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30 November, 2023

Are UC Officials Who Hire Illegal Aliens Subject to Criminal Prosecution?

Last September, 29 law professors assured the University of California that “no federal law prohibits [it] from hiring undocumented students”, that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986’s prohibition on the knowing hiring and employment of aliens not authorized to work under federal law “does not bind state government entities”. I have concluded that if the UC regents do authorize such employment and the federal government challenges it, that IRCA’s employer sanctions regime will likely be found to apply to UC and UC will likely not be found to have a constitutional right to hire unauthorized aliens as professors.

Following the receipt of this assurance from the 29 law professors, the UC regents indicated their support in principle and voted to form a working group to examine the issue and complete a proposed implementation plan by November 2023. The regents have not yet publicly announced a plan.

The professors failed to detail to UC the risks involved, not only to HR officers, but also to the UC regents themselves. For “employer sanctions” violations carry not only civil but also potential criminal liability, and penalties include (and have resulted in) imprisonment.

Employer sanctions’ primary criminal offense involves “pattern or practice” violations: “Any person or entity which engages in a pattern or practice of violations ... shall be fined not more than $3,000 for each unauthorized alien .., imprisoned for not more than six months for the entire pattern or practice, or both”.

Other applicable criminal offenses include:

“Any person who, during any 12-month period, knowingly hires for employment at least 10 individuals with actual knowledge that the individuals are aliens” unauthorized to work who have been smuggled into the U.S. is subject to penalties including “fine[s] ... or imprison[ment] for not more than 5 years, or both.”

“Any person who ... knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien in any place ... or ... engages in any conspiracy to commit any [such] act[], or ... aids or abets the commission of any ... [such] act[]” is subject to penalties including “for each alien in respect to whom ... a violation occurs ... fine[s] .., imprison[ment for] not more than 5 years, or both ... “or [if] the offense was done for the purpose of commercial advantage or private financial gain, ... fine[s] .., imprison[ment] not more than 10 years, or both”.

“Any person who ... encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law ... or ... engages in any conspiracy to commit any [such] act[], or ... aids or abets the commission of any ... [such] act[]” is subject to the same potential set of penalties as for harboring.

The “harboring” and “encouraging/inducing” offenses are predicate offenses for purposes of civil and criminal application of RICO — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

No administration has aggressively utilized employer sanctions’ criminal penalties. A principal cause of this failure is the difficulty in proving that an employer “knowingly” hired or employed unauthorized aliens, in large part the result of the easy availability to them of fraudulent documents. However, proof of knowledge should not be a difficulty in the case of an employer, potentially such as UC, that publicly proclaims that it will knowingly hire unauthorized aliens.

While the Biden administration utilizing its power of prosecutorial discretion might very well refuse to enforce employer sanctions against UC, the statute of limitations for the federal crimes involved is five years. Thus, the next administration would be able to bring prosecutions for most or all UC’s hiring under a new policy, and certainly for the continuing employment of unauthorized aliens still employed at UC (as continuing employment is a continuing offence).

https://cis.org/Report/Are-UC-Officials-Who-Hire-Illegal-Aliens-Subject-Prosecution

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29 November, 2023

How the Border Crisis Affects Our Nation’s Law Enforcement and First Responders

The crisis caused by the Biden administration’s reckless, open-border policies has burdened Americans across this country, no matter how far from the border they live. Every state has now become a border state. From Yuma County, Arizona to Jackson County, Mississippi and all the way to New York City, the costs of this disaster come in many forms.

With more than 40 years of law enforcement experience under my belt, I know this crisis does not just affect a community—it affects the dedicated men and women tasked with defending it.

The unprecedented flood of more than six million illegal aliens across the Southwest border since Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took office has stretched many law enforcement agencies to their breaking points. The never-ending chaos makes it harder for them to successfully protect and serve at a time when many police and sheriffs’ departments are already facing a retention crisis.

During my eight years as sheriff of Jackson County, I saw the physical, emotional, and psychological toll that this career can take on individual officers. Those difficulties are magnified when local law enforcement is forced to bear the costs of a national crisis. Instead of focusing on their communities, officers find themselves forced to spend valuable time and resources dealing with the ripple effects of the open border.

The Biden-Mayorkas strategy isn’t working, and it’s undermining the morale and the homeland security mission of law enforcement across the country.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) continues to encounter alien criminals who have been previously convicted of crimes like sexual assault, theft, and murder. Just a few days ago, Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens said his agents have been arresting an average of 47 aliens with “serious criminal histories” per day this year. Local law enforcement is seeing the same, too. And every one of these crimes and arrests, as well as the resulting jail time, falls on taxpayers.

For example, Yuma County spent $1.3 million on detaining illegal aliens last fiscal year according to testimony by Supervisor Jonathan Lines in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security. Lines also told our Committee that the county continues to see additional law enforcement costs as first responders are stretched thin responding to calls involving the border crisis while simultaneously responding to calls within the community.

In Cochise County, another Arizona border county, the state has allocated more than  $12 million to the Sheriff's Department to deal with crimes connected to the border crisis. In 2022, booking costs alone totaled over $4.3 million for 1,578 suspects.

Counties all over Texas are facing immense financial pressure from this administration’s open-border policies as well. In Brooks County, law enforcement has been forced to spend well over a million dollars on migrant-related crimes and deaths. In Tarrant County, taxpayers foot the bill of over $3.6 million to detain and hold nearly 250 illegal immigrants throughout the year. Another county’s employees had to take pay cuts to afford burials and cremations for illegal aliens found dead in their jurisdiction. Even McMullen County, with a population of just 600, spends half a million dollars every year dealing with crimes committed by illegal aliens. The inability of the federal government to detain these criminal aliens means that American communities are suffering.

These costs aren’t limited to states along the Southwest border. In my home state of Mississippi, just north of the district I represent, three illegal immigrants from Honduras escaped an ICE vehicle and were pursued through the night by local law enforcement; this pursuit lasted 15 hours. The cost and diversion of manpower, coupled with the cost of booking these men, could have been avoided had this administration’s policies not incentivized illegal immigrants to cross our border.

And in New York City, over 1,600 miles away from the Southwest border, police and firefighters could see their overtime pay taken away and instead spent on housing expenses for illegal aliens. The city has proposed a five percent spending cut to cover rising immigration-related costs, and in recent testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security, Joseph Borelli, minority leader of the New York City Council, said that overtime would be “the first to go.”

Why should our first responders be paid less because President Biden and Secretary Mayorkas refuse to secure our border?

Law enforcement and firefighters aren’t the only first responders affected by this crisis. Dispatchers and EMTs have had their resources stretched thin as well. Dustin Caudle, deputy chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s Yuma Sector, recently told our Committee that illegal aliens sometimes call 911 not due to any emergency, but because they are “frustrated that we aren’t picking them up and transporting them fast enough and…because they’re ready to go.” Yuma County Sheriff Leon Wilmot told the House Judiciary Committee this year that the county had recorded 759 phone calls to 911 from illegal aliens in the desert asking for assistance. Each illegal alien call dispatchers take could result in an American abandoned in a time of need.

We may never fully know the impact of this crisis on the men and women who serve our communities as law enforcement and first responders, but we can see its evidence in South Mississippi and in communities across the country. As the disaster continues, families could face roadblocks in accessing emergency services, such as longer wait times for police or paramedic response. The cost to the American people has been very real and we see it every day.

America cannot sustain this ongoing crisis. As long as illegal immigration is encouraged by this administration, the men and women on our communities’ front lines will be forced to bear the cost. It is past time to prioritize border security so that our nation’s law enforcement and first responders can best serve their local communities.

https://townhall.com/columnists/rep-mike-ezell/2023/11/21/how-the-border-crisis-affects-our-nations-law-enforcement-and-first-responders-n2631469

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28 November, 2023

British Cabinet breaks ranks to warn PM: Get tougher on migration

Rishi Sunak’s immigration plan was hit by fresh turmoil after No 10 admitted its new Rwanda treaty had been delayed and ministers broke rank to push the PM for “much tougher” moves to get record-high migration numbers down.

Downing Street refused to commit to having the revised Rwanda pact in place before Christmas, saying only that it would be ready “in the coming weeks” – having previously promised it would published in “days”.

It came as cabinet rifts over immigration deepened, with business secretary Kemi Badenoch revealing that she was “pushing” for Mr Sunak to take “much, much tougher measures” to tackle record-high net migration.

Meanwhile, immigration minister Robert Jenrick moved to quell Tory anger – insisting that the Rwanda plan remained “extremely important” after backbench MPs challenged home secretary James Cleverly over his claim it was not the “be all and end all” of the stop the boats push.

The Independent understands a new crackdown on legal migration to address record-high numbers has also been delayed, as different departments continue to argue about how far Mr Sunak should go.

Senior Tory Steve Brine said slashing migration to keep Ms Braverman happy was not good for society or the economy.
No 10 had said in the hours after the 15 November Supreme Court ruling against the Rwanda plan that an updated deal with the central African country would be produced in the “coming days”. On 16 November, Mr Cleverly said the deal was “pretty much” ready to be done “within days, not weeks or months”.

But on Monday, the PM’s official spokesman refused to commit to having the pact with Kigali in place before Christmas – saying only it would be set out “in the coming weeks”.

Grilled by reporters on why there had been such a long delay, the PM’s spokesman said No 10 was working to give the government the “strongest possible position because we want both the treaty and the bill to have the best possible chance of success”.

Mr Cleverly’s comment at the weekend that the scheme was not the “be all and end all” of small boats policy had angered some on the right of the party – given the new home secretary is known to be opposed to pulling out of, or ignoring, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Right-wing Tory MP James Morris shared concerns about Mr Cleverly’s remarks – challenging immigration minister Mr Jenrick, an ally of sacked hardliner Ms Braverman, to say if he shared those sentiments.

Visibly angry at the jeering from the Labour benches over Tory splits, Mr Jenrick insisted that the Rwanda deportation flights remained an “extremely important component” of the stop the boats plan.

Seeking to calm Tory frustration at the failure to act, Mr Cleverly also told MPs in the Commons that the Rwanda plan was “an incredibly important part of the basket of responses that we have”.

Mr Cleverly shrugged off a question from right-winger Simon Clarke, who said it was his “profound conviction” that the government must disapply the ECHR and UN Refugee Convention to get the Rwanda flights off the ground.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sunak-rwanda-plan-delayed-cleverly-tories-b2454271.html

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27 November, 2023

Asylum-seeker boat lands in Western Australia: Arrivals sent to Nauru

The 12 asylum-seekers apprehended by Australian Border Force officials in Western Australia on Wednesday have been flown to Nauru.

After initial processing in Darwin, the 12 individuals have been confirmed as unauthorised maritime arrivals.

The Australian understands they will remain in Nauru awaiting regional processing, which is consistent with Operation Sovereign Borders protocols that have been in place for more than a decade.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says Anthony Albanese has given people smugglers a green light to resume operations, warning the government’s dismantling of Operation Sovereign Borders could see “people drown at sea and kids end up back in detention”.

Mr Dutton, a former immigration and home affairs minister who oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders, on Friday accused the Prime Minister of a “catastrophic failure” after a vessel made landfall in Western Australia.

Attacking the government for not providing details about the group who arrived by boat on an isolated and rugged stretch of the Kimberley coastline, Mr Dutton said “this is the tenth venture (since Labor won the election) and the public is not hearing a lot about it at the moment”.

“The Albanese government dismantles Operation Sovereign Borders and the boats restart. Under this Prime Minister, he stops the economy but he starts the boats,” Mr Dutton told Ray Hadley on 2GB.

“The people smugglers have worked out there’s a Prime Minister who’s weak and doesn’t have the ability to stand up to people smuggling and the human tragedy if it starts again. People drown at sea and kids end up back in detention. It’s exactly what Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd did.”

After the government abolished Coalition-era temporary protection visas and watered-down other immigration enforcement powers, which Mr Dutton says creates a “pull-factor” for people smugglers, the Liberal leader warned “there’s a greater likelihood that these people now stay”.

“If you come from Afghanistan or Iran or other countries where the Albanese government determines you can’t be returned to, then the people smugglers are going to market that,” he said.

“(The people smugglers will) say … jump on the boat because look at what’s happened with the High Court, you can get an outcome in Australia which means you might be in immigration detention for a few months, or even a couple of years, but eventually you’ll get back out into the community and you’ll be given a permanent visa.

“That’s exactly what the government has created. It’s a huge mess and it’s a pull factor for these people smugglers who are selling their wares again. Tragically, people drown at sea as a result, you don’t know who is coming into our country and the Prime Minister has sent all of the wrong messages and signals from the first day he was elected.”

After the Albanese government was last week forced by the Coalition into rushing through emergency powers legislation in response to a High Court ruling on indefinite detention, Mr Dutton said Australians were “shaking their heads at this government at the moment”.

“It’s just not the action of a competent government and I think the training wheels (are) well and truly falling off this Prime Minister and I think a lot of people are really shaking their heads as to how the Prime Minister could put Australians at risk the way that he is currently.

“There are now 340 more people it seems that can get out into the community and the government has no answers.”

Mr Dutton said the government had since June to “deal with this matter and they came into the parliament saying … you can’t pass legislation, we’re just bound by the High Court decision”.

“Then as it turns out you can pass legislation but they wrote the legislation overnight in a very hasty fashion and if that is the way they conduct themselves then they leave themselves open to greater legal risk.”

“If you’ve got a competent minister and a competent Prime Minister … they take the lead, they have a national security committee discussion to iron out all these problems. The government just hasn’t done that because people like Andrew Giles and Clare O’Neil and other people from the hard left of the Labor Party don’t believe that these people should be in immigration detention.

“So, they’re happy to hide behind the outcome of the court and say we tried, we couldn’t do anything … we’ve got to release these people, that’s in accordance to their human rights needs.

And they completely and utterly forget about the victims and future victims of some of these individuals.”

Hitting back at Mr Dutton, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil told The Australian that “national security is the first priority of our government”.

Ms O’Neil accused Mr Dutton of being a “reckless politician who will do and say anything to score political points – even if it puts the national security of Australians at risk”.

“As security agencies have repeatedly warned, inflammatory language has a direct link to increased risk of violence. Everyone in our parliament needs to consider the impact that their language will have,” Ms O’Neil said.

“Our government is careful and deliberate about how we discuss national security issues and especially operational matters. No political objective should ever come before the security of our country and the integrity of the operations and agencies that protect us every day.

“Whether it’s the conflict in the Middle East, tensions at home, Operation Sovereign Borders or even the highly sensitive security operations involved in individuals returning from conflict, there’s nothing Peter Dutton won’t use for his own political ends.”

Education Minister Jason Clare on Friday said an investigation into the boat arrival was underway.

“We don’t comment on Operation Sovereign Borders matters. I just make the general point that if people seek to come to Australia by boat, the boat is either turned back, or people are returned to their country of origin, or they’re settled in a third country,” Mr Clare said.

“That was the position under the former government, it’s the same position under this government.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/dutton-says-pm-has-given-people-smugglers-a-green-light/news-story/cc239c0c04d0d38018054ac710bdfa3b

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26 November, 2023

Muslim refugees unpopular in Ireland

It was a night of shame for one of the most welcoming countries in the world. Ireland was left reeling after as many as 500 thugs responded to a horrifying knife attack on schoolchildren in Dublin on Thursday by launching an anti-migrant rampage.

Fuelled by online misinformation and unsubstantiated rumours that the person behind the attack – which saw three children and a woman injured – was a foreign national, the mobs gathered close to some of the city's most iconic locations, some waving flags and brandishing signs reading 'Irish Lives Matter'.

Shocking scenes saw police officers attacked, with around 50 sustaining injuries – one of whom faces having a toe amputated – while buses and a tram were torched, with one driver punched and dragged from his cab.

Armed police were even dispatched to Irish PM Leo Varadkar's Dublin home after calls on extremist messaging sites for rioters to descend on it, the Irish Times reported.

An intensive all-night clean-up operation saw O'Connell Street, one of Dublin's best-known thoroughfares, return to an appearance of normality yesterday.

But despite reassurances that it was 'safe to come into the city', dozens of businesses chose to close their shutters and missed out on lucrative Black Friday sales.

One hotel manager said he received ten times the number of usual cancellations. 'Now that could just be a moment in time, but the world has seen Dublin on fire,' Paul Gallagher said.

While migrant communities said they were fearful for their safety, with some parents pulling their children from school.

A Muslim-run soup kitchen, where many female volunteers wear veils, shut amid safety fears. Founder Lorraine O'Connor said: 'We don't want anybody to be an easy target. We just don't want any more suffering.'

She added that Muslim migrants were were as outraged by the 'barbaric act' as the wider community. 'But because they say he's Muslim, we have to carry the weight of this on our shoulders, and we shouldn't because, in our eyes, as much as the Irish community are mourning for the hurt and pain of them children and their poor families, we are too.'

Last night, the five-year-old girl stabbed in the chest and a school care assistant who 'used her body as a shield' in an attempt to protect children from the attacker remained in a critical condition in hospital.

While the senseless violence was roundly condemned, warnings were growing that Ireland's political establishment was failing to heed concern at soaring immigration.

On a visit to Dublin, Northern Ireland Secretary Chris Heaton-Harris said 'mainstream politicians' needed to 'articulate' such worries, or risk leaving 'a vacuum for other people who might not be as benign as we are'.

In recent years, soaring numbers of migrants, many of them accommodated in poor areas of central Dublin or small provincial towns, have put acute pressure on Ireland's housing and public services.

A total of 141,600 immigrants arrived in the Republic in the 12 months to April, the highest level since 2007, of whom almost 42,000 were from Ukraine.

And unlike in the UK, where families displaced by Vladimir Putin's invasion were initially accommodated by private individuals, in Ireland they have been put up by the State in hotels and empty office blocks.

In Dublin, huge numbers of foreign nationals have been housed in predominantly working-class areas, where the arrival of unemployed single men can create social friction.

Across the country, a worsening housing crisis and an acute shortage of rental properties, particularly in Dublin and Cork has resulted in a profound change which has severely tested the image of Ireland as a welcoming country.

The upshot has been that an initially warm welcome for refugees has been replaced by mounting tension, with at least 300 anti-migrant demonstrations documented before Thursday's violence.

In one particularly ugly incident back in January, an angry mob of about 200 surrounded a police station in Finglas, a working-class district of Dublin, after rumours spread on social media that a local girl had been raped by a man who had recently arrived in the country.

Just over 14 per cent of the Republic's 5.2million population - 757,000 people – are now non-Irish citizens.

But recent polls suggest that 75 per cent of people believe that the number of refugees Ireland is taking in is 'now too many'.

In a bitter irony, it emerged yesterday that one of the heroes of Thursday's attack on the schoolchildren was himself a recent immigrant.

Brazil-born Caio Benicio, 43, was making a Deliveroo delivery when he witnessed the bloodbath, jumping off his moped and battering the knife-wielding assailant to the ground with his helmet.

'When I saw the knife, I stopped my bike and I just acted by instinct,' he said yesterday.

Downplaying his own courage, the father-of-two paid tribute to a creche worker who was left in a serious condition as she tried to shield the terrified youngsters, describing her as 'very, very brave'.

And he said the anti-migrant anger which erupted hours later 'doesn't make sense because I'm an immigrant myself and I was the one who helped out'.

An online fundraiser asking supporters to 'buy a pint' for Mr Benicio quickly topped £20,000.

Ireland's police commissioner Drew Harris initially blamed the rioting on a 'lunatic, hooligan faction driven by a far-Right ideology'.

Denying that the horrific scenes were proof of a failure of policing, he insisted yesterday 'we could not have anticipated that in response to a terrible crime, the stabbing of school children and their teacher, that this would be the response'.

Meanwhile, last night it emerged that the suspect in the quadruple stabbing was arrested earlier this year for possession of a knife.

The man, originally from Algeria, previously faced deportation proceedings but eventually received Irish citizenship a decade ago.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12788897/Dublin-welcoming-city-explode-anti-migrant-violence-why.html

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23 November, 2023

AOC agrees Biden failing NYC on migrant crisis but wants to ‘check the math’ on Adams’ budget cuts

Far-left Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez agrees with Mayor Eric Adams that President Biden is failing to do enough to help New York City address the ongoing migrant crisis, but disagrees with Hizzoner that the problem requires cuts to essential municipal services.

“I agree that the federal government hasn’t done enough. We’ve been pressing the Biden administration to do so,” Ocasio-Cortez, 34, told HellGateNY in an interview following a recent turkey drive event at Hunts Point Produce Market in The Bronx.

The “Squad” member went on to question the need for additional federal spending on security at the US-Mexico border, saying previously allocated money hasn’t been spent.

“We’re over-allocating in some areas, but we are dramatically under-allocating in resourcing for things like what we’re seeing here—shelters and other services here in New York City, Chicago, and other municipalities as well,” said the self-described democratic socialist whose district includes parts of The Bronx and Queens. “In that respect, the mayor has a point.”

But Ocasio-Cortez was dubious that the costs of caring for asylum-seekers necessitated Adams’ plan to impose drastic reductions in funding to city services, saying further analysis was needed.  “I actually think we need to check the math on that,” she said.

“The idea that the migrant crisis would somehow require cuts to all of these across-the-board services does not quite add up to me. To make that claim is an invitation to investigate those numbers, and I think that’s what our next step would be.”

Adams was slammed last week after announcing a new, updated 2024 financial plan that would see the NYPD’s force slashed to 29,000 cops by the end of fiscal year 2025 — its lowest strength since 1993 — by cancelling graduating classes to bring in new recruits.

Few city departments emerge unscathed from Adams’ proposed 5% cuts to balance the budget