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Has Trump Helped Curb Illegal Immigration?
No one knows how many illegal immigrants (a catch-all term here for false asylees, visa overstays, border sneaks, the general undocumented, and the like) are in the United States, but various studies suggest it is a large number, maybe 18.6 million people, close to 6 percent of the entire population of the United States. For many years we had no mechanisms to count them, and in many instances the government did not really want to know. For example, despite issuing as many as 11 million visas a year, the State Department has avoided any comprehensive analysis on how many people overstay or misuse their visas as feedback to guide future decisions, claiming in a bureaucratic tussle the task belongs to DHS and isn’t any of their business. Even rudimentary immigration exit controls at airports, near standard world-wide, have only recently been deployed in the U.S. by DHS.
So any measurement of Trump’s attempts to lower illegal immigration begin with current, not historical, numbers. The U.S. Border Patrol recorded about 237,000 migrant “encounters” at the southern border in FY 2025, down from more than 1.5 million in FY 2024 and more than two million annually during the Biden peak years of 2022–2023. ICE reached a milestone this year of more than 10,000 foreign gang members arrested, many at the border. There are now more Border Patrol agents than any other time in the Patrol’s 102-year history. At the same time, Trump did away with the CBP One app which allowed would-be asylum seekers to begin the process by smart phone app even before they reached U.S. soil. Trump also restricted asylum processing and toughened standards against widespread fraud, even seeking to punish an American immigration attorney who (allegedly) filed false asylum applications, a rare Federal action.
Trump expanded expedited deportations and removals, reinstated tougher ICE deterrence policies and arrests, and made changes to the State Department visa-issuing system abroad to include new and higher fees and bond deposits, fewer visa posts issuing visas at all in fraud-plagued Africa, and stopped immigrant and non-immigrant visa issuance entirely in countries that do not cooperate with the U.S. on deportations and fraud prevention.
ICE arrests rose from a long-term average of roughly 350 per day to as many as 1,300 per day, increasing more than three times compared with the final year of the Biden administration. Deportations from within the United States increased by roughly 4.6 times during the first nine months of Trump’s second term. The use of third countries to accept deportees when their home country refuses to do so has increased significantly, with a new office at the State Department set up just to handle the details. Efforts to get illegals to self-deport have yielded almost 90,000 voluntary departures. ICE detention populations increased substantially, reaching nearly 70,000 detainees at one point, compared with roughly 39,000 when Trump returned to office. Congress also approved tens of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement and detention operations through 2029. Trump toughened up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become citizens. The Justice Department launched legal challenges in states which allow illegal alien college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for legal in-state residents. Trump deincentivized working illegally in the United States while at the same time cutting into money laundering by Mexican and other drug cartels with a 3.5 percent remittance fee on the often untaxed money sent by aliens in the U.S. to their home country.
The administration’s changes were reinforced by two recent Supreme Court victories which allow Trump to regain substantial authority managing the border. In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado the Court ruled an undocumented person must be physically present in the United States to make an asylum claim. Asylum seekers who are stopped on the other side of the border (i.e., in Mexico, not actually admitted to America) are not “present” in the United States. If treated as inside the country as under Biden, despite being outside it, these individuals would be allowed to enter the U.S. and remain for years, with work permits, while their asylum claims pended. The eventual formal asylum approval rate was as low as 15 percent, even under Obama and Biden judges, and many asylum seekers simply disappeared into the United States as permanent illegals rather than face refusal and deportation. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found the immigration court system does not systematically track hearing attendance anyway, making it impossible to produce a real “no-show rate.”
The Supreme Court also gave DHS a powerful new tool in Mullin v. Doe, upholding the right of the administration to remove Temporary Protection Status (TPS) from more than 356,000 Syrians and Haitians now in the U.S. Congress created TPS in 1990 to allow temporary legal status and work authorization to nationals of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other transient conditions that make safe return impossible. With TPS, Congress intended the emphasis to be on “temporary.” The alien would not be expected to return home in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, but was expected to return home as soon as possible. TPS as created by Congress never provided a path to permanent residency or citizenship. Yet hundreds of thousands of aliens stayed in the U.S. indefinitely under TPS, often vying for other immigration statuses like asylum when available. Many Haitians affected by the new Supreme Court ruling have been in the U.S. in “temporary” status since 2010, many Syrians since 2012. What was once intended as a temporary humanitarian gesture had been hacked into a new de facto permanent immigration status. The new Court ruling allows TPS to return to its original function. Elsewhere, Trump also seeks to end TPS for people, some 1.3 million of them, from 13 out of 17 countries holding the designation when Joe Biden left office. One TPS designation, for Somalis, has been in place for 35 years.
At the same time, Trump deportations, arrests, and detentions do continue to face significant legal and political constraints. This shows how deeply entrenched illegal immigration is in our society, and how easily it can be made into an emotional and political football. The article you are reading now, with its statistics about ICE enforcement growing, might be seen by The Atlantic as a call to arms against fascism. At The American Conservative, many of the same government actions are likely to get a nod of approval. Progressives are driven by the immigration myth that because their great, great grandpa immigrated to the U.S. from some eastern European shtetl that America is obligated forever to allow near-unfettered immigration. Others believe it is the right of any person living under less-than-ideal circumstances anywhere in the world to “have a better life” in the U.S., ignoring that every other nation instead tries to vigorously control its borders and interior with metered immigration.
Lastly, so much of the opposition to Trump’s immigration changes is simplistic Trump hatred. Reasonable Trader Joe-type suburban people are willing to suck tear gas and engage in street fights with armed Federal law enforcement over points of immigration law they had not heard of a few years ago. One resistor was just sentenced to 100 years in jail for trying to murder an officer in the midst of an armed assault on an ICE facility. The mayor of New York, unaware apparently of the importance of the Rule of Law in America, vows to not enforce a recent Supreme Court decision ruling because he feels it is anti-immigrant. These people’s apparent willingness to risk death or imprisonment over the fate of illegal aliens they do not even know is irrational. What they see as authoritarianism is simply the enforcement for the first time of laws on the books for decades. They don’t see immigration change in terms of something that might possibly help America, only in some schadenfreudian calculus that makes it seem Trump is losing a battle against them. Their way of thinking blocks any sensible discussion of immigration, one that ultimately could result in reforms to the law. Policies that might once have been debated on their merits are now interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of “resistance.” It is all America’s loss as chaos replaces democracy in the streets.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Morality, Responsibility, and Immigration
Imagine my wife and me coming to the realization we just can’t give our kids the safe, happy life in America all children deserve as a human right. The health care is lousy and expensive. The neighborhood school is full of drugs and gangs, and the kids don’t learn much there anyway. What can we do?
We’ve never been to Switzerland but we heard it offers opportunities. We just want a better life for our kids. So we hire someone who knows how to wrangle kids into Switzerland (a sleazy travel agent, coyote guide, human smuggler) and send our two off to enter there against the law and live with a paid third party, maybe with some distant relative, maybe on their own. They don’t speak any local languages but some do-gooder enrolls them in a public school with free meals who then has to figure out what to do with them. We pay no taxes for all this, of course. Then Switzerland, under a new government, sends them home to live with their own parents in their home country where they speak their native language and practice their native religion and culture in ways not easily accessible in Switzerland.
Sorry to single Switzerland out, because immigration restrictions are not unique to the Swiss. All countries have borders. They have to so they can make decisions about who can enter their country and who can become a citizen. No non-failed state allows people to simply move in. Every border globally is designed to place a barrier in between those allowed and those who are not. Some countries do not want immigrants, some choose immigrants by job skills, some by religious beliefs, some seemingly just because unaccompanied children still too young to work as drug mules or prostitutes were smuggled over the border by coyotes.
A new analysis by the Brookings Institute says more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration. The findings point to family separations that far eclipse those of Trump I under its “zero tolerance” policy, when about 5,500 children were removed from their parents. The numbers get a little fuzzy; today’s 100k kids also include American Citizen children scooped up accidentally when their illegal parents are arrested, while the 5k number represent all foreign children taken into custody immediately after crossing the southern border and not technically deported. No matter, because the bottom line, that the U.S. takes children into temporary custody and punishes them for their parents’ actions as part of enforcing long-standing immigration law, remain valid.
Most of these kids are soon just set adrift in America when their parents get arrested. U.S. law gives illegal parents a choice of being removed with their children back to their old country or placing their U.S.-born children with a designee in America. That can literally be anyone, and there is no oversight.
“We found that remarkably few end up in foster care — children stay with friends and family who don’t have a legal obligation to care for these children,” said one study. Children are often left in the care of older siblings or other immigrant families already grappling with immigration status. These “guardians” usually lack any legal basis to make educational or medical decisions for the left-behinds, so those decisions just are not made. This is the on-the-ground immoral, unChristian, system the Democrats blame on the cruel policies of the Trump administration. The unspoken about part is that the U.S. has practiced such a policy long before Trump. About 7,600 unaccompanied minors were deported between fiscal years 2012–2015 under the Obama administration. During that same period, Obama deported some 171,000 unaccompanied children at the border, most of whom arrived with smugglers, not parents.
The issue of what is best to do with children in our immigration system is complex. If your sense of right and wrong relies at all on the numbers, the numbers are likely lying to you. Nobody really wants the truth here, because it confuses their beliefs on what is right and wrong on immigration.
One thing that is clear is there is no sense that parents bear any responsibility for what happens to their children once those kids cross illegally into the U.S. with a smuggler or are born in the U.S. to out-of-status parents who know they are subject to deportation at any time. There is no responsibility placed on employers who exploit illegal workers and act as a magnet to draw them and their families to the United States. There is no responsibility to a broken Biden asylum system (now on pause under Trump) that brought illegals to America knowing they could live here indefinitely while they waited for their mostly bogus cases to be heard (“Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for an asylum claim). And who is responsible for the children left behind to be taken in by nearly anyone, a sibling, a relative, or God help us all, a clever pedophile?
The morality of child deportation sits at the intersection of law, sovereignty, and human rights. When immigration enforcement involves children, many too young to understand the systems acting upon them, the moral questions become far more difficult than the legal ones. A society may have the legal right to deport children or deport families with children, but the deeper question is whether exercising that right is ethically justified, and under what circumstances. But if we just ignore immigration laws, basically America’s policy for the last few decades, the law itself becomes arbitrary and ultimately not reasonably enforced against anyone. This leads to hundreds of thousands of kids being sent to the U.S. via human traffickers, a dangerous and thus immoral act in itself.
The peak year for legal immigration to America was 1907. Your great-grandfather entered a rapidly industrializing nation desperate for workers with no time to waste deporting kids. But a humane immigration system cannot be built solely on outrage over modern enforcement or nostalgia for Ellis Island. Enforcing the law harms children, while failing to enforce the law incentivizes more dangerous migration involving children. Any serious immigration policy must confront both realities at the same time. The United States does not merely need harsher enforcement. We need a 21st century asylum and immigration policy. The blame lies there, not on soon another new administration hoping something better just comes along.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Denmark’s Immigration Backlash: Lessons for America
What happens when a country with a long history of tolerance toward immigration and refugees has had enough? What happens when false asylum claims come to predominate, when immigrants resist assimilation? What happens when left-leaning politicians go too far in protecting the rights of immigrants and not far enough in assuring the rights of citizens?
You get Denmark. These are the real lessons for America in what happened to immigration and asylum policy there, showing immigration is a governance problem, not a moral abstraction.
Between 2019 and 2023, Denmark ushered in what is known domestically as the paradigm shift (paradigmeskiftet.) The policy framework prioritized return of asylees and temporary rather than permanent protection when asylum was granted. In 2021, Denmark became the first EU country to revoke Syrian refugees’ residency by claiming parts of Syria were safe to return to. The Danish reframed the debate and caused a rethinking of mass immigration into western Europe.
For years, Denmark was considered the European Union’s black sheep of migration policy. In the aftermath of the 2015-2016 Syrian migration crisis (driven in large part by the Obama administration’s misdeeds in that country), Denmark adopted increasingly restrictive rules to deter arrivals. The key event was in 2019, when Denmark approved its paradigm shift law that made temporary protection for refugees the new norm. Permanent residence was eventually still available, but subject to, among other criteria, full-time, stable employment. By limiting the duration of asylum (in the U.S. and most of Europe, a grant of asylum is indefinite) Danish authorities made it easier to check whether the grounds of protection were still applicable and, if not, whether deportation was feasible. Residence permits of hundreds of Syrian refugees were revoked. In 2021, Denmark signed a memo of understanding with Rwanda, under which the Danes would transfer asylum seekers to a reception centre in the African nation to wait for their applications, a kind of outsourcing strategy. Denmark later backed away from the plan under intense outside criticism.
These changes were justified by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, who said mass immigration exerts undue pressure on the welfare state, particularly harming low-income and low-skilled Danes. “For me, it is becoming increasingly clear that the price of unregulated globalization, mass immigration… is paid for by the lower classes,” she stated. “You cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” she added in a more recent interview. Other Danish officials say their approach is necessary to protect the welfare system and ensure that benefits are only being offered to residents who fully contribute to tax revenue and other social structures.
Changes to the asylum process were not the only measures a Denmark that had had enough put into place. One of the most controversial was Asset Confiscation (“Jewelry Law”) under which Danish authorities can seize valuables, cash, and jewelry from refugees entering the country. Used only in a few dozen cases to date, it allows police to confiscate cash and valuables worth more than about $1500 from arriving migrants and asylum seekers. This was followed by caps on non‑western immigration. The government required social welfare benefits recipients to work at least 37 hours weekly. Though enforced only spottily, legislation prohibiting niqabs and burqas passed. Residential areas with high proportions of non-Western residents were designated “parallel societies,” and subject to everything from economic redevelopment plans to actual bulldozing. Then there was the so-called “Ghetto Law” which allows authorities to forcibly remove foreigners from neighborhoods if the ratio of non-Western foreigners in those areas exceeds 30 percent. Obviously some of these things would never pass in the U.S., culturally and Constitutionally.
When migrants posing as students began streaming in around these tightened asylum rules, as of May 2025, international students enrolled in non‑accredited programs were barred from working, post-graduation job seeking, or family reunification. Generous cash subsidies (around $6000) are available to anyone agreeing to self-deport. Refugees without residence permits who refuse to voluntarily return to their country of origin are required to stay in departure centers without cash benefits or the right to work. By 2019 some 114 restrictions were enacted within immigration policy to deter would-be migrants.
Surprisingly, under these new rules the quantity of immigration increased but at the same time so did the quality, a critical lesson. In recent years refugees still comprised the largest share (35 percent as of 2022) of Denmark’s non-Western population. This is due to the Danish government recruiting targeted migrants, especially in the health and elder-care sectors, in response to declining birth rates. In 2022 the government introduced a fast-track procedure for certified companies to perform more flexible international recruitment, representing about a third of total worker intake. This is a far cry from the mid-2000’s when ten of thousands of Syrians were accepted without regard to job skills, as is the American system. “We’ll take all the refugees we can get,” a Canadian diplomat told me once, “as long as we can choose which ones.”
Denmark does not want to leave people outside to die. “We did not question that people fleeing need help, shelter, and to be protected. They are not fleeing for fun,” one center-left politician said, noting such an acknowledgement was vital to get fellow party members on board. “Migration numbers were simply so big that they could not be dealt with in a way that is sustainable for the welfare state of Denmark. We understood even then that the migration model was broken and we needed to come up with an alternative.” It was in fact the center-left party, not the right wing conservatives, that brought many of these changes into place while in power. By adopting tough policies, the center-left Danish Social Democrats took on the far-right Danish People’s Party, whose narrative they undercut. The strategy allowed them to reclaim working-class voters concerned about welfare pressures, job security, and cultural cohesion. The left-center party positioned itself as the choice for “ordinary people who play by the rules,” a far cry from supporting open borders and standing up for the rights of criminal aliens. Political support for the Social Democrats soared, while far-right parties dropped to low single digits. Immigration ceased to be a dominant public concern. Such buy-in was critical to addressing a massive problem for the benefit of the country over that of the party.
Could the lessons of Denmark be more obvious? Even the Washington Post editorialized positively about the Danish paradigm shift as a model for Democrats. But sadly, Democrats in the United States are not ready to follow the advice. This reluctance is all about Trump, the idea that whatever Trump supports, regardless of its merits, is wrong, and thus their failure to take seriously moderation. How many more elections will pass with one party actively promoting illegal immigration? How far toward the draconian moves of the Danes will America have to go before the Dems recognize what America needs done?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
U.S. Gets Internal Immigration Enforcement for First Time
The millions of illegal aliens resident in the United States got here primarily through two avenues of neglect, exacerbated by a lack of internal immigration enforcement. Here’s how the system works, and what has changed under Trump.
Many aliens simply walked in, using the wide-open southern border. The others, perhaps the majority over the years, were issued legitimate tourist or student visas abroad by a Department of State more concerned with facilitating travel than protecting America. Those illegals simply stayed in America as they pleased, as long as they pleased, doing whatever they pleased, whether that be working out-of-status or in the extremis, going to flight school and conducting the attacks of September 11. There was no one to interfere with their plans once a visa was issued and they were admitted to the U.S. because America for decades lacked any form of internal immigration enforcement. Until now, and now everything has finally begun to change.
The system works like this. A Department of State employee abroad at one of our embassies or consulates issues tourist, student, and temporary worker visas. While the terms of those visas are set by law, the standards of adjudication (i.e., who actually gets a visa under a part of the law called 214(b)) are largely determined by mid-level officials at each overseas post. Once issued, the visa is valid, in the case of most tourist visas, for ten years. That means the person issued that visa can use it to enter the U.S. once or as many times as they like, during a ten year period. There is no further review of circumstances that may change in the person’s life, or their home country, during those ten years. There are an estimated 55 million valid such nonimmigrant visas in existence in the hands of travelers from Niger to Iran, from China to Russia. In FY 2023, the State Department issued over 10.4 million nonimmigrant visas, any holder of which could apply to enter the U.S. As the numbers keep growing exponentially as staffing stays the same, scrutiny inevitably must drop.
The mantra during the 1990’s, when I was a visa officer as a young State Department employee, was to issue visas, lots of visas, as conveniently as possible. We were told by our bosses we were not law enforcement and our duty was to facilitate travel. As policy we took full advantage of the ability to waive personal interviews for as much as 40 percent of our clientele. We were trained to overlook certain overstays in the U.S., and to not question or review decisions made by others. This mania for issuance reached its peak with the Visa Express program. Visa Express was a Washington-sanctioned State Department program in Saudi Arabia that allowed most Saudi nationals to apply for U.S. visas without going in person to a U.S. embassy or consulate for an interview. The idea was to streamline visa processing, since Saudi Arabia generated huge numbers of applications and in-person interviews were seen as burdensome. Three of the 19 9/11 hijackers got their U.S. visas through Visa Express. Some had gotten their multi-year tourist visas years before. But Visa Express was not an anomaly; most posts overseas had something similar in place. It happened to be Visa Express in Saudi that made 9/11 possible, but it could have been any of us, whispered visa officers globally. It was policy.
Programs like Visa Express were done away with in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, only to creep back a few years later. The Trump administration has now mandated near 100 percent personal interviews once again. Other changes were imposed on a recalcitrant State Department, including a requirement to fingerprint all visa applicants, extensive use of facial recognition technology, and closer liaison with the intelligence agencies. But the prime directive of facilitating travel still remains. It is part of the culture and demands some sort of backup, some sort of internal enforcement.
Once handed his visa, the traveler applies to enter the U.S. at one of hundreds of ports of entry, run until 2001 by the predecessor to Homeland Security, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The visa holder is stamped in for a period of time, typically six months for tourists. A side system exists where people from 41 certain “vetted” countries need no visa at all. In FY 2023, the United States welcomed approximately 18 million visitors to the U.S. under the Visa Waiver Program. Once any of these people left the airport, up to now, almost none had any contact with any form of immigration enforcement, a massive oversight involving everyone looking the other way as the number of illegal aliens in America grew.
I handled the case of a Syrian man. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa years earlier, and no one cared that he was obviously not a tourist. He attended community college without a student visa because no one at the college cared, received food stamps for awhile, got a driver’s license, upgraded that so he could drive a taxi and work full-time, and eventually bought a house. He even became a notary public in pursuit of his real estate license. At each instance the government officials he encountered did not care he was an illegal alien, if they even knew. He learned he could do what he wanted in America, that the law meant very little. When I was able to deny him his new visa, he asked me a question that has haunted me ever since: of all the people, why do you care? (FYI, he married a Syrian-American and got a waiver for his ineligibility.)
One extreme example of time allowed in the U.S. is student visas. Most international students are admitted for “duration of study.” That means as long as they stay in full-time status, as determined by the school or university mind you, not ICE, they can live and work part-time in America. And weep not; many of these “colleges” are run by fellow nationals out of store fronts, offer no classes, but for a fee validate student status. Some students live in the U.S. in “soft” status for a decade or more (this will soon change to a set, limited time frame under new DHS guidelines.) Other aliens benefit greatly from bogus asylum claims. They are allowed to live and work in the U.S. while the claim grinds through the courts, something a clever lawyer can drag out for years. Then, finally given an order of deportation, under the policy of no internal enforcement, they simply left the courtroom and resumed their illegal life.
At one point the number of illegals grew so high that an amnesty was granted to, for a moment, reset the number to zero. The immigration amnesty was in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, with the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). This law offered a pathway to legal permanent residency (and eventually citizenship) for most undocumented immigrants who had entered the U.S. before January 1, 1982 and had lived continuously (albeit illegally) in the country. It also provided legal status to seasonal agricultural workers who had worked a minimum number of days as illegals in America. It had the should-have-known but unexpected consequence of reshaping Latino communities, especially in California, Texas, and the Southwest, with long-lasting political and social effects. But employer sanctions in the IRCA were weakly enforced under the no internal enforcement policy, and unauthorized hiring continued. Border enforcement ramped up somewhat, but without creating new legal entry channels for low-wage workers, and without any internal enforcement of immigration law against the new batch of illegal entrants who snuck through, undocumented migration resumed as usual.
Under Trump, things have changed. One of the most significant backstops to so many visas being issued abroad and then promptly forgotten about is a new plan to review the more than 55 million people who have valid U.S. visas for any violations that could lead to deportation. The State Department said all U.S. visa holders, to include tourists and students, are now subject to “continuous vetting,” with an eye toward any indication they could be ineligible for permission to enter or stay in the United States. If such information is found, the visa will be revoked, and if the visa holder is in the United States, he would be subject to deportation.
The pre-Trump eras reflect how U.S. immigration law was often little more than symbolic. Before Trump, the United States pursued immigration enforcement policies concentrating on border security while neglecting the nation’s interior. Both Democrats and Republicans tolerated the presence of millions of illegal aliens, balancing weak enforcement with political and economic considerations. Since Trump’s second administration came into power, the most obvious change in immigration policy is the current campaign by ICE to locate and deport aliens in the United States illegally. This summer storm has been a long time coming. This is a step that the flaccid immigration system demanded for decades, as local, state, and Federal authorities turned a blind eye toward illegals walking free out of court rooms, walking free from prisons, and living any life they chose, good or bad, in America. There is no other country in the world so lax on internal immigration enforcement, and the time has come to play catch-up on the millions of cases allowed by so many officials to be in America. It isn’t authoritarianism or fascism, it is enforcing laws on the books for decades for the first time.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Real Cost of Illegal Immigration
A stretch of Roosevelt Avenue running through AOC’s Bronx district is nicknamed “The Market of Sweethearts,” due to the chaotic bazaar of prostitution there. Most workers are illegal aliens from Central America. It is impossible to provide a definitive number of undocumented immigrant sex workers in the United States due to the clandestine nature of this activity. However, Polaris, an anti-trafficking organization, analyzed information on sex trafficked women to find some 52 percent were illegals. Another study found 72 percent of sex workers were immigrants. That’s uptown, AOC territory. In Midtown, Korean illegal immigration (since there is no visa for prostitution, it is in a way 100 percent illegal aliens, i.e., “unlawful presence”) runs the show. Downtown, it is the Chinese. Elsewhere, borough by borough, different nationalities do the nasty work. New York speaks 700 different languages, just not to each other.
According to The New York Times, sex work has exploded into a “$3 billion-a-year industry” relying on tens of thousands of foreign women ensnared in a form of modern indentured servitude. “The frequently middle-aged women who work in parlors with names like Orchids of Asia and Rainbow Spa,” continues the Times, “are often struggling to pay off high debts to family members, loan sharks, labor traffickers and lawyers who help them file phony asylum claims. In some cases, their passports are taken and their illegal immigration status keeps them further in the shadows.” A federal law enforcement official said the most common method for smuggling women from Asian countries was either a fraudulent tourist visa or a fraudulent work visa. Many came as students, then overstayed to work in the sex industry. What woman, given other legitimate, livable opportunities, would choose to work as a prostitute?
For awhile I worked in a number of New York’s pizza restaurants. Almost to the man all the kitchen work was done by likely illegals, somehow primarily from Ecuador. With my nascent Spanish it wasn’t easy to get to know them, until I hit on some key phrases. It was too sensitive in most cases to ask if the guy was illegal (after all, I was a older, white man just like the owner, who pretended not to know) but I eventually learned that asking how long it was for the guy between visits to his family back home was a good way to get at the idea. Many had been working six days a week for years. I was paid minimum wage plus alongside tips; they got less and worked longer and harder. That’s why, while eating your pizza waiting in line to visit Ellis Island, the slice was only $1.99.
Ellis Island celebrates the historical version of America’s immigration fantasy — Uncle from The Old Country arriving with $5 to grab the American Dream. In fact, the great wave of 19th century immigration, first from Ireland, and then from Italy and Eastern Europe, was driven from poverty at home (same as today) but was drawn by the massive need for cheap, disposable labor in the United States. Instead of staffing pizza joints and massage parlors, Irish immigrants (technically not “illegal” since the U.S. had no real immigration law at that time) were tricked to leave New York City and dig the Erie Canal by hand for pitiful wages. The Irish were also trafficked to New Orleans, where many of the city’s levees and canals were built by laborers who worked under grueling conditions. This came at a cost. Tens of thousands of Irish workers (nobody kept track) lost their lives due to horrific working conditions, malaria, and dangerous flooding. The term “Irish slaves” is sometimes used to refer to the harsh reality faced by these laborers.
That era of exploitation on the eastern and southern coasts mimics that of the great Midwest and western agricultural states. Decades after men like Cesar Chavez though they broke the back of Big Ag, which was using Mexican and other labor to make huge profits, little has changed. I just got an email from Amazon/Whole Foods saying some of the prices on my weekly standard delivery order are going up due to “increasing labor costs.” In the agriculture sector, 76 percent of the exploited persons are immigrants and nearly half of all those are from Mexico.
And that touches the third rail of importing cheap labor to the United States, the actual slave trade, which preceeded mass immigration. Call it racist to bypass the forced nature of this “immigration,” but the parameters are terribly similar. Both involve people being denied basic rights and protections, both situations involve exploitation — long hours, little or no pay, unsafe conditions, and both enslaved people and illegal alien workers are in vulnerable positions, often unable to leave or seek help safely (such as trafficked aliens.) It is certainly not the same but the cheap, exploitable labor that drives prostitution and farm work in modern America is the same in the basics as the cheap, exploitable labor which drove the antebellum global agrarian economy.
The pool of vulnerable labor is by necessity large, with some 18.6 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. And demanding even more immigration, and playing cops and robbers with ICE, is a key platform for the Democratic party today. So what are they fighting for?
They are for the same base of exploitable labor that has been a part of the United States from near the Founding, only this time dressed up in modern moral dress. The farm workers the Democrats celebrate as hard working men of the soil are just people imported for their vulnerability. Those 19th century immigrants were sacrificing all for a better future by laboring in some of the worst sweat shops of the century (my maternal grandfather was an unschooled child laborer in a candy factory.) It looks good for many family stories to focus on those black and white relatives who came over (and that certainly is the myth behind the Ellis Island version of things) but in reality it hides the same dark tale still being written today.
Despite her pretty words about freedom, AOC supports the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Gavin Newsom supports the use of Mexicans in his “sanctuary” state as long as they do back breaking field work. Eric Adams is ensuring his New York is maintained with inexpensive restaurant food and plenty of sex traders. Forget the sob stories about hard-working dads plucked out of the meat packing plants (undocumented workers make up up to 50 percent of the meatpacking workforce; meatpacking companies recently paid out $8 million for child labor violations) by Gestapo ICE and focus on what is underlying all those workers being drawn here in the first place. Illegal labor is the engine of a shadow economy and always has been, now fully supported by Democrats.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
No Tears for Mr. Garcia
There are no tears for Ammar al-Baluchi, aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, as there are for Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They languish in prisons abroad, yet only for one does the Left weep.
Mr. Garcia (as the New York Times insists on calling him), the Maryland father (as his senator insists on calling him) is an illegal alien who lived for over a decade against the law in the United States. He is a Salvadoran citizen deported from America back to his home country. While in the U.S. Garcia was charged with domestic abuse. Garcia threatened and repeatedly abused his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, according to a protective order she filed in August 2020. Included are claims Garcia dragged her out of a vehicle by her hair and left her on the street, smashed her son’s tablet, broke down doors in their house, and pushed her against a wall while breaking TVs and phones.
Garcia also appears to have worked as a human trafficker, driving other illegals from Texas to the Northeast. The Left’s immigration martyr either used a fraudulent Social Security Number, or paid no taxes while illegally in the U.S. He received his due process in 2019, when an immigration judge concluded he was likely a member of the MS-13 gang (based in part on his tattoos and information from a confidential informant) and ordered him deported, anywhere but El Salvador where he was supposedly under threat from an MS-13 rival gang, all the root of his current situation.
The deportation was not effected until 2025, under the Trump administration, who in error did send him back to his home country. He was there quickly moved from a maximum security facility to a work-based prison with better living circumstances. It was then that he was visited by a succession of Democratic lawmakers seeking his release back to the U.S. Even his most adamant supporters do not claim he was been tortured or abused in custody. He looked good dressed in civilian clothes, on national TV. Protests continue around the U.S. seeking his release, and the Trump administration is under a mild court admonition to get Garcia back. Because of the Garcia case and others like him, some 52 percent of Americans think Donald Trump is a dangerous dictator. They worry pointlessly he will not stop with aliens, and soon will ship American citizens off to offshore gulags. Garcia and others are routinely referred to as “disappeared” even though a large number of Americans, due to incessant media coverage, know his name and recognize his face.
No one knows the name Ali Abdul Aziz Ali or can picture his face. Ali has been held for over 20 years in Guantanamo as someone who aided in the 9/11 attacks (sending money and providing other support to some of the hijackers.) He has not been found guilty of any crime. In the latest attempt to find him guilty of something after two decades of confinement, the military judge in charge of the military tribunals at the military base in Cuba found instead that none of Ali’s confessions could be admitted into evidence. One reason was the prisoner’s statements were obtained through the CIA’s use of torture, including beatings and sleep deprivation. “However,” he added, “the three and a half years of uncharged, incommunicado detention and essentially solitary confinement — all while being continually questioned and conditioned — is just as egregious” as the physical torture.
Judges in two capital cases at Guantanamo rejected confessions taken from prisoners after they were in CIA detention, illustrating the “enduring stain” of a Bush administration decision to hide suspected members of Al Qaeda in black sites rather than use the court-monitored system in the U.S. From his capture in Pakistan in 2003 to his transfer to Guantanamo in 2006, Ali was kept out of the reach of lawyers, the courts, the media, and the International Red Cross. He was afforded no due process. His confinement began with George W. Bush as president and continued through the presidencies of Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Throughout that time, despite the overt torture and utter lack of due process, no Democratic lawmaker sought to visit Ali, and only minimal, generic protests over Gitmo took place years ago. Gitmo has garnered some attention recently when President Trump proposed its use to house deported illegal aliens from the U.S., however.
Ali was deprived of sleep for 82 hours. He was shackled at the ankles and the wrists and forced to stand, naked, and hooded. He was made to fear he would be drowned via waterboarding. He was shuttled between five overseas prisons, including in Eastern Europe. Food and clothing were given only as rewards for his cooperation with CIA. He was interrogated over 1,000 times.
“The goal of the program was to condition him through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning,” the judge wrote. “The program worked.”
Why is one man, allegedly deprived of full due process and held abroad, the subject of the Left’s anguish while they remain silent over the same situation, a lack of due process and held aboard, never mind torture, for another? Why is one a constitutional crisis driven by an authoritarian, a dictator, and the other an embarrassing bit of forgotten history?
It shows the hypocrisy and emptiness of the Left and Democrats. They chose one criminal and glorified him and ignored another one victim of much more heinous treatment. They weep for Garcia because he was sent away by Donald Trump, and ignore Ali because his torture and confinement was supported by presidents they did not loathe. They screech about the rule of law but then show how easily they will abandon it when it fits with the short-term political needs of hatred for anything Trump does.
None of this is to excuse or down play the horror of Ali’s alleged crime. But neither is it to downplay the fact that Garcia also committed crimes against the United States. To say the severity of a crime justifies ignoring torture in one case is simply to say there is no rule of law, and that the rules of a moral society apply only flexibly as partisan politics demand. Oh wait, that is what the Left is saying, as efforts to release Garcia have reached the Supreme Court while Ali’s only hope is an early death to end the nightmares.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Five Questions Explain Why the H1-B Visa Needs Reformed
Five questions to explain why the H1-B visa needs to be reformed.
1) What is an H1-B visa?
Visas for foreigners to travel temporarily to the U.S. are designated by letters and numbers. B-1 is a business visa, B-2 is for tourists. H1-A allows foreign nurses to work in the U.S. while H1-B is for highly skilled workers — think AI scientists, programmers, and engineers — to work in the U.S. Unlike most nonimmigrant visas, H1-B is considered a visa with duel intent, meaning it is understood most holders will go on to apply for green cards, permanent residence in the U.S., and never return home to their foreign residence.
Created in 1990, the H-1B is an employer-sponsored visa that authorizes foreigners to work in the U.S. for up to six years. Tech companies and IT consultancies are the top recipients. Every year, a government lottery awards 65,000 slots to applicants with an undergraduate degree and another 20,000 to those with advanced degrees (universities and nonprofits are exempt from these caps.) The private-sector allocation is typically filled within days, hence a lottery to chose finalists for the visa. More on this in a moment.
2) Who are the H1-Bs in the U.S.?
The majority of H1-Bs work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with computer-related occupations accounting for 65 percent. This was followed by about 10 percent distributed among architecture, engineering, and surveying. Amazon was the top employer of H-1Bs in 2024, hiring more than 13,000. Other top employers were Google (4th), Meta (6th), Microsoft (7th), Apple (8th), and IBM (10th.) Tesla ranked 22nd. The rest of the top employers are Indian staffing companies (see below.) All successful H1-Bs came through the lottery system.
3) Does the Lottery Assure the U.S. of Getting the Best and Brightest from Abroad?
Since 2004, the number of new H-1B visas issued has been capped at 85,000 per year, 20,000 of which are reserved for foreign students with master’s degrees or higher from American universities (the cap does not apply to universities, think tanks, and other non-profit groups, so more are issued.) These limited slots are chased by some 386,000 approved H-1B applications in fiscal year 2023, all thrown into that lottery.
So that winnows out the best candidates? Nope, sometimes just the opposite. Or maybe better to say any of the best and brightest are chosen by dumb luck and have just as much chance as the dull and dim. Because so many more people want an H1-B visa than there are visas available, a lottery is held. The lottery does not look at the quality or credentials of the applicant; he’s just thrown into the hopper to try his luck. All that is needed is the minimum qualification to enter, so many excellent candidates to fill jobs badly needed in the U.S. are never even considered.
Worse yet, the lottery is dominated by IT staffing firms which routinely flood it with entries, often for more visas than they need, crowding out companies that play by the rules and submit for specific, individual workers. Many of the world’s smartest engineers are shut out from the most lucrative, in-demand jobs, and shortages at the top end persist. It works like this: American Company A needs a programmer. Rather than try to recruit abroad and then navigate the cumbersome U.S. immigration system alone, they contract with an IT staffing firm, usually located in India (there are more than a million Indians in the U.S. on H-1 B visas, 72 percent of the whole; five of the top ten H1-B firms are Indian), for such a person, any person who fits the general bill. The IT staffing firm then recruits say 100 such programmers and dumps them all in the lottery hoping one will win. That’s your man!
The paperwork is sometimes tidied up to change the employer from the staffing firm to American Company A. In some cases even the lottery winner can be substituted for a preferred candidate. It makes it near-impossible for a specific individual to make it through the process. The lottery — by design — doesn’t reward top talent. It rewards luck and gaming the system. So it is not surprising 85 percent of H-1B petitions are awarded to employers paying well below the median wage, as determined by occupation and location. The floor for the H-1B visa salary is only $60,000, a number that has not be raised since, well, since when 60k was a decent salary in the IT industry. Even the the median compensation was only $118,000 fiscal year 2023.
4) Do H1-B Workers Compete with Americans for Jobs?
The law says H1-B workers are supposed to be paid the prevailing wage for their job, based on the Department of Labor statistics. In reality, the Economic Policy Institute found that 60 percent of H-1B positions were assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation. A Government Accounting Office report found that between June 1, 2009, and July 30, 2010, 83 percent of H-1B jobs were certified at Level 1 (Entry-level.) This does not mean the workers themselves were entry-level, only that to save money some highly-skilled workers were down-labeled to make them cheaper to hire. Companies get low-cost employees, and the worker himself considers the eventual Green Card enough a part of his compensation that he tolerates the lower wage. The H1-B workers can’t complain too much; their visa is for a specific company and they are like indentured servants, unable to freely change jobs and thus made to take what they are given. Too bad about the displaced American workers priced out of the market.
5) What Can Be Done to Fix This?
Elon Musk and other tech barons argue the H-1B visa program is critical to ensuring American companies can find highly skilled labor that may not be easily available in the U.S. labor force. Trump himself has spoken highly of the program, ensuring its continued viability.
“Ultimately, if you’re going to have a skilled worker program for ‘skilled’ workers, you don’t award these visas via a lottery,” said Eric Ruark, the director of research at NumbersUSA, an organization that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “Obviously, that’s not how you find the best and the brightest.” To make the program better, dump the H1-B visa lottery in favor of a merit-based program for skilled workers that assigns points for various criteria, including education and work experience, similar to how Canada and other Western nations allocate their “Green Cards.” Another possible approach, considered during Trump 1.0, would be to prioritize allocation of visas by wages. One way or another replace luck with skill to the benefit of the United States.
It is also time to raise the salary floor for H1-B workers to make Americans more competitive for their jobs. The Department of Labor needs to update salary schedules more frequently, with an eye toward what real wages in the IT world are. And enforcement of H1-B regulations must eliminate more highly-skilled workers being used to fill entry-level jobs to get around wage caps. There should be no competition between American workers and H1-Bs.
Raise the overall number of H1-B visas available. Exempt “critical” industries such as defense oriented companies from the numerical cap. To get more of the world’s best, the U.S. needs to open more doors to them.
Continue to streamline the H1-B application process. The January 17 H-1B visa reforms are a good start but still not enough.
What should not be done is to eliminate the H1-B visa. The program as it stands today is necessary but not sufficient, and ripe for overhaul as part of the greater scrutiny Trump seeks to apply to all immigration to the United States.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Trump Staffs Up for Immigration War
After Americans overwhelmingly give the White House, Senate, and House (you might as well count the Supreme Court in, too) to one party, which ran with a vow to limit illegal immigration on Day One of its control, what do you do if you’re governor of a liberal state? Why, you ignore the support Trump and the Republicans have in your state and try to work around the coming war on immigration in direct opposition to the Federal government in Washington. Might as well be 1860 all over again.
“Democrats,” says the New York Times, “envision flexing their power in these states to partly block the Trump administration’s policies — for example, by refusing to enforce immigration laws.” The Times claims some of the planning in blue states began in 2023 as a potential backstop if Trump won, but the preparations were largely kept quiet to avoid projecting public doubts about Democrats’ ability to win the election. The anti-populist Democratic effort will rely on the work of hundreds of lawyers being recruited to combat Trump policies. Advocacy groups are workshopping cases and recruiting potential plaintiffs to challenge expected regulations, laws, and administrative actions. For example, Democracy Forward, a legal group formed after Trump won in 2016, has a multimillion-dollar bank roll and more than 800 lawyers on call.
Governors Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois are mobilizing their Democratic-controlled legislatures to gird their states loins against the future Trump administration. Newsom’s legislature issued a proclamation to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration… bolstering California legal resources to protect civil rights, reproductive freedom, climate action, and immigrant families.” Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker took a more direct stand, stating “You come for my people, you come through me,” apparently referring to migrant families and illegal alien criminals as “his people.” Pritzker and Governor Jared Polis of Colorado announced the formation of a group called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.
Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey vowed to protect the state’s “citizens and residents.” While New York’s sanctuary city-loving mayor lies low in the face of ethics charges, Governor Kathy Hochul convened the Empire State Freedom Initiative to combat “threats” from the Trump administration, including on immigration. She and Trump-hating Attorney General Letitia James vowed to be warriors in the fight to, in Redstate’s words “stop what the American people just voted for.” Sanctuary cities and other localities across the U.S. have, since Biden took office, freed more than 22,000 criminal migrants wanted by federal immigration authorities, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE.) The number of criminal aliens freed into the country by sanctuary authorities could potentially be much higher given many times local law enforcement releases criminal migrants before ICE is aware of them and files a detainer notice.
But it is not all bad news. Oklahoma is launching a program, Operation Guardian, to turn over illegal immigrants already in prison to ICE to jump-start Trump’s deportation effort. Governor Kevin Stitt shared with the Washington Examiner plans to expeditiously deport 526 convicted illegal immigrants as soon as Trump takes office. “We want to be the first state that works with President Trump,” Stitt said. “Right now, we have over 500 people incarcerated in Oklahoma who have broken the law, who are criminals, and they also are illegal. We would love to get them out of the state of Oklahoma, out of the country.” The state pays $36,000 to house them each day, according to the governor’s office.
Trump is staffing up for the war. In addition to Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff, Trump is set to install an immigration hardliner in a major White House role, a position that does not require Senate confirmation and will enable him to enact Trump’s immigration agenda across the federal government. Tom Homan, who’ll be immigration czar, formerly headed (but was never confirmed as) the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) division responsible for arresting, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants. The two men’s prompt installation in senior White House roles, says Politico, among the first personnel selections for Trump 2.0, signals immigration enforcement is a “top priority.”
Immigration is a complex affair in the U.S., with the immigration legal code longer and more complex than the tax code. Miller, Homan and their staffs will need to poke holes in various parts of DHS in general but also look deeper into the bureaucracy. There’s the Department of Labor, which issues work permissions for many visas (such as the H-1B likely of interest to Elon Musk), the Department of Justice, which runs the immigration courts, and the Department of State, which issues the actual visas themselves abroad. Project 2025 specifically calls out the “Diversity” Immigrant Visa lottery, and F and J student visas as in need of an overhaul. “This is the biggest national security vulnerability this nation has seen since 9/11 and we have to fix it,” Homan said.
But initially Trump’s immigration plan will focus on the reported 1.2 million illegal alien criminals loose across the U.S. This population was created by the Biden-Harris administration by allowing migrants to flow across the border without any vetting being done. The plan was especially egregious when dealing with citizens of places like Venezuela, which refuse to cooperate with U.S. law enforcement. Next in line may be military-age Chinese males. All of this targeted enforcement is a far cry from the “mass deportations” feared by the Left.
Trump is serious about all this, beyond personnel choices. Trump confirmed on Truth Social he will declare a national emergency and use military assets to help him carry out his deportation plans. Trump also pledged to continue building the U.S.-Mexico border wall, revive the Remain in Mexico program, hire more border patrol agents, and end birthright citizenship for those born on U.S. soil to illegal migrant parents.
“I’ve got to go back and help because every morning I get up, every morning I’m pissed off about what this [Biden] administration did to the most secure border in my lifetime. So I’m going to go back and do what I can to fix it,” said Homan. “I have seen some of these Democratic governors say they are going to stand in the way. They are going to make it hard for us,” he said. “Well, a suggestion. If you are not going to help us, get the hell out of the way. If we can’t get assistance in New York City, we may have to double the number of agents we send to New York City. We are going to do the job. We are going to do the job without you or with you.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
For Next Time, Memo to Trump
If there is a next debate (you say no, but it depends on whether you’re ahead or behind in a month, and a fair choice of moderators being offered) it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first debate. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.
For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25k for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412k, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment. But try things in California where the average housing cost is $793k) punch back with “You’ve had three years, why haven’t you just done it?” and follow-up with “And how are you going to pay for that, with tax increases on the middle class?”
One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala rhetorically why she did not initiate any of her special programs as Vice President. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit as VP she did very little and had power enough to do even less, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is win-win for you. In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Reminded the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues Harris raised as problems (economy, immigration) during the debate.
On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by 20.3 percent.
Almost 50 percent of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. It’s true; the Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise many Americans were still not quite better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the main reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.
Create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration. It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration. Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.11 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices remain 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.
And build a separate app that calculates gas and mortgage costs. It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount. As the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote economists point to as the cause of inflation — the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.
The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you Kamala admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.
Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats, Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. Still the poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased four-fold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with U.S. driving rules.
Or the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a Midtown overtaken by homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’ time as a prosecutor and Attorney General in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.
Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally yes. The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden’s Immigration Obsession Floods U.S. with Migrants, Kamala with Troubles
Immigration ranks as one of the top three issues affecting voter opinion (Biden’s age was number 1, immigration number 2, and inflation/economy in third place.) There’s little more Biden can do about number 1, and little he seems to want to do about number 3, but on immigration Joe will leave quite a record for Kamala Harris (assuming she’s the candidate) to drag into November.
The problem is Joe Biden was obsessed with immigration. He was obsessed with finding new ways to bring more migrants to the U.S. — some tricks resulted in tens of thousands of people entering, others just a few hundred. The numbers seem to matter less than the process. Such is obsession. Harris seems not to share his zeal, but inherits it as a legacy (and an electoral problem) just the same.
Harris’ problem began on the southern border, where practically concurrent with taking office, Joe threw open the doors. The Trump campaign is already releasing ads tying Harris to Biden’s policies there. The ad claims “If you ever wondered how Joe Biden could get the border so screwed up. Remember, he had help,” a narrator reads. “Here’s Biden appointing Kamala Harris to be his border czar to deal with illegal immigration. And here are a record number of illegal immigrants.”
Under the Obama administration the standard was about 1,000 attempted crossings a day. By the time the Trump administration ended, the U.S. was deporting more people than were illegally coming into the country. In less than a month under Biden, the number of people illegally coming into the country shot up to more than 6,000 per day. Even with Biden’s most recent executive order cutting back on immigration, up to 2,500 crossings are still allowed each day. For the past three years, Biden policy allowed nearly 6,000 asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced an average 1 million immigrants every 200-odd days, a significant number given otherwise only about 1 million legal green card–type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year.
Some 2.5 million joined the illegal population under Obama, actually slightly less than under George W. Bush. Biden broke those records in about his first 18 months in office with the wide-open southern border. More than 8 million migrants have entered the U.S. along the southern border since Biden took office in January 2021, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data. That Harris was ostensibly in charge of border affairs does not help her at all; it gives her some sort of ownership and limits any behind-the-scenes denials. She seems at minimum sympathetic; in 2021, she visited the southern border to say “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
In mid-June Biden-Harris announced a new amnesty policy lifting the threat of deportation for tens of thousands of illegal aliens married to U.S. citizens. Biden (to be fair, it was likely almost 100 percent his idea) promoted the new program at a White House event to celebrate the Obama-era “dreamers” directive that offered deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. The policy allows roughly 490,000 spouses of U.S. citizens an opportunity to apply for a “parole in place” program, which would shield them from deportations and offer work permits if they have lived in the country illegally for at least 10 years. The new policy also removes a legal barrier to allow qualifying immigrants to apply for permanent residency and eventually, U.S. citizenship. It’s a privilege previously reserved solely for spouses of U.S. military members. Those newly-eligible will have three years to apply for citizenship, in time for the 2028 elections if Harris were to get that far.
To invoke some Obama-love, Biden announced another policy on the 12th Anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA; “Dreamers”) making recipients of the program eligible for visas, rather than the temporary work authorization they currently receive under the Obama executive order. Getting a visa potentially legalizes the DACAs and sets them up for a shot at permanent residence and then U.S. citizenship. This move could affect as many as 530,110 active DACA holders. This number does not include the pending applications that cannot be processed due to ongoing litigation. As of December 2023, estimates are that the eligible DACA population to be 1,161,000 were the program to resume in full under Harris.
One way to cut back on deportations is to hamstring the parts of the U.S. government involved in uncovering information that could lead to deportation, in this case with unaccompanied minors. The Department of Health and Human Services is no longer inquiring about the criminal histories of migrant teens in its care. A senior HHS official overseeing the program for solo child migrants told the House Judiciary Committee that even though agency officials contact the embassy of whichever country unaccompanied children hail from, they do not request any criminal records. They do verify date of birth, the child’s birth certificate, and whether the “child” is suspected of being an adult. The result is more than 400,000 have been released into the U.S. in the last few years, with 70 percent of that group aged 15 or older and male. This all raises grave concerns about Central and South American gang members taking up residence in the U.S. via this loophole. The gangs once established won’t be going away, something a President Harris would have to answer for.
There’s also some small scale stuff that help illustrate the whole. One U.S. Customs and Border Protection office in an unnamed airport did not have an effective process for detaining and removing inadmissible travelers. In a two year period CBP released at least 383 inadmissible travelers from custody; 44 percent of the travelers did not return for their removal flights and disappeared into the United States. Overnight detention requests for inadmissible travelers before removal flights are denied because of staffing and bed space limitations. In addition, CBP does not have enough overtime funds to pay officers to detain inadmissible travelers at the airport after operating hours. CBP also cited difficulties transferring inadmissible travelers to another airport because they must receive permission from the airline involved.
There’s also the so-called “Dark Brandon” scenario, where lame duck Biden, freed from election-related restraints, makes more immigration changes by executive order for Kamala to take responsibility for. Either way, Biden was a terrible president on immigration issues and some Democrat is going to have to pay for it.
Biden (and by extension, Harris) is appealing to a very small part of the base. Over two-thirds of Americans disapprove of his handling of the border. Even Hispanic voters are not swayed by Biden. A recent poll showed a large number of Hispanic people favor the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. The CBS News/YouGov poll found 53 percent of registered Hispanic voters favor the government starting “a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally,” a program already proposed by Donald Trump.
Candidate Harris faces the worst of two worlds. As the sitting Vice President she is expected to support Biden’s (unpopular) policies. As a Candidate she must drag those policies forward, and must limit ideas of her own or face calls of disloyalty from the party base. Indeed, a Politico article on policy differences between Biden and Harris failed to even mention immigration. Immigration is probably the most significant of those double-edged issues, but other divisive topics, from Ukraine to Gaza, suggest hers will not be an easy road.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden’s Southern Border Political Sleight-of-Hand
Joe Biden is playing voters for suckers. He thinks he can snap up their votes with some sleight-of-hand new policy on the southern border. This all comes cynically as the border is emerging as a major issue in the campaign for president; only 28 percent of voters approve of Biden’s handling of the matter so far, and voters overall mark it as their second biggest concern, after the economy. But why fix anything when you can just fake the rubes out?
Biden took executive action earlier this month to turn away asylum seekers who cross the southern border illegally when the weekly average of daily border crossings exceeds 2,500 between ports of entry (it has exceeded that number consistently since Biden took office, averaging about 4,500.) Administration officials, reports The Hill, “walked a tightrope announcing the order, a forceful but targeted shift on asylum rights — one that administration officials said is not comparable to the Trump administration’s system-wide crackdowns.”
Well, maybe. The president’s decree certainly rhymes with a 2018 Trump policy, invoking the same powers to deny people seeking asylum. Federal courts blocked that one. The American Civil Liberties Union says it will challenge the Biden ban as well.
Otherwise, all well and good, except when you drill down a bit. For the last three years Biden policy allowed 4,500 or more asylum seekers to illegally cross the border daily, seven days a week. That number meant the southern border alone produced a million immigrants every 200-some days, a significant number given otherwise only about one million legal Green Card-type immigrants are allowed into the U.S. each year. The border does not discriminate; in addition to the flood of poor Mexicans entering the U.S. this way, the in-flow from the southern border is chock-a-block with Serbs, Chinese, Central and South Americans, as well as Africans from a multitude of countries. Almost none of those people got there on their own, benefiting from organized crime and human traffickers to help them make the arduous journey from say Nigeria to Texas. It was worth it to most, as standard Green Card applications (except for spouses of American Citizens) can be backed up for years, decades for certain categories. Why wait when you can be one of 4,500 lucky daily winners? Reducing that 4,500 to 2,500 a day is good one guesses, as it means Biden policy only comes close to doubling immigrant numbers yearly.
What was left untouched by the new executive order was the Biden method for handling those 2,500 claiming asylum.
Humanitarian parole refers to a discretionary mechanism employed by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service to allow individuals to remain in the United States on a (theoretically) temporary basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. It was never intended to replace regular visas or Green Cards but rather to be a form of temporary relief.
Prior to Biden, humanitarian parole was typically granted in cases involving medical treatment not available in the individual’s home country, urgent family needs, or situations where the person can contribute significantly to the public interest, say as an artist fleeing a repressive government. Pre-Biden, the decision to grant humanitarian parole was mostly made on a case-by-case basis.
The previous two administrations averaged about 5,000 individually-selected cases per year, not per day as under Biden. Past uses of mass parole include the one-time flood of migrants after the Vietnam War (340,000 people) and the Mariel Boatlift (125,000) from Cuba. Every administration, Republican and Democratic, used parole in emergencies; none had made it the cornerstone of an ongoing mass migration program before Biden. Parole used this way is part of the asylum process which is being abused daily on the southern border.
Asylum applicants must demonstrate if sent home they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. For example, since 1994, LGBT status has been a possible grounds of asylum. Victims of domestic violence were granted consideration for asylum under the Obama administration, rolled back under Trump. However, asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to economic situations affecting blanket-like most everyone in a country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for a legit asylum claim. Until Biden. Economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have taken advantage of slow processing by American authorities. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous.
The 1996 Clinton Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for logistical and political reasons, prior administrations simply released most asylum seekers into American society to wait. Asylum seekers become eligible for work authorization if their case has been pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do. Trump instead directed the letter of the law be followed, ending this catch-and-release system. He also negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working in the U.S. Biden did away with Trump’s reforms.
Biden’s new executive order also contains loopholes for unaccompanied minors, and those applying at a formal port of entry, who won’t count against the 2,500 daily limit. In May 2017, when Trump made an exception for minors, the number of unaccompanied children soared by 329 percent. The smugglers are quick to adjust to any changes in U.S. policy.
Biden of course was equally quick to blame his opposition for the mess he created. While senior administration officials did not explicitly tie the timing of the executive order to the election, they argued the measure was a result of congressional Republicans’ inaction. “If Congress refuses to act, and if congressional Republicans refuse to act, the president is prepared to do so,” one official told reporters. The president and White House officials previously said it was up to Congress to enact changes at the border and suggested Biden’s hands were tied on the issues. They never were.
Republicans chastised Biden for waiting to take executive action on the border and argued this measure is too little, too late. They are correct. It made no sense for Biden to throw open the southern border to faux asylum claims in the first place. It made even less sense for him to maintain there was nothing he could do about the crisis he created, that it was up to Congress alone to fix it, when obviously the executive orders issued by Trump were always available, as well as the weak-tea of Biden’s own order. So, when angry Joe Biden says that there was nothing he could do about the southern border without Congress acting, he was lying. The border crisis is caused solely by Biden’s decision to employ humanitarian parole on a large scale, a decision that can be rescinded anytime. Reducing the daily influx of asylum claimants from 4,500 to 2,500 just months before the presidential election is indeed too little, too late.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Why Trump Will Win
Gloom consumes America. Some 73 percent of respondents say the United States is on the wrong track, the highest portion since 1989, when that polling question was first asked. In similar polls, there’s been a prolonged downward trend in Americans’ satisfaction with the direction of the country, from a peak of 71 percent in 1999 to just 22 percent today. Biden’s 39 percent approval is the lowest of any president running for a second term a year out from the election. Inflation hit 8.9 percent. The cost of rent and food rose two or three times as much as incomes.
So who believes Joe Biden and his running dogs in the liberal media when they say things are actually OK? What tiny 28 percent of America are they talking to? A whole intellectual industry developed to support Joe, making excuses why the dumb Americans in the heartland don’t see how well Bidenomics has left things for them. The industry has come up with three explanations. See if they make sense.
It’s the Media, Stupid. This is part of a bigger problem, presupposing most of the American interior is made of dummies who believe everything they hear on places like Fox, part of an outrage industry. Never mind kitchen table economics, it’s all in your head, idiot.
Referral Syndrome. This hypothesis comes from the Wall Street Journal, which speculates Americans see so many mass shootings, so much immigration chaos, so many overdose deaths, and proxy wars they simply feel bad about everything (which, economy aside, does not bode well for the incumbent.) So when pollsters ask their views on the economy, they get a negative response, because people just feel overwhelmingly negative.
Fatalism. Pretending the economy is just dandy wouldn’t be complete with some candy from Paul Krugman. The New York Times’ resident soothsayer claims all is well if only you could see things from the perspective of a rich, white, Nobel prize-winning New Yorker who writes gibberish for a living. Krugman also postulates Trump supporters who believe Biden stole the 2020 election are so apocalyptic that they skew the whole nation’s outlook.
While the inflation rate may be declining somewhat, the cost of food, rent, and transportation is still higher than pre-COVID levels. Affordable housing kills in most areas. The problem for Joe is these are not problems of perception, they are disasters surrounding hard-core home economics. We’re left with the conclusion maybe the economy really is treating the bulk of non-coastal Americans poorly, the ones who could not sell burgers or clean hotel rooms via Zoom during the pandemic and the ones for whom high mortgage interest rates mean the difference between a home of their own and barely scraping by to pay the (rising) rent. It is these people who will vote Trump, or stay home, but are unlikely to vote for the Biden record on the economy. It is not perception, it is reality. People know when they can afford to feed the kids and pay the rent and when they cannot.
In this environment, for the first time since President Grover Cleveland in 1892, voters face the choice of basically two incumbents, two candidates running on their recent performance in the White House. One was president during a time when wages rose faster than inflation, when the stock market was standardly strong, when home loan rates were accessible, and one wasn’t. But it is more than dollars and sense which will see Trump win in a fair election. It is his understanding of the America that he rode to victory in 2016, and came close to using to win in 2020.
Think of Hillbilly Elegy if you want to take the shortcut. Or as another pundit put it, “Trump rode a wave of pessimism to the White House — pessimism his detractors did not share because he was speaking about, and to, an America they either didn’t see or understood only as a caricature. But just as with this year, when liberal elites insist that things are going well while overwhelming majorities of Americans say they are not, Trump’s unflattering view captured the mood of the country.” Trump’s thesis may be truer today than it was the first time he ran on it — polls show most young people never expect to earn what their parents do now, and deaths of despair continue to rise. People tend to notice when they are doing better in an economy, and when they are not.
Immigration under Trump was simple, and matched a large number of Americans’ thoughts: we may have enough. As Trump said, “A nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters!” Yet under Biden a pattern of curtailment, thought once labeled racism is now edging toward policy in sanctuary cities: we may have enough. Biden in a way should be thanked for drawing such a stark contrast between his immigration policy and Trump’s, and what the coastal elite minority hold true and what the majority of inner Americans likely believe and will express by voting for Trump.
They understand that wall hyperbole aside, enforcing one’s borders is a requirement of nationhood. Check out the shelters and sidewalks of Manhattan and Chicago, where it is obvious Biden’s immigration policy is a failure. Trump’s message was crudely delivered but astonishingly accurate, at least to those willing to see through the former to the latter. Call him a bigot, or a racist, or a fascist, but he was right about controlling the border. In fact, every other country in the world does so for itself.
In the broader picture, there are a lot of people who believe immigrants threaten jobs and security. They believe we should bring our troops home from places like Iraq and let other nations such as Ukraine fend for themselves. They believe Hunter and Joe Biden sold influence to Ukraine and China and they believe a deep state exists. They want education but don’t want college to be free to those who won’t repay their loans. They believe welfare encourages people to stay home, and social security won’t be there for them. They want to own guns. And though they are the base, they not alone. Trump’s backing from white, college-educated Republicans doubled to 60 percent over the course of last year.
And outside the MSM no one is buying the “end of democracy” argument. The simplest counter argument is that if Trump does not believe in the system, why is he following its rules and campaigning? Wouldn’t a wanna-be dictator, you know, act more dictatorial? Same for J6. Wouldn’t a proper insurrection, as opposed to a protest march that morphed into a tantrum of sorts, have some path toward success? Yet the J6 “insurrectionists” simply walked back out of the Capitol building on their own, and their supposed leader, Trump, did the same with the White House two weeks later. If that was a potential ending of democracy event, it was a pretty lame one.
If Trump wanted to be a dictator he had four fine years to implement that and he did not and anyone willing to think about it knows that. Rednecks amuck in the Capitol for an hour or two is not the same as tanks on the Ellipse and anyone willing to think about it knows that. If anything the use of lawfare to jail or drive an opponent off the ballot seems as undemocratic as anything else. Like supporting the blue line on J6 and decrying it over George Floyd, hypocrisy is an ugly thing to build an election strategy around.
Trump’s voters look for America and see Brazil. Their detractors blame the Electoral College, or talk radio, or redneck ignorance, or Putin. Trump’s win in 2016 and likely win in 2024 inexplicable? Try again.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Biden’s Foreign Policy; the Biden Doctrine
Joe Biden ordered airstrikes on Iraq, against Iranian-backed militants, in retaliation for recent attacks by those militants that severely injured three American soldiers. Joe didn’t consult with Congress or anyone else before ordering the strikes, and no declaration of war exists of course. Yet no one believes the militias, following their spanking, will disappear or stop harming Americans.
That sums up the Biden Foreign Policy, call it a doctrine if you’d like: a series of geopolitically unsuccessful, inconsequential, mostly reactive unilateral actions, with no end game. Underlying it all is the sense that no one is particularly frightened, respectful or wary of American power anymore. Let’s see how this worked on a global scale over the last three bloody years.
The disastrous evacuation of Kabul in August 2021 should have warned all of us we were dealing with foreign policy amateurs. The rush for the last planes was an expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time for third country landing rights. Mistakes made as long ago as Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas for translators and others until literally the last flights were scheduled out. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just “land some planes and see if that works.” No endgame really, simply a unilateral decision to cap the evacuation off at a certain point in time and declare it over no matter who was or was not saved.
Ukraine is some yellowed vision of cold war. The Biden plan was based on a Wonka-like act of imagination, that U.S. arms wielded by amateur fighters backed up by intelligence, space-based targeting, and special forces infiltrated on the ground would hastily defeat a determined opponent (See Afghanistan, failure of the same strategy, 2001-2003.) When the miracle cure strategy failed, there was no Plan B except to continue to pour arms in to a war that had no clear end game, that was not winnable, only sustainable. Meanwhile, Biden restrictions on domestic mining mean the United States is the largest purchaser of Russian enriched uranium. If the Russians are scared of American power they hide that well.
The results have not been better elsewhere. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine preceeded what one pundit described as “the 2023 brazen Chinese spy balloon’s uncontested trajectory over the United States, the recent Hamas invasion of Israel, the serial Iranian-fueled terrorist attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq and Syria, and the terrorist Houthis’ veritable absorption of the Red Sea. America’s enemies had become opportunistic, not deterred.” Biden took the bait at each open-ended opportunity, and now Joe is dangerously close to letting Gaza and Yemen spiral into a global conflict.
And so another “coalition” fight, this time in Ukraine with NATO, ended up a U.S. primary struggle. It is NATO mostly walking away from the meat of the Ukraine struggle, and the baby NATO coalition elsewhere of France, Italy, and others that was supposed to control the Red Sea breaking down. It is a thin gruel of happy talk about caring for civilians backed up by unlimited arms to Israel, handled so poorly diplomatically that the U.S. has inherited pariah status globally. The modern version of American power was demonstrated when Egypt snubbed Joe Biden’s visit over the mess in Gaza. The question of Palestine, always simmering, is now another major issue to divide Red and Blue and further polarize society. In addition to receiving $6 billion in frozen oil funds from Biden as a ransom for five American hostages, Iran controls the playbook, attacking with impunity via its proxies across Iraq, Syria, and southern Lebanon; Iran’s partners carried out more than 100 attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea. They decide if and when the 1:1 conflict with Israel goes regional, and the U.S. will be again forced to react. The Houthis, also Iran-backed, have dragged the U.S. into a broad promise to keep the Red Sea open to shipping, as the world rolls its eyes as Pax Americana once again looks like a punchline. Can anyone say we are still indispensable?
Another Biden foreign policy disaster has come home, literally, in the immigration crisis. For reasons too vague to enunciate, the Biden administration did away with any semblance of immigration law and flung open the southern border to anyone interested in wandering in. Already more than eight million illegal entrants have come across, with another quarter-million entering each month. As in Ukraine and elsewhere, there is no endgame. When will the border close? How much will caring for the millions cost (New York City has processed more than 160,000 migrants; some 70,000 remain in the city’s care. In Denver, caring for the new migrants has consumed 10 percent of the city’s budget)? The United States has now exceeded, both in real numbers and in percentages, all past numbers of non-native born American residents. What impact on our greater society will such an influx have, especially given how it is targeted at a handful of cities? Will the Russians ever surrender? What about the immigrants?
Three years ago, there was no war in Ukraine and certainly no U.S. military involvement in the Crimea and Donbas. Israel and Hamas existed in their tinder-like stasis condition, no brutal massacre of 1,600 Jews (30 of whom were Americans) and no invasion of Gaza. Campus protestors limited their protestations that they were not anti-Semitic in their hatred of Israel. Iran and the U.S. cooperated on fighting ISIS in Iraq, uneasy partners for certain but not shooting cousins as now. The Houthi struggle was confined within Yemen’s borders. On the positive side, efforts were being made to watch diplomacy bloom with North Korea, which instead is now test firing missiles aplomb once again. Biden has made no progress on China either to limit their opportunistic stance or reduce their hold over America economically. Biden has largely ignored most of Africa and South America as well as the world’s most populous democracy (and nuclear power) India. It is impossible to call it progress and all too easy to call it sadly the Biden Doctrine.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What is Title 42?
Title 42 is a clause of a 1944 Public Health Services Law which allows the U.S. government to prevent the entry into the country of individuals during certain public health emergencies, in this case asylum seekers who are sent to wait out their years of processing in Mexico, not in the United States, during Covid.
But to really understand Title 42 you have to understand what is happening at the southern border and what has happened with asylum claims. At play are potentially millions of aliens flooding into the United States. America’s asylum laws, meant to help the most vulnerable, have instead become a clogged backdoor for routine economic migrants. Title 42 was a very small step by the Trump administration toward restoring asylum to its correct role in American immigration policy. Biden seeks to go back to the “everybody in” system with all the consequences.
Asylum recognizes a person persecuted by his own country can be offered residence and protection by another country. The actual conditions vary considerably across the globe (the U.S. considers female genital mutilation grounds for asylum while in many nations it is a desired practice). But in most cases, asylum is offered to people who face a well-founded fear of persecution if sent home on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds have also varied greatly based on shifts in American domestic politics. Since 1994, for example, LGBT status has been, and remained under Trump, a possible claim to asylum. Domestic violence was granted consideration as grounds under the Obama administration, only to be rolled back under Trump.
But the reality of 2022 is the asylum system evolved into a cheater’s backdoor, a pseudo-legal path to immigration not otherwise available to economic migrants. They lack either the skills for working visas or the ties to qualify for legal immigration under America’s family reunification system. So they walk to the border and ask for asylum, taking advantage of previous administrations’ look-the-other-way “solution” to their ever-growing numbers. Affirmative asylum claims, made at ports of entry, jumped 35 percent pre-Covid.
It worked — for them. A Honduran on the border who says he simply came for a job is sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case. Since detaining asylum seekers and their families while the processes play out is expensive and politically distasteful (kids in cages!) until recently most asylum seekers were instead released into American society to wait out their cases. They then became eligible for work authorization when their cases extended past 150 days. The number of pending cases pre-Covid was 325,277, more than 50 times higher than in 2010.
Eventual asylum approval rates for all nationalities over the past decade average only 28 percent. Yet even after they’re denied, applicants can either refile as defensive asylum claims or disappear into the vast underground of illegals. Simply making a claim to asylum is often enough to live and work in America. Trump tried to change that with Title 42. Basically due to the possibility of flooding the country with Covid-positive asylum seekers, the threat of disease was invoked as a reason/excuse to keep the asylum seekers out of the U.S. while their cases drag on and on. Some asylum seekers and their families were detained at the border as a deterrent rather than released into society. But public outcry over caged families and the massive costs in housing and feeding sent the Trump people looking for another way to implement Title 42.
The change was for the Trump administration to negotiate for asylum seekers to wait out their processing times not in American society or an American detention facility, but in Mexico, through a program called the Migrant Protection Protocols. People at the border make their asylum claims, and are then nudged a step backward to wait for an answer in Mexico. The Department of Homeland Security also established an agreement with Mexico to accept all Venezuelan nationals who cross the border seeking U.S. asylum.
Title 42 stopped some 2.4 million would-be immigrants. The Biden administration now seeks to return to the old pre-Trump system, whereas asylum seekers would generally be set free inside the U.S. to go somewhere and wait out their processing. Nascent implementations of this system fell flat; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) estimates they already “lost” 150,000 migrants due to Biden admin’s lack of processing. These people are simply at large and likely forever will be within American society. As David Frum wrote approvingly at the time, “if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.”
Biden’s administration tried to end the Title 42 policy this past April in court, but a Louisiana judge ruled proper administrative protocol must be followed to formally lift the program. Lower courts then issued a stay on ending Title 42 until December 21, extended now by the Supreme Court, and traffic backed up at El Paso and other prominent crossing points. Meanwhile, for those who are crossing now, the expulsion of migrants has continued while the protracted legal battle plays out among the government, migrants represented by the ACLU, and now, a group of 19 GOP-led states seeking to intervene in the case.
The states have argued that they will suffer “irreparable harm” if Title 42 ends and migrants stay in the U.S. for longer periods of time. Between 9,000 and 14,000 people are expected to cross the southern border each day after Title 42 ends (border crossings are now at around 7,000 a day.) The coalition of GOP attorneys general requested the court push back the Dec. 21 end date pending deliberations on an appeal. Migrants are waiting in Mexico, hoping Title 42 will be overturned and they can cross and stay in America. The final decision will likely lie with the Supreme Court.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Immigration by the Numbers
Numbers can be boring. When discussing immigration blur the lines between sweet old auntie and that bum lapping at the public trough. So let’s look at Mr. Jimenez from Ecuador and Mr. Singh from India, alongside some numbers. Both want to come to the U.S., one for illegal work, one to take his family to New York on a vacation.
Mr. Jimenez will enter across the Southern Border near El Paso. Many people do, and certainly most illegals. In 2022 there were only 330,037 legal immigrants to the U.S. (LPRs, green card holders.) Meanwhile, over 2.75 million “migrant encounters” occurred along the southwest border since Joe Biden took office. In the Rio Grande Valley sector alone, roughly 10,000 encounters with illegal immigrants occur every week. Those number are expected to rise after December 21 as Title 42, a Trump-era legal speedbump to immigration, expires and more people can apply for asylum from inside the U.S. without waiting first in Mexico. Mr. Jimenez will be an illegal, i.e., not have a U.S. immigrant visa or Green Card. He’ll be in that clump of 2.75 million. As a comparison, historically, the peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country.
“United States Border Patrol had lost operational control of our southern border. They can’t contain what they have now,” former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Tom Homan said. The Texas Department of Public Safety says of the 371,000 criminal aliens booked into local jails through May 31, 2022, 255,000 were charged with more than 424,000 criminal offenses. These include more than 700 homicide charges, 51,000 assault charges, and 52,000 drug charges.
The crime rates aren’t the only problem; the amount of money taxpayers spend for illegal immigrants to call Texas home averages approximately $850 million a year. Texans pay an average of about $152 million a year to house illegal aliens, between $62 million and $90 million to include illegals in Texas’ emergency Medicaid program, and up to $717 million for hospitals to provide uncompensated medical care. Now to be fair immigrants don’t create such a large cost for taxpayers because they’re lazy. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are just regular people trying to make it through the day. But their relatively low level of education means the kinds of jobs they can get don’t pay much. That in a best case scenario means they pay relatively little in taxes and use more in government services.
These costs are because people in the Biden administration and those who support it believe aliens have a right to enter the U.S. and taking that right away with a wall or a visa regulation is not who we are. Joe Biden called it part of “securing our values as a nation of immigrants.” He’s claimed reducing immigration has been an “unrelenting assault on our values.” Immigration, says Biden, “is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future.”
The problem is Mr. Singh from India. Mr. Singh does not want to work in America, does not seek uncompensated medical care or Medicaid. He wants to visit New York on a tourist visa, eschewing the wet walk in at El Paso for a First Class ticket landing him at JFK. He wants to do things the legal way.
Indians hoping to head the U.S. for vacations are now faced with huge delays in obtaining the interviews needed to be granted a visa. According to the State Department, the wait time in early December for one of these interviews at the American Embassy in New Delhi was 999 calendar days. In Hyderabad, it was 780. In Mumbai, it’s 999. Nothing is higher than 999 days, so one suspects the real toll is in the thousands, and a note warns “These are estimates only and do not guarantee the availability of an appointment.” A non-sarcastic reminder states “Please schedule a regular visa appointment well in advance.” Ironically if Mr. Singh were to fly into Mexico City and seek a U.S. visa interview there, he’d still face a 702 day wait. And by the way, the fee for that visa, should it eventually be issued, is a cool $160 per person.
According to the National Travel and Tourism Office, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, pre-Covid India was the country’s 10th biggest tourism market, and fifth biggest spender. The study estimates the U.S. is potentially missing out on $1.6 billion in tourism revenue from Indian tourists alone who opt to go elsewhere in 2023. “To date, we have not seen the desire at the State Department to get this issue addressed,” the study concludes. Not so — the State Department says it has actually begun an IG campaign encouraging Indians to apply for even visas more called the “12 Days of Visas” based on a jaunty Christmas theme. The backup plan is to train diplomats’ spouses and adult children already in-country to do the visas.So Joe Biden, time to put up or shut up. If unfettered immigration is part of our national fabric, either deploy the resources needed to properly process visas in India and around the world, or plug the holes along the southern border to greatly slow the rate of illegal immigrants. Trying to have it both ways only leaves the United States looking like a hypocrite on immigration, and that’s not who we are, right?.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Wokeness Claims Another Institution; History Fights Back
When will our intellectual life return to normal, the place Socrates, et al, once left it, where facts come together into conclusions? Today in service to ideologies like CRT a conclusion is established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support it.You can’t argue intellectually against something so profoundly unintellectual but you can still take note of it in hopes someday we will want to untangle ourselves. That’s why we’re visiting today the Tenement Museum on New York’s Lower East Side.
When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016 it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments. Of the over 7,000 people who inhabited that building over its lifespan, researchers established who had lived in which rooms, detailed their lives, forensically reconstructed the surroundings, and we shared that with guests. Rule 1 was always “keep it in the room,” focus on specific individuals and how they lived in the room where you were standing. Over the years these included Irish, Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants. There had been no Bangladeshi’s, Spaniards or blacks; their stories lay elsewhere, “outside the room.” It is the same reason there is no monument to those who died on D-Day at Gettysburg. That didn’t happen there. That story is told somewhere else.
Imagine the power of telling the story of an immigrant family’s struggle between earning a living in the new factories demanding labor in New York, and the pull of maintaining their own religious traditions from their living room where such family arguments took place. Think about explaining sweat shop conditions in a room that was actually such a place. No need to talk about lack of space and privacy, it was literally all around visitors. The Rogarshevsky family walked this hall. The Baldizzi family put their hands on this banister to climb the stairs at the end of a weary day. They came home to this evening light in their parlor. They smelled the rain as visitors did on a March day. You could literally feel history.
After Trump’s election everything changed. Our mission at the Museum went from telling real stories to “fighting fascism and destroying the patriarchy.” With our focus on immigration, we were given tips on handling what the museum snidely called “red hats,” MAGA-capped Trump supporters, usually parents visiting a hip child in NYC who dragged them in for reeducation. I witnessed an Asian museum educator say out loud without any concern by management “No more Jews, I want to tell my story!” Her parents were university professors from Asia and she was born in a toney NYC suburb, so I’m not quite sure what her story was. Narratives were rewritten, so for example the Irish immigrants went from suffering anti-Catholic discrimination in Protestant New York to being murderers of innocent blacks during the 1863 Draft Riots. Never mind the Irish family spotlighted by the Museum lived there in 1869 with no connection to the Riots.
The wokeness which drove me to quit is now poised for a new lows in a desperate move to shoehorn a black family into the mix because of course everything has to be about race. The Museum is planning for the first time not only to feature the story of a (black) family who never lived there, the family were not even immigrants, born instead in New Jersey. To accommodate this change, the Museum will do away with its current Irish family tour in lieu of a hybrid to emphasize black suffering and deemphasize the actual life experiences of discrimination imposed on the Irish by “whiter” New Yorkers. They will build a “typical” apartment of the time on the fifth floor for the black family, an ahistorical space they never lived in, an affront to those whose real life stories once did. It would make as much sense to build a space to tell Spiderman’s story.
The existing Irish tour is particularly important because it supports a classist, not racial, basis for discrimination in America. It forces guests to think through the roots of inequality given that rich white people already established in New York discriminated against poor white people (the Irish first, then the Jews and Italians.) That narrative is problematic in 2021 because it spreads victimhood broadly, and chips away at the BLM meme that race is the cause of everything.
The story is also problematic in 2021 because it emphasized how the Irish organized themselves politically to fight back and claim a more equal place in society. Many of the Irish had entered the United States before there even was any immigration law, simply walking off ships into the New World. Later, as nascent citizenship laws demanded proof of several years of residence as a condition for regularized status, many Irish could not prove it, the purest form of undocumented as no documentation existed when they went feet dry. The post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution designed to overnight change freed slaves into American citizens with the right to vote also scooped up masses of Irish immigrants. Aided by the sleazy needs of men like Boss Tweed who were willing to trade patronage jobs for votes, the Irish began to prosper.
If you wanted to ask the question of how the Irish did that, and later the Jews, Germans, Italians, Hispanics, and Chinese, but not blacks, you were once welcome to do so. In better days the museum referred to this as “introducing complexity,” asking questions without clear answers instead of imposing a pre-written doctrine on guests. No more. The Irish are once again not popular among the rich white people running New York, this time in the guise of the Tenement Museum. Their story will exist only as a sidebar to a black experience that never really was. It is a literal rewriting of history. What a shame a place designed to help us remember wants to make us forget.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Running Biden vs. Governing Biden (Pick One)
Joe Biden and the Democrats did OK getting elected. When do they plan to start the governing part?Everyone was supposed to calm down once Uncle Joe took office. Good old Joe. CNN got it, running an article about how Joe plays Mario Kart with the grandkids, has a nice non-dumpster wood fire in the Oval Office, and goes to bed early. Politico ran a hard-biting piece on how “the first couple’s romantic gestures aren’t just genuine — they’re restorative.” Mr. Rogers with some PDA. A lot of familiar people are in the cabinet and mid-level positions. It’s almost as if it is 2016 again. Safe, happy 2016. But better, as we now also have Kamala (remember her, the first ever this-and-that vice president?)
It’s nice. But the governing part is off to a slow start. Congress has been busy, albeit with another failed impeachment trial (counting Russiagate/Mueller, let’s call it impeachment shot in the dark III) of a guy who is not even president anymore, with a 9/11 style commission apparently to follow. At his Senate hearing the nominee for Attorney General was goaded into agreeing to some sort of additional investigation. “Hold him accountable” people say. Well, he lost the election, that’s pretty accountable. And why not — hearings are scheduled for the Postmaster General, whose days in the job are numbered, about why maybe some mail-in ballots might have been delivered late on accidental purpose five months ago.
Trump nostalgia? No, keep fear alive seems to be the driver. For the first time in history the Capitol has a non-scalable fence enclosing it, and the Kapitol Kops are asking that the barbed wire stay in place until September “while authorities work to track down threats.” The National Guard is on near-permanent assignment (cost to date $480 million) on the Hill for no apparent reason other than to give directions to a few lost tourists. Political theatre, re-election stunts. A waste of time when the clock is running so hard against us.
Because if we accept the Democratic/MSM campaign premise Trump nearly destroyed America, then this is a time of great urgency, life or death stuff. Things need fixing. But not that you’d know watching Biden and his Democratic Congress run the partisan table while the real problems sit like grandma in a Cuomo nursing home.
Let’s see what the Democrats, in full control of Congress, are really up to. They haven’t been in such a position of power since 2008 during First Obama, and they know it. Their solution to fix America? Stamp out the opposition ahead of the 2022 midterms.
Start with a mess ‘o politically driven Executive Orders canceling Trump. No more Muslim ban! Yea, except nobody can travel anyway because of COVID. Except of course everybody along the Mexican border with hazy asylum claims, whom Biden is fast tracking into America. Business travel from Europe, hmmm, dangerous, but anyone living in a tent outside El Paso, bienvenido.
So it’s no surprise the first major legislation the Democratic Congress is to take up is an amnesty to transform the 11 million illegal immigrants who have collected in the U.S. since the last amnesty into 11 million new Democrats, er, citizens, within eight years (i.e., the next next presidential election but it may not matter because climate czar John “Muppet Lurch” Kerry says we only have 9 years left to live) The bill includes $4 billion to boost economic development in Latin American countries, which are not in the unemployed United States. Viva!
Elsewhere the House wants reparations for slavery ended 150 years ago because that will fix everything on TV. The military has been restocked with transpeople. In another game-changing Executive Order, Biden revoked Trump’s E.O. creating an apprenticeship program paid for by industry to be replaced by one paid for by the Federal government which will favor the unions Dems need to be re-elected. President Biden has shown real concern for the people of Texas, hit by natural disaster, by ignoring them. The Dems in general are no longer demanding Ted Cruz leave the state forever but return to it to stop the blizzards. Outside of the halls of Congress, Democrats are trying to cancel conservative media from major cable providers.
But the real hot button issue is finding a way an Executive Order can wipe out trillions of dollars of student loan debt without any thought to the broader economic consequences of such a decision and without reforming the way higher education is funded going forward. Because giving out free temporary debt relief is a primary function of government, some clause or amendment they talked about in civics class the day everybody faked being sick to go to the KISS concert. The Dems haven’t (yet) gone as far as nominating the corpse of Ruth Bader Ginsburg back to the bench but keep an eye on the news.
What about America’s real issues? Stuff like COVID vaccine availability, the economic and social effect of lockdowns (San Francisco kids are committing suicide at an alarming rate, in New York as well, but at least they’re not in cages), unemployment (millions of people are forbidden from earning a living by their government), maybe the crumbling infrastructure. Or lockdown-driven drug overdoses, with deaths 3x those from COVID in San Francisco. The solution so far? Not school openings, because the Dems owe the teachers unions big time for their votes. Most of Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion Coronavirus Relief Bill has little to do with public health; only 1 percent is allotted to the vaccine. Biden even said after whooping COVID, he is going after cancer. But for now here’s $1400 bucks, knock yourselves out, buy Gamestop.
Remember foreign policy? Joe said recently “diplomacy is back” so, well, OK then. Iran still needs tending to and says we’re moving too slow. Russia must be up to something. Word is China is a big dealio. Anything? Bueller? All we’ve gotten so far is a non-decision to not follow through on Trump’s troop withdrawals from Afghanistan and elsewhere along the failed path of the Global War of Terror. We all know we do have Susan Rice’s next bright idea to look forward to. One hears Libya needs re-liberating.
Everyone knows it is possible to walk and chew gum at the same time. The problem is the Dems have chosen to only do one, not attempt both.
On the other hand, think about how this might play in the midterms. Obama made the mistake of actually trying to take his election momentum and control of Congress and turn it into history making health care reform. He ended up losing his majority and producing a new half-baked health care system to augment the old half-baked system while creating a political football for all to play with.
Not so for the Biden Democratic party. Their goal is paying off electoral votes while finding ways to make January 6 a 2022 top line issue for voters. That what running looks like, creating a narrative, not governing.
“For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years, I want to make sure all the news is the American people. I’m tired of talking about Trump,” Biden said during a campaign appearance at a CNN town hall tongue bath, albeit a month into his term as president not candidate. But while Biden takes pains to refer to Trump as “the former guy” or “the previous administration” the attention Trump gets from Congress and the media, coupled with Biden’s lack of action, keeps the whole machine in campaign mode and that always requires a villian, an opponent, and that’s Trump. Dems want to run against Trump whether he is or is not ever again a candidate.
We need more than that, you even told us so Joe. Remember during the campaign, Joe, when you promised to “crush” the virus the day you took office? We’re quarantining until our skin becomes translucent for lack of sunlight. Our national symbol is Karen telling someone they need to wear a yellow hazmat suit to Safeway or they’ll have her kid’s blood on their hands. An America with its schools closed, its people out of work due to government decree, its worker’s economy weezing, its faith in itself low, an America where no one believes anything is true anymore and the president is just puddling along playing Mario Kart while settling political debts? Joe, you’ve been in office for six weeks, close to half of those all-important First 100 Days you talked about during the campaign.
Like about half the country, I didn’t vote for Biden, but like all of the country I live here. Unlike some Democrats, who for example realized lockdowns were a useful tool in destroying the economy that was leading to Trump’s re-election, I do not want to see further suffering for partisan gain. If a Democrat can solve some of our problems, I celebrate that. So get started. Fix something. We’re bleeding out here, Joe.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Democratic Narrative: No Morning in America for You
The chaos of the primaries, the lack of a clear party vision in the last debate — are Democrats a progressive party, a party of moderates, a plaything for billionaires or just people sniping each other for virtue points? It is time for concern.
Politics is always about the biggest story you tell and how voters see themselves in that story. If the Democrats lose in November one of the main reasons — and the competition is strong — will be getting trapped inside a set of false narratives. Or, in the words of James Carville, “Losing our damn minds.”
Think how powerful the narratives of “Morning in America,” or “Hope and Change,” were, and contrast those with the Dems’ “things suck more than you realize, people” and you see where this is headed.
At the top of the list is the economy. The Democratic narrative is the economy is bad, with a recession just around the corner (or maybe the corner after that, keep looking.) Yet outside the debate hall 59 percent of Americans feel they are better off than a year ago. The overall quality of life is satisfactory for a massive 84 percent. Unemployment is at historic lows. Wages are up a bit.
The reality is bad enough for Dems. But the narrative problem is the Democrats are confusing a strong economy with economic inequality. The economy does benefit everyone, but it benefits a small percentage at the top much more. They have not gotten this message across to an electorate that is happy to have any job, content with some rise in wages, and for the half of Americans who own some stock, see some growth in their 401(k) to suggest maybe at least part of retirement won’t be dependent on canned soup being on sale. The Dems are running on a narrative that the economy failed; Americans believe if it failed, it failed less than before and that’s good enough.
Holding Democrats back is their false narrative of all-you-can-eat white privilege. Economic inequality across America is not primarily racial, though it has a racial component. But Dems are still telling the old story, as if whites across the midwest still have the union factory jobs that raised them and blacks never did. The powerful message of “we’re all in this together” is being thrown away to capture black victimization narrative votes. Dems also insist on lumping blacks, Hispanics (30 percent of whom support Trump), Chinese, and everyone non-lily into “People of Color,” a classic case of one size fits none. It would be an award-winning SNL skit to watch Larry David’s Bernie try to convince a Chinese friend, a medical doctor with kids in the Ivies, that as a “POC” his personal concerns had significant crossover with what was happening to a guy uptown as played by guest host Samuel L. Jackson. It’s about money, stupid, not color.
Dems seem to be working this narrative into the ground in an effort to alienate as many voters as possible. Poor whites, too meth-addled to see Trump making false promises, deserve to be replaced by driverless delivery trucks. Poor blacks, it’s not your fault, because racism. Everyone else not white, whatever, go with the black folk on this one, ‘kay? An issue that could unite 90 percent of Americans gets lost. And if you don’t agree racism is the root cause of everything, from “top to bottom” as Bernie says, well, you’re a racist! James Carville says for the Democratic Party to win it has to drive a narrative that “doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.” Instead, the strategy seems to be Dems turning from criticizing ideas to criticizing voters.
Much of the rest is a mighty credibility issue for the Dems. They have stuck with so many proven false narratives so long no one believes them if anyone is even still listening. Trump did not work with Putin to get elected, yet Maddow on MSDNC is still pushing something similar even today. Do we really need to talk about how few Americans cared so little about impeachment? Trump did not start WWIII. Roe v. Wade is still firmly the law.
But the transpeople! Dems have clung to the narrative transrights are somehow a major issue among voters; Biden tweeted “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time.” While most voters want to see transpeople treated decently, there is no national election issue here. Same for all the other virtuous baggage Dems drag around the social media they take way too seriously — for example, rights and benefits for illegal immigrants. It makes them seem out of touch with mainstream America, a particular liability in an election likely to hinge on Purple voters in swing states.
Dems also cling too hard to the narrative of Barack Obama. Maybe he deserves accolades for this or that, maybe not, but that the guy who seems to be the talk of the Democrat party isn’t one of the people on the ballot is not a strong thing. Barack and Michelle’s formal portraits are touring the nation, apparently so Democrats can worship them like artifacts from some lost cargo cult, a “communal experience of a particular moment in time,” according to the National Portrait Gallery. Five equally desperate candidates, with Biden in the lead Art Garfunkel role, are airing ads featuring St. Barack.
Healthcare is a kitchen-table economic issue. A majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, rank cutting health care and drug costs as their top priority. That polled as far more important than passing a major health system overhaul like Medicare for All. Americans are not interested in converting the entire economy to some flavor of socialism just so they can see a doctor. The bigger the change Dems sell it as the more it frightens people away. Same for all the other free stuff Dems are using to troll for votes (college, loans, reparations.) Each good idea is wrapped in a grad school seminar paper requiring America to convert its economy from something people have grown to live with into something they aren’t sure they understand. It is a helluva narrative to sell at home, Democrats making an election against Trump into a sub-referendum on socialism lite at a time when Americans’ personal economic satisfaction is at a record high.
Everybody’s great grandma was a wonderful immigrant, salt of the earth. But for much of the nation the narrative is no longer about whether immigration is a moral responsibility. Immigration for vast swaths of the nation is another kitchen-table economic issue. Dems are telling the wrong story — land of the free, huddled masses, yada yada — and seemingly ignoring pleas about opportunities lost. Their narrative cuts short the needed conversation about skills-based immigration policy as is standard in Europe, Canada, Japan, Australia, and elsewhere for the 21st century instead of dragging forward a 19th century legal relic. People concerned about immigration as a pocketbook issue are thrown into the garbage dump by Dems as racists, as if Democrats instinctively cleave to the narrative that alienates the most voters.
James Carville summed it up saying “We have candidates talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election… By framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to people’s lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you.”
WaPo wrote “The 2020 election is no ordinary contest. It’s an emergency. If you’re being driven off a cliff, you don’t need to find your favorite Formula-1 driver. You just need someone to take the wheel and stop the impending carnage… Trump’s reelection would constitute an existential threat to our republic. He has already tried — repeatedly — to subvert our free and fair elections.” Among all the others, this is the fundamental flawed narrative which may get Trump re-elected. The Dem vision that we are either already in the abyss, or standing damn close to the edge. Many hard-core Dems feel this way because Trump, but I am far less sure that it is broadly felt outside the media/NYC/Hollywood world. Twitter is not real life. While few would go as far as “morning in America,” most are pretty sure it is not an emergency out there, and are pretty sure the majority of Americans will find it hard to support and trust a candidate who says it is.
Where you once had hope and change, there’s instead the always exasperated Warren, the out-of-breath grumpy Bernie, that frozen Pete grin, Yang and Steyer once onstage giving their TED talks, all the lost governors remembered as well as the other guy from Wham!, Biden looking like the last surviving member of an 90’s rock band playing a Holiday Inn gig remembering when he and Barack once filled arenas, man. And now Mike Bloomberg, cosplaying a Democrat. Oh well, the Beto revival of 2024 isn’t that far away.
If I were writing ad copy for the Republicans, I might try this: “Voters, do me a favor, look out the window. Do you see chaos? A Republic on the edge of collapse, Weimar, Rome, the U.S. in 1860? Is your life controlled by an authoritarian? That’s what Democrats say is out there. But you don’t see that, do you? You see more people with jobs. You have a little more. And more kids down the block are home from war then gearing up to fight in places like Libya and Syria none of us really care about, at least not enough to give up a son or daughter. So when you go to vote, think of whose story about what you see you believe. Your choice is pretty straightforward at that point. Have a good night, and a good day at work tomorrow.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Looking for Trouble (and Answers) in Berlin
I went looking for trouble in Berlin.
Traveling in Germany as an American I was left with one thought: why can’t we live this way? Of course modern Germans have their problems, but it seems wherever you go it is clean, safe, organized. They pay taxes, sure, but receive nearly free healthcare, college, and federally-mandated vacation time. The trains run on time. They have trains everywhere.
But there had to be more to it. So I went looking for trouble, asking Berliners where I shouldn’t go, where the off-limits parts of town are, you know, the places I wouldn’t be safe. It turned out to be a difficult question. OK, there were some areas where I might be pickpocketed at night, and a few parks where if I went in search of someone to sell me drugs I might find him. Prostitution is legal and sin is orderly. The closest I saw to a fight was four drunk non-German tourists hassling passers by. I went to an immigrant area which was statistically Berlin’s highest crime zone, and saw lots of graffiti and received some close looks but nothing more threatening than that. I couldn’t find a really bad part of town, and I tried.
A similar quest in nearly any major American city would be a lot easier. We run our lives, never mind plan a tourist’s itinerary, around the bad parts of town. I live in New York City, where we play a kind of parlor game about which areas are not as bad as they used to be. In Alphabet City where they filmed Taxi Driver in the 1970s the former crack houses now rent out tiny apartments for over $3,000 a month. There is a moderate push-pull between the border of the Upper East Side and Harlem as gentrification drives up housing prices.
The police presence around the areas in Harlem where tourists venture — the legendary Apollo Theater, the soul food restaurants — is effective even as the area still retains its snap. I was savagely beaten not far away, near the White Castle which serves as a kind of Checkpoint Charlie between zones. I wandering into five black teenagers pounding the life out of a much smaller Hispanic kid and yelled for them to stop or I’d call the cops. They quit, but circled around the block and attacked me, all at 4pm in the afternoon, you know, just after school.
So at age 60 I threw my first punch in anger since maybe 8th grade. After the cops came and the attackers scattered (and nobody nearby saw nothing) I was told I was likely part of an initiation, as no one made any attempt to rob me or the Hispanic kid. The cops said almost certainly a gang member was taping it all, so I should check online. It made me remember how the insurgents in Iraq would also have a video guy nearby when they set off an IED.
Pray for the tourist who alights at Hunts Point in the Bronx. The neighborhood has the highest reported crime rate in New York City, including the most violent crime. And given the poor relations between residents and the police, you can be assured reported crimes represent only some sliver of what really happens. Over 50 percent of the area lives in high or extreme poverty. Unemployment is among the highest in the state. It’s all just eight subway stops from Jeffrey Epstein’s old mansion.
Hunts Point is split between blacks and people from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but race is less the criteria for victims than familiarity. Very, very few people on those streets don’t already live there, and as a stranger of any hue you are unwelcome except as prey. Daytime, in and out of a roast chicken joint, okay, but stay off the side streets, keep your eyes down, avoid displays of gang colors (and you better know what they are) and, well, just don’t go there.
A good friend spent a couple of years in a Hunts Point high school under Teach for America, our national service program designed to destroy the souls of liberal arts graduates, and was told her most dangerous days would be her first, until the beast that is the neighborhood adjusted to her presence. Luckily she he was quickly subsumed as a neutral element, and by the end of her tenure probie gang members in her classes would even graciously suggest she not hang around after school certain days when trouble was expected.
New York is also awash in hate crime, centered in parts of Queens and Brooklyn formerly considered “safe.” Hate crimes reported this year show an 83 percent rise over the corresponding period last year, what the governor calls a “growing cancer.” In one recent incident, Heil Hitler, a swastika, and the words “gas chamber” were spray painted on a predominantly Jewish club which counts many Holocaust survivors among its members. The hate crime wave is under-reported, however, in that the majority of the incidents are anti-Semitic, and the perpetrators often black, as once-separated neighborhoods grow together, all counter-narrative to the national white supremacy meme.
On the S-Bahn train trip back into Berlin center from another not-so-bad bad neighborhood I was preoccupied with the people around me. None of them were really poor, or even could become poor. Under Germany’s social system, there is only what they call “relative poverty,” with the lowest levels of households receiving about 60 percent of the average German income. So everybody eats.
And everybody gets medical care; the healthcare system in Germany is funded by statutory contributions ensuring healthcare for all. You can also choose private insurance. The system can be complicated, but basically takes about 7 percent out of everyone’s paycheck, matched by their employer. Absent yearly copays of maybe $50, that’s it. If you make below a minimum wage, you pay nothing and still get the same healthcare as others. The system also covers long-term nursing care.
College is free. At work, there are maternity benefits, a cash child allowance, and laws ensuring expectant mothers stay home for six weeks before birth and eight weeks after. Child mortality rates are almost twice as good as in the U.S. overall, and staggering compared to forgotten places like Hunts Point. The United States is the only advanced industrial nation that doesn’t have national laws guaranteeing paid maternity leave.
For every German there is a national pension plan, work-related accident insurance, and welfare for extreme situations. No one lives homeless except by choice. The U.S. is also the only advanced economy not guaranteeing workers any vacation, paid or unpaid, and the only highly developed country (other than South Korea) that doesn’t guarantee paid sick days. In contrast, European Union nations guarantee workers at least four weeks paid vacation. Among the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has the lowest minimum wage as a percentage of the median wage.
In Germany there are plenty of rights. Free speech and freedom of religion all you want, elections at all levels. Even with restrictions Germany has one of the highest global rates of gun ownership. And none of that gets mixed up in questions of whether to provide everyone healthcare, because it has nothing to do with providing everyone healthcare, or a college education, or maternity leave.
I’m sure there are downsides beyond what a short term visitor can see. But look around Germany: whatever the tax rates, it works for a very broad range of people. Not perfectly, but it works and it’s better than what we have in what we unironically and constantly otherwise remind ourselves is the Greatest Country in the World. You can’t get past that. I don’t know how to twist every detail to make it work in America, and I’m not sure Bernie or Elizabeth or whomever we could elect can try hard enough (Trump and Biden are campaigning on not trying), but there it is, in Germany. And in the UK, Japan, China, Canada, etc. To an American, it all sounds too good to be true.
I write with a certain desperation, not wonderment. I’m not an undergrad who just took his first trip overseas, amazed at the great big world. I lived abroad for 24 years, used national health care in three nations, and traveled to many others. I’ve been a Democrat, voted Republican and third party, been called a fascist and a liberal, had long hair and short, lived in my car and paid off a mortgage.
In Germany I had some sense of what life would be like freed from the burdens which define American life: no worries about healthcare, or old age care. Money enough to really live on if I lose my job or become disabled. No decades-long burdens to get my education, followed by more to help pay the rising costs of my kids’. No worries about outliving my savings, or having a carefully crafted retirement plan blown to shreds by a recession, or being struck down illness my insurance won’t pay for. To never have to wonder how to pay for their spouse’s life-saving medications or watch them whither. What would life be like absolved of those fears?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Is America’s Answer to Its Immigration Assimilation Problem in Germany’s Mistakes?
Too many Americans think immigration is about arguing over head scarfs. Many simplistically demand or oppose the diversity migrants bring. But they’re all using the wrong words, maybe because the right word – heimat — is in German.
The Marzahn neighborhood is way out of town, near the end of the S-Bahn train line, in what used to be East Berlin. There aren’t many obvious signs of the heady Cold War days except the most obvious ones, endless rows of Stalinist apartment blocks. They’re plattenbau, housing constructed of prefabricated concrete slabs. From a distance they look like the greatest set of Legos ever made, and are much more colorful than the brown-gray public housing people in New York live in. The Marzahn area was historically farmland, but in the 1970s and 80s these housing estates were the largest in East Germany, mass scale showcase socialist living.
The fall of the Berlin Wall sent the sharper residents west and the Marzahn area was populated for many years by Germans who could not or would not leave, East Germans left behind by the new demands of capitalism. The population fell from 170,000 about 12,000. In 2015 the near-empty neighborhood was called on to house a large number of Muslims flooding out of the Middle East and North Africa. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to bypass the orderliness of the Dublin Convention and expeditiously take in more than one million migrants (with more to come; the backlog of asylum applications is still well over 400,000) brought the challenges of assimilation to the fore in German politics. With the new additions, today every fifth person in Germany comes from an immigration background.
Initial enthusiasm gave way to fear amid rising numbers of new immigrants. Violent protests hit the eastern city of Chemnitz, leading Merkel’s interior minister to call immigration “the mother of all political problems.” Populist politician Thilo Sarrazin published Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself) about the end of a majority race in the nation as more and more Muslims arrived, apparently with the sole goal of reproducing. One conservative Christian Social Union politician announced “Islam doesn’t belong in Germany.”
The Germans in places like Marzahn who awoke one day to find themselves living among immigrants became known as some Euro version of the characters in Hillbilly Elegy. They reacted by registering some of the strongest support for the anti-immigration party Alternative for Germany (AfD), helping AfD finish third in the 2017 elections. Marzhan’s reputation for crime, especially what we might call hate crime and what the Germans label “politically motivated crime,” rose.
Things are quieter now, but the area today has one of Germany’s highest unemployment rates at 20 percent. About 45 percent of families with kids use government benefits. Like in Marzahn, in 43 percent of Berlin’s elementary schools the majority of children speak little or no German at home. More than 80 percent of Muslim migrants see themselves as “very religious” or “true believers.”
Walking around Marzahn, I never found trouble. Some graffiti. A lot of suspicious looks. But stores were open with the cashiers not hidden behind protective glass, women in hijab pushed baby strollers while chatting on cellphones, and men smoking shisha in mid-afternoon returned the least of an obligatory nod. None wanted to talk, but none objected to me asking. They weren’t going anywhere, but they also weren’t going anywhere.
The other 88 percent of the people in the area are German.
“No, no, nobody is going to burn down the mosque,” sighed one German. “But none of us are friends with them.” Another interrupted to point out Muslims don’t wait in line, and don’t try to speak German. They don’t work hard, he said. He had been a bricklayer. His generation had its first Christmases in the ruins of WWII. They’d seen the massive 1960’s and onward diaspora of Turkish guest workers, gastarbeiters, frustratingly still not fully assimilated. Someone who might have been second? third? generation Turk swept the floor around us and another who looked like a sibling tended bar. Every German has a favorite late night doner kebab joint run by a faux-friendly Turkish guy with a funny accent. Fewer have a Turkish best friend.
“There are always those who will take advantage of this problem, for politics,” said one German. “But no one seems to understand what we feel.” It didn’t take long for the word heimat to come up. It is often mistranslated as “homeland” or even “fatherland” by American progressives desperate to connect everything to some creeping Nazi resurgence, but a definition truer to this conversation would be a place allowing someone to experience safety in the form of predictability, a place of reliability of existence. A place where you know where you are and what is around you, and what is around you supports your sense of heimat. It tells you you are in the right place. Rooted. The opposite is feeling rootless in your supposed home, a foreigner in what once was your country.
Heimat was what this was about, creating it somehow or suffering when you don’t, something evolutionary, not revolutionary, progress or lack of, not to be judged by one election or two. It was about the longer term, politics vs. assimilation vs. stubbornness vs. time cheating away anyone who remembered it differently. Historical-time scale change, the kind that took from WWII through the Cold War through Reunification in these German lives here.
Maybe that only can happen once a generation. But time alone doesn’t seem to be an answer either. The Turks, Germany’s largest minority group today at four million, remain largely segregated from mainstream culture. They earn lower wages than Germans, and their children are less likely to attend university. Generations in, mostly citizens now, many still work the “immigrant jobs.” As one writer put it, “We asked for workers, and human beings came instead.” Nobody had a plan for that.
But somebody somewhere tried to raise awareness, told everyone to change, or refuse to change, or that the other side should change, or they are racist not to change, or that change is antithetical to who they are. Anti-racism morphed into anti-whiteness. You are a lesser person because of the way you vote. Every group’s goal should be to create their own Wakanda. Expecting migrants to blend in to a homogeneous society nullifies the benefit of multiculturalism. Expecting a homogeneous society to simply accept the changes and challenges of multiculturalism as a “value” ignores millennia of human nature. Anger and fear are always exploitable. The dinosaurs didn’t live forever but unmanaged they stomped a lot of mammals on the way out.
It would have been easy to move the discussion from Marzahn, Berlin to Akron, Ohio. There are always people who see it as Brown and White. Their answers are simple and will fail as simplistic. More/less immigration. Progressive/racist. Build the wall/abolish ICE. Asylum for almost none/asylum for almost all and let the ones denied stay anyway. #Families/#None without skills.
The better of the Germans eschew hashtags to ask themselves what their heimat will look like in five and 50 years, and likely so on the Muslim side as well. As on both sides of the Atlantic, it is easy to guess everyone would agree the government will continue to not bother to solve the problems arising out from the lack of integration. In search of a modern answer, one person introduced a term, societal diversity management, currently missing from the polarized conversation.
Politicians decide how many and how fast for their own short-term election goals. Whoever was already there and whoever just arrived are left to work it out. People stand across the street from one another, one side despairing their rootlessness because they won’t change to assimilate the newcomers, the other facing multi-generational marginalization because they won’t adapt. They think they’re arguing over head scarfs when in fact they are arguing about the need to create a livable version of heimat.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Towards a More Sensible Asylum Policy
America’s asylum laws, meant to help the most vulnerable, have instead become a clogged backdoor for economic migrants. The Trump administration is restoring asylum to its correct role in American immigration policy. It is a long overdue, right thing to do, but almost nobody is satisfied. Here’s why.Asylum is a very old concept, dating back to the ancient Greeks. It recognizes a person persecuted by his own country can be offered residence and protection by another country. The actual conditions vary considerably across the globe (the U.S. will consider Female Genital Mutilation grounds for asylum while in many nations it is an accepted practice), but in most cases asylum is offered to people who face a well-founded fear of persecution if sent home on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group.
The definition of those five protected grounds have also varied greatly based on shifts in American domestic politics. Since 1994 for example, LGBT status has been, and remains under Trump, a possible claim to asylum. Domestic violence was granted consideration as grounds under the Obama administration, only to be rolled back under Trump.
But even as those criteria have changed with political winds, asylum has never been about simply wanting a better life. Poverty, for all its horrors, has never fallen within the protected grounds of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group, though is often assumed to by progressive journalists without access to the Internet and some Democratic legislators from the Bronx.
A theoretical “perfect” asylum case in the U.S. might be a prominent Chinese democracy advocate finally granted permission by Beijing to lecture in the U.S. As he arrives, his government announces he will be arrested upon his return to China for intellectual crimes against the state, and per the State Department, likely subjected to torture.
The reality of 2019 is the asylum system has evolved into a cheater’s backdoor, a pseudo-legal path to immigration otherwise not available to economic migrants. They lack either the skills for working visas, or the ties to qualify for legal immigration under America’s family reunification system. So they walk to the border and emptily ask for asylum, taking advantage of previous administrations’ look-the-other-way “solution” to their ever-growing numbers. Affirmative asylum claims, made at ports of entry, jumped 35 percent in the last two years even as refusal rates for those cases along the southern border run into the 80th percentile.
It works — for them. A Honduran on the border who says he came to work is sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case. Since detaining asylum seekers and their families while the processes play out over at time years is expensive and politically distasteful (kids in cages!), until recently most asylum seekers were instead released into American society to wait out their cases. They became eligible for work authorization if their cases extended past 150 days, as almost all do. The number of pending cases in early 2019 was 325,277, more than 50 times higher than in 2010.
Eventual approval rates for all nationalities over the past decade average only 28 percent (some place the approval rate as low as 15 percent and argue it is because of unfairness in the system, rather than illegitimate claims. Others claim the approval rate, however low, is bogus, reflecting clever coaching by immigration lawyers instead of legitimate fears), and after denial the applicant could either refile as a defensive asylum claim, or simply disappear into the vast underground of illegals.
Previous administrations’ plans to create expedited asylum processes proved ineffective as numbers endlessly just increase to fill the available opportunities. Simply making a claim to asylum has been enough to live and work in America in one status or another. Trump is changing that.
The most visible change is detaining asylum seekers and their families at the border instead of releasing them into society to wait for their cases to be processed. Detention is a deterrent to economic migrants making false claims to asylum, statistically somewhere between seven to nine out of 10 persons plus their families.
The next change was for the Trump administration to negotiate for asylum seekers to wait out their processing times not in American society or in a detention facility, but in Mexico, a program called the Migrant Protection Protocols. People at the border make their asylum claim, and are then nudged a step backward to wait for an answer in Mexico. This relieves the U.S. of the costs, monetary (the House just voted an additional $4.6 billion to be spend on beds and baths for detainees) and political.
Mexican officials estimate about 60,000 people will be sent to Mexico by the end of August under the Migrant Protection Protocols. The policy seems to be effective in weeding out economic migrants as many, denied the chance to work off their debts in America to the human traffickers they paid for the journey north, choose to return home to Central America and abandon their previous sworn assertion such a return would imperil their lives.
A more significant Trump change to U.S. policy is to bring it in line with the European standard (“Dublin Convention“) of country of first refuge. Most of Europe subscribes to this model, which requires asylum claims to be made in the first country that can offer refuge. The idea is a person legitimately fleeing a repressive government would want safety as soon as possible. If the person is really just an economic migrant, this will stop him from “forum shopping” to see if the economic benefits are better in Italy or Austria. Or Mexico versus the United States.
In the American context, if someone is fleeing gang vengeance in Honduras, Mexico would become his refuge even though his cousin needs help in the restaurant in Chicago. The U.S. will thus not consider asylum seekers who pass through another country before reaching the United States (the order is being challenged in the courts.)
To put the plan into practice, U.S. reached a deal with Guatemala for that nation to take in more asylum seekers from other Central American nations. The U.S. is expected to sign similar agreements with El Salvador and Honduras. The U.S. has had an identical but little-noticed arrangement in place with Canada for many years, allowing the U.S. to not consider asylum applications from persons who did not apply first while in Canada. Despite the media hysteria about cruelty, the idea is nothing new.
The impact of these changes will be significant. Though Mexico does not yet have a formal safe third country agreement with the U.S., its Commission for Aid to Migrants projects 80,000 asylum requests this year, up from only 2,137 five years ago. Mexico and other Central American nations are expected to also become a place of first refuge for the many Haitians, Cubans, and Africans who previously just passed through their territory en route to America.
This illustrates an ancillary benefit to moving some of the costs of housing migrants to Mexico, and asking for more asylum processing by Guatemala and other nations: it gives them a reason to police their own borders. Until recently, there was no incentive for these countries to stop migrants headed north, and indeed much incentive to pass on the problems by opening their own borders to northbound traffic. This same thinking allowed human traffickers and drug dealers to operate with near impunity.
Following all this, the newest change concerns derivative claims to asylum. Spouses and minor children of those approved for asylum continue to be granted asylum alongside the principal. AG Barr, however, recently overturned a decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals saying a Mexican adult man could apply for asylum on the basis of his father being targeted by a cartel. Previous administrations held such an adult, while obviously not a dependent minor, would still automatically “inherit” asylum as the member of a particular social group, his extended family. Barr says now the adult can still apply today for asylum, but has now to prove his case independent of his father.
Barr’s decision is in line with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who ruled victims of domestic violence would no longer be considered members of a particular social group, i.e., all abused women of say Honduras, and were thus not eligible for asylum based simply on a claim to have been such as victim. Sessions determined each woman would need to prove a specific case of persecution and not simply assert she was a victim of a crime sadly endemic to many Central American societies.
Americans broadly favor immigration in general. But the gap between orderly immigration and unfettered immigration based on how many people can slip through physical holes in the border and loopholes in the law has grown too wide, to the point where a quarter of the 45 million foreign-born people currently in the U.S. arrived here illegally. Some 60 percent of likely voters support efforts to “prevent migrants from making fraudulent asylum claims and being released into the country.” As Europe has acknowledged and America is learning, modern immigration comes with considerable social and political costs, and those will be accounted for by society one way (good and thought out) or another (violent and chaotic.)As David Frum melodramatically wrote to encourage his fellow progressives to abandon garbage “policy” like abolishing ICE and throwing open the borders, “if liberals won’t enforce borders, fascists will.” Rewriting that a bit, if Congress will not reform immigration policy in line with a broad national consensus, then whoever is in the White House will, albeit in a piecemeal fashion. The result is Obama’s DACA reforms didn’t outlast his administration, and if a Democrat wins in 2020 Trump’s changes to asylum processing will be rolled back. Nothing gets permanently resolved that way, and it needs to be.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dems are Shorting White Voters in 2020
The cornerstone of progressivism, and one of the reasons Democrats are likely to lose the 2020 presidential race, is their misunderstanding of white privilege. It leads inexorably to devaluing the voters needed to clinch the Electoral College.
The basic idea is whites are ahead of other races economically via privilege, an amorphous term including access to good colleges, sympathetic treatment by cops, better terms on mortgages, and more. Kanye scores big money-wise, but when he tries to get a cab he’s just another black guy, while taxis compete for me to be in their back seat.Not sure? David Brooks of the New York Times says “Racial equity has become the defining issue of the moment.” In fact, white progressives are now further left on race and diversity issues than the typical African-American voter, what one very white man calls The Great Awokening and feels is comparable to the abolitionists in the North who demanded civil war to right racial wrongs.
Elsewhere, the Times wants to impeach Trump for racism. That article claims Democrats’ problem is their “obsession with Robert Mueller and his tedious investigation — an investigation all but irrelevant to the racist agenda that animates Trump’s political project.”
The problem with this victim-washed vision of 2019 America (not a good era for subtlety overall) is white is not enough, never has been. I learned this during my 24 years at the State Department. I was a diplomat, about as privileged a job on paper as you can get. But inside the State Department (and don’t think while it is different today it is all that different) being white was only a third of the bargain. The criteria for upward mobility was “pale, male, and Yale.” Being white (the pale part) was a great start, but only if you were also a man; women suffered in promotion rates and even then only in less-desirable job categories (girls are nurses, boys are doctors.) But white and male got you only to the front door. The “good” jobs required the right background.
A sort-of proud graduate of The Ohio State University (somehow Harvard feels no need to call itself The Harvard) my privilege only went so far. Some animals are indeed more equal, and I couldn’t fake it. They knew each other. Their fathers knew each other. They had money, well, parents with money. No surprise the State Department has been sued successfully over the years by its woman diplomats and its black diplomats. We Big Ten alums however never got our class action together and so muddled mostly in the middle levels.
The idea white, or even white and male, was enough has always been laughable. America did not welcome our grandpas; it shunted them into slums and paid them as little as possible to work for male, pale and Yale owners. Check how many Irish died digging the canals around New Orleans. Read how immigrant children were worked in factories decades. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act used phrenology to exclude Italians. It was so horrendously racist Hitler praised it in Mein Kampf.Now in the world of 2019 mentioning the Irish triggers someone with purple hair and a neck tattoo in Elvish to shout slavery was worse. It was. But applying a rank-order to suffering disguises the reason this ideology will drag the Democratic party to likely defeat in 2020: it is about more than race. What progressives call white privilege is mostly wealth privilege, with a lot of unrelated things chucked in to fill out the racist argument, basically everything bad that happens to black people from airplane seating scrums to what color the director is of the next superhero movie as if every moment today is a hot summer morning in 1968 Birmingham.
The candidates then either dismiss what they call white angst as a Fox narrative or condemn it as white supremacy, Nazism, fascism, the words having lost specific meaning. Dems gleefully crow about changing demographics that will turn America into a non-majority nation soon enough, and celebrate the end of privilege as the country depletes its stock of Caucasians. They fail to see the salient statistic of America is not that the 61% who are white is falling, but that a tiny, tiny percentage, the top 0.1% of households, now hold about the same amount of wealth as the bottom 90%.
And every white voter in every swing state knows that, even if the candidates do not. And every one of those voters knows that the solutions the Democrats propose will not help with it (they are also unlikely to fix racism.) Mayor Pete’s Douglass Plan provides billions for black businesses and colleges, Kamala Harris proposed a $100 billion plan for black homeownership, everyone on CNNMSNBCNYTWAPO favors reparations, and all the candidates support free medical care for illegal immigrants, but not so much for those they see as already having too much, who actually have just a little more but not enough.
Nothing excuses the at times dangerous behavior of Trump and some of his supporters (but it does explain why this hasn’t hurt the president politically.) Yet declaring all Trump supporters racist is far too crude an understanding. Many feel they are under attack from progressives who fail to see their economic vulnerabilities. Instead of Barack Obama (Columbia University ’83, Harvard Law ’91) talking about hope and change for everyone, they hear the Dems dedicating themselves to over-correcting racial wrongs not committed by any of the people who now feel as if they are being punished for those historical sins. They witness Democrats scolding them into resentment over what little more they have than others.
Democratic hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand failed to sell this version of white privilege right at Ground Zero for economic inequality, Youngstown, Ohio. Youngstown was archetypal postwar America, a midwest city built around a now-dead steel industry. It was a racially-mixed city, not only statistically, but in reality. The now-gone union jobs paid living wages to whites and blacks and allowed people to buy homes on each others’ streets, same as they worked together in the mills. It was workers’ privilege.Gillibrand was asked at a campaign stop “This is an area that, across all demographics, has been depressed because of the loss of industry and the opioid crisis. What do you have to say to people in this area about so-called white privilege?”
Her answer, praised on CNN as “powerful,” was a wandering narrative about how while white privilege didn’t spare the questioner unemployment, the loss of her house, her son to opiods, and her soul itself at the hands of rapacious inequality, the black folk in Youngstown had it worse, ’cause the white supremacist cops would bust a black kid for weed while a white kid would walk away. It was the perfect answer for a progressive media hit. It was the worst possible answer if a candidate wanted some of those Ohio votes. Gillibrand stumbled on to say she understands families in the community are suffering, “but that’s not what this conversation is about.”
The answer was thin soup to a women who lost a son to opioids. Opioids now rank just below suicide as a cause of death in America, as if the two were unconnected. More die of opioids now in America than car crashes, and more die of opioids than police violence against POC. In 2017, Ohio had the second highest opioids death count in the U.S., 4,293. And how much time will the issue get at the next Democratic debates?
Gillibrand, standing in as the poster child for progressives, likely cares nothing of September 19, 1977 in Youngstown, Black Monday, when 5000 steelworkers were laid off, or of the 50,000 who lost their jobs after that. The town never recovered, trauma which helped put Reagan and then Trump in the White House. She doesn’t see what Trump sees, and what Ronald Reagan saw. The problem is not black and white, it is up and down. The people of Youngstown understand this in their bones and to the amazement of progressive media, they support Trump even when he is ineffectual in helping, because at least he understands. He would never tell them their economic problems pale in comparison to racism.
It is time to admit racism is not the core problem, the one candidate Pete Buttigieg claims “threatens to unravel the American project.” It is in 2019 an exaggeration driving a key Democratic strategy, betting the White House on a pool of voters with a history of unreliable turnout (since the 1980s blacks turned out in higher numbers than whites, percentage-wise, only for the Obama elections) against any hedges toward a body of whites they devalue.This is a risky strategy. It alienates too many, challenging too many others (older Americans of all races historically produce 30-40% higher turnout rates than the youngest voters) to vote for the party that denounces Thomas Jefferson as a slave holder, and throws its own Vice President emeritus and poll-leader under the racism bus while Barack silently lets it happen. Voters meanwhile wonder when the reparations for their lost jobs and homes will come. They know Dems won’t represent them if elected; as whites, their literal existence is painted as the cause of a problem Dems claim to want to solve.
The Dems can’t reassess because to discuss racism in any but the Party’s own terms is more racism. Dissenters are racists, or at least noncompetitive. Mayor Pete who in January said “Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and our democracy,” now leads the charge with racism. Argument is ended with “Oh, so says a white person.” Whitesplaining! It’s like saying only doctors who have cancer are allowed to treat tumors.
Writes The New York Times‘ Charles Blow in a column that uses “racist” or “racism” more than 30 times: Americans who do not concede that Trump is a racist—are themselves racists: “Make no mistake. Denying racism or refusing to call it out is also racist.”
In Wall Street terms, the Dems are shorting white voters. A short means betting against something. If you are short on Microsoft, you make investments which will go up if Microsoft goes down. Dems think white voters have little value, and are betting against them with exaggerated claims of white supremacy. Along the way they assume all “people of color” will fall into place, believing what resonates with young, ever-so-offendable urban blacks will also click with their older rural relatives, as well as with Latinos who trace their roots from Barcelona to Havana to Juarez, and why not, Asians. If that sounds simplistic, never mind inaccurate and a bad idea, you may want to short the Dem’s for 2020.
BONUS: If any of this sounds basically like the same strategy Dems are using now to shun people as misognyist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, you may be right.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
So a Republican and Democrat Walk Into a Bar…
So a Republican and Democrat walk into a bar and start to talk about the upcoming presidential election.
Republican: We negotiated a deal with Guatemala which will reduce false asylum claims on the southern border.
Democrat: We lost our shit over Baltimore this week.R: We passed tax reform in line with campaign promises.
D: A man touched many butt without consent in 1983.R: Full exoneration, no collusion, no obstruction, witch hunt.
D: Well, we’re looking into it. We need more evidence. We’ll see.R: We’ve got Trump.
D: We’ve got Biden and like 20 more. There’s a full list somewhere on line.R: We oppose Obama care.
D: Um, since we want to replace it with Medicare for All, I guess we sorta do too. But not really, it just has to go away after we supported it for a decade and through the last election.R: We appointed two Supreme Court judges.
D: Merrick Garland was unfair.R: The economy is roaring. Stocks at all time highs.
D: Obama did that.R: Fundamentals are very strong, plenty of room for more interest rates cuts if needed.
D: It’s gonna crash.R: We held the line for our base on 2A.
D: We exploited the Parkland kids.R: We built the Wall.
D: We won the popular vote.R: We pushed the Muslim ban through the Supreme Court.
D: AOC and her squad tweeted about that from their last sleepover. They made a prank call to the White House after midnight, too!R: We made significant changes to asylum processing.
D: We complained about that on Twitter and on Colbert.R: We put kids on cages.
D: We complained about that on Twitter in ALL CAPS.R: You got anything at all?
D: Most of our candidates have prefered pronouns now.R: We’re interested in smaller government.
D: We hate men.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Broken Asylum System, and How We Ended Up With Kids in Cages
How did we end up with kids in cages? We put them there, across multiple administrations, and created a politicized immigration and asylum system that constrains better options. So time to stop saying this isn’t who we are and start looking beyond the hysteria.There are givens. Immigration restrictions are not inherently racist. All countries have borders. They have to so they can make decisions about who can enter their country and who can be a citizen.
No nation allows people to simply move in. Every border globally is designed to place a barrier in between those allowed and those who are not. At the same time, most economies depend on the cheap labor of immigrants. For most of the developed world, labor needs are worked out via a points system that admits a regulated number of workers with designated skills coupled with border enforcement. The U.S. instead focuses on “reunification,” with family members legally in the country petitioning for relatives with unknown skills to immigrate (do we get the brother with the 4.0 GPA or the one with 3.0 murders under his belt?) Our borders have historically then been left porous to ensure an adequate number of exploitable workers. But since the number of people drawn to work usually exceeds the demand, our immigration laws also place speed bumps in front of the many, many people around the globe who want to try their luck. Inevitably you end up with kids in cages.
Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act set new records for immigrants detained. Next up was George W. Bush’s 2005 Operation Streamline, a zero-tolerance plan to prosecute all illegal entrants. But to avoid the logistics and negative optics, the program made exceptions not written into the law for adults traveling with children. Nature finds a way, and more and more economic migrants arrived with somebody’s child in hand as a Get Out of Jail Free card. Fewer kids in cages, but more illegals.
Obama initially prosecuted only those found illegally entering more than once. Caught off guard by an influx of asylum seekers from Central America, the administration in 2014 established then-legally permitted family detention centers to hold parents and children — potentially indefinitely — in cages as a means of deterring others. There were also children held alone in cages when they arrived without parents, or in the hands of human traffickers, or when their parents were criminally dangerous. The program ended only because of a 2016 court decision ordering the release of most of those hostage families and largely prohibiting family detention facilities. Adult men, women, and children, would be caged separately in the future.
The whole Obama program got little media attention, although kids were in cages, mostly at the same facilities in use today. The holding facility at Clint, for example, currently a focal point for progressives, has been open since 2013. It was set up specifically for children. Fort Sill, Oklahoma, housed Japanese-American detainees during WWII, 1200 immigrant children during the Obama years, and will reopen to again take in immigrant children for Trump. Immigrant rights activists dubbed Obama “deporter in chief” for having deported more immigrants than any president. He still holds the title because his administration deported more migrants per year than Trump.
While many children at the border are with parents, others arrive with human traffickers, some on their own. “Children” can include everyone from infants to 17 year old “boys,” and the dangers of housing those vulnerable people among adults of all types should make it obvious why the law is written as it is. While on the face a nice solution sounds like “parents with their own kids,” imagine the terrible things that can happen when children and adults are detained together. Also under Trump, parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due process laws do not allow children to be kept with the parent because the child is not being criminally prosecuted.
Trump set out in April 2018 to prosecute every illegal crosser, first or tenth time, with or without kids, the letter of the law. There had been a growing rise in the number of people from the Northern Triangle (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) along with Mexico. For example, the border patrol detained 6,405 unaccompanied children in May 2018, up from 4,302 in April. In comparison with May 2017, the number of unaccompanied children soared by 329% and parents migrating with kids as a family surged by 435% in 2018.
By law now children and adults cannot be detained together; it was allowed during the Obama years and earlier under the Flores Settlement. Most parents arrested at the border are criminally charged with illegal entry. Due process laws do not allow children to be kept with the parent because the child is not being prosecuted. Overall, interpreting what these laws say must be done versus can be done to end up at what should be done draws some very fine, politically-motivated legal lines.
What is clear is by ending the various catch-and-release, and ignore and don’t catch policies of his predecessors, Trump triggered the next variation on an old problem. With no legal avenue to immigrate for work, and with border enforcement stopping many from simply walking north and blending into the estimated 11 million illegals already in the U.S., a vast number of economic migrants now ask for asylum. They are aided by for-illegal profit asylum cartels, staff from a Democratic Congresswoman’s office, and volunteer American lawyers.
Asylum applicants must demonstrate if sent home they would be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The definition of those five protected grounds has varied based on American domestic politics. For example, since 1994, LGBT status has been a possible grounds of asylum. Victims of domestic violence were granted consideration for asylum under the Obama administration, rolled back under Trump. However, asylum never has been and was never intended to stretch to security or economic situations affecting blanket-like most everyone in a country. “Wanting a better life” has never been grounds for an asylum claim.
However, economic immigrants without legitimate claims to asylum have long taken advantage of slow processing by American authorities. A Mexican man caught on the border who says he came just to work may be sent back almost immediately. However, should he make a claim to asylum, the U.S. is obligated to adjudicate his case, however frivolous (there are potential expedited processes.)
The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act requires those seeking asylum be detained while their cases are processed. But for logistical and political reasons, prior administrations simply released most asylum seekers into American society to wait. Asylum seekers become eligible for work authorization if their case has been pending for more than 150 days, as almost all do. Trump has directed the letter of the law be followed, ending this catch-and-release system. He also has negotiated for many asylum seekers to wait out their cases in Mexico instead of working the while in the U.S.
The problem is the backlogs are unresolvable. Affirmative asylum seekers, such as most of those now at the border, apply administratively through DHS. The number of such pending cases as of January 2019 was 325,277, more than 50 times higher than in January 2010. Defensive seekers are those applying for asylum once facing deportation or removal for some reason, including being denied under an earlier affirmative application. These cases go through the courts. As of July 2018, there were over 733,000 pending. The average wait time for a hearing was a staggering 721 days.
The approval rates for asylum claims are low, and always have been. Some recent figures for Mexican claimant approvals are 12%, Salvadorans 21%, Honduras 22%, and Guatemalans 26%. Those countries account for more than 40% of asylum applications, and have for some time. The high refusal rates, while up under Trump, are not at odds historically. In 1984, only 3% of asylum cases from El Salvador and Guatemala were granted, even as U.S.-sponsored wars raged there. Approval rates for all nationalities over the past decade average only 28%, skewed high over recent years by waves of cases designed to pander to general U.S. voters (Chinese pro-democracy applicants) and evangelical voters (Chinese anti-One Child Policy applicants.)
But as we talk there are still kids in cages. None of this is to defend the conditions in detainee camps. Those are a result of a sudden shift in implementation of immigration law coupled with a lack of infrastructure planning, driven by a president who impulsively wants to be seen as “tough” facing down a problem, all backed by an asylum system no longer suited for the conditions imposed on it. Conditions can be quickly improved, and the House just voted $4.6 billion to do that.
But we need also acknowledge the dangers in 2019 of hysteria, driven by media and progressive politicians exploiting the situation to paint themselves as liberating another concentration camp on the road to Berlin, when the immediate solutions are more in line with hygiene kits and child care workers. And no whataboutism. Under Obama we tolerated kids in cages. Without that tolerance then we would not have the intolerant situation now.
But there are deeper dangers. Progressives don’t want to fix Trump’s logistical mistakes (AOC and others voted against the recent humanitarian funding increases.) The camps must not be made more humane, they say, they must be closed. Deportations must not be limited, they must be ended by decriminalizing illegal entry. Free medical care for illegal immigrants. Asylum to economic migrants. Abolish ICE. Open borders.
Meanwhile, Trump’s immigration policies resonate with important sectors of the public. Some 60% of likely voters support efforts to “prevent migrants from making fraudulent asylum claims and being released into the country.” This does not grow from racism or white supremacy (Latinos support much of the Republican immigration agenda), though using those words is an easy way to blame people impacted by decades of imposed change and delete them from the conversation on how to do better.
The driver seems to be the imposition by elites of an uncounted number of illegal immigrants with unknown skills and unknown criminal backgrounds to have an unknown impact on the places they choose to settle. Do we get the guy with the 4.0 GPA or the one who committed 4.0 murders? We are destined — required — to take the bad with the good, scatter them around the country, and hope for the best.
So when economic turmoil in Mexico during the early 1990s pushed migrants north, just as war in Central America drove them in the 1980s, and gang violence does today, in America there is no plan. Tired, consumed, with resources stretched, there was a backlash building Trump sensed and acted on. As Trump was unprepared at the border and told DHS to make do, America for decades has been unprepared and told to make due. A de facto open border similar to 2015 Europe imposed by progressives would have the same effect here as there, leading to a new, even more conservative backlash.
The peak year for legal immigration to America was 1907. Your great-grandfather entered an agricultural and rapidly industrializing nation desperate for workers with no time to waste putting kids in cages. To get them out today we need more than olde timey nostalgia and modern outrage. We need a 21st century asylum and immigration policy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
A Mini-Lesson in US Immigration History
I am dying of stupidity reading progressive “takes” on immigration.Abolish ICE! Every country in the world that has the means to control its borders does so. The US is no different. Every country that can has rules about who it accepts and in what numbers. You, for example, cannot just pick up and move to Canada ’cause you wanna. The merit (points-based) systems progressive decry as fascism are used by “fascist” countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, across the EU, etc.
But muh grandpa came to this country without on $1 in his pocket and no English and was welcomed!?!?!Our period of unfettered immigration into the US was brief, with any serious volume occurring from about 1870-1920 (Ellis Island opened in 1892, replacing the previous main processing facility in New York, Castle Clinton), and coincided with a huge demand for unskilled labor driven by industrialization, western expansion as we killed off the Native Americans and needed to fill their lands with farms, and the end of slavery coupled with efforts to not readily allow those freed slaves into the new economy. At the same time, horrible conditions in, serially, Ireland, eastern Europe, and Italy made waves of people available to immigrate into really horrid conditions waiting for them in the US.
As for numbers, and the fear that the US is no longer “welcoming” immigrants, the numbers reveal the truth. The peak year for admission (adjusted for one-time special programs such as those in place post-Vietnam) of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. The number has hovered around a million a year for the past two decades. During the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s legal immigration was about half what it has been since. Illegal/undocumented immigration numbers have swelled dramatically since the 19th century as cheaper travel and rising prosperity across much of the world has made travel easier and more possible for many.
We did not “welcome” your grandpa; we shunted him into slums and paid him as little as possible to work in dirty and dangerous jobs for us, all the while calling him kike, polack, greaseball, hynie, and the rest. No one cared about preserving immigrant culture; newcomers faced enormous pressure to abandon their native languages and learn English if they wanted better jobs. They could either isolate into ghettos or assimilate into the mainstream culture. The latter if they wanted to get ahead. Google how many Irish died digging the canals and building the levees around New Orleans. Read up on how immigrant children were worked in factories before you wail about “concentration camps” on the Mexican border that no longer feature sports programs.
“Not who we are?” Bullshit, it is who we always have been.
Those were unique historical circumstances and our (lack of) immigration laws in the period matched. The race-based restrictions which followed just happened to coincide with economic changes and eventually the Great Depression that required fewer unskilled workers. Racism played a part in deciding which immigrants to cut, but not in the decisions to cut immigration.In simple words: Most of what people believe about immigration is myth. Myth is a bad basis for policy. Immigration policy, like economic policy, defense policy, etc., is meant to help the nation. It is not a global charity (that’s refugee policy, a separate thing.) When immigration helped the nation, it was matched to our economic situation. The current immigration laws, which favor relatives of those already here regards of their skills and abilities, do not match America’s current economic need for highly skilled workers. We should adjust the laws to fit the current circumstances as we have done before.
It is just too easy to forget history and apply 2019-think to what really happened. So please don’t.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
After Jeff Bezos, Everyone in America is Now a Victim
“I didn’t think we’d see this for a few more years, but this Bezos thing put us over the top,” said Department of Homeland Security Director of Victims Ronald Devine, accompanied by his support dog and her personal support kitten.
“It’s 100% as of today. Every American is now classified — officially — as a victim.”
Devine explained the final holdout were super-wealthy, white, straight, older men, led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos was once seen by most observers as victim-proof, given his fierce Caucasianess. Yet revelations this week he was not actually a philandering old dude caught sending pathetic nude pics to his younger trophy mistress while still married to the woman who worked beside him for decades while they built Amazon together, shocked a nation.
“Bezos is a victim,” stated every blue-check, which includes all previously designated victim-Millennials. “His phone, we heard from Seth, was hacked by the Russians on orders from Trump because Bezos’ Washington Prime Post writes journalism about Trump, so Trump ordered the Russians to trick Bezos to take photos of mini-Jeff.”
“And that did it,” said DHS Director of Victims Devine. “We had previously categorized only about 50% of the entire population as victims until we looped in all women except Melania, who social media feels sort of deserves it. Then it was the creation of ‘People of Color’ being victims, a super victim smoothie that ties together the whole Pantone scale from a Chinese billionaire to a Dominican guy delivering food.
“Of course black folks were brought in after Black Panther told their origin story, same as Star Wars once did for white people. All immigrants and their grandchildren who write college entrance essays were entitled to victim status for years. Same for Native Americans, though the category now includes all older men who wear overly large turquoise jewelry and bolos.
“We’d already counted all veterans and their grandchildren who write college entrance essays as victims. It once was just those Vietnam guys rocking handlebar mustaches down at the VFW who all needed to blame their drinking problem, their cheating problem, and their buying cars at 21% interest problem on something, but now anyone who did two years as a supply clerk at Fort Hood is in. You don’t need to even show any paperwork anymore; just get a Support the Troops sticker on your car, or, south of the Fairfax County line in Virginia, fly that POW flag in your front yard.
“Most of the rest of Americans — I think it got us into the 90% percentile — made it to be victims when we started adding letters to being gay. In the old days we just had the guys from the drama club at Brett Kavanaugh’s old high school. The category jumped when LGBT became so many letters. LGBTQIA added queer, intersex, and asexual. We also have U for unsure, C for curious, another T for transvestite, TS or 2 for two-spirit persons, P for polyamorous, and O for other. The initialism LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual) covered most of California and parts of Austin.
“Another step forward toward 100% victimization was a decision to merge ‘survivors’ and ‘community’ with ‘victims.’ There’s a ton of crossover you know. People who had a suspicious mole removed from their back now qualify as cancer survivors, and everyone that knows them forms a cancer survivor community supporting their struggle, see. And then once you could purchase that kind of thing by typing your credit card number into a GoFundMe, it was like the Big Bang of shared victimhood.
“So really all that was left were super-wealthy, white, straight, older men. We at this office had been keeping an eye on them for some time, and thought they’d made the jump into victim status when Trump claimed avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was ‘his Vietnam.’ But for some reason that didn’t catch. Funny, given how nearly every super-wealthy, white, straight male of his generation would have been under that umbrella alongside those college deferments. Same as that Esquire article about American boys everyone flipped out on. Nonetheless, it is, once again I may add, Jeff Bezos who leads us into the future. Him being the victim, his very privacy lost, brings every single person in America into victim status. We did it, people. There still is that American Dream. This rejects the Trumpian view of the world.
“So effective immediately, some changes. We’ve ordered millions of ‘Do Not Pet’ reflective vests for Americans to wear themselves to avoid unwanted touching at work. Otherwise, no more clothing with words on it. Every pet and most house plants are now officially designated as support animals. No more need to buy those fake ID cards for Rover off Amazon.
“Things are gonna get crazy at the airport, because after the crew boards everyone with a branded credit card and local municipal employees in uniform, 100% of the remaining passengers are going to qualify for preboarding and extra time. We may need to create new, expansive forms of social media. I know one already being tested is called SJWMobster. I can imagine mandatory VLOGs. It’s difficult to see Joe Pesci’s career advancing, but there will be huge opportunities in sensitivity training. And we gotta add about 8000 words to the First Amendment to define hate speech so we can ban it. We can expect ‘raising awareness’ to become the number one major at America’s colleges, and setting up a GoFundMe our fastest growing job title.
“What’s ahead? I think the new frontier in America is going to be celebrities, who have already been victims for a long time owing to the pressures they face earning millions of dollars and having to do drugs, using some of the new victim coaches out there to grow themselves into more varied categories of victimhood. There will be a lot of competition to book those who can tick the boxes in three or more categories.
“We’ll be busy sorting out who we should be boycotting, given the competing victim statuses creating new categories of multiverse victims for nearly every piece of music, literature or film ever made. Here at the Department of Homeland Security we have already created a new sub-ministry of truth that is even now working through everything ever published to unoffend it double-quick. We may just close all the libraries and let Amazon decide what’s safe to read now that all victims finally have a voice.
“With 100% of Americans enjoying victim totalitarianism, somebody is being hurt, retraumatized, triggered or disrespected right now as I speak, maybe just because I am speaking. How will we as a nation deal with that? I mean, it’s not like we can just laugh at all this, right?”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Wall May Be a Waste, But It is Not a Crisis
Trump’s wall isn’t going to stop much illegal immigration. On the other hand, it is unlikely to hurt much of anything; it will most likely just be another waste of money. It is certainly not a Constitutional crisis over authoritarianism.
There are currently some 700 miles of fence/wall/barrier along the 2,000 mile southern border, built in pieces under the Bushes and Clinton administrations, and maintained under Obama. Clinton even called his 1994 wall effort “Operation Gatekeeper.” There was little-to-no national opposition raised when the various walls were constructed, and no widespread movement to tear them down when Democrats held full control of the government in the early Obama years. No Russian leader stood on the border and declared to freedom loving people everywhere “Mr. Bush, Mr. Clinton, Other Mr. Bush, or Mr. Obama, tear down this wall!”
Democrats in the Senate,including then-Senators Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton, voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was signed into law by George W. Bush. The law authorized a fence along about 700 miles of the border between the U.S.-Mexico border. By 2015, Customs and Border Protection had constructed 654 miles.
There was certainly nothing on the scale of what we are hearing today, with Nancy Pelosi calling Trump’s plan to add another 234 miles of fence/wall/barrier “immoral… not who we are as a nation.”
Maybe she forgot the beloved Abe Lincoln was an actual railsplitter, a person whose job it was to create rails for fences. The wall meanwhile wasn’t immoral in the 1990s and it wasn’t immoral a year ago when Democratic senators negotiated a compromise Republicans rejected for a wall in exchange for legislation on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
So what’s different in 2019? Via the New York Times: unlike the other parts of the existing fence/wall/barrier, the part Trump wants to add will be “a symbol of hate and racism.” How can one tell? Different construction? A sign? Why isn’t Trump’s part just another brick in that existing wall? What’s the message conveyed by the unwalled half of the border still left after Trump’s part is built?
The president wants something and the other side doesn’t want him to have it. Think of this all as a prelude to the 2020 campaign, including the fierce commentary storm enraging everyone. The media even has us debating whether “walls” as a concept work; do or don’t people sometimes build walls around their (gated) communities for protection, some ask with great seriousness. WaPo ran an Op-Ed criticizing all walls, from medieval times to the present day.
Silly media. Like the shutdown, this is not about walls. Every government shutdown is about brinkmanship. And brinkmanship is risky business, because it demands someone must lose and compromise is off the table. That’s not always a good idea when one side holds a trump card. The president’s is he may declare a “national emergency” (there are also less dramatic “declarable” options) which he feels would allow him to reprogram funds to pay for his contribution to the fence/wall/barrier. Within his narrative, it will play as decisive – someone had to solve the impasse – and as an antithesis to whatever people expected from the midterms’ Blue Wave. “No wall, no deal,” Mike Pence declared. “We’re going to keep standing strong, keep standing firm.”
That sounds all scary, even authoritarian, and you will read articles about how it is unconstitutional or a crisis or an impeachable offense. One outlet called this a “Pandora’s Box” that could even lead to Trump shutting down CNN and Facebook.
It’s not. Declaring a national emergency is at times necessary, at times bureaucratically convenient, and at times rough politics. Shutting down government over a policy dispute is always a cheap move. Trump and the others involved will be judged by the voters. But that’s about it, folks.
Here’s a list of the current 28 standing national emergencies. See if you can find some that rise to the level of what any normal person thinks of as an emergency that couldn’t be dealt with except by the president using extraordinary powers. For example, Obama proclaimed Blocking Property and Suspending Entry of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Venezuela as a national emergency.
Funny thing: the September 11 national emergency, still in force today, was used to have the military do some domestic construction work, the same thing anti-wall pundits claim is now illegal under Trump (other laws also suggest Trump can use the military in this manner.) What if Trump used the existing 9/11 emergency again for whatever he wants, same as Bush and Obama did, instead of declaring a fresh emergency? Maybe that would wake Americans up.
Now if you still want to talk about misuse of executive power, you may want to look at the Constitution. The document doesn’t say much about walls, but it does limit the power to declare war to Congress. Nobody has done much about that misuse of power, as every president since WWII started new wars without any declaration and in most cases without even a head nod out of Congress. To make things clear after Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act in 1973, a bit of executive power-limiting legislation that has been fully ignored ever since.
Leaving aside the gross fig leaf of the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that has been waived over every American invasion, special forces incursion, regime change, drone attack, bombing campaign, reconstruction project, and police action in the last 17 years and still counting, there has been more debate given to the wall than much of any of the conflicts around it.
Certainly more anger and angst has been spewed alongside the wall, and the waste of money it represents. Trump wants $5.7 billion to build it! That is all of about 1/7 of the yearly cost of the war in Afghanistan, and of course that war has run on at $45 billion a year for 17 years. Anybody want to talk about that money being wasted? Maddow? Pelosi? Ocasio-Cortez? Bueller?
And for the media, who discovered via “fact-checking” Trump exaggerated the terrorist threat on our southern border, where were you when every facet of American foreign and domestic policy was driven by two administrations using this same lie?
Apparently all the fears about abuse of power center on a couple of hundred miles of wall in the desert; wars in deserts further away now barely make the news. Spare us the hand wringing over crisis, abuse of power, and unconstitutionality. If anyone really wants to talk the talk on those topics, let’s reopen the debate on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria as part of the negotiations to reopen the government.
That all of that is ignored while the nation is on edge over a slice of wall tells you what this is all really about: 2020.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Wall B.S. and the Politics of 2020
A wall was not immoral every other time it was built. There are already 700 miles of wall along the southern border, and we’re talking today about building only another 235 miles but somehow that is “not who we are.” In linear distance, it less than a third of who we are, actually. Nobody objected then because this is all about the politics of 2020.No previous national emergency declaration (there have been over 50 since the law changed in 1976) was ever considered a sign of “Pandora’s box” with all the fear mongering about authoritarianism attached. Nobody objected then because this is all about the politics of 2020.
Senators Schumer, Obama, and Clinton voted for a border wall, fence, and barriers in 2006 (the Secure Fence Act), which was completed under Obama in 2015. Nobody objected then because this is all about the politics of 2020.
The media never “fact checked” Bush or Obama’s statements about the terrorist threat which were used to justify every war and domestic loss of civil rights in the last 17 years. The media “checks” only when it suits their narrative.
With respect, this is all about the politics of 2020.
Everyone is otherwise losing their heads, as they have over Steele, Comey, Syria, North Korea, Putin, and everything else this administration has touched. There are better and worse decisions over the last two years, but it is not all crisis, all the time.
BONUS: Trump’s wall isn’t going to stop much illegal immigration. On the other hand, it is unlikely to hurt much of anything; it will most likely just be another waste of money.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
American Immigration: We Need a Merit-Based System
The American immigration system based on family reunification is broken. A merit/points-based system can fix it.Nearly alone in the industrialized world, the U.S. has a patchwork of immigration laws and policies which fail the national interest while simultaneously failing many of the people seeking to immigrate here. What to do about immigration is a national policy decision (like defense spending, environmental rules, and taxes), not a global humanitarian program (that’s refugees.) The answer is not less immigration. Every person who brings their skills and labor contributes to growth, and everyone who acquired skills abroad did so at no cost to the U.S. In a global economy, that represents a magnificent advantage to nations that understand infrastructure is much more than bricks and mortar. It’s brains.
Dollars and cents? Immigrant-owned businesses in 2014 generated more than $775 billion in sales and paid out more than $126 billion in payroll. Immigrant-owned businesses collectively created four million of the jobs today in the United States. Immigrants and their children founded 40% of Fortune 500 companies, which collectively generated $4.2 trillion in revenue in 2010. And you don’t need another list of immigrant celebrities, scientists, and business leaders.
But what if we can do better, a lot better?
Through the end of the 19th century, America essentially had no immigration law. The country was huge, land was available for the taking, and the need for unskilled workers seemed bottomless. The waves of Germans, Irish, Jews, Italians, and Chinese came from every, well, shithole across Europe and beyond. They entered an America where New York City was a center of light manufacturing and the source of more than half of all ready-made clothing, and the vast midwest was blanketed with family farms and steel plants greedy for workers. This system gave way as the first real immigration laws targeted the Chinese, no longer needed to build the railways out west, and, following WWI, Italians and eastern European Jews who were considered “inferior.” Racism played a significant role, but it dovetailed more than coincidentally with an economy that was shrinking (ultimately, the Great Depression) and demanding more skilled workers.
The years following WWII saw a massive change in immigration law. In the booming post-war economy, it was believed there was room for everyone again, and old racial wrongs were righted by removing national quotas and emphasizing family unification. Most post-war immigrants, unlike those of the great waves of the 19th and early 20th centuries, were the relatives of earlier immigrants. Little attention was paid to who these people were, what education and skills they had and, most significantly, what the needs of the American economy were in comparison. The majority of available slots were given to family ties, not persons independently seeking to work in America like our great grandfathers. This is the system in place today.
Family reunification has some no-brainers, such as relatively easy entry for the spouses, children, and parents of American citizens. The complications arise in the preference categories. These include adult unmarried sons and daughters of U.S. citizens and Green Card holders, and their families. Also allowed to immigrate are the married adult sons and daughters of U.S. citizens and their families, and the brothers and sisters of U.S. citizens, and their spouses and minor children. Once those people become legal, they can then file for immigration for their next generation of relatives. One immigrant can sponsor dozens of relatives, who in turn can then sponsor dozens — chain immigration.
There are two massive problems with this system.Mexico, the Philippines, China, India, and the Dominican Republic are the most prolific sending countries to the U.S., creating a statistical snowball; more Chinese immigrants means more Chinese relatives to follow. Because of that snowball effect, and because Congress places strict numerical limits on the number of most family reunification-based immigrants, the waiting lines grow exponentially. In fairness to other nations with fewer emigrants, Congress created country-by-country limits (de facto quotas.) Those limits have become unmanageable under the first-come, first-served system. The most-backed up is the processing of siblings of Americans from the Philippines. That process is only now taking those applications (“priority date”) first filed in 1994. Applicants literally die waiting for their turn. Others see the long wait and jump the line, entering the U.S. illegally.
How many people are we talking about? For all of the family unification immigrant visas, in 2017, about 466,585 people, out of a total immigrant pool of 559,536.
That left 23,814 visas for people who immigrated to the U.S. based solely on their skills, education, and talent — merit. So out of more than half a million souls, only 23,814 were admitted based on what they bring to the U.S. Everyone else can be a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, or, randomly, a rocket scientist.The core problem with the family reunification system is the primary qualification to legally immigrate is simply that family tie; are you the sibling of an American? Welcome. So America gets the drunk brothers alongside the physicist sister. It’s a crap shoot. There is no connection to America’s economic needs. The family reunification system is a 19th-century legal hangover.
It actually is worse than just the numbers when it comes to seeking the best and brightest from around the world. Of the 20,000 some merit based immigrants, in 2017 almost 7,000 of them were designated only as “skilled,” meaning they had only two years of training or work experience, and did not require a college degree. There are even a handful of merit-based visas reserved for unskilled workers.
More? Merit-based immigration is largely based on first-come, first-serve grappling for those limited spaces. There is nothing in the system to prioritize a scientist working on something critical to the U.S. versus someone educated but in a field already overcrowded. It all depends on who files the paperwork first.
The American family unification system, with its small number of merit-based visas tagging along, is near unique in the industrialized world. Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand use primarily a merit system based on “points.” Based on national needs, an applicant with no relatives in Canada will accrue points based on education (Canada awards 25 points for a Master’s, only five for a high school diploma), language ability (24 points toward immigration up north if you are fluent in English and French), and job skills. But you may not need a master’s in computer technology, for Canada: they’ll take you if you’re a rocket scientist, but they’ll also take you if you are a tar sands miner willing to live five years in the unsettled west. Think you’re good enough for Canada? Start the points process here.
The present system fails so badly that it remains a statiscal miracle any good comes out of it at all. The small number of merit-based immigrants are untethered to America’s economic needs, and the family-based system is backlogged. How can the U.S. bring it’s immigration system into the 21st century?
Step one is an emotional reckoning. We all know your grandfather came here with nothing and built his American Dream; mine, too. We also know many people rightly fear their jobs are endangered by immigration. It is time for America to move past the falsehoods and full-on hate that drives too much of the conversation. Same for the myths that largely unfettered immigration is so enshrined in the American story as to be untouchable.
America must then move away from its over-emphasis on family-based immigration. Eliminate certain categories, or more sharply limit them. Then, remake the current merit system into a points system directly tied to economic needs. Need more electrical engineers than web developers? Prioritize. Change the priorities as needed, and move resources from the family-based side to the points side so that cases are processed fast enough that demand and supply match up. There are various proposals long these lines being put forth by Republicans in Congress that don’t cut immigration, just change it.
It is hard to see why this seems so complicated. If the U.S. can draw the global best and brightest instead of hoping someone’s brother falls into the slot, why wouldn’t we want to do that?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The US: A Nation Of Immigrants With a Bad Immigration Policy
immigration good for the United States? Mostly yes, but sometimes no. But that’s the wrong question to ask, so try this one: is the policy, law, and regulation of immigration haphazard at best and clearly not serving the nation’s needs? Absolutely.
That America is a nation of immigrants is far from a trope; no other nation on earth has been so formed by immigration, from its national myths to the hard core realization of its industrial revolution to its current draw of immigrants, from the most highly-skilled to the most unskilled, from around the globe.
At the same time, no other nation so intertwined with immigration has as ambivalent attitude toward it as expressed through law and policy, and no other nation whose economy is intimately tied to immigration has a set of laws so seemingly divorced from that. America, at best, jerks forward and backward on immigration issues based on often largely uninformed thought, at times racist emotion and good old political pandering.
Let’s take a deep dive into the way American immigration currently works, its benefits and pitfalls, and what might be done to maximize those benefits and avoid the worst of the pitfalls.
What is the State of Immigration Today?
Immigrants are those seeking, legally or not, to live permanently in the U.S. There are also non-immigrants, persons such as temporary workers (from the unauthorized agricultural worker to the skilled H1-B programmer), as well as students, and the like.
But nothing seems to dominate the American political mind more than undocumented immigration (or maybe terrorism, but even that is often conflated with immigration issues.) From Candidate Trump planning to build a wall on the Mexican border, to Candidate Clinton offering various legislative schemes to immigration-savvy Hispanic voters, the topic is very much a part of the American conversation.
Conservatives seize on every violent crime report that features an undocumented immigrant perpetrator, while liberals point to immigration’s economic benefits and the humanitarian aspects of united families. Pretty much everyone chokes up to see new immigrants become citizens in front of the flag.
Under the current way, immigration works in America, people arrive via three main streams: undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants joining family members, and legal skilled workers. The latter two categories are also known as Green Card holders, or Legal Permanent Residents (LPRs). Most will upgrade to full-on U.S. citizens. There are also those who immigrate by winning the visa lottery, refugees, legal semi-skilled workers, and other niche sub-categories.
Let’s take a look at each of the three main streams delivering immigrants to the United States.
Undocumented Immigrants in the United States
A huge hole in any discussion of undocumented immigrants is no one knows how many of them there are. Intelligent estimates range from 11-20 million, quite a spread, especially given the very vague math behind the accounting. And even the low estimates seem, well, high. Between 1880 and 1930, the magical Ellis Island period of nearly unfettered immigration into the U.S., the total intake over 50 years was 27 million people.
The walk-ins, mostly Mexicans, make up about half of America’s undocumented immigrants. Something like 40% of soon-to-be undocumented immigrants in the U.S. enter legally, on tourist and student visas, and then simply stay. But the lack of any comprehensiveness tracking system means nobody can be too sure.
And because the group is indeed undocumented, who they are is also unknown. How many will work at all, how many will take low-level jobs and how many will move into well-paid positions and possibly seek legal status at some point is tough to sort out. In Florida, a neat number are older Brits settled into the sunny retirement communities there. Undocumented people self-select to come to the U.S., and so there is no sorting out of things, no connection to America’s economic and job needs.
Keep an eye on that last sentence, about no connections to America’s economic needs, as we turn to family reunification-based immigration.
Family-Based Immigration to the United States
The second stream of immigrants into the United States are persons legally entering under America’s family reunification laws; the process accounts for about two-thirds or more of all lawful immigration to the U.S. every year. American citizens and Legal Permanent Residents can apply to bring their relatives to the U.S., to include in one way or another (the categories can be complicated) foreign spouses, unmarried children, parents, adopted children, fiancées of American citizens, married sons, married daughters, and brothers and sisters of adult U.S. citizens.
Family reunification has long been the cornerstone of American immigration policy. Many early immigrants to America, particularly those fleeing religious or political persecution in their homelands, migrated as families. In subsequent centuries, a head of household often came first to the new land and later sent for his family. Prior to 1965, when the current family reunification law was first codified, the timeliness of family reunification in the U.S. depended almost entirely on how long it took for this first family member to secure a job and raise enough money for his spouse and children.
The family reunification system was and is still largely based on immigrants applying for other immigrants. Immigrants from countries that send a lot of people to the U.S. later bring more people from those same places in. Thus Mexico, the Philippines, China, India and the Dominican Republic dominate the current immigrant pool in a kind of statistical snowball.
But at least families can get together, right?
Wrong. Because of that snowball effect, and because Congress places numerical limits on the number of most family reunification-based immigrants, the waiting lines grow exponentially. Over the years Congress was pressed into creating country-by-country limits for the most robust sending nations. Those limits have become unmanageable under the first-come, first-served system. The most-backed up is the processing of siblings of American citizens from the Philippines. That process is now only taking those applications (“priority date”) first filed in 1992. Applicants literally pass away waiting for their turn.
The family reunification system, which once made sense in a growing nation anxious for workers of all kinds, now represents something of a 19th-century legal hangover. Because the only qualification is that family tie, America gets the loser drunk uncles alongside the brilliant sister physicists. It’s a crap shoot. There is no sorting out of things, no connection to America’s economic and job needs.
Now keep an eye on that last sentence, about no connections to America’s economic needs, as we turn to skills-based immigration.
Highly Skilled Immigrants in the United States
Immigration based solely on skills is the smallest stream of legal entries into the United States. While some 140,000 persons enter yearly under this overall umbrella (by comparison, the U.S. admits about 70,000 refugees each year), only about half of those fall squarely under what can be considered highly-skilled categories (keep in mind we are discussing immigrant visas, Green Cards, that allow permanent residency and employment in the U.S., and not more well-known non-immigrant, temporary, visas such as the H1-B. There are, for example, some 700,000 H1-B visa holders in the United States at present, a guesstimated 20% of the IT workforce alone.)
Aside from the highly-skilled immigrants, employment-based immigration still for some reason retains a category for unskilled workers, another for those whose jobs require less than two years training, and one for those whose work only requires an undergraduate degree. Like all permanent working immigration, those categories are numerically limited by law (with additional limits for Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Philippine citizens.) While the numbers of un- or semi-skilled worker immigrants are small, that such categories exist at all in 2016 (priority date backlogs mean that cases currently being processing were first filed in 2003; what business can wait 13 years for an unskilled worker to arrive?) and in the face of large numbers of undocumented immigrants already in the U.S., explains much about the unfocused nature of America’s immigration policy.
The tighter numerical limits on some countries, especially China and India, are designed to make the system “fair” by leaving room for immigrants from other places, and have no connection to the higher standards of education, and thus presumably higher quality workers, there. So an especially gifted Chinese programmer must wait her turn to allow a mediocre photographer from Spain in first.
Across the spectrum of work-based immigration, almost no mind is paid to what skills the immigrants bring to the U.S. Unlike countries such as Canada and Australia that use “point based” systems to try and prioritize those with especially needed skills, the U.S. requires only that its work-based immigrants be skilled, at well, something. And then they get in line, first-come, first-served.
No need to add that line about no connection to America’s economic needs again, right? You get the picture by now.
Is Immigration Good for America?
The answer is pretty much a clear yes. Always has been. Easy to imagine it always will.
America’s 19th-century industrial revolution could not have happened without the influx of workers into the nation. Cities such as New York were built literally by hand by early Irish and Italian immigrants, who brought strong backs and ready skills in with them. Scandinavian immigrants settled the vast northern territories of the U.S., adapting their home agricultural techniques to cold lands most existing American farmers weren’t sure what to do with. Chinese immigrant labor built the great railroads of the West.
Do we really need another list of famous immigrants and their contributions? Albert Einstein, Joseph Pulitzer, Intel founder Andy Grove, Google creator Sergey Brin, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, along with Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Young, David Bowie, Tracey Ullman and Mario Andretti. Pick any field and you’ll find within it significant achievements by immigrants, and their sons and daughters.
Economic Benefits of Immigration
Immigration is infrastructure. Every person who brings his/her skills and labor contributes to the growth of the United States. Each of those persons who acquired his/her skills abroad did so at no cost to the U.S., and each of those people making a contribution inside America improves the nation’s competitive level at the expense of the losing country — the brain drain from one, the brain gain to the other. In a 21st century global economy, that represents a significant advantage to nations that understand infrastructure is much more than bricks and mortar. It’s brains.
Economically, immigrants broadly (many studies are unable or uninterested in parsing out who is undocumented and who is legal) represent a significant presence at nearly all strata of America society. Some 46 percent of immigrants work in traditionally white-collar positions. And while immigrants only make up 16 percent of the workforce in general, they make up over 20 percent of dental, nursing and health aides, and double-digit numbers of all software developers.
While immigrants on average initially make less than their native-born peers, in many communities all family members are expected to work and pool their incomes. The percentage of immigrants below the poverty line, at 20%, is only slightly higher than the national average of 16%. No data is available, however, as to how long immigrants remain below the poverty line, as compared to citizens.
Immigrants also show a greater entrepreneurial spirit than many native-born Americans. In a 2012 report, the Partnership for a New American Economy notes “over the last 15 years, while native-born Americans have become less likely to start a business, immigrants have steadily picked up the slack. Immigrants are now more than twice as likely as the native-born to start a business and were responsible for more than one in every four U.S. businesses founded in 2011, significantly outpacing their share of the population.”
Immigrant-owned businesses in the U.S. generate more than $775 billion in sales and pay out more than $126 billion in payroll each year. There are also hefty tax payments alongside all that money. One in every 10 workers at privately owned U.S. businesses works at an immigrant-owned company. Altogether, immigrant-owned businesses collectively created four million of the jobs that exist today in the United States. And much of that economic growth comes from exports, as immigrant-owned businesses are 60% more likely to export than non-immigrant businesses. Who better than a Guatemalan expat to sell U.S. goods in Guatemala? And of course, exports are a major plus for an economy, pulling foreign money in.
Immigrants and their children founded 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies, which collectively generated $4.2 trillion in revenue in 2010, more than the GDP than of every country in the world except the United States, China, and Japan. A little less than 20 percent of the newest Fortune 500 companies – those founded over the 25-year period between 1985 and 2010 – have an immigrant founder. Those whose concepts of immigration are based on images of fruit pickers think far too small.
Does Undocumented Immigrants Bring Economic Benefits?
Undocumented immigrants and the American payroll and tax system create an odd windfall for Social Security, paying an estimated $13 billion a year in social security taxes and only getting around $1 billion back, according to the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration (SSA).
As most undocumented workers who are not paid under the table lack legal Social Security numbers but still need to fill out tax forms for their employers, many/most use fake or expired social security numbers. The money comes out of their paychecks and is sent off to SSA, and is seen by the workers as a cost of their new life in America. As the social security numbers are bogus, no one comes calling to collect benefits on them and risk exposing the fraud. The SSA estimates unauthorized workers paid $100 billion into Social Security over the past decade.
Those same undocumented immigrants pay almost $12 billion in federal, state and local taxes. Tax contributions from ranged from less than $3.2 million in Montana with an estimated undocumented population of 6,000 to more than $3.2 billion in California with more than 3.1 million. It is one thing to cheat on immigration law, quite another to try and escape the tax man. Not convinced? Roll into any large immigrant neighbor in the Spring to see tax preparation services popping up alongside the small groceries and ethnic restaurants.
People paying taxes is good. Social Security can always use more money. New businesses are good for business. Jobs create jobs. Employed people spend money in their communities. Exports make America stronger.
If you’re still not sure about immigration, imagine some sort of immigration Rapture, right out of the television show The Leftovers, where one day every immigrant to the U.S. magically disappears. Look at the money above, and imagine the economy without it. Look at the jobs that would no longer exist or be created in the future, and impact on our health care system of the loss of workers, the children who would no longer be paying tuition at colleges, and the loss of cultural diversity. Any argument against immigration needs to begin by negating all of the above, in dollars and cents.
Indeed, if immigration to the U.S. did not exist, it would be necessary to (re)create it.
Is Immigration Bad for America?
Most arguments against immigration rely more on emotion than data, and always have.
Looking back into America’s past, each successive wave of immigrants was demonized by the preceding ones, or criticized with old world prejudices carried over along with the luggage. And so cheap Italian labor was going to take away jobs from people who a decade earlier were going to take away jobs from whomever got there first. Jews coming to America ran into anti-Semitism reminiscent of Eastern Europe, likely practiced by some of the same people from home who just had gotten on a earlier boat. During the World Wars German saboteurs were the scary boogie men jihadists of their day. None of these things makes for a very strong anti-immigration argument.
That said, immigration as it stands now in America, where the largest numbers of newcomers are undocumented people from Mexico and Central America, clearly does hold down wages and fill up the lowest level jobs. That large numbers of such immigrants are clustered in border states and cities like New York only adds to the problem, as the burden is not spread anywhere close to equally. To counter, however, critics point to the unanswerable question of how many of those jobs would be taken by Americans without a substantial increase in the minimum wage.
One area where wage suppression seems a clear concern is in the tech industry, where a Green Card is often offered as a form of compensation in lieu of a better salary. Many immigrants from the tech industry first arrive in the U.S. via temporary H1-B working visas. In return for accepting lower than market salaries, their companies sponsor them for permanent status. Once in possession of a Green Card, the worker may move on, to be replaced by a new H1-B person from abroad.
Immigrants, legal and otherwise, do send money “home” and always have, money that is pulled out of the host economy. Globally, India is the top recipient of such remittances at about $72.2 billion, followed by China with $63.9 billion and the Philippines at $29.7 billion. The money flow is so important to economies such as the Philippines that the government established the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration to manage the flow of workers out, and money back in. The World Bank estimates the real size of remittances is actually “significantly larger” than recorded as there are unrecorded flows through the formal and informal sectors.
Note that those are worldwide numbers, for all Indians working away from home all across the globe. The outflow directly from the United States is harder to establish, though Mexico, with the majority of its overseas workers in the U.S., receives $24 billion a year in such remittances. It is also difficult to know who is sending the money; the remittance businesses don’t ask if the sender is a citizen, a legal immigrant or undocumented.
No one can argue that large sums of money leaving the U.S. is a good thing, but one can also argue that money earned belongs to the worker to do with as s/he chooses. And of course many wealthy Americans export significant sums to avoid taxes or as investments, never mind American corporations who offshore their profits to bypass U.S. taxes.
Immigrants in general, and illegal immigrants specifically, do add to the costs of public education in the United States. The 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe struck down a state statute denying funding for education to undocumented immigrant children and simultaneously struck down a municipal school district’s attempt to charge such children an annual $1,000 tuition fee to compensate for the lost state funding. The ruling made clear states can’t deny free public education to its children on the grounds of their immigration status. For communities where large numbers of immigrants arrive seasonally to do agricultural work, are paid under the table, and thus do not contribute in taxes, this can be a significant financial burden.
The collection of welfare, food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP) and other social programs by immigrants is a touch-point issue for persons opposed to immigration. One study showed the welfare payout to all immigrant-headed households, legal and illegal, was an average of $6,241, compared to the $4,431 received by a citizen households. Unexamined in that data are the questions of which of those benefits were earned, such as Medicaid, by working people, and which went to the American citizen children of immigrants. As citizens, those children are fully entitled to the same things offered to any American, no matter the status of their parents. The dollar amounts alone do not answer the question asked.
Food stamps are not available to non-U.S. citizens, with exceptions for some refugees, the disabled, the very old and the very young, what all but the most cynical would consider a humanitarian necessity. Critics, however, point to the easy availability of fake citizenship documentation and suggest persons not legally entitled to SNAP receive it anyway. Some no doubt do, but no one has any hard numbers on the problem.
Alongside the social benefits arguments, critics of immigration point to crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Statistics do not, however, support this argument per se, but the money side of the issue does sting.
According to Department of Justice, some 14 percent of federal prison inmates are illegal immigrants, though many locked up only for immigration violations. In state prisons, illegal immigrants account for less than five percent of all inmates. Some argue that without illegal immigrants present in the U.S., none of those crimes would have been committed at all, and none of the prison costs would have been paid. A study done in 2010 estimated administration of justice costs at the federal level related to criminal immigrants at $7.8 billion annually. The comparable cost to state and local governments was $8.7 billion.
Lastly, any accounting of the burden immigrants place on American society should include the $18 billion spent annually by the federal government on immigration enforcement.
The State of Immigration in Other Countries
Comparing immigration among various countries is very difficult, as policy is deeply tied to each nation’s history and culture. What works in one country has no business in another, and it is hard to find a place where immigration plays anywhere near the role it does in the United States.
That said, Old Europe may offer some lessons in how to get thing mostly wrong. Old prejudices and young idealism seem to control views on immigration, and centuries of homogeneity, driven by established culture, language and stable borders, make assimilation tough. Few economies are expanding beyond the professionals produced domestically anyway, and much of the true immigration debate is tangled up in lurching refugee policies, themselves often driven by outside forces, such as American pressure to “deal with” the Syrian crisis.
Japan is an especially egregious example of dysfunctional immigration policy, essentially one of no legal immigration at all. Despite declining birthrates and soaring numbers of the elderly such that the country is experiencing a shortage of workers, prejudice toward outsiders dating back hundreds of years or more stops discussion of an obvious solution: bring in new blood from abroad. Instead, Japan delays some obviously approaching day of reckoning with the idea that robots will fill in the labor gap.
Another interesting case is China. With an expanding economy, China has first looked internally to its large population. As high tech needs grow, the nation has essentially created a hybrid class of immigrants, Chinese educated abroad who are convinced to leave jobs in the U.S. and Europe to return home. While not immigrants per se, these Chinese bring a mix of foreign education and diversity typically only available through traditional immigration. Plus there are little-to-no assimilation issues. India has similar options available.
Overall, while terms like “good” and “bad” can be seen as relative, as best we can tell, the benefits of immigration to the United States outweigh any negatives. Add them up yourself.
The “Hypothetical Immigration” Reform
Immigration per se is hard to argue against. The preponderance of evidence over decades points to the nation-changing economic, cultural and social benefits gained by the United States. Any costs must be calculated, as in any business situation, against the benefits.
While immigration itself is hard to rationally argue against, it is equally hard to argue against the need to reform immigration policy (some might say “create a policy” instead of accepting the de facto one that has evolved on its own.)
If the goal is to enhance the benefits to the U.S. of immigration while lowering the costs, the present system fails so badly that it remains a miracle that any good comes out of it at all. The working/skills based immigrants are untethered to America’s economic needs, the family-based system is backlogged and make little sense in the 21st century, and no one even knows how many undocumented immigrants are in the U.S. or what they are doing.
So What Do We Do To Fix Immigration in the US?
Anyone, candidate for office or otherwise, who tells you s/he has pat solutions to America’s immigration situation is lying, misinformed or simply pushing some political position. And yes, yes, any proposed change will be difficult, costly, time-consuming, impossible to get through Congress (the last comprehensive immigration reform, absent all the security-related legislation post-9/11, took place in 1986). So, if it is easier to swallow, think of the following as a kind of thought experiment, a pie-in-the-sky wish list.
Here are some ways things that might change.
– America must move away from its over-emphasis on family-based immigration, especially for categories such as siblings and adult children that are so backed up as to be meaningless. The system may have been the right thing at the right time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it is long past its over-due date here in the 21st.
– Whatever the current work/skills immigration system is based on, it should be remade into a points system directly tied to American economic needs. Skills needed in the economy should be assigned points to be matched up with applicants. Need electrical engineers more than web developers? Prioritize. Change the priorities as often as needed, and move resources from the family-based side to the skills side so that cases are processed fast enough that demand and supply match up. Adjust the intake so as not to disadvantage existing workers.
– Better data. How can one work on a problem that is not actually understood? How many undocumented immigrants are there, where do they come from, what do they do when they are here, how much do they pay in taxes and Social Security, and how much do they draw out via social programs? In addition to the big unknowns, in nearly every instance where “facts” are available, data that supports immigration comes from pro-immigration groups’ research, and the opposite for “negative” information. Fully objective data is nearly impossible to find, and parsing out all of the statistical anomalies and bad scholarship is very difficult.
– Reform immigration record keeping. One under-discussed problem in collecting data on undocumented immigrants is the determination of who is and is not “illegal.” U.S. immigration law takes up more shelf space than federal income tax law, and in many ways is more complex. For example, if you were stopped and told to prove your citizenship by a police officer, exactly how would you do that? The only iron-clad documents that prove citizenship are a U.S. passport or travel card, a Certificate of Naturalization, or a bona fide U.S. birth certificate. Few people carry those around, and fewer law enforcement personnel can tell a real one from a good fake. There is no national database of citizens and Americans resist a national ID card in favor of a pastiche of driver’s licenses and ragged cardboard Social Security cards. Green Cards are issued for life, and some old timers have one with a photo of their twenty-five-year-old self on it.
As another example, student visas are valid for the period of time the bearer remains in full-time education. In theory, assuming no departures from the U.S., a teenager could be legally given a student visa for four years of high school, that she used for another four years of undergraduate education, followed by three years of grad school, followed by a work-study period of employment, followed by a 90-day grace period until required departure. It is all legal, but sorting that out roadside is near impossible.
– Trump’s hyperbole aside, America does need some sort of effective border control. It is clear that large numbers of people are able to simply walk in. That “policy” is no policy.
The State Department issued some 12 million non-immigrant visas (student, tourist) in 2015. Most visas are valid for five years, meaning there are some 60 million of them out there at any one time. In addition, citizens of 38 countries, such as Canada, Japan and Britain, can enter the U.S. for tourism or business without visas.
Altogether, as an example, during 2011 alone, there were 159 million non-immigrant admissions to the United States, visa and visa-free. No one knows where they are. Presumably most returned home, but, since the United States stands alone among industrialized nations (travelers in the Schengen zone are an exception) in having no outbound/exit immigration control, no one knows. Various programs are in evolution, but almost all involve the airlines gathering data when people fly, instead of making an inherently governmental process the business of the government.
Student visa holders are only tracked by their schools, who report to the Department of Homeland Security. As one can imagine, Harvard and Ohio State take this job seriously, the Podunk School of Cosmetology less so.
– If, and only if, all that gets done, an amnesty to reset things seems justified, and will allow the U.S. to better judge the status of its reformed immigration policies.
– Finally, outside of legislation and regulation, it is time for America to move past the angry falsehoods and full-on hate that drives too much of the conversation on immigration. Same for the myths that immigration is so enshrined in the American story as to be untouchable. The questions to answer and the problems to solve are with us. We need to get down to it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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