RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/yes-weve-nabbed-terrorists-on-the-southern-border/Here are some examples.

The Trump-hating media have pounded White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her “unfortunate misstatement” (as presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway put it) on Fox News Sunday that some 3,700 “known or suspected terrorists” were caught at the U.S.–Mexico border. In fact, these “special-interest aliens” include terrorists, people who have lived or traveled through terrorist hotbeds, and others whose whereabouts trigger closer scrutiny when entering the U.S. This number includes people apprehended on the border, but mainly at airports and other locations.

Trump’s detractors have used this dustup to imply that if there are not 3,700 ISIS killers in Tijuana pole-vaulting into San Ysidro, then terrorists must be as rare there as polar bears. This echoes the words of former U.S. representative Robert Francis O’Rourke (D., Texas). He claimed last year that “precisely zero terrorists, terrorist groups, or terror plots have ever been connected with the U.S.–Mexico border to do harm to people within the United States.”

PolitiFact — not exactly a far-right news organization — rejected O’Rourke’s statement: “We rate this claim False.”

In fact, terrorists have been caught on the southern frontier, including some who were conspiring to rustle their comrades across the border and others intent on committing mayhem against Americans. As PolitiFact explained: “It also looks to us like authorities have foiled every known plan.”

Janet Napolitano, Obama’s homeland-security secretary, testified on Capitol Hill in July 2012 that terrorists enter America via the southern frontier “from time to time.” So, we have that going for us.

Obama himself identified this problem while he was a Democratic senator from Illinois. As he said on the Senate floor on April 3, 2006, “because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/09/the-ironies-of-illegal

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan or Chile.

Mexico also is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and earns billions in foreign exchange from visitors. It enjoys a temperate climate, is rich in minerals, and has millions of acres of fertile farmland and a long coastline.

In addition to being strategically located as a bridge between North America and South America, Mexico has ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It is not an overcrowded country: Mexico ranks in the lower half of the world in population density. Too many people and too little land are certainly not the reasons why millions of Mexicans either emigrate or wish to emigrate to the United States.

Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adapt to an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272466/democrats-seismic-shift-immigration-jules-gomes

The Apostle James might not have thought much of Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein or Bill Clinton or even Barack “He-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong” Obama. They are just some of the political prodigies who change their policies as often as Lady Gaga changes her clothes—about five times a day.

James has a juicy jibe for such political pendulums. He calls them “double-minded,” warning his readers that “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” If you are going to swing from policy to policy like Tarzan the Ape Man, at least clarify and justify your political flip-flopping.

A little over a decade ago, the Democrats were singing in four-part harmony to President Trump’s “we need another brick in the wall” anthem. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants into this country,” belted out Barack Obama.

Cue prima donna Pelosi, 2008: “Do we have a commitment to secure the border? Yes.” Why? “Because we do need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country. We certainly do not want any more coming in.” Solo from Chuck Schumer, Georgetown, 2009: “Illegal immigration is wrong. A primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.”

In 2013, each of the 54 Democrats in the Senate voted for $46 billion in border security, which included 700 miles in border fencing. Blaring through their Marxist megaphones they pleaded the plight of low-skilled American workers whose wages were hit by cheap immigrant labor. The burden on America’s welfare state would be intolerable, they wailed.

So what are the sirens luring the Democrats to the perilous shores of open borders? Why now? Why so radically? Why display this double-mindedness in such a short span of time?

Commentators from conservative Dan Bongino to leftwing The Atlantic posit two political explanations. First, more illegals means more votes for the Democrats. Second, given the contagion of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, “Democrats hate the wall because Trump loves it” as the National Review puts it bluntly.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272446/how-no-border-wall-caused-homeless-crisis-2500-daniel-greenfield

When Americans think about border security, they usually imagine the floods of migrants crossing the border and showing up in Texas and Arizona. The illegal migrant crisis is at its worst in places like El Paso where gang members released by a broken immigration system swarm the streets. Limited border fencing had previously helped sharply cut crime rates in El Paso, but it doesn’t end in El Paso.

2,500 miles away, Portland, Maine is experiencing a crisis that redefines the nature of the problem and whom it impacts. Illegal border invaders aren’t just from this continent. Anyone who can fly into South America and make their way up to Mexico has a shot at crossing the border and invading America.

Portland shelters, 2,500 miles away, are overloaded by illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who crossed the border and then kept right on going to one of the coldest, but most profitable parts of the country. Portland, like many areas in Maine, attracted migrants because of the generous social safety net that had been set up to help the local population deal with turbulent economic times.

