RUTHFULLY YOURS

Harden your hearts.

According to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, 68 million people around the world are or at risk of becoming refugees. The migration of a few million people has already turned the European Union inside out and motivated the election of an America-first presidency. What we have seen so far, though, is nothing compared to what is to come.

Fertility is declining in almost all the educated and prosperous parts of the world, notably including East Asia. But it remains extremely high in the least-educated parts of the world with the worst governance and the poorest growth prospects.

At constant fertility, the number of people aged 20 to 30 years will grow from 1.2 billion to almost 4 billion over the present century, and all of the growth will occur in Africa and South Asia (notably in Pakistan, where total fertility is 3.6 children per woman vs. 2.4 in India). Africa will be the main source of new young people.
Prominent Evangelicals Weigh in on the Immigration Debate

At least 5,000 Africans died during 2016 crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. According to Frontex, a half-million attempted the crossing last year, and the United Nations estimates that 2 million have done so since 2014.

Writing in The New Republic, Laura Markham reports that a trickle of “extra-continental refugees” is infiltrating the United States via Brazil, and that this trickle is likely to turn into a flood:

Because of the high risks of crossing and the low odds of being permitted to stay, more and more would-be asylum-seekers are now forgoing Europe, choosing instead to chance the journey through the Americas … Each year, thousands of migrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia make their way to South America and then move northward, bound for the United States — and their numbers have been increasing steadily. It’s impossible to know how many migrants from outside the Americas begin the journey and do not make it to the United States, or how many make it to the country and slip through undetected. But the number of “irregular migrants” — they’re called extra-continentales in Tapachula — apprehended on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico has tripled since 2010.

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court dealt a setback to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy on Monday, declining to take up an administration appeal that sought a quick end to the Obama-era program protecting young, undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

The high court’s action, which effectively requires Mr. Trump to finish litigating in the lower courts first, means that hundreds of thousands of program recipients may continue to renew their protections while legal challenges continue, a process that could take another year or longer.

The court’s action also relieves pressure on Congress, which has struggled to find a legislative replacement for the program begun by former President Barack Obama.

In September, Mr. Trump announced that the program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, would end on March 5. But two lower-court judges have issued injunctions blocking that plan for now and ordered administration officials to continue to process renewals, so Congress doesn’t face an imminent deadline.

The court’s action Monday was a rejection of an unusual request by the Justice Department, which had asked the justices to intervene now, even though appeals courts haven’t yet ruled on the cases.

The high court almost never grants such requests, but the department, citing time sensitivities, had argued the court should settle the issue without delay. That didn’t sway the justices, who turned down the request in a two-sentence order without recorded dissents.

Leftist billionaire George Soros has been pouring big money into a Texas district attorney race as part of his effort to install extremist prosecutors across America who will protect lawless so-called sanctuary cities that obstruct the enforcement of federal immigration law.

We already knew that pressure groups funded by Soros are litigating to keep U.S. ports-of-entry wide open to terrorists and other people who hate America. And leftist propaganda shops like the Brennan Center for Justice, which has taken in about $23 million from Soros since 2000, have churned out reports arguing that state judicial systems need to be reshaped to more closely follow the Left’s agenda.

Soros is using his vast fortune in an attempt to radicalize local prosecutors’ offices in part because he wants to block U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from functioning. The self-styled philosopher wants to cripple law enforcement in order to advance the radical abstraction known as social justice that simplistically breaks the world down into race, class, and sex. Radicals claim that American laws and institutions are corrupt and that these systems protect, for example, wealthy, white, native-born, non-disabled males at the expense of everyone else. In this instance, U.S. immigration law is inherently unfair to illegal aliens, or so the reasoning goes.

Soros’s current target is Bexar County, Texas, District Attorney Nico LaHood, Peter Hasson reports in the Daily Caller. LaHood is a Democrat who oppose sanctuary cities and describes himself as “a conservative guy.”

Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, is the fourth most-populous county in Texas. Knocking off LaHood would be a significant step forward for the Soros agenda.

Soros has already blown through around $70,000 supporting LaHood’s primary opponent, Joe Gonzales, by way of Texas Justice & Public Safety, a political action committee or PAC. The sum includes more than $30,000 devoted to mailers attacking LaHood as “bigoted,” “racist,” and “Islamophobic” in both the English and Spanish languages.

Nancy Pelosi gave a marathon speech on illegal immigration the other day. But how would she know much about the realities of open borders, given her palatial retreat in Northern California and multi-millionaire lifestyle that allows wealthy progressives like herself to be exempt from the consequences of her own hectoring? In the end, the House minority leader was reduced to some adolescent racialist patter about her grandson wishing to look more like his Mexican-American friend.

I was thinking of the San Francisco Democrat’s speech last week, during a brief drive into our local town, in a region that is ground zero of California’s illegal immigration experience.

Illegal immigrants are neither collective saints nor sinners, but simply individuals who arrive from one of the poorest regions in the Americas, without legality or much in the way of English, or high school education.

They encounter an American host that has lost confidence in its once formidable powers of assimilation and integration as well as its ability to mint Americans from diverse races, religions, and ethnicities. Instead, American culture has adopted an arrogant sense that it can ensure near instant parity as redemption for supposed past –isms and –ologies. That may explain the immigrant’s romance for Mexico to which he fights any return, and the ambiguity about America in which he fights to stay.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

The anarchist thugs of Antifa are branching out into obstructing immigration law enforcement, apparently no longer content with shutting down conservative speakers and beating up those they promiscuously label “fascists.”

A case in point was last Thursday, Feb. 15, when about 70 activists surrounded a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) van that was attempting to enter the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. The anarchists chanted “no more deportations,” “Trump and Pence must go,” “f–k ICE,” as well as slogans in the Spanish language.

Although the two ICE agents in the van at the time were unharmed and there were no arrests, the action was viewed by anarchists as a successful test of the tactic. Antifa intends to expand its use of the approach. Given Antifa’s ugly track record, this could mean violent, terroristic attacks on law enforcement.

The nighttime action was leftist retaliation for ICE officers doing their jobs by enforcing the law. ICE reportedly detained more than 200 illegal aliens in Los Angeles during a recent five-day enforcement sweep.

Radical leftist Rabbi Aryeh Cohen bitterly complained to the Los Angeles Times about ICE doing what it is supposed to do.

“The original goal was to really loudly proclaim that we’re not going to stand for ICE destroying families … on Valentine’s Day of all days,” said Cohen, who is on the board of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, which helped to publicize the action.

“When the ICE/DHS van came, our group of people decided it was time to put their bodies in front of the machinery of deportation,” he said.

Articles about chain migration have three common characteristics:

1) They are presented as thoughtful, in-depth discussion of the topic;

2) They are quick to arrive at conclusions and hammer then in repeatedly;

and

3) They are extremely sparse in details.

You can read a hundred such articles without understanding what percent of legal migration is due to chain migration, what exactly is chain migration, and how it works. But when you are done reading this article, you will be such an expert that all your friends will turn to you for advice and succor on the subject.

Let’s look at total legal immigration in 2015, courtesy of the Center for Immigration Studies:

At the age of 14, my lovely mother went to work in a Chicago factory sewing ladies’ coats. It was 1918. She was a brilliant girl but couldn’t go to school because her family needed the income. Whenever I hear people rile about “white privilege,” I often wonder if they have my mother in mind.

Twelve million European immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Today, it’s estimated that 40% of the U.S. population is descended from these pioneers. My mother arrived with her parents, Christopher and Angela Serritella, in 1911. Like many immigrants of the era, they were so thrilled to be in beautiful America that they did whatever they thought proper to be good citizens. Grandfather Donato DiCarlo didn’t mind at all when an immigration official suggested Dan DeCarlo would sound more American. They happily learned English too.

My family came from Ricigliano, where practically everyone was named Serritella or related to someone who was. The town was inland from the beautiful seaside resort of Sorrento. It took monumental determination for people from Ricigliano to take the train to Naples for the Atlantic crossing, not knowing what they would find on the other side.

Many experienced discrimination, especially if their complexions were dark. During World War II thousands of American citizens with Italian names were rounded up and whisked away to detention areas. We don’t hear much about this anymore. Italians are not good complainers. Metropolitan Opera star Ezio Pinza was arrested and held for three months.

As a child I lived on Chicago’s South Monitor Avenue, across the street from Sam Giancana. We children didn’t really know who he was until years later. In 2013 New York’s Metropolitan Opera staged a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto” with a Frank Sinatra character as the libertine duke. During an intermission interview, one of the duke’s courtiers was introduced as Sam Giancana. I was the only one in the theater who laughed.

Not all Italians were opera stars. Some took to the dark side. The interesting thing about the Italian-American gangsters of old was they actually had a sense of loyalty and honor. They loved America. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump may need a refresher course in deal-making after the Senate on Thursday rejected his take-it-or-leave-it offer on immigration. He could start by recalling who’s President, and stop giving adviser Stephen Miller a policy veto.

The Senate considered four amendments Thursday, and all failed to reach the 60 vote threshold to open debate. But the bill backed by Mr. Trump did the worst with a mere 39 votes. The amendment with the best chance of passing was a bipartisan effort negotiated by Susan Collins (Maine) and Mike Rounds (South Dakota) that had the support of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. It included the President’s biggest priorities as well as concessions from both parties, but it fell six votes short of 60 after the White House issued a veto threat.

In a bizarre mid-morning statement, the Administration warned that the bipartisan amendment “would drastically change our national immigration policy for the worse by weakening border security and undercutting existing immigration law” and “would undermine the safety and security of American families and impede economic growth for American workers.”

Did anyone tell Mr. Trump what’s in that amendment? It legalizes as many as 1.8 million Dreamer immigrant adults who were brought here illegally as children on Mr. Trump’s terms. But it also goes a long way to meeting the President’s other priorities. That includes authorizing $25 billion over 10 years for Mr. Trump’s wall on the Mexico-U.S. border. That’s a huge political victory on one of his main campaign promises.