RUTHFULLY YOURS

Republicans just blew up Democratic hopes for using DACA for leverage in shutdown talks. Both House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and White House Legislative Director Marc Short confirmed that there would be no DACA negotiations while the government remained without funding.

Politico:

“I think it’s more difficult to get any agreement on DACA in a shutdown,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy heading into a meeting with GOP leaders Saturday. He was referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, shielding hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children from deportation, known as Dreamers.

White House Legislative Director Marc Short, who attended a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, echoed that stance.

“I think the administration’s position is that as soon as they reopen the government, we’ll resume negotiations on DACA,” Short told reporters. “It’s hard to negotiate on that when they’re keeping our border agents unpaid, our troops unpaid, not paying for American services.”

Trump, who canceled a weekend trip to Florida to celebrate his first anniversary in office, spoke with Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Saturday morning, aides said.

House Republicans scoffed at a tentative framework to reopen the government being discussed by a bipartisan group of senators.

Under the proposal — conceived by GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake — Senate Democrats would agree to re-open the government and fund agencies until Feb. 8. In exchange, they would secure a vote on a bipartisan Dreamers bill. While McConnell signaled that he might go along, Senate Democrats also wanted a commitment from Ryan to include the bill in must-pass legislation in the House.

But McConnell would not agree to that demand, senators said, because he cannot bind the House to a Senate deal.

And Ryan insisted that the Senate needed to approve the House bill to fund the government until Feb. 16 as a starting point for any broader agreement.

“We were not party to any negotiations, and our only message to the Senate all day yesterday was pass our bill to keep the government open,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokeswoman, said in a statement. “The government shut down because Senate Democrats decided to hold the entire federal government and children’s health insurance hostage. It’s pretty straight forward.”

Who really isn’t sick to death of people being ungrateful nitpicks who cannot say thank you for all the benisons bestowed by this president, no matter his alleged blue tongue? So what if he said one word you don’t like?

I have been to Haiti, the poorest of all the nations in this hemisphere. I have been to El Salvador, a corrupt, ungovernable country with rampant crime and gangs. I have been to over ten countries in Africa, none of them star performers in the GDP and modern conveniences and mindset sweepstakes.

They are indeed horrible places, where corruption and citizens’ fear are the order of the day, where their alleged governments are rife with unloving, greedy, small-minded, and power-lusting so-called leaders.

These are countries whose human products are not, in the main, people we need here – not because they are this shade or that, but because their average standard of skills, education, integrity, and civic virtue is at tremendous variance from what we have for 241 years essayed to raise and keep elevated.

We are not, in the main, uncharitable. But if your home comfortably seats twenty, if you push the limits of your beds, sofas, carpeting and easy chairs, what happens when an unexpected troupe of fifty more uninvited decide you have a real nice view, and they like your fixin’s?

Ever had a party? The work of the party isn’t so much the prep and the cooking and shopping for comestibles and beverages. The real angst of the party is the clean-up. The guests rarely stick around for the empties and no-ashtray-won’t-stop-their-smoking butts, the wrappers and pizza crusts, or the half-eaten messes on the cake trays.

That’s the U.S. But we aren’t a night-and-day party, though the uninvited “guests” keep slavering after our table, sleeping on the new couch covers, using up the toilet tissue, leaving an unidentifiable restroom aroma, and wolfing down the leftovers you’d hoped to serve your spouse the next day.

But even if the president did drop that one word, a word and a concept, I wager, that 99% of regular folks in this country use, though they will deny it strenuously – we are not born yesterday – he was not stating a “racist” sentiment. He was being factual. These are abysmal states that create citizens who are not prizes we need here.

Ironically, when I professored in the People’s Republic of China, my very best students asked me for letters of recommendation so they could apply to the U.S. for graduate school in their chosen fields. I was delighted to write these letters. The whey-faced PRC government, however, had other ideas. They turned down all applicants: why would China choose to release its foremost scholars and most promising professionals to help the United States?

And why, then, it follows, do we need to import a cadre of the low in terms of skills and smarts, longevity, and overall health to lower our achievement, our life stats, our job numbers? What sane country does that? And don’t give us those anecdotal tales of one Ph.D. subliming his way into nuclear physics or one earnest striver finishing Johns Hopkins with his specialty of forensic anthropology.

Anecdotes are cute. They mean close to nothing in the broader picture of overall excellence. We all know this, even if we’re Democrats and learn to elide common sense whenever at all possible.

But no one is stopping these undaunted invaders from many countries. (OTMs means Other Than Mexicans, a handy capsule reminder that Central and South America are not the sole-source contributors to our festering Hoovervilles of undocumenteds and skill-frees.)

When I taught in China, I had about 1,000 students among the four colleges at which I was privileged to teach. All of them, all my college students, male and female, wanted to come to live here.

Many Democrats see their party as the working man’s choice. They want to soften capitalism’s rougher edges, humanize big industry, and give the average American a fighting chance. One may (and should) disagree with their methods, but their intentions are good and their beliefs sincere.

That is not how the party elites feel. Their mantra is “open trade and open borders,” as Hillary Clinton told Wall Street bankers in a private speech. Recall how the Democrats supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” deal that would have gutted American industries. And it is Democrats who oppose President Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration, which hurts America’s poor.

The Democrats don’t care about American workers. They care about winning elections.

At this point, the chorus of “progressive” rhetoric reaches a fever pitch. “But we need immigrants to support the welfare state! We need immigrants to pay for Social Security!” Saying it does not make it so.

In truth, immigration is destroying the welfare state, in America and throughout the West. This is happening because immigrants receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Of course, this is not true for every immigrant – some never collect government handouts – but it is true for the overall immigrant population. Studies from across the Western world prove this point.

A recent and comprehensive study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that although immigration is (theoretically) revenue-neutral in America, not all immigrants are created equal. Half of all immigrants actually receive more in government assistance than they pay in taxes, but thankfully, they are balanced out by the other half. Specifically, immigrants who came to America for family reasons, or arrived as refugees, cost a net present value of $170,000.

President Trump’s latest obloquy—calling a number of countries “shitholes” and asking why we are expected to accept their immigrants—is offensive for all the reasons you’ve probably heard: it’s insulting, racially divisive, callous, and so on. The United States has welcomed immigrants from various “shithole” countries for much of its history. Those schleppers worked, sweated, and saved, started businesses, paid taxes, and asked God to bless America.

If only that was all there was to it. As is so often case in this president’s administration, noxious wording is distracting from a serious public-policy debate. The truth is that an “hourglass,” low-mobility, big-government economy presents a new set of questions about immigration policy. Today’s immigrants face a different economic reality from their predecessors.

During the mass migration that took place in the period between 1850 and 1930, more than 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many were uneducated and unskilled people from countries that were largely shitholes. Immigrants from nineteenth-century Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Austro-Hungarian, Greece, even the now-flush Scandinavian countries, were escaping poor, stagnant places where the future promised more of the same.

Poverty and lack of skills didn’t stop newcomers from finding work because there was plenty of it—on the piers of New York and Philadelphia, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest, and in the factories that were spreading to cities all over the country. In 1914, over 70 percent of the factory workers at Ford Motor Company were foreign-born. Immigrants and their children were over half of all of American manufacturing workers in 1920. New technologies and a swelling population also meant more jobs for construction and transportation workers. The pre–World War II industrial economy, sociologists Roger Waldinger and Joel Perlman have written, offered a “range of blue collar opportunities” for immigrants and their children.

Today’s unskilled immigrants are not so lucky. Automation and offshoring to Third World countries have seriously eroded the number of blue-collar jobs. Manufacturing positions plummeted from 19.4 million in 1979 to 11.5 million in 2010, even as immigrants were adding millions to the population of job seekers. In 1970, blue-collar jobs were 31.2 percent of total nonfarm employment. By 2016, their share had fallen to 13.6 percent of total employment. Today’s immigrants are more likely to be hotel workers, agricultural hands, bussers, janitors, and hospital orderlies. They may be earning more than they could have in their home countries, but their wages—assuming they work full-time—are enough only to keep them a notch or two above the poverty line in the United States. Adding to their troubles is frequently a lack of benefits, unreliable hours, and little chance for moving up the income ladder.

With President Trump’s blessing, various factions within the Republican Party are cracking the door open to an amnesty deal for illegal immigrants currently enrolled in the unlawful Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Last week, Reps. Bob Goodlatte, Michael McCaul, Raul Labrador and Martha McSally introduced a relatively narrow and targeted amnesty for current DACA recipients that would come alongside increased border security, robust internal enforcement, and 21st-century reforms to our nation’s legal immigration system called the Securing America’s Future Act.

To be clear, the Goodlatte bill does contain amnesty. Amnesty, as The Heritage Foundation explained in 2013, “comes in many forms, but in all its variations, it … treats law-breaking aliens better than law-following aliens.” Conservatives have rightly opposed amnesty in the past as a failed policy that is anathema to the rule of law, fundamentally unfair to Americans and would-be legal immigrants, and a magnet that attracts more illegal immigration in the future. Those critiques remain as true today as they have been in the past.

Given the unique political circumstances and the legal quagmire created by former President Obama’s unlawful actions, many congressional conservatives are contemplating how best to limit the scope of an amnesty and thus its damage, while also securing important changes to address security, protect sovereignty and enhance economic competitiveness. The shift is exemplified by Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker and House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows urging the House to vote on the Securing America’s Future Act.

So why are some House conservatives — and many of their Senate colleagues — opening the door to amnesty?

First, the Goodlatte amnesty provision is extremely narrow. It would only allow illegal immigrants who currently have “deferred action on the basis of being brought to the U.S. as minors [to] get a 3-year renewable legal status allowing them to work and travel overseas.” In other words, there would be no permanent status or path to citizenship. And while the Pew Research Center estimated 1.1 million illegal immigrants were eligible for DACA in 2012, only 790,000 ultimately took advantage of the program and fewer than 690,000 remain in it. That number is about 94 percent smaller than the Bush- and Obama-era amnesty proposals, which would have resulted in upward of 11 million illegal immigrants being eligible for one of the greatest gifts imaginable: American citizenship.

Last winter, the local media was touting Imam Abdullah Khadra as a victim of President Trump’s travel ban. Khadra, a Syrian, was here on a religious worker visa and was applying for political asylum.

The refugee Imam living in North Carolina called Trump’s move, “absolutely inhumane and ridiculous.”

Jewish leftists agreed. Lucy Dinner, the clergywoman from Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, denounced “singling out an entire group of people based on their faith.” Lucy Dinner had previously signed a letter in support of anti-Israel activism by Eric and Jennifer Solomon. Eric Solomon was affiliated with the anti-Israel hate group, T’ruah, and Jenny Solomon ran controversial educational programs at the NC Hillel.

But the local media’s favorite Syrian refugee was soon caught preaching the murder of Jews.

Cary and Islam had previously been in the news when a heavily armed Muslim convert had been arrested last year by the FBI over a terror threat. “For too long the kuffar [non-Muslims] have spit in our faces and trampled our rights. This cannot continue. I cannot speak of anything. Say your dua [prayers], sleep, and watch the news tomorrow. It will only be the beginning,” he had warned.

But now an Islamic Association of Cary figure had upstaged him with his own rant.

In his sermon, Imam Khadra declared that all of Israel was “Muslim land” and would be reclaimed by Muslims. “The question is: Will you be among those who will contribute to regaining it or not?” he asked.

If his congregation was under the improbable impression that he meant regaining it through diplomacy and negotiations, the Syrian refugee went on to quote a notorious genocidal Islamic hadith.

“The Prophet Muhammad gave us the glad tidings that at the End of Time, we will fight those Jews until the rocks and the trees will speak: Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me,” the Imam declared.

Three weeks after college, I flew to Senegal, West Africa, to run a community center in a rural town. Life was placid, with no danger, except to your health. That danger was considerable, because it was, in the words of the Peace Corps doctor, “a fecalized environment.”

In plain English: s— is everywhere. People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water. He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water. Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country. Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral. The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen. I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole. Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures’ terms. But they are not our terms. The excrement is the least of it. Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal. In fact, I was euphoric. I quickly made friends and had an adopted family. I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man. People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us. The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese. How could they be? Their reality is totally different. You can’t understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

The Democrats used to be the party of the working class: they supported trade unions and believed in the welfare state. Their goal was to smoothe capitalism’s rougher edges, to humanize modern industrialism, and to give the common man a fair shake. One may find fault with their methods, but their stated goals were laudable and most of them were sincere in their beliefs.

Fast forward to 2018. The Democrats are the party of the elites. Their new mantra is “open trade and open borders,” as Hillary Clinton told Wall Street bankers in a private speech. Remember, it was the Democrats who supported President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a “free trade” deal that would have gutted American industries. And it is Democrats who currently oppose President Trump’s attempts to stop illegal immigration, which hurts America’s poor.

The Democrats don’t care about American workers. They care about winning elections.

At this point, the chorus of “progressive” rhetoric reaches fever pitch: “but we need immigrants to support the welfare state,” they say—”we need immigrants to pay for our pensions and healthcare!” But saying it does not make it so.

In truth, immigration is destroying the welfare state, in America and throughout the West. Here’s how:

Mass immigration destroys the welfare state because immigrants receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. This is not true for every immigrant—some never collect government handouts—but it is true for the overall immigrant population. Studies from across the Western world prove this point.