Hundreds of African migrants who illegally crossed the border are now crowding Portland’s homeless shelters which are meant to protect local residents from the cold, but have instead been overrun by foreign migrants who have taken over the system and pushed the progressive city to the edge.

Portland, Maine, a city where the temperature this April had hit a balmy 28 degrees, is not a natural homeless hotspot. But refugee resettlement had diverted resources away from helping Maine’s poor, putting more people on the street, and the migrants began crowding into homeless shelters. Not only were Maine’s poor having trouble finding housing, but they were even being pushed out of homeless shelters by aggressive foreign migrants coming out of Africa through Mexico and Texas to Maine.

https://spectator.us/oval-office-address-protecting/

In his late essay ‘Perpetual Peace,’ Immanuel Kant lauded the ideal of ‘universal hospitality.’

In his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night, President Donald Trump took issue with Kant (though not by name), noting that the porous Southern border of the United States represented a serious humanitarian and security crisis.

Everyone who can spell ‘Google’ knows that the Democrats, until November 7, 2016, supported robust border security and, indeed, a physical barrier — otherwise known as a wall — to retard the flow of illegal immigrants into this country. The election of Donald Trump was not something they had bargained for, so they promptly put politics before people and were happy to ‘shut down the government’ (actually, it never shuts down, and more’s the pity) in a partisan mud-slinging match with Donald Trump.

Those who believe the President will blink and cave are, I’ll wager, wrong. The pain — whatever it really is — from the shutdown is something he is happy to countenance for as long as it takes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/on-stupid-emergency-laws/

I’m getting to be a bit of an old dog to learn many new tricks, but maybe some day I’ll learn not to be flip when the situation calls for something more thoughtful.

This morning, I was interviewed by Fox News’s Bill Hemmer about what to expect from President Trump’s speech tonight and, in particular, whether the president could legitimately declare a national emergency in order to rationalize the reallocation of Defense Department funds for the construction on the southern border of a “wall” — or, at least, some kind of physical barrier (the semantics of which are of more interest to the Beltway’s posturing antagonists than they are to me — if I may be flip about it).

I don’t think the president should do this because it is bad policy (I’ll come to why); and I hope he won’t do it because it would be smarter to try to convince more of the public that he has a good case, which would put pressure on Congress to address the problem. But that said, I do not doubt that federal law empowers the president to declare a national emergency and reprogram funds to construct civil-defense projects the president deems essential to national defense. (See, e.g., Section 2293 of Title 33, U.S. Code.)

Speaking with one of the producers as commonly happens before these interviews, I glibly opined described as “stupid” this and other laws strewn through the federal code that authorize executive action on the president’s unilateral determination that action is required.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-baseless-trite-arguments-against-walls/

Of all of the flatulent memes that have been running low on gas since the late 1960s, the most aggravating — against stiff competition — are probably all variations on “Build bridges not walls.” The bridge I must cross most often in an average year is Westminster Bridge. Since a jihadist plowed a car along the pavements of one side of the Westminster Bridge (killing and wounding dozens of locals and tourists) a couple of years ago, it has been covered in walls. Specifically, it has been covered in metal crash barriers erected to stop replays of that incident. So as I find myself reminded on a weekly basis at least, when it comes to bridges and walls, the world is not necessarily an either/or choice. Who could have guessed?

Well, a lot of the president’s opponents by the sound of it. There are satisfactory arguments on both sides about the utility of building a wall along the southern border of the U.S. My personal view is that since the president was partly elected on the promise of building this wall, he should probably get a chance to build it and give at least some voters what they asked for.

But it is not the practical but the moral objections to the president’s initiative that are so unutterably tired. For instance, one objection just made by Nancy Pelosi is that building a wall is “an immorality” and “not who we are as a nation.” Walls are also, according to Pelosi an “old way of thinking.”

In fact, in Europe — among many other places — walls are not an old way of thinking at all. In fact, they are a much newer way of thinking than anything Nancy Pelosi is offering. Since the European migrant crisis was at its height in 2015, countries across central and eastern Europe have begun erecting walls. I have gone to see a number of them, and very smart, modern fence-like things they are, with movement-detectors, drones to fly overhead, and more. When the Hungarian government erected their first wall (having had hundreds of thousands of people pour across their previously un-walled borders in a few months), they received some criticism from their neighbors.