RUTHFULLY YOURS

Protesters at the Supreme Court were wrong.

The weak arguments made on Wednesday in the Supreme Court against President Donald Trump’s restrictions on travel from dangerous countries demonstrate that the government should win the case. The justices should rule in favor of upholding the president’s authority to protect national security and the safety of the American public.

It was a rainy, overcast day in the nation’s capital, but that did not stop protesters outside the Supreme Court who were yelling about the so-called Muslim ban, which exists only in their fevered imaginations. The weather also did not deter those attending the arguments inside the courtroom, which was packed with Washington’s media and political elites, including Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, and legislators including Representative Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Even Lin-Manuel Miranda, author of the Broadway musical Hamilton, was there.

The justices heard their final oral arguments of the term in U.S. v. Hawaii, the case filed against Trump’s revised proclamation of September 24, 2017. That proclamation was issued after an intensive, multi-agency review applied to 200 countries. The Department of Homeland Security recommended that entry be restricted from eight countries that, as Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, told the Court, “failed to provide the minimum baseline of information needed to vet their nationals.”

The countries included Iran and Syria, state sponsors of terrorism; Libya, Yemen, Chad, and Somalia, which have extensive terrorist activities inside their borders; and two non-Muslim countries, North Korea and Venezuela.

Francisco put on a very strong case on behalf of the government. He relied heavily on a straightforward provision of federal immigration law, whereby Congress gave the president the power to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” As Francisco argued, “the proclamation reflects a foreign-policy and national-security judgment that falls well within the president’s power” under this federal law.

The solicitor general argued against the courts’ getting involved in this, since “the whole vetting system is essentially determined by the executive branch. It’s up to the executive branch to set it up. It’s up to the executive branch to maintain it. And it’s up to the executive branch to constantly improve it.” He pointed out that prior presidents, Carter and Reagan, used this law to restrict entry from Iran and Cuba, and Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that Trump’s proclamation contains more detail on the specifics of the grounds for the restrictions than did those prior presidential proclamations.

A recent Supreme Court decision stopping a deportation was correct, but Congress can easily fix the law.

The Trump administration’s efforts to get convicted criminal aliens off of our streets and out of the country was dealt a setback this week, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court.

A majority in Sessions v. Dimaya held that a part of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) used to deport criminal aliens was unconstitutionally “vague.” Fortunately, this is a problem Congress could easily remedy with a very simple legislative fix. Only those opposed to safeguarding the public from convicted felons could possibly oppose it.

At issue was a provision of the INA that defines what a “crime of violence” is for purposes of removal proceedings. Under federal law, if an alien is convicted of an “aggravated felony,” he is subject to deportation even if he is in the country legally. The INA has a long list of specific offenses that fit the “aggravated felony” definition, one of which is a “crime of violence” punishable by at least a year in prison.

The man at the center of this case, James Dimaya, is a lawful permanent resident alien from the Philippines. The U.S. moved to deport him after his second felony conviction for first-degree burglary under California law. An immigration court ordered Dimaya’s deportation because it found that first-degree burglary met the “crime of violence” definition.

Why? Because a “crime of violence” is further defined in federal law as any felony that poses “a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”

Over the past century many commentators have remarked on the parallels between the modern West and ancient Rome in its period of decadence and decline. The most influential proponent of the idea, perhaps, has been Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West is now widely viewed as a classic of conservative thought. As might be imagined, “progressives” have consistently sneered at the idea, but, then again, they would scarcely be progressives if they didn’t. One is reminded of the Chinese saying: “When a fool sees the Tao [Truth] he laughs. If he did not laugh it would not be the Tao.”

The parallels between decadent Rome and the modern West are actually there. And they are uncanny, and they are becoming more numerous by the day.

In 410 A.D. the walls of Rome were breached and the city plundered by a barbarian army under the leadership of Alaric the Goth. This was the first time since the Gallic sack of the city around 390 B.C. that the imperial metropolis had been entered by a hostile enemy. The fall of Rome shocked the world at the time, but what is not generally known nowadays is that the Gothic army that carried out the atrocity had entered the Empire thirty years earlier as refugees.

Until the second half of the fourth century the Goths had inhabited a vast swathe of territory taking what now comprises Romania as well as the Ukraine. In 375, however, they were attacked by the Huns, a tribe of nomad warriors from central Asia who had been moving steadily westwards during the preceding century and a half. In the ensuing war the Goths suffered a crushing defeat and large numbers of them fled westwards towards the Roman Empire. By the summer of 376 an enormous host of Goths, generally estimated at around 100,000, arrived at the River Danube and pleaded with the Roman authorities to be allowed into the Empire.

President Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to the U.S./Mexico border to provide support to the U.S. Border Patrol is not unprecedented. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama also sent unarmed National Guard troops to the southern border.

While the administration has yet to fully explain how the troops will assist the beleaguered Border Patrol agents, it is to be presumed that the National Guard personnel will also be unarmed and not directly involved in the interdiction and apprehension of aliens attempting to enter the United States surreptitiously without inspection.

