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IMMIGRATION

No, Americans Who Want Border Security Aren’t Anti-Immigrant After accounting for taxes illegal immigrants pay, we’re still supporting them to the tune of some $123 billion. Don’t we need that money for the opioid crisis, infrastructure, and aircraft carriers?By Donna Carol Voss

http://thefederalist.com/2018/06/21/no-americans-want-border-wall-arent-anti-immigrant/

A recent Quinnipiac poll confirms what most of us already know: Republicans favor a border wall, Democrats don’t. In April, 81 percent of Republicans favored a wall, while only 4 percent of Democrats did.

In the eyes of the Left, this makes Republicans “the bad guys.” They are portrayed as a stain on our national character — “That’s not who we are” — and a shameful blight on our heritage — “We’re a nation of immigrants.” Worst of all, they are portrayed as anti-immigrant.

But they’re not. They’re anti-illegal immigration, and there’s a big difference. It isn’t personal.

Any decent person’s heart breaks at the plight of Central American parents worried sick that MS-13 will recruit their children, if they aren’t killed by violence first. (Read up on what happens to unaccompanied minors once they get here, however. Out of 214 recent MS-13 gang arrests, 30 percent had crossed the border illegally as unaccompanied minors.)

Drug cartels in Mexico feed on broken families, poverty, and hopelessness, aided by rife government corruption and an astronomical murder rate (25,340 in 2017). We want to rescue as many of these people as we can, but there’s a limit to how many can join our country every year. We have a right to control who gets in, for our own survival.

It is not anti-immigrant to want to block illegal aliens from pouring into our country. Even if every single one were a squeaky clean Mother Teresa, the sheer fact of their presence robs citizens and legal residents of something precious. Some of the calculus is economic, some isn’t.
Illegal Immigrants Are a Big Net Economic Loss

The Real Child Abusers of Border Insecurity The zombie lawsuit causing family separation that never dies. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270517/real-child-abusers-border-insecurity-daniel-greenfield

What the media has been falsely calling President Trump’s family separation policy began with Hollywood actor Ed Asner’s housekeeper and a lawsuit by the ACLU during the Reagan administration.

The issue was child trafficking.

Teenage girls were being smuggled into the United States. Some were being sent on to their illegal alien family members in the United States. Others were being sent to the United States as cheap labor or being trafficked for prostitution. People purporting to be family members might show up asking for them to be released into their custody. And immigration authorities were faced with a horrible situation.

The ACLU was less interested in the teens than in Attorney General Edwin Meese. Reagan’s AG was the Sessions of the day. A man whose name so enraged the left-wing group that at one point it circulated petitions demanding that Reagan fire Meese and called him the most dangerous official since Nixon.

Flores v. Meese, the case that led to the family separation policy, was born with Ed Asner’s housekeeper and the ACLU’s obsession with Meese. But the case, with various AGs replacing Meese, dragged on. And the ACLU went on insisting that refusing to release teenage illegal aliens violated the Constitution.

In ’93, when Jenny Lisette Flores, the girl at the center of the original case, was 23, the Supreme Court finally ruled 7-2 against the ACLU and rejected its bizarre claim that illegal teens had a right to be released. The verdict was brutal and made a hash of the ACLU’s opportunistic misreading of the Constitution.

And that should have been it. But by then it wasn’t Flores v. Meese, but Flores v. Reno.

Obama officials rushed to explain photos from 2014 that went viral showing locked-up immigrant children — and Trump’s facilities look the same

http://www.businessinsider.com/migrant-children-in-cages-2014-photos-explained-2018-5

Several 2014 photos of detained immigrant children in cages went viral in May, and former Obama administration officials rushed to offer explanations.
The former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau had even shared the images on Twitter, mistakenly believing they were taken during Donald Trump’s presidency.
The former officials doubled down on their criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies, and said the 2014 photos showed unaccompanied children the government had been attempting to place with family members.
On June 17, reporters toured a similar government holding facility in McAllen, Texas, where migrant families are separated from one another and held in cages.

Several former Obama administration officials took to social media and news outlets last month to explain a gallery of years-old photos that showed immigrant children sleeping in shoddy conditions at a government-run holding facility in Arizona.

The images, which the Associated Press first published in 2014, resurfaced recently for reasons that remain unclear, and quickly prompted viral outrage on Twitter. One particularly disturbing image showed two children sleeping on mattresses on the floor inside what appeared to be a cage.

The Migrant Question Western nations are fracturing on the issue. Theodore Dalrymple

https://www.city-journal.org/html/migrant-question-15980.html

Europe, despite its Union, is as divided as ever. Recently, when Italy’s new right-wing government—anxious to prove its credentials—refused to allow a boat carrying 629 African migrants to dock in Italy, Spain’s new left-wing government—equally anxious to do the same—accepted the boat. When the French president, Emmanuel Macron, criticized the Italians for their decision, the Italian government accused the French of hypocrisy, inasmuch as they had refused to take more than 9,000 migrants from Italy that they had previously agreed to accept.

