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IMMIGRATION

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Melting Pot or Civil War? By Reihan Salam

By on September 27th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/immigration-america-melting-pot-or-civil-war/

The choice will depend on our immigration policies

On December 11, 2017, Akayed Ullah, a 27-year-old man born in Bangladesh, detonated a crudely designed explosive device in New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, which sees more than 230,000 commuters every day. Thankfully, Ullah injured no one but himself. His intention, however, had evidently been to take as many of those commuters with him to the afterlife as he could. In the days and weeks that followed, dogged reporters, in the United States and in Ullah’s native Bangladesh, pieced together a troubling story: Though not notably radical before settling in Brooklyn in 2011, the young man had come to loathe the U.S., the country that had welcomed him, and to see his true home as being with the Islamic State, a gang of zealots best known for its homicidal brutality. Ullah apparently concluded that innocent U.S. commuters, including any number of recent immigrants much like him, deserved to be put to death to avenge America’s war against the Islamic State.

News of the botched attack sent my mind reeling. For one, Ullah lived in Kensington, the neighborhood where I grew up, and he was born in the same country as my parents. Ullah and I had shared the same stretches of sidewalk, and probably frequented the same corner stores. He settled in the country legally via a green card sponsored by a family member, not an uncommon story among Bangladeshi immigrants. When I saw Ullah’s face, I saw someone who could have been a cousin, or who might have helped my mother carry an armful of groceries.

After I heard the news, I girded myself for what would come next. In the age of Trump, all conversations about immigration descend into dueling spasms of culture-war outrage. As a poor Muslim immigrant turned lone-wolf terrorist, Ullah was emblematic of some of the most polarizing aspects of the president’s immigration agenda. Trump had famously campaigned on banning Muslim immigration to the United States outright, a stance that enjoyed overwhelming support among GOP primary voters. As president, he had called for curbing family-based admissions on the grounds that they meant admitting millions of immigrants lacking in “merit.” Immi­gration advocates pushed back. Some argued that it was obscene to suggest that a man such as Ullah was representative of immigrants at large. Others said that it was racist to question our current approach to family-based admissions.

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Strangers and Citizens By Reihan Salam

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/immigration-debate-melting-pot-or-civil-war-reihan-salam/Immigration will only benefit our country if we’re committed to assimilating new arrivals.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from Reihan Salam’s new book, Melting Pot or Civil War: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case against Open Borders. It appears here with permission.

‘Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger,” said President Barack Obama, “for we know the heart of a stranger — for we were strangers once too. . . . And whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in, and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship. What makes us Americans is our shared commitment to an ideal — that all of us are created equal, and all of us have the chance to make of our lives what we will.

One of Obama’s great talents was his unsurpassed ability to stack the rhetorical deck. Here he was announcing his executive order for deportation relief in 2014. To disagree with him was not just to reject his take on the costs and benefits of a particular policy, it was to oppress a stranger, which no less an authority than Scripture tells us is a very bad thing to do. Yet there was a small wrinkle in the former president’s remarks. While calling on his fellow citizens to welcome the millions of strangers who make their way to our country to better their lives, he also insisted that his executive action would shield only those who’d been in the country unlawfully for five years or more. Moreover, it did not extend to those who might settle in the United States unlawfully in the future.

But surely those who’ve been in the country for, say, four years are strangers who deserve our compassion, too. Having praised unauthorized immigrants who work hard in low-paying jobs and who worship in our churches, the president must understand that there are tens of millions of people around the world who would gladly do the same, even if it meant risking their lives. According to one survey, there are roughly 700 million people around the world who would like to move permanently to another country, and 165 million of them say that their first choice would be to move to the United States. My guess is that the vast majority of these aspiring immigrants are decent people who mean us no harm. If the Biblical injunction against oppressing a stranger is to serve as the lodestar of our immigration policy, why on Earth would we set any limits at all?

Obama’s expansive language gave succor to open-borders romantics— and to the most demagogic voices on the other side of the debate, up to and including the man who succeeded him in the White House. Together, these forces are making it all but impossible to craft a durable immigration compromise. The irony is that Obama had a different and more potent argument at his disposal, namely, that the young people to whom he was offering deportation relief weren’t strangers at all. Because of our decades-long failure to enforce our immigration laws, an arrangement that suited unscrupulous low-wage employers just fine, they had become part of our communities. There was a perfectly good case for doing right by them while also embracing resolute enforcement, a case Obama gestured toward early in his presidency, yet which open-borders activists came to angrily reject in its waning days. The result is that immigration polices championed by liberals and centrists as recently as the 2000s are now routinely denounced as unacceptably extreme.

