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IMMIGRATION

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Supreme Court Restores Trump’s Travel Ban Legal sanity returns to immigration and visa policy. Matthew Vadum

By on December 6th, 2017

The Supreme Court has allowed President Trump’s ban on travelers from Islamic terrorist-infested nations to take full effect, marking a huge victory for the rule of law, common sense, and U.S. national security.

“This a substantial victory for the safety and security of the American people,” U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said after the orders were handed down.

At 7 to 2, the vote Monday to lift two lower court stays hindering enforcement of Presidential Proclamation 9645 while several legal challenges inch their way through the judicial system, wasn’t even close. Unsurprisingly, leftist Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor voted to deny the Trump administration’s application to rescind the stays. As is its custom, the Supreme Court did not offer a rationale for its decision in the orders.

That the Supreme Court took this dramatic action suggests it may be ready to permanently rule that Trump’s efforts to protect Americans by regulating the flow of visitors to the United States from trouble spots around the world are lawful.

Critics of President Trump falsely claim the proclamation is a “Muslim ban,” even though it leaves out the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries on earth. And even if it did single out Muslims, it should still survive constitutional scrutiny, many legal experts say. The Constitution’s prohibition of so-called religious tests doesn’t apply to immigration policy, which is why no one raised a fuss during the Cold War when the U.S. set aside visas specifically for Soviet Jews escaping religious persecution.

“President Trump’s anti-Muslim prejudice is no secret,” whined Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “He has repeatedly confirmed it, including just last week on Twitter.”

While Jadwat droned on calling Trump and ordinary Americans who support his policies religious bigots and racists, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) offered a more reasonable appraisal of the high court’s actions.

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Encouraging a Migration Explosion By Robert Curry

By on December 5th, 2017

Are they doing it on purpose? Of course they are.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/04/encouraging-a-migration-explosion/

America’s progressive elite has disdain for Americans who refuse to embrace their globalist, “borderless world,” and anti-American agenda. Consequently, the progressives have decided to replace the American people with people better suited to help enact their ambitions.

For a glimpse into the future they have planned for you, watch the video below of a stroll through an American mall—not just any mall, but the Mall of America—where you can contemplate that future where it has already arrived.

Or consider what the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times had to say about the University of California/Janet Napolitano scandal. A state audit found UC President Janet Napolitano hiding a $175 million slush fund both from auditors and from the UC Board of Regents. But according to the Times what she did should be overlooked because of the good she has done: “She has been a strong leader for the university during troubled financial and political times, resisting efforts to weaken the university’s independence with a welcome level of toughness and dedicating herself to protecting the university’s undocumented students.” In other words, Napolitano deserves a pass because she protected university students in this country illegally.

Before her selection to head the University of California, Napolitano occupied the office of secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama Administration. In that role, she demonstrated her fitness for her new job at the university by working to enact the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and encouraged “prosecutorial discretion” (meaning they were free to break our immigration laws with impunity) for so-called “dreamers.”

Speaking of California, a jury in San Francisco last week acquitted the illegal alien who murdered Kate Steinle. His acquittal sent a clear message to people living in America illegally—and to American citizens, too. It shows that a particular class of noncitizens have privileges beyond those of mere American citizens. As an illegal, “forced” as the progressives say “to live in the shadows,” Steinle’s killer was an oppressed person. He therefore deserved the mercy of being permitted to live in a “sanctuary city” like San Francisco, even though he had been deported five times before, because he was oppressed by the “white privilege” of Americans like Steinle and her family.

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Supreme Court permits full enforcement of Trump travel ban

By on December 5th, 2017

Handing the White House a huge judicial victory, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of President Trump’s travel ban affecting residents of six majority-Muslim countries.

The justices said the policy can take full effect despite multiple legal challenges against it that haven’t yet made their way through the legal system.

The ban applies to people from Syria, Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

Lower courts had said people from those countries with a “bona fide” relationship with someone in the United States could not be prevented from entry.

Grandparents and cousins were among the relatives courts said could not be excluded.

The nine-member high court said in two one-page orders late Monday afternoon that lower court rulings that partly blocked the ban should be put on hold while appeals courts in Richmond, Va., and San Francisco take up the case.

Liberal-leaning Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have left the lower court orders in place.

The justices offered no explanation for their order, but the administration had said that blocking the full ban was causing “irreparable harm” because the policy is based on legitimate national security and foreign policy concerns.

