RUTHFULLY YOURS

By one estimate, only 6 percent of American high-school seniors will play college football and Edwin Jackson of Westlake High School in Atlanta was a walk-on at Georgia Southern University. Jackson played well but the odds of making it to the National Football League were not in his favor.

Of some 20,000 college freshmen only 1.5 percent will make an NFL roster and no NFL team showed much interest in Edwin Jackson. Instead of giving up, he went the free-agent route and after release by the Arizona Cardinals he found a home with the Indianapolis Colts. In the eight games he started for the team, Jackson recorded 66 tackles. In the NFL, performance counts and at 26, the hard-working linebacker had the best of his career before him.

By all indications, Jackson was popular with teammates and careful to avoid trouble off the field. Indeed, while out late last weekend, Jackson showed the good sense to take Uber rather than drive. He doubtless planned to watch the Super Bowl but Edwin Jackson would not tune in or ever play another game in the National Football League.

Early on Sunday, a Ford F-150 pickup slammed into Jackson and driver Jeffrey Monroe, 54, who had pulled to the side of Interstate 70 in Indiana. Both men perished in the impact and the driver fled. Police chased down Alex Cabrera Gonsales but that name turned out to be fake.

The man who killed Edwin Jackson was actually Manuel Orrego-Savala, 37. He had no driver’s license and his blood-alcohol level was 0.239, three times the legal limit. The politically correct would say he had a problem with “substance abuse” but in reality he’s a drunk who was not supposed to be in the United States in the first place.

U.S. Senate leaders were all smiles Wednesday as they announced an agreement on a two-year spending plan. The House of Representatives passed a similar continuing resolution on Tuesday. Democrat threats to shut down the government are out, bipartisan backslapping is in. So how did this come together?

The Associated Press sums it up nicely: “Senate Democratic leaders have dropped their strategy of using the funding fight to extract concessions on immigration, specifically on seeking extended protections for the ‘Dreamer’ immigrants.”

That’s a nice way of saying that Democrats folded. But why? Recall that just two weeks ago Democrats called a DACA-based amnesty nothing short of a moral imperative and “the civil rights issue of our day.” Rhetorical modesty is not considered a virtue on the Left. Neither, apparently, is constancy.

After the Schumer Shutdown turned into a public relations debacle Dick Durbin inveighed, Chuck Schumer threatened, and Nancy Pelosi…well, we couldn’t quite decipher what Nancy Pelosi said but we’re pretty sure it was meant to express Resistance™! They postured and preened for a few days but then Donald Trump offered them a DACA deal that gave them more than they asked for—nearly 2 million people legalized with a path to citizenship in exchange for some modest border security—and they walked away. Apparently, Democrats couldn’t take yes for an answer.

Trump called their bluff. Democrats never really wanted a DACA deal. Their histrionics were just crocodile tears. They really wanted two things: 1) an issue they could use to fill campaign coffers with money from coastal elites eager to signal their virtuous solidarity with immigration scofflaws they meet only in CNN’s hagiographies but never in person, and 2) a narrative of Republican villainy they could sell to credulous Resisters to keep them in a permanent state of hyperbolic outrage until election day.

“At the federal, state, and local levels, taxpayers shell out approximately $134.9 billion to cover the costs incurred by the presence of more than 12.5 million illegal aliens, and about 4.2 million citizen children of illegal aliens.” — Matt O’Brien and Spencer Raley.

It is also rather more than the single payment of $25 billion that it will cost to build a wall — five and a half times more, and every year.

“Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes…” — John R. Lott.

In 2015, included in the DEA’s drug-threat assessment was the fact that drug overdoses killed more people in the United States than car accidents or guns. Many of these drugs [were] smuggled in large volumes by drug cartels.”

In his State of the Union address on January 30, US President Donald J. Trump referred to the brutal murder of two 16-year-old girls from Long Island in December 2016 by members of the “savage MS-13 gang,” responsible for a spate of other gruesome killings in the area, as well.

Many of these gang members, he explained, had entered the United States illegally. “For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities,” he said.

Calling on Congress “to finally close the deadly loopholes that have allowed… criminal gangs to break into our country,” he listed the four pillars of his immigration-reform proposal:

A path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrants who were brought to America by their parents.
The construction of a “great wall on the southern border” and enforcement by agents patrolling and securing the border.
Ending the visa lottery, “a program that randomly plans out green cards without regard for skill, merit, for the safety of American people.”
Ending the “current, broken system” of chain migration of distant relatives, and limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children.

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, Donald Trump showed us the president who could build an enduring majority and put the identity-mongering, America-dissing Democrats behind the eight ball for a long time to come. Let’s hope that it’s not too late.

President Trump’s admonition that “Americans are dreamers, too” was a brilliant retort to illegal-alien sentimentalism, and we have already heard frustrated cries that he unjustly “appropriated” the designation. Trump made a compelling case for an immigration system that puts the interests of Americans first. “I want our poor to have a chance to rise,” he said, something that is more difficult in competition with large flows of unskilled aliens. Trump is right to demand the closure of loopholes that have allowed unaccompanied juvenile illegal aliens to evade the law; he is right to call for the end to chain migration and the visa lottery system. Legal entry for immigration purposes should be conditional on the intending immigrants’ skills, language abilities, and education levels, not by their clan affiliations. The Democrats’ refusal to negotiate on their demand for blanket amnesty betrays their real priority, which is not providing for illegal immigrants who are already here but ensuring unlimited flows of immigration in the future. To them, yet-unborn foreigners are just dreamers waiting to happen.

President Trump is proposing a very large-scale amnesty—a path to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal aliens—that his base will perceive as a betrayal. He can distinguish it from previous amnesties, however, by insisting on something missing from all previous remissions: that the illegal alien and potential American have zero arrests and convictions. Heretofore, every proposed and actual amnesty gave illegal aliens two free misdemeanor convictions, but avoiding crime is hardly an insuperable demand of new citizens. President Trump said that the amnestied illegal aliens must show “good moral character”—a clean criminal record is an essential prerequisite of such a showing.

Something very odd and potentially self-defeating is happening to liberalism in the Trump era.

Confronted by the rise of a harder right, the center-left has responded by declaring the intellectual and political equivalent of a public health emergency. Policy positions adopted by their opponents, which liberals of the past would have considered wrong but perfectly legitimate, are now deemed morally unacceptable threats to our form of government — a hazard to the soul of American democracy akin to the danger that an outbreak of a deadly plague would pose to individual American bodies.

Nowhere has this change been clearer or more dramatic than on immigration, and never more so than in reactions to the proposal floated by the White House late last week. In return for providing a permanent path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, the Trump administration hopes to gain approval for significant cuts to legal immigration.

There are three ways to respond to such a proposal. The first is to make a pragmatic case that cutting legal immigration will harm the economy. The second is to make a moral case that cutting legal immigration will betray America’s highest ideals. Both responses implicitly presume that there will be legitimate arguments made on the other side and that those arguments may well prevail in the back and forth of public debate.

But a surprisingly large number of liberals are taking a third, and very different, approach — not claiming that cuts to legal immigration shouldn’t be made, but that the very act of proposing and defending them in the first place is morally illegitimate. These liberals appear to believe that immigration restrictionists should be excluded on principle from participating in public debate and discussion about immigration policy in the United States.

This is absurd.

President Donald Trump reportedly asked why the U.S. is “having all these people from shithole countries come here.” I think he could have used better language, but it’s a question that should be asked and answered. I have a few questions for my fellow Americans to consider. How many Norwegians have illegally entered our nation, committed crimes and burdened our prison and welfare systems? I might ask the same question about Finnish, Swedish, Welsh, Icelanders, Greenlanders and New Zealanders. The bulk of our immigration problem is with people who enter our country criminally from Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East. It’s illegal immigrants from those countries who have committed crimes and burdened our criminal justice and welfare systems. A large number of immigrants who are here illegally — perhaps the majority are law-abiding in other respects — have fled oppressive, brutal and corrupt regimes to seek a better life in America.

In the debate about illegal immigration, there are questions that are not explicitly asked but can be answered with a straight “yes” or “no”: Does everyone in the world have a right to live in the U.S.? Do Americans have a right to decide who and under what conditions a person may enter our country? Should we permit foreigners landing at our airports to ignore U.S. border control laws just as some ignore our laws at our southern border? The reason those questions are not asked is that one would be deemed an idiot for saying that everyone in the world has a right to live in our country, that Americans don’t have a right to decide who lives in our country and that foreigners landing at our airports have a right to just ignore U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.