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IMMIGRATION

Nancy Pelosi Says ‘A Wall Is An Immorality.’ James Woods Asks The Perfect Question.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/41874/nancy-pelosi-says-wall-immorality-james-woods-asks-amanda-prestigiacomo
Pelosi is not alone regarding such double standards, of course. A house owned by the Obamas is barricaded by a ten-foot tall wall, too.
Reacting to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s anti-Trump and anti-wall speech last week, successful actor and outspoken conservative James Woods asked the Democrat one simple question: Why do you have a wall around your property, then?

Like many politicians, Pelosi apparently lives by a set of politically-expedient double standards. Though she has repeatedly slammed President Donald Trump for his goal of funding a wall at the Southern border, calling it an “immorality,” she’s perfectly fine with securing her own property.

“The fact is, a wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation,” Pelosi told a crowd of reporters Thursday. “We are not doing a wall. Does anybody have any doubt? We are not doing a wall,” she added.

Woods replied to the tweet, asking, “Well, then, why do you have one?”

According to a report from right-wing outlet The American Mirror in 2018 (see photos, here), and begrudgingly backed by left-wing fact-checking site Snopes, Pelosi has a barrier around a multi-million dollar property she and her husband own in Napa Valley.

According to The Washington Post, the estate was worth around $5 million in 2011, and brought in “at least $5,000 worth of grape sales from the vineyard, according to financial disclosure forms for 2010.” (Nancy and Paul Pelosi, by the way, are estimated to be worth somewhere between $58.7 and $72.1 million.)

Opposition to A Border Wall Is Opposition to Public Safety Open borders cost innocent lives. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272473/opposition-border-wall-opposition-public-safety-michael-cutler

The battle between the Congressional Democrats and the Trump administration continues over the construction of a border wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

Many political battles are fought over hypothetical arguments. This debate, however, is well-grounded in cold, hard, irrefutable facts and in the deaths of far too many innocent people, who have fallen victim to aliens who entered the United States illegally, often repeatedly.

Let me be clear, in my judgement, the Democrats have left the administration with no choice but to take the action of shutting down a part of the government. As a former INS agent I can certainly empathize with the federal employees. All too frequently the employees of the government suffer from the bad decisions of our political leaders. However, America faces many threats and challenges that are the direct result of multiple failures of the immigration system and our nation must finally address these failures beginning with securing our borders.

The most critical issues that the federal government must address are national security and public safety.

On January 3, 2019 I participated in an interview of Fox & Friends First to discuss the senseless murder of 33 year old police officer Ronil Singh, from Newman, California, by a citizen of Mexico who was allegedly an illegal alien: 32 year old Gustavo Perez-Arriaga.

The Washington Post’s December 29, 2018 article, Suspect, 7 others, arrested in fatal shooting of California police officer, noted that this arrest that has sparked a debate about California’s sanctuary policies began with this excerpt:

The arrest Friday of a man in the shooting death of a California police officer has renewed criticism of sanctuary laws, with a local sheriff suggesting that the state’s efforts to protect undocumented immigrants could have contributed to the killing.

Gustavo Perez Arriaga, a 32-year-old undocumented immigrant, was charged with homicide in connection with the shooting death of 33-year-old Newman police officer Ronil Singh, according to law enforcement.

Stanislaus County Sheriff Adam Christianson assailed sanctuary laws that limit state and local governments’ cooperation with federal immigration agents, but he did not detail how those rules applied to Perez’s case or how they would have prevented Singh’s death.

President Trump Calls for America to Recruit ‘the Smartest People in the World’ By David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/president-trump-calls-for-america-to-recruit-the-smartest-people-in-the-world/

Not a word appeared in the mainstream media about President Trump’s call for more legal immigrants to build America’s talent pool. The liberal media is so anxious to portray the president as a jingoist xenophobe that it ignored a key policy statement on immigration. Trump declared in his Jan. 4 press conference on the government shutdown that the U.S. should convince the hundreds of thousands of foreign students who attend our universities to stay here and contribute to the U.S. economy. He’s been listening to U.S. tech companies, who need the talent. And he’s exactly right:

At the same time, [people] can apply to come into our country legally, like so many people have done. And we need people, Major. We have to have people. Because we have all these companies coming in. We need great people. But we want them to come in on a merit basis, and they have to come in on a merit basis. They can’t come in the way they’ve been coming in for years.

I get calls from the great tech companies, and they’re saying we don’t allow people at the top of their class, at the best schools in the country, we don’t allow them to stay in our country. So they end up going back to China and Japan and so many other countries all over the world, and we don’t keep them. They get educated at our finest schools, and then we don’t allow them, through a various set of circumstances, to have any guarantees of staying. So we lose out on great minds. We can’t do that.