Both courts are scheduled to hear arguments in those cases this week.

Both courts are also dealing with the issue on an accelerated basis, and the Supreme Court noted it expects those courts to reach decisions “with appropriate dispatch.”

Quick resolution by appellate courts would allow the Supreme Court to hear and decide the issue this term, by the end of June.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley called the ban “lawful and essential to protecting our homeland.”

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Europe’s Migrant Crisis: Millions Still to Come “African exodus of biblical proportions impossible to stop” by Soeren Kern

By on December 3rd, 2017

More than six million migrants are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe, according to a classified German government report leaked to Bild.

“Young people all have cellphones and they can see what’s happening in other parts of the world, and that acts as a magnet.” — Michael Møller, Director of the United Nations office in Geneva.

“The biggest migration movements are still ahead: Africa’s population will double in the next decades… Nigeria [will grow] to 400 million. In our digital age with the internet and mobile phones, everyone knows about our prosperity and lifestyle…. Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” — Gerd Müller, Germany’s Development Minister.

The African Union-European Union (AU-EU) summit, held in in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, on November 29-30, 2017, has ended in abject failure after the 55 African and 28 European leaders attending the event were unable to agree on even basic measures to prevent potentially tens of millions of African migrants from flooding Europe.

Despite high expectations and grand statements, the only concrete decision to come out of Abidjan was the promise to evacuate 3,800 African migrants stranded in Libya.

More than six million migrants are waiting in countries around the Mediterranean to cross into Europe, according to a classified German government report leaked to Bild. The report said that one million people are waiting in Libya; another one million are waiting in Egypt, 720,000 in Jordan, 430,000 in Algeria, 160,000 in Tunisia, and 50,000 in Morocco. More than three million others who are waiting in Turkey are currently prevented from crossing into Europe by the EU’s migrant deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

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Roger Franklin A Case for Immigration Reform

By on November 27th, 2017

Official policy facilitated the importing of a teenage bride destined for an arranged marriage and, ultimately, the death by a mother’s hand of her 14-month-old daughter. Why, Minister Dutton, is the trade in chattel brides permitted while applicants who might do much for the country get a hard time?

In April, 2016, Sofina Nikat took 14-month-old daughter Sanaya Sahib for a walk in a Melbourne park, smothered her by the banks of a creek and tipped the little corpse into the water, subsequently informing police the infant had been abducted by a drunk of African appearance. Three days later under police questioning, the mother finally conceded her “shoeless African” did not exist and admitted it was she who had killed her toddler. Charged initially with murder, later downgraded to the offence of infanticide, Ms Nikat was yesterday sentenced by Justice Lex Lasry, who took note of the 529 days she had been held pending trial. Concluding that was quite enough time behind bars, he imposed a year of community service and turned her free.

Reaction on Melbourne talkback radio was swift and much of it involved the accusation that Justice Lasry is soft on infanticide. This seems remarkably unfair to the judge, as the maximum penalty for killing a baby in Victoria is a mere five years and, given Ms Nikat’s lengthy stretch on remand, she would not have served much more time even if the full weight of the law had been brought to bear. Worth noting is that Justice Lasry last year presided at the trial of a woman who drowned three of her children after driving an SUV into a pond. He gave her 26 years.

What seems to have been so far ignored in the Nikat matter is the light it shines on this nation’s immigration policies. Consider

Raised in Fiji, 18-year-old Ms Nikat was shipped to Australia as the chattel in an arranged marriage.

Questions: Is an arranged marriage acceptable grounds for seeking and obtaining residence in Australia? The ABC seems to think such unions represent you-beaut cultural enrichment, but is this Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s view? If not, would he deem it a good idea to institute a rigorous screening process?

Observation: A Singapore-born journalist of Quadrant Online’s acquaintance, a woman with several degrees, including one from Oxford, had to jump through hoops to obtain even short-term Australian residency, despite a job offer from News Corp. The process cost her a large sum for lawyers and fees which, after two years, she was expected to repeat in order to stay on the right side of the law. She chose instead to leave and now works for the New York Times. Smart, industrious and never likely to be a charge on the public purse, Australia has lost her. Perhaps, had she agreed to an arranged marriage, she would still be here — at considerably less cost to herself and the nation’s future productivity.

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Why America Can’t Lower Child-Poverty Rates Allowing millions of low-skilled immigrants into the U.S. every year swells the ranks of the poor. Kay S. Hymowitz

By on November 26th, 2017

Articles about America’s high levels of child poverty are a media evergreen. Here’s a typical entry, courtesy of the New York Times’s Eduardo Porter: “The percentage of children who are poor is more than three times as high in the United States as it is in Norway or the Netherlands. America has a larger proportion of poor children than Russia.” That’s right: Russia.

Outrageous as they seem, the assertions are true—at least in the sense that they line up with official statistics from government agencies and reputable nongovernmental organizations like the OECD and UNICEF. International comparisons of the sort that Porter makes, though, should be accompanied by a forest of asterisks. Data limitations, varying definitions of poverty, and other wonky problems are rampant in these discussions.

The lousy child-poverty numbers should come with another qualifying asterisk, pointing to a very American reality. Before Europe’s recent migration crisis, the United States was the only developed country consistently to import millions of very poor, low-skilled families, from some of the most destitute places on earth—especially from undeveloped areas of Latin America—into its communities, schools, and hospitals. Let’s just say that Russia doesn’t care to do this—and, until recently, Norway and the Netherlands didn’t, either. Both policymakers and pundits prefer silence on the relationship between America’s immigration system and poverty, and it’s easy to see why. The subject pushes us headlong into the sort of wrenching trade-offs that politicians and advocates prefer to avoid. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: you can allow mass low-skilled immigration, which many on the left and the right—and probably most poverty mavens—consider humane and quintessentially American. But if you do, pursuing the equally humane goal of substantially reducing child poverty becomes a lot harder.

In 1964, the federal government settled on a standard definition of poverty: an income less than three times the value of a hypothetical basic food basket. (That approach has its flaws, but it’s the measure used in the United States, so we’ll stick with it.) Back then, close to 23 percent of American kids were poor. With the important exception of the years between 1999 and 2007—following the introduction of welfare reform in 1996—when it declined to 16 percent, child poverty has bounced within three points of 20 percent since 1980. Currently, about 18 percent of kids are below the poverty line, amounting to 13,250,000 children. Other Anglo countries have lower child-poverty rates: the OECD puts Canada’s at 15 percent, with the United Kingdom and Australia lower still, between 11 percent and 13 percent. The lowest levels of all—under 10 percent—are found in the Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Finland.

How does immigration affect those post-1964 American child-poverty figures? Until 1980, it didn’t. The 1924 Immigration Act sharply reduced the number of immigrants from poorer Eastern European and southern countries, and it altogether banned Asians. (Mexicans, who had come to the U.S. as temporary agricultural workers and generally returned to their home country, weren’t imagined as potential citizens and thus were not subject to restrictive quotas.) The relatively small number of immigrants settling in the U.S. tended to be from affluent nations and had commensurate skills. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 1970, immigrant children were less likely to be poor than were the children of native-born Americans.

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Sanctuary Cities and Judicial Madness Judge blocks Trump’s effort to end sanctuary cities — the day after a border patrol agent is bludgeoned to death. Michael Cutler

By on November 24th, 2017

On Sunday, November 19, 2017 two United States Border Patrol agents were attacked and one of the agents, identified as 36 year-old Rogelio Martinez, died of massive injuries to his head and body, possibly caused by rocks. His partner, who has not yet been identified, was grievously injured but is expected to survive.

On November 20th CBS News and the Associated Press jointly reported on the attack which reportedly occurred about 110 miles southeast of El Paso Texas and 30 miles from the U.S. / Mexican border.

El Paso is directly across the U.S./Mexican border from Ciudad Juarez, one of the most violent cities in Mexico and has become synonymous with the deadly drug trade.

Meanwhile even as news reports about the deadly attack on members of the United States Border Patrol were being made public, on November 20, 2017 San Diego-Union Tribune reported, “Judge permanently blocks Trump order that cut funding to sanctuary cities.”

That disheartening and infuriating report began with this excerpt:

A federal judge has permanently blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to cut funding from cities that limit cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities.

U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick issued the ruling on Monday in lawsuits brought by two California counties, San Francisco and Santa Clara. Orrick said Trump cannot set new conditions on spending approved by Congress.

There is a clear nexus to these two events that has not been covered in the news.

Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez was killed because he and his seriously injured partner were performing their sworn duties, protecting America and America by securing our dangerous border.

The individuals who attacked those valiant agents escaped and, for all we know, are presently hiding out in a city in the United States. It is likely that they would feel most secure in a Sanctuary City that will happily ignore that they are illegally present in the United States.

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Death on the Border Agent Rogelio Martinez sought “to defend my country from terrorists.” Lloyd Billingsley

By on November 22nd, 2017

United States Border Patrol agent Rogelio Martinez knew his job was dangerous, but as Aileen Flores noted in the El Paso Times, the four-year veteran loved his work. “Dad, it’s the job I like,” Rogelio would tell his father José Martinez. “I want to defend my country from terrorists … I want to prevent terrorists and drugs from coming into the country.”

Rogelio Martinez, 36, had been planning a Sunday home gathering to watch the New England Patriots play the Oakland Raiders in Mexico City. Rogelio never made it home because, as José told the Times, his son’s head had been “destroyed.”

Martinez was dead and another agent in serious condition. What should have been a festive occasion, Flores wrote, “instead turned into a day of mourning filled with disbelief, sadness and heartache.” Based on past cases, the death of agent Martinez will not elicit much lamentation from the Mexican government and its American collaborators, particularly on campus.

In March of 1995 U.S. Border Patrol agent Luis Santiago fell to his death while pursuing illegals. Voz Fronteriza, an officially recognized student publication at the University of California at San Diego, responded with “Death of a Migra Pig,” a page-one editorial that celebrated both the death of Santiago and called for the killing of federal agents.

“We’re glad this pig died, he deserved to die. All Migra pigs deserve death,” said the officially funded UCSD publication. “We do not mourn the death of Santiago, instead we welcome it. Yet it is too bad that more Migra pigs didn’t die with him. . . All of the Migra pigs should be killed, every single one. There are no good Migra agents; the only good one is a dead one.”

In 1994, Voz Fronteriza received $6,000 from UC student activity funds and many of its writers are members of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, which refers to the American Southwest as “occupied Mexico.” California attorney general Xavier Becerra, a former congressman once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate, boasts of his involvement with the militant group.

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Border agent killed, another wounded at Texas border By Rick Moran

By on November 20th, 2017

A border patrol agent was murdered in the Big Bend sector of the US-Mexican border yesterday. His partner was severely injured.

Agent Rogelio Martinez, 36,died of injuries while responding to reports of “activity” near Interstate 10 in the Van Horn Station area. His unidentified partner was taken to an area hospital where his condition is listed as serious.

Martinez is the second agent killed this year.

Fox News:

President Trump pushed the need for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall Sunday night following the incident, tweeting: “Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!”

Elaine Duke, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, released a statement Sunday calling Martinez’s death a “tragic event.”

“Earlier this morning, I was notified that Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez died as a result of serious injuries suffered while on patrol in the Big Bend Sector of our southern border in Texas. Agent Martinez was responding to activity while on patrol with another agent, who was also seriously injured,” the statement read.

“We are fully supporting the ongoing investigation to determine the cause of this tragic event. On behalf of the quarter of a million frontline officers and agents of DHS, my thoughts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Agent Martinez and to the agent who is in serious condition.”

Records show the Big Bend sector of the border has been relatively quiet:

Border Patrol records show that Big Bend accounted for about 1 percent of the more than 61,000 apprehensions agents made along the Southwest border between October 2016 and May 2017.

The region’s mountains and the Rio Grande make it a difficult area for people to cross illegally into the U.S. from Mexico.

A recent audit by the GAO showed that the border patrol is short about 2000 agents and is losing them faster than they are being hired.

More than 900 agents leave each year on average but the Border Patrol only hires an average of 523 a year, the Government Accountability Office said in a broad survey of staffing and deployment challenges at the key border law enforcement agency.

The law requires the agency to have a minimum of 21,370 agents on board, but it had just 19,500 agents as of May.

That’s an even bigger problem when stacked up against President Trump’s call for hiring 5,000 more agents, to reach a workforce of 26,370.

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More Than 200 Arrested in MS-13 Crackdown ICE official said the six-week operation targeted the gang’s most dangerous members By Del Quentin Wilber

By on November 18th, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/more-than-200-arrested-in-ms-13-crackdown-1510859147?mod=trending_now_2 Law enforcement authorities arrested more than 200 suspected members and associates of MS-13 during a recent six-week operation targeting the violent street gang across the U.S., the Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday. Officials said federal agents and local police arrested 93 alleged MS-13 members and associates on federal or state charges that ranged […]

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