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Google vs. Border Security How Google employees colluded to undermine Trump’s executive orders. Michael Cutler

By on September 25th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271407/google-vs-border-security-michael-cutler

On September 21, 2018 Newsweek published a disturbing article that contained infuriating revelations titled Google Brainstormed Ways To Combat Trump’s Travel Ban By Leveraging Search Results For Pro-Immigration Causes.

The Newsweek report stated that Google and their hi-tech colluders took legal action to block the Trump administration from enforcing standing immigration law.

Google, along with Apple, Facebook and other technology companies, filed a joint amicus brief challenging the travel ban, stating that it “inflicts significant harm on American business, innovation and growth.”

It is clear that to the employees and the executives of Google (and other hi-tech companies), America’s borders and immigration laws are impediments to their wealth and to the goals of their companies, rather than what they truly are, our first and last line of defense.

This set the stage for Google’s efforts days after the Trump administration first issued an executive order on immigration in January 2017, which would temporarily prevent the entry of citizens of seven countries from entering the United States, not because of their religion but because they could not be effectively vetted.

The media has repeatedly noted that the countries on the list were “Muslim Majority” countries yet many other “Muslim Majority” countries were not on that list including Indonesia, the most populist ‘Muslim Majority” country on the planet.

Google is determined to obstruct the Trump administration from enforcing long-standing immigration laws to protect America from international terrorists.

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Antifa Website Calls for ‘Slaughter’ of ‘Fascistic Border Patrol Dogs and Their Bosses’ By Debra Heine

By on September 21st, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/trending/antifa-website-calls-for-slaug

In a post Thursday at far-left antifa website Incendiary News, an activist advocated for revolutionaries to rise up and “slaughter” what he called “fascistic Border Patrol dogs and their bosses,” Far Left Watch reported on Friday.

Disturbingly, far-left activists have in recent months become more brazenly militant and violent in their rhetoric on their websites and social media, as PJ Media has documented here, here, here, here, and here.

The author of the Incendiary News piece, Ulrike Salazar, likens Border Patrol agents to SS troops who “take away young boys and girls, tear apart families, throw away undesirables into dark and cramped dungeons.”

Then, after decrying all of the so-called atrocities committed by Border Patrol against illegal immigrants, Salazar writes: “This author only hopes that this chapter in American history will also include the moment when revolutionaries rose up with the masses and slaughtered the fascistic Border Patrol dogs and their bosses, slaying them with revolutionary fire and justice.”

By “bosses,” he presumably means Carla L. Provost, the chief of the U.S. Border Patrol; her boss, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen; and her boss, President Donald J. Trump.

In an attempt to fan the flames, Salazar adds: “Who can read this, knowing the plight of the undocumented immigrant masses who struggle daily not for supremacy but basic economic survival, and have the gall to suppress that uncontrollable rage that builds inside you?”

He also calls on fellow radicals to destroy the “settler-colonialism imperialism” of Customs and Border Protection, ICE, and the whole U.S. covernment from “without, not within,” implying through mass violence.

Salazar goes on to praise the Red Guards, a Maoist group that hopes to duplicate in the United States the anarchy and terror Chairman Mao’s Red Guards inflicted on China during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The group identifies as “antifascist” and has cells throughout the United States. According to Far Left Watch, Incendiary News is run by Red Guards – Austin (RGA).

“Revolutionary organizations throughout the country such as the Red Guards appear to be organizing among the immigrant masses in forming defense units, rallying around the shared slogan of ‘fight ICE with fire!'” he writes, adding, “the time for activism is over. Now is the time for war.”

Now is the time to mobilize the masses, particularly the immigrant masses from Central America and Mexico, to exact revolutionary vengeance and seize power. Without it, everything is just empty words. End the barbarism. End U.S. imperialism!

The Red Guards’ far-left comrades, “Serve the People L.A.,” are showing their revolutionary, anti-capitalist zeal by selling “Fight ICE with Fire” t-shirts: CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Ravages of Leftist Thought Control The “Newspeak” of Orwell’s 1984 is here. Michael Cutler

By on September 21st, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271375/ravages-leftist-thought-control-michael-cutler

On September 12, 2018 the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) posted an article in its official website, Twitter Ads Rejects Tweets for “Hateful Content.”

The CIS article noted:

Yesterday Twitter rejected four Center for Immigration Studies tweets for use in the Center’s Twitter Ads campaign, alleging hateful content. (Several others were approved.) All four tweets use the statutory phrases “illegal alien” or “criminal alien,” and all of the tweets referenced law enforcement, either at the border or in the interior. One of the tweets contained a powerful Daily Caller video showing illegal aliens in camouflage carrying large backpacks across the border unimpeded.