This story is revealing in several aspects. The first is that, whatever attitude governments take to the migrants, no one truly believes that they are more of an asset than a liability. Madrid’s action, for example, was taken on “humanitarian” grounds, rather than because it believed that Spain would benefit from the migrants’ presence. When European leaders discuss the migrant question, it is always in terms of sharing the burden, not the assets, equitably. No one speaks of foreign investment in this way, which suggests that European politicians believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the free movement of people and capital are different in an important way.

The leaders speak of sharing the burden, then, and are incensed when countries such as Hungary and Poland refuse point-blank to take any migrants from Africa or the Middle East. But I have never seen mentioned in this context the question of where the migrants themselves want to go. They might as well be inanimate toxic waste as far as the discussion is concerned, rather than human beings with wishes, desires, ambitions, and so forth. They are but pawns in a political game. Hungary, for example, is deemed duty-bound to take x number of migrants: no one asks whether x number of migrants can be found who want to go to Hungary. Nor is the question ever discussed in public whether Hungary, having open borders, would be held responsible for making the migrants stay there once they had arrived. Short of penning them in, how exactly would you keep them in Hungary, or in Poland?

Border Politics and the Use and Abuse of History By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/border-politics-family-separation-debate-abuse-of-history/

Much has been written — some of it either inaccurate or designed to obfuscate the issue ahead of the midterms for political purposes — about the border fiasco and the unfortunate separation of children from parents. Rich Lowry’s brief analysis is the most insightful.

The media outrage usually does not include examination of why the Trump administration is enforcing existing laws that it inherited from the Bush and Obama administrations that at any time could have been changed by both Democratic and Republican majorities in Congress; of the use of often dubious asylum claims as a way of obtaining entry otherwise denied to those without legal authorization — a gambit that injures or at least hampers thousands with legitimate claims of political persecution; of the seeming unconcern for the safety of children by some would-be asylum seekers who illegally cross the border, rather than first applying legally at a U.S. consulate abroad; of the fact that many children are deliberately sent ahead, unescorted on such dangerous treks to help facilitate their own parents’ later entrance; of the cynicism of the cartels that urge and facilitate such mass rushes to the border to overwhelm general enforcement; and of the selective outrage of the media in 2018 in a fashion not known under similar policies and detentions of the past.

In 2014, during a similar rush, both Barack Obama (“Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”) and Hillary Clinton (“We have to send a clear message, just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay. So, we don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”) warned — again to current media silence — would-be asylum seekers not to use children as levers to enter the U.S.

Border Games The Left’s dishonesty about families disguises its real intentions. Bob McManus

https://www.city-journal.org/html/border-games-15977.html

New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced this week that he will refuse to deploy National Guard troops to assist in border control—though no one asked him to, and no one is ever likely to ask. Cuomo is a master of the political non sequitur—last month, he promised to send a Dunkirk-style small-boat flotilla against offshore oil rigs that don’t exist—and he’s also pretty good at twisting the English language to serve his interests.

In this, he is not unique—hence the rhetorical riot generated by the Trump administration’s so-called “family separation” policies—but the governor’s National Guard posturing is at once over the top and instructive. “In the face of the federal government’s inhumane treatment of immigrant families, New York will not deploy National Guard to the border,” Cuomo announced Monday. “We will not be complicit in this ongoing human tragedy.”

Well, again, nobody asked. But the Guard diversion is a useful tool, deflecting attention from the fundamental dishonesty of the governor’s full statement. That is, the federal government is treating no one inhumanely; the “families” involved are not so much immigrants as they are economic migrants with no inherent right of entry into the United States—and to the extent that there is an “ongoing human tragedy” on the border, responsibility for it resides with those attempting to enter the county illegally.

It is true that Americans love children. The Clinton administration discovered that in 2000, when it sent heavily armed immigration agents storming into a Florida home to remove a screaming seven-year-old boy. The reaction was furious. That same instinct underlies the current controversy, as well as the politicized reaction to it. Just as most people don’t want bad things to happen to children, even fewer want to be perceived as agents of harm, and not just to children. That’s why disingenuous rhetoric such as Cuomo’s can be such an effective tool.

Proposed Legislation For DACA Aliens Spurs Stampede “Separation of alien families” is an emotional artifice concocted by globalists. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270492/proposed-legislation-daca-aliens-spurs-stampede-michael-cutler
President Trump made border security and the effective enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws the centerpiece of his successful campaign for the presidency.