We have companies that, if we don’t change that — and we’re working on that, and we discussed that with the Democrats, and I think they agree. We’re working on that. But we don’t want to lose our great companies because we have a ridiculous policy that we won’t accept smart people. So, call it politically correct or not, but we have to let these great, brilliant companies have the smartest people in the world.

Only 7% of U.S. undergraduates major in engineering, compared to a third in China. Russia, with roughly a third of our population, graduates as many engineers. We need more opportunities in STEM for Americans. We should subsidize engineers, mathematicians, and scientists and starve the resentment-studies programs that pollute American universities. To train more engineers and scientists, though, we would have to recruit more teachers from overseas, as Edward Dougherty, distinguished professor of engineering at Texas A&M University, explained in a recent essay in Asia Times. CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Veers Off Message on the Border Wall By John Fund

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/trump-border-wall-construction-pentagon/

He should ditch the “military version of eminent domain” and order the Pentagon to start building.

Donald Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign railing against President Obama’s misuse of executive power, especially Obama’s decision to extend legal protection to underage children who were brought to the U.S. by their foreign parents.

But now President Trump, frustrated by Congress’s failure to deliver $5 billion in funding for the border wall, is proposing to bend the Constitution to get what he wants. Trump told reporters that he may be willing to declare a state of national emergency to build the wall “very quickly” without congressional backing, and that he may even use “the military version of eminent domain” to seize the property such a structure might need. “I can do it if I want,” he declared.

Trump can certainly declare a national emergency, but the courts would probably look askance on any rash actions. In 1952, President Harry Truman cited a state of emergency when he ordered the government to seize the steel mills during a strike. He claimed it was the only way to guarantee that the mills would continue to produce weapons for the Korean War. The Supreme Court — packed with justices appointed by New Deal presidents — nonetheless concluded by a 6 to 3 vote that he didn’t have the authority to nationalize private businesses. Few legal scholars believe that the current Supreme Court — the conservative portion of which is steeped in Federalist Society principles of limited government — would give Trump the benefit of the doubt in a non-war situation.

But many legal scholars say there is a way Trump could act legally. Current law allows the Defense Department to use “un-obligated” money to fund construction projects during war or emergencies. “The Department of Defense has funds in its account that are not specifically designated for anything,” Harvard Law School professor Mark Tushnet told NBC News. “My instinct is to say that if he declares a national emergency and uses this pot of unappropriated money for the wall, he’s on very solid legal ground.”

A Tale of Two Immigrants By Deroy Murdock

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/a-tale-of-two-immigrants/
The murder of police corporal Ronil Singh highlights the deadly consequences of Democrats’ border-weakening and ‘sanctuary’ policies.

‘He’s not coming back,” said Reggie Singh.

The inconsolable brother of the late Newman, Calif., police officer Ronil Singh told journalists last week, “There’s a lot of people out there that misses him.”

Corporal Singh is gone for good because Gustavo Perez Arriaga shot him dead, officials say. This small-town case has national repercussions. This tale of two immigrants finds Singh and Arriaga as the apotheoses of how Republicans and Democrats respectively see immigration.

Singh, 33, was a model immigrant. He came to America from Fiji — legally. He reportedly drove a four-hour round trip to attend Yuba City’s police academy. He took speech classes to smooth his heavily accented English, his third language. He became a public servant and spent seven-and-a-half years as a cop.

“He came to America to become a police officer,” Newman police chief Randy Richardson said. “That’s all he wanted to do.” On Facebook, Ugesh Yogi Singh, Ronil’s uncle, called him “my adventurous nephew” and “my family’s Action Hero.”

President Donald J. Trump sent every member of Congress the slides from the security update that Pelosi and Schumer ignored. According to that presentation, Customs and Border Protection seized 850 tons of narcotics and arrested 17,000 adults with existing criminal records in fiscal year 2018, blocked 3,755 known or suspected terrorists from entering the country in FY 2017, and apprehended 6,000 gang members. How much of these substances and how many of these dangerous individuals eluded federal officials? Who knows?

Trump Must Not Include DACA “Fix” In Exchange for Wall DACA compromise would undermine national security. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272432/trump-must-not-include-daca-fix-exchange-wall-michael-cutler

The partial shut-down of the federal government grinds on while the Democrats, poised to assume the majority in the House of Representatives, refuse to fund a wall to secure the dangerous U.S./Mexican border against the un-inspected entry of people and cargo into the United States.

I am compelled to reiterate a point I have made repeatedly in past articles, that a wall along that problematic border would not stop a single person from entering the United States but would force all who seek to enter the United States to undergo the statutorily required inspections and vetting process that is conducted at ports of entry and to record entries or attempted entries by aliens for national security and related purposes.

President Trump has refused to sign off on a budget that does not fund the wall that would protect our nation. He has consequently opted to shut down non-essential elements of the federal government.