Of course anything that can be done to free up Border Patrol agents from activities that distract them from their primary mission of securing the border are welcome, but we must understand that these national guard troops will not, by themselves, seal that problematic border.

Once again attention has been drawn, virtually exclusively, to the need to secure the southern border of the United States. Make no mistake, that border must be secured, however, the need to enforce the immigration laws from within the interior of the United States has always been ignored. We will consider interior enforcement shortly.

The justification for President Trump’s decision to deploy those National Guard troops was reported in an April 8, 2018 ABC News report, Trump adviser cites ‘alarming’ 200 percent increase in attempted US-Mexico border crossings.

Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist.

Illegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions.

We saw a glimpse of reality with the recent “caravan” of Central Americans. With a strong wink and nod from their Mexican hosts, the travelers assumed an intrinsic right to march northward into the United States. Had they done so, they would have confirmed the impression, advanced during the last administration, that the border is porous and that a sovereign United States and its citizenry have scant legal right to secure it.

How did we get to such a point of absurdity?

The ideology of illegal immigration rests on certain illogical assumptions that must not be questioned. Immigration exactly is one-way. But why exactly do we simply accept that without inquiry? What is it about a free-market, constitutional, transparent, and law-abiding America that draws in millions desperate to abandon their homes in otherwise naturally rich landscapes in Mexico and Central America?

In the absence of intellectual honesty about the need for political and economic reform in Latin America, mythologies can abound. Millions are desperate to enter a country antithetical to the protocols of their own. They are even more desperate to stay here — even as many mask that paradox by expressing ethnic and cultural chauvinism, along with anger at their hosts. Witness the signs, flags, and symbols of many open-borders, anti-immigration-enforcement rallies. Apparently, nations that create conditions that drive out their own can be the objects of romance, but only at a safe distance.

When then-candidate Donald Trump announced his presidential bid in 2016, he did so with a bang. Right out of the gate, he took on one of the deepest and long-simmering dysfunctions in our republic—illegal immigration.

Never one for subtlety when an opportunity for the dramatic presents itself, Trump used what some found to be incendiary rhetoric referencing Mexicans, drugs, rape, and criminality. Ever since, this important discussion is punctuated by the claim from the Left that “people can’t be illegal,” despite the fact that the term “illegal” refers only to immigration status which can, of course, be illegal. The point of that discussion-ending appeal to emotion is to insinuate that any human arguing against illegal immigration lacks compassion and that the Right rejects our shared and immigration-rich history, is therefore unpatriotic, and that any desire for secure borders is fundamentally based on racism.

This kind of idiocy serves only to anger all parties so that there is rarely any real scrutiny of the illegal immigration reality in this country. The issue is growing worse daily and we need to accept certain facts. First and foremost we must accept that illegal immigration is, in fact, illegal and that this is a problem. People who are not coming here through legal channels are breaking our laws. This is an exercise in the obvious. Our nation, like all nations, has a set of immigration laws that were designed to protect its citizenry from those who would not be additive to our society, might harm our citizens, or don’t demonstrate sufficient potential to be happy here among us.

America is a welcoming land, full of promise. One does not need to be the kind of entrepreneurial soul capable of founding an electric car company, or to serve in our military, or to become an expert in our history to come to America. But if one does come to this country, it is important that he loves it, understands what it represents, and does his best to make it better in whatever way God has made him able.

When an individual, regardless of the circumstances, breaks the immigration laws of this country, his immigrant status is illegal and he is an illegal alien. Calling it something other than illegal denigrates the value and importance of law in our society and, after all, one of the defining aspects of America that made it such a desirable destination for so many immigrants is our respect for the rule of law against the rule of men.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-vanishing-caravan-1522970881

President Trump can’t seem to decide if his border-control plan is a success or an imminent national crisis.

Not long ago he was touting fewer apprehensions at the Southwest border. Then he jumped on the story, from BuzzFeed and Fox News, that an immigrant “caravan” was heading from Central America through Mexico for the Rio Grande. He treated this like a Russian invasion, first saying he’d send “the military” to the border and then signing an order to deploy the National Guard.

There was no need. By Thursday the invading horde had largely dispersed before it reached even Mexico City. It isn’t clear most were even heading to the U.S. Mr. Trump conceded on Twitter that “The Caravan is largely broken up” and he credited Mexico’s “strong immigration laws,” which he usually derides.

He was also back to touting his border-control success: “Because of the Trump Administrations [sic] actions, Border crossings are at a still UNACCEPTABLE 46 year low.”

Apprehensions were down in fiscal 2017 to 310,531, the lowest since at least 2000. But they were up year over year in February and March, and our guess is that’s due to the strong U.S. economy pulling in more migrants coming for work.

This underscores the contradiction in Mr. Trump’s economic agenda. Faster growth from tax reform and deregulation means a tighter labor market that attracts more migrants. Mr. Trump would be wise to trade border security for reform that allows more legal immigration to meet the economy’s needs. Then he wouldn’t have to pull stunts like hyping a band of poor migrants as an invading army.