Two days later, on September 14th The Daily Caller posted a report updating the situation: Twitter Allows Center For Immigration Studies To Promote Tweets About Illegal Aliens That Were Previously Rejected.

Twitter apparently reversed its decision when Mark Krikorian, the Director of CIS, appeared on Fox News to discuss the issue.

Here is an excerpt from The Daily Caller article:

The four tweets that could not get promoted, but are still on Twitter, contained the terms “alien,” “illegal alien” or “criminal alien” along with reference to law enforcement, according to a statement from CIS Wednesday.

A promoted tweet is a normal tweet bought by advertisers that can have a greater outreach on people, according to Twitter’s website.

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Sanctuary Policies Protect Sex Offenders Victims are mere “speed bumps” on the road to anarchy. Michael Cutler

By on September 18th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271333/sanctuary-policies-protect-sex-offenders-michael-cutler
On September 12, 2018 the Department of Homeland Security issued a press release, ICE arrests 16 during 2-day Operation SOAR in the New York City metropolitan area.

Here is an excerpt from that press release:

In years past, most of these individuals would have been turned over to ICE by local authorities upon their release from jail based on ICE detainers. Now that many sanctuary cities, including New York City, do not honor ICE detainers, these individuals, who often have significant criminal histories, are released onto the street, presenting a potential public safety threat.

“Many of those arrested in this operation had been found guilty of inappropriate sexual behavior against a minor,” said Thomas R. Decker, field office director for ERO New York. “Our communities are safer, our children are safer, from the efforts of the men and women of ICE. We have removed them from our city’s streets and we will seek to remove them from the United States.”

Arrests include:

In the Bronx, a 53 year-old, Mexican national, released from NYPD custody with an active detainer, who has convictions for criminal possession of a loaded firearm; criminal possession of a weapon: defaced for concealment; and sexual misconduct: male has intercourse with a female without her consent;
In Manhattan, a 42 year-old previously removed Salvadoran national, who has a conviction for sexual abuse of a child less than 11 years of age;
In Maspeth, a 39 year-old Dominican national, who has a conviction for sexual abuse, and is a registered sexual offender;
In Wyandanch, a 32 year-old Guatemalan national, who has a conviction for course of sexual conduct against a child less than 13 years of age;
In Huntington Station, a 40 year-old previously removed Salvadoran national, who has a conviction for rape, and who has failed to register as a sexual offender;
In Deer Park, a 54 year-old Italian national, who has a conviction for possession of sexual performance by child less than 16 years of age;
In the Bronx, a 42 year-old Ghanaian national, who has a conviction for sexual contact with an individual greater than 17 incapable of giving consent;

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19 Aliens Charged With Illegal Voting In 2016 The tip of the illegal immigration iceberg — of unknown proportions. Michael Cutler

By on September 17th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271300/19-aliens-charged-illegal-voting-2016-michael-cutler

On August 27, 2018 the DHS website posted a report, 19 foreign nationals indicted for illegally voting in 2016 elections that began with this paragraph:

WILMINGTON, N.C. – Nineteen foreign nationals were charged with unlawfully voting in the 2016 elections Friday, and a U.S. citizen was charged with aiding and abetting an alien to falsely claim U.S. citizenship to register to vote. The indictments follow an investigation by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) as part of a newly created Document and Benefit Fraud Task Force (DBFTF) in the Eastern District of North Carolina.

On the following day, on August 28th, the Justice Department issued a press release about the very same case, Nineteen Foreign Nationals Charged for Voting in 2016 Election and added:

Multiple Defendants Voted In More Than One Election.

This press release reporting on the actions of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raises a number of significant issues that we will explore today.

First, however, I am compelled to note that I wrote about the newly-created Document and Benefit Fraud Task Force in my June 15, 2018 article, Trump Administration Opens Office To Find Naturalization Fraudsters in which I noted that this was a great first step, but much needs to be done.

The nineteen aliens who were the subject of the DOJ and DHS press releases were investigated by the Trump administration’s newly-created counter-fraud operation which hired additional attorneys and immigration officers to review the cases of aliens who had been ordered deported but then are believed to have assumed false identities to become lawful immigrants and subsequently acquire U.S. citizenship under their false identities by defrauding the naturalization process. Under the provisions of 8 U.S. Code § 1451 such alien’s naturalization can be revoked and the alien may also be criminally prosecuted for having committed such fraud.

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Trump Admin. Settles Lawsuits, Will Reconsider Asylum Claims of 1,000+ Immigrant Parents & Children By Mairead McArdle

By on September 13th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-administration-settles-lawsuits-reconsider-asylum-claims-of-1000-immigrant-parents-children/

The Trump administration reached a settlement agreement late Wednesday in three lawsuits levied by the American Civil Liberties Union and Muslim Advocates over the Justice Department’s “zero tolerance” immigration-enforcement policy, which resulted in the separation of nearly 3,000 children from the adults who brought them across the border illegally.

Over 1,000 parents and children who crossed the border illegally and claimed asylum on the grounds of a “credible fear of persecution or torture” in their homeland will get a second chance to file their claims if the settlement is approved by U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw. The ACLU said in a statement that under the settlement, there is also a possibility that some parents deported without their children may be allowed to reenter the U.S.

The administration halted the family-separation policy in June and attempted to defuse the bipartisan backlash it had caused. A California federal judge ordered the reunification of separated families days afterward, but the reunification process has been slow, and several hundred children remain separated from their guardians.Many of the immigrants in question may not ultimately gain asylum, since Attorney General Jeff Sessions reuled earlier this year that fear of domestic or gang violence would no longer be considered valid grounds for a claim. While their cases are being heard, often over a period of years, asylum seekers are allowed to live and work in the U.S., and under the settlement, some parents and children who are at different stages of the process will be allowed to live together in the country.

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23,000 California DMV voter-registration fails, and we’re not supposed to worry about illegals voting By Monica Showalter

By on September 6th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/09/23000_california_dmv_voterregistration_fails_and_were_not_supposed_to_worry_about_illegals_voting.html

In an issue the press suggests we shouldn’t be too concerned about, the California Department of Motor Vehicles says it’s screwed up 23,000 voter registrations based on its stewardship of the state’s automatic voting registration system, known as its motor-voter law.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Tens of thousands of Californians have been registered to vote incorrectly by the state Department of Motor Vehicles, including some who were assigned the wrong political party preference, officials said Wednesday.

Officials insist the errors were limited to 23,000 of the 1.4 million voter registration files sent to elections offices between late April, when California’s new automated “motor voter” system went into effect, and early August. Californians who were affected will soon receive notifications in the mail instructing them to check their voter registration status.

Hey, we know what your first question was, and both the DMV and the press assure that none of them was an illegal. They aren’t too sure what happened, which is why they are telling everyone to check his own registration, but they are…sure there were no illegals. This, despite the origins of the problem they described: that DMV officials left old screens up, and the information from the previous clients was sent to the state on behalf of the clients who followed. Why that couldn’t possibly include illegals was not a topic of inquiry for either the Los Angeles Times or the Sacramento Bee, which covered this issue. Illegals, see, wouldn’t dream of registering to vote, nor would any of the Democrats running the DMV out in the one-party precincts ever dream of registering them, right?

If there is any truth in this just being a matter of classifications gone wrong, with no illegals involved, none of them is saying how he actually would know. Never mind that uncomfortable detail about the DMV being suddenly tasked with both issuing drivers licenses to illegals and registering voters – in a one-party state. We’re just supposed to trust them on this.

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Massive MS-13 Bust in California Establishment media ignores the story – and California Democrats seek to avoid “labels” for violent criminal illegals. Lloyd Billingsley

By on September 4th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271230/massive-ms-13-bust-california-lloyd-billingsley

“Murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking among charges against alleged MS-13 members,” read the Fresno Bee headline last week. The story got little attention at the national level, despite the gravity and scope of the crimes. According to Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims, the investigation began with 14 homicides in the town of Mendota and in Fresno County between 2015 and 2017.

“The homicides are extremely violent in nature,” Mims said in the press conference. “Most as a result of hacking injuries” and knife attacks. Police confiscated seven guns, 57 knives, 10 machetes, and 270 rounds of ammunition. The investigation eventually covered at least 30 homicides in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Houston and New York City.

“The investigation uncovered a wide range of criminal activity, including murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking by MS-13 cells operating in and around Mendota and Los Angeles,” U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott told reporters.

“MS-13 members were using the remote area of our county as an extension of their larger operation in Los Angeles,” Fresno County District Attorney Lisa Smittcamp said, “and created a home base to continue to operate their unlawful activities while ingraining themselves in our community.” A full 25 members of the MS-13 gang, ages 18 to 31, face charges for murder, violent assaults and drug trafficking, but it wasn’t just a local or California issue.

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