During the failed negotiations President Trump, in confronting a belligerent and recalcitrant Chuck Schumer, said that he would be proud to shut down the government if he could not get the funding for the wall. Schumer accused the President of throwing a temper tantrum. If anyone was throwing anything, I would accuse Mr. Schumer and his cohorts of throwing America and Americans under the proverbial bus. What has never been asked of Schumer, Pelosi and the other Democrats is why they would not want a wall to prevent the un-inspected entry into the United States, of illegal aliens including criminals, fugitives, terrorists, gang members and massive quantities of narcotics and other contraband.

As I noted above, the purpose of the wall is not to seal off the United States from Mexico but to simply prevent aliens and contraband from entering the United States without inspection. That inspections process is essential to vet aliens to prevent the entry of those whose presence in the United States would be problematic and/or dangerous to America and Americans. In point of fact, the decisions of the CBP (Customs and Border Protection) Inspectors who conduct those inspections are guided by 8 U.S. Code § 1182, a section of law comprehended within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), that enumerates the categories of aliens who are not to be admitted into the United States. Among the categories of aliens who are to be excluded are those suffering from dangerous contagious diseases or suffer from severe mental illness. Additionally, aliens who were previously deported, are criminals, terrorists, spies, fugitives from justice, human rights violators, war criminals, human traffickers, and aliens who would likely become public charges or take jobs of Americans.

Central American Countries Are Helping Middle Easterners Illegally Enter The United States Panama and Costa Rica are chokepoints on the migrant trail followed by people from other continents seeking easier U.S. entry through our porous border with Mexico. Todd Bensman

http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/02/central-american-countries-helping-middle-easterners-illegally-enter-united-states/

In December 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies dispatched Senior National Security Fellow Todd Bensman to Panama and Costa Rica to investigate President Donald Trump’s widely ridiculed assertions that suspected terrorists had been apprehended among Middle East migrants through Latin America. Panama is a geographic chokepoint, or bottleneck, through which migrants from countries of the Middle East, who are moving out of South America, must push on their way to the U.S. border.

The following article is based on Bensman’s on-the-ground research over two weeks. His video reports, photos, and writings from the trip can be found here.

Golfito, Costa Rica — It was here in March 2017, at the main aluminum structure of a government migrant camp, that federal Costa Rican police arrested Ibrahim Qoordheen of Somalia as a suspected al Shabaab terrorist operative on his way to the U.S. southern border.

Qoordheen had been smuggled from Zambia to Brazil, passed through Panama, and was making his way north through Costa Rica when the Americans had him arrested here, 20 miles inside Costa Rica, according to an American intelligence official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Golfito camp, with a capacity of 250, was set up as a two-day rest station for South America-exiting migrants whom the governments of Panama and Costa Rica register and help move through northward to Nicaragua.

How Two Gustavos Used California’s Sanctuary State Law to Spread Terror Across 200 Miles No sanctuary for the victims of these two illegal alien killers.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272403/how-two-gustavos-used-californias-sanctuary-state-daniel-greenfield

Less than 200 miles separate Tulare County and Stanislaus County. And a little over a week separates the two reigns of terror in these two California counties by Gustavo Garcia and Gustavo Perez Arriaga.

Both Gustavos were dangerous and violent illegal aliens. On Monday, December 17, Gustavo Garcia went on a murderous rampage that killed at least two people and put seven more in the hospital. On Wednesday, December 26, Gustavo Perez Arriaga murdered a law enforcement officer at a traffic stop.

Cpl. Ronil Singh, murdered by the second Gustavo, and Rocky Paul Jones and Rolando Soto, murdered by the first Gustavo, did not have to die. They died because California’s sanctuary state law took their lives.

Gustavo Garcia had a criminal record dating back to 2002 covering everything from illegal weapons to meth. He had been deported in 2004 and then again in 2014. There had been three immigration holds on the illegal alien criminal. Before he began his murderous spree, Tulare County sheriff’s deputies arrested him. ICE put a hold on him as a dangerous illegal alien. But because of California’s sanctuary state law, local law enforcement had to let him loose. A few days later, the illegal alien’s carnage began.

Garcia shot a farmworker picking fruit in the chest, robbed a mini-mart at gunpoint of $2,000, shot and killed a man, shot at a woman in the parking lot of a Motel 6, wounding her in the arm and torso, opened fire at two gas stations, killing Rocky Jones, fired shots into several homes, including the home of his ex-girlfriend, forcing her and her children to flee, opened fire on the deputies pursuing him, stole a car from three other farmworkers at gunpoint, and got into a high speed chase while deliberately trying to hit other cars.

He exchanged fire with pursuing cops during the chase, and smashed into other cars while going 100 miles, taking his own life and putting four other people in the hospital, including one critically wounded.

And that’s actually an incomplete list of the illegal alien killer’s crimes after the ICE hold wasn’t honored.

“Before SB 54, Gustavo Garcia would have been turned over to ICE officials. That’s how we’ve always done it, day in and day out. After SB 54, we no longer have the power to do that,” Sheriff Mike Boudreaux said.

Next Caravan Rising Organizing in Honduras – while Congress sleeps. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272419/next-caravan-rising-matthew-vadum

Another large caravan of would-be illegal aliens is forming down in Central America with the intention of moving north to demand jobs and government benefits, according to media reports.

The formation of this new army of migrants drives home the point that a border wall at the lengthy, porous U.S.-Mexico boundary is urgently needed. The failure to move forward with wall construction sends a message to the world that America is a weak country that lacks the moral fiber and political will to defend its national sovereignty. Not building the wall also provides would-be border jumpers extra incentives to enter the United States unlawfully.

The new caravan is estimated at 15,000 people and is reportedly planning to leave Honduras on Jan. 15.

“They say they are even bigger and stronger than the last caravan,” Irma Garrido, a member of Reactiva Tijuana Foundation has been quoted saying.

Thousands of Central American migrants from previous caravans in the fall are still present in various cities along the border. Many are waiting for U.S. authorities to process their requests for asylum. The migrants have worn out their welcome in Tijuana, Mexico, where overcrowded shelters are taxing local resources.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Coordinators who helped direct the migrants on the 2,000-mile trek with bullhorns, arranging for buses and giving advice along the way, have mostly vanished. Many of the migrants say they feel abandoned and unsure where to turn next. Some are ready to return home.

Garrido said this new, larger caravan will probably be joined by more people in El Salvador and in Guatemala, but she said they don’t plan on coming straight to the Tijuana-San Diego border, where resources are already stretched nearly to a breaking point.

Last week, the U.S. and Mexico agreed to formulate a strategy to reduce Central American migration. It includes a $25-billion expenditure by Mexico in its southern states over the coming five years. The U.S. has vowed to ante up $4.8 billion for aid programs in Mexico and $5.8 billion for programs benefiting the Northern Triangle of Central America, consisting of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

And yet American lawmakers have still not approved the $5 billion needed to begin construction of a wall on the international border with Mexico. President Trump has said he is considering shutting down the nation’s southern border if wall funding is not approved.

Borderline Christmas Where America meets the sea Clark Whelton

https://www.city-journal.org/mexican-border-christmas

At the southwest edge of the Lower 48, on a sunny, breezy beach where America meets the sea, a green and white van sits on a sandy road, facing south. Behind the wheel is a Border Patrol agent with his eyes on Mexico. The frontier fence stands 100 feet away. On the Mexican side, dozens of people are quietly taking selfies or peeking between the steel ribs of the 20-foot tall barrier. On the American side, three people from New York City look back. Two are visitors from Manhattan. The third is the agent himself—he hails from Brooklyn.

“I thought there would be more people on this side of the fence,” I said, noting that the nearby International Friendship Park was empty.

“More are coming,” the agent replied. “They’re on the way now.” I wanted to ask how he knew, but instead I squinted north, following the wide beach as it curved westward toward Coronado Island and San Diego Bay, clearly visible in the distance. There was no one in sight, and no border security, either—at least, none that I could see. It was three days before Christmas and on both sides of the border all was calm, all was California bright. “Just the way we like it,” the agent said.

At the southwestern edge of America, the border fence continues into the Pacific for 100 yards or so. Next stop, Shanghai. My cell phone flashed “Welcome to Mexico!” I glanced up at the huge Plaza de Toros bullring that towers above the border. Tijuana has worked hard to overcome its seedy reputation as a tourist trap selling souvenirs to norteamericanos. The city is now a thriving metropolitan area, with its own international airport, industrial parks, and condo developments. Tijuanistas are not happy about a politicized migrant march using their home town as a staging area.

But the march got lots of attention in the media, which is why my wife and I are here. After all that coverage of the troubles in Tijuana, we wanted to see what’s happening on the American side. That’s why others are coming, too, even though the automobile road to this part of the border is closed. Reaching the steel fence requires GPS assistance and a strenuous slog southward.

From Border Field State Park, it’s a three-mile round trip on foot, but a steady stream of visitors seemed willing to try. In the parking lot I met a man from Warsaw. “Poland has its own border problems,” he said. “I wish to see how America handles things.”

Parked beside him was a family of five from Australia. Mr. Aussie was also curious about the American side, though he confessed to feeling guilty about Australia keeping out Asian immigrants who arrive there uninvited, “in rickety boats.” Even using the word “rickety” unsettled him. “It’s probably the best they could do,” he said.

A van arrived with seven young people from India, who debated about making the walk to the border. “We want to see what’s happening,” said a man who had come to the U.S. to study at the University of Virginia. Now he worked for Amazon. “In India we are careful about borders,” another man said.