This has enraged globalist politicians from both political parties who see in America’s borders impediments to their wealth and the wealth of their campaign contributors.

Prior administrations have refused to take immigration law enforcement seriously and our nation has, as a direct consequence, paid one hell of a price.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear, the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 were made possible by multiple failures of the immigration system that enabled the terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves.

The preface of the official report, 9/11 and Terrorist Travel begins with the following paragraph:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.

That report went on to note:

Once terrorists had entered the United States, their next challenge was to find a way to remain here. Their primary method was immigration fraud. For example, Yousef and Ajaj concocted bogus political asylum stories when they arrived in the United States. Mahmoud Abouhalima, involved in both the World Trade Center and landmarks plots, received temporary residence under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers (SAW) program, after falsely claiming that he picked beans in Florida.

Et tu, Laura? By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/et_tu_laura.html

Laura Bush is publicly supporting the Democrats’ BS propaganda effort, hand-wringing over the poor “immigrants” (make that illegal immigrant law-breakers) who are arrested and therefore separated from the children. She wrote a column for the Trump-hating Washington Bezos Post that is getting major attention from all the other Trump-haters:

On Sunday, a day we as a nation set aside to honor fathers and the bonds of family, I was among the millions of Americans who watched images of children who have been torn from their parents. In the six weeks between April 19 and May 31, the Department of Homeland Security has sent nearly 2,000 children to mass detention centers or foster care. More than 100 of these children are younger than 4 years old. The reason for these separations is a zero-tolerance policy for their parents, who are accused of illegally crossing our borders.

The reason for the separations is that their parents have been arrested for violating our law. Just like American citizens who are arrested. As Bre Payton of The Federalist reminds us:

Putting a child in temporary housing or foster care when their [sic] parent engages in illegal activity is standard practice – even for U.S. citizens. A bit of information that’s been largely ignored is that there are an unknown number of American children who’ve been seperated [sic] from their parents and placed in foster care when their parents are incarcerated.

Trump Administration Opens Office To Find Naturalization Fraudsters A great first step — but much more needs to be done. Michael Cutler

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270462/trump-administration-opens-office-find-michael-cutler

On June 11, 2018 the Washington Times published an article, U.S. launching office to identify citizenship cheaters, reporting that the Trump administration is opening an office to identify aliens who defrauded the naturalization process by concealing material facts in filing for U.S. citizenship and seek their denaturalization.

This is an important measure and one that enhances the enforcement of immigration laws from within the interior of the United States that will plug yet another gap in the highly porous immigration system.

This, as you will see, also has serious implication for national security.

However, generally most aliens who commit naturalization fraud also committed fraud in their applications for various immigration benefits that subsequently enabled the to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Because of the huge number of applications for various immigration benefits, more than six million applications for various benefits are processed each year by the beleaguered adjudication officers employed by USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services), many applications are adjudicated without so much as an in-person interview, let alone a field investigation conducted to verify the information contained in the applications.

This creates an invitation for fraud on a massive scale.

The Wasington Times article draws the parallel with this new effort to uncover aliens who lie on application for U.S. citizenship to previous efforts to identify Nazi war criminals who also gamed the naturalization process in order to secure U.S. citizenship to evade prosecution for their heinous crimes against humanity.

14-Year-Old Jewish Girl Murdered by Muslim Refugee in Germany Another innocent girl pays the price for Europe’s open borders. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270399/14-year-old-jewish-girl-murdered-muslim-refugee-daniel-greenfield

On May 22, Susanna Maria Feldman went missing. It was the day after the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which celebrates G-d’s revelation of the Ten Commandments to Moses and a nation of freed slaves.

The fifth commandment is, “Honor thy father and mother.” The sixth is, “Thou shalt not murder.”

And in the German city of Mainz, whose Jewish community dates back to Roman times, a worried mother waited for the worst. Susanna had gone off with her friends. They came home. And she didn’t.

Her mother received a WhatsApp message from her daughter’s phone on the afternoon of the 22nd. “Mom, I’m not coming home. I went to Paris with my friend. Don’t look for me. I’ll come back after 2 or 3 weeks. Bye.”

According to Diana, Susanna’s mother, the message sounded nothing like her daughter. 4 hours later, the teenage girl’s phone was switched off. There was nothing more.

“I hope and pray that nothing bad has happened to her,” she posted on Facebook. “Please help me find my daughter safe again.”

The police reassured the frantic mother that her daughter had just gone off with some friends and would come back on her, but she feared the worst while the authorities stonewalled.

On June 1, she published an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel in which she wrote, “I feel abandoned by the German state.”

Two weeks passed. The police searched. Dogs sniffed around but found nothing. And then someone noticed a flash of white among all that brown and green. It was the white of a clothing label.