50, U.S. Code). While the NEA was actually an attempt to rein in executive lawmaking, it explicitly endorsed it. As Rich and I discussed in the podcast, regardless of whether this is right, it is routine.

If I had my druthers, the whole concept would be revisited. Alas, that is a more fundamental question for another day. For now, Section 1621 authorizes the president to declare national emergencies and invoke any powers Congress has delegated by statute for such emergencies.

CNN’s Acosta Confirms Walled Part of the Border Is Crisis-Free

https://freebeacon.com/uncategorized/cnns-acosta-confirms-walled-part-of-the-border-is-crisis-free/

CNN reporter Jim Acosta confirmed no crisis existed along a walled portion of the U.S.-Mexico border during a visit Thursday.

In a video shared to Twitter, Acosta pointed to “some of the steel slats that the president’s been talking about.” Walking along the border in McAllen, Texas, Acosta noted that the president has warned of a national emergency at the unwalled portion of the southern border. Acosta observed that this emergency did not exist along the portion of the border that had already been secured with steel slats.

“As we’re walking along here we’re not saying any kind of imminent danger,” he remarked, patting the border barrier with his hand as he filmed himself. “There are no migrants trying to rush towards this fence.”

President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “build the wall” and secure the border. Though the rate has decreased in recent years, hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals cross the southern border into the United States every year.

Democrats have refused to provide funding for the president’s border wall, though many have voted for it as part of larger immigration bills in the past. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) jokingly offered the president one dollar for the wall and called it immoral. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), have refused to accommodate Trump’s wish to build a border wall.

“He is not going to get the wall in any form,” Schumer said last month. Some Democrats, like Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.), have agreed that “enhanced fencing” would in fact help secure the border. The estimated cost is between $2-5.7 billion dollars.

In an address to the nation from the oval office Tuesday, Trump stopped short of declaring a federal emergency to secure unilateral authority to fund the wall. Now in its twentieth day, the government shutdown is approaching the longest of its kind in American history.

A New National Security Strategy for America Immigration is America’s top national security threat. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272520/new-national-security-strategy-america-daniel-greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

After the Cold War, what is the biggest threat to America? The debate between Obama and Romney famously bogged down over the question of whether Russia was our biggest geopolitical foe. While Obama slammed Romney’s answer as a Cold War relic, after losing the next election, his party defines its foreign policy and domestic opposition around the fear that Russia is now more of a threat than ever.

Answers by other politicians have ranged from the structural, the national debt and internal divisions, to the inanimate and absurd; Bernie Sanders’ claim that global warming is our top national security threat. But assessments that name conditions rather than threat vectors are unhelpful because even when they are right, they tell us to address a weakness or failure, rather than meeting an external threat.

Being able to name and define external threats is vital for reaching informed national security decisions.

The debates over border security, Syria, Afghanistan, and Russian informational warfare have been taking place in a chaotic environment of rapid fire talking points backed by ideological agendas, but with no framework for understanding the larger threat environment and how to achieve national security.

Our national security framework dates back to the Cold War. The doctrines we employed during the Cold War quickly became dated even while the Soviet Union was around. They’re so old now that the vast majority of Americans weren’t even born when they were hatched. And yet in the generation since the Cold War ended, we haven’t found anything new to replace them with. And that is the problem.

The Clinton administration ignored national security and put the military at the disposal of the UN on exercises in nation building that helped revive Russia as a serious threat while ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda. The Bush administration rolled out nation building as a response to Islamic terrorism. This was a misguided approach that failed to understand the nature of the threat and how to address it.

The Silly Arguments Against a Border Wall They’ll go around it? Exactly—that’s the point. By Dan Crenshaw

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-silly-arguments-against-a-border-wall-11547165119

Mr. Crenshaw, a Republican, represents Texas’ Second Congressional District.

This week saw the culmination of the great wall debate. President Trump made his case—one I generally agree with—and explained what an extra $5.7 billion (approximately 0.1% of the budget) would do for the security of our southern border. Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi immediately dismissed it. It is honestly surprising how quickly and thoroughly Democrats adopted the notion that a wall of any kind is such an obviously stupid and immoral idea. Well, is it? Let’s lay out the claims one by one:

• They’ll just climb over it, dig under it or break through it. Just like that huh? I spent 10 years as a Navy SEAL, and people often say, “Dan, you know better than anyone how ineffective a wall is.” Actually, I know how effective walls are, even against skilled SEALs. Planning to scale a 30-foot steel slatted barrier is a daunting challenge. Do you bring an enormous ladder all the way there? How do you get down from the top? Jump? Rappel? This isn’t a Tough Mudder course. A few skilled and well-equipped people may figure it out, but the reality is that most will be deterred

The same goes for “digging” or “breaking.” Tunneling would require special equipment and hundreds of hours to dig under the barrier, the base of which would penetrate many feet underground. To break through it, you’d need specialized circular saws, torches or explosives. Typical equipment for a special-ops team, but not exactly on the packing list for a migrant. And Border Patrol agents would easily detect such a ruckus.

• They’ll just go around it. Exactly—that’s the point. A deterrent at the busiest sections of the border would allow more effective allocation of manpower. If a mile of the border is walled off, that’s one less mile the Border Patrol needs to worry about. Agents can still respond to the location if a special-ops caravan shows up with a blowtorch, but otherwise they can focus on open areas where it is simply not viable to build a barrier. CONTINUE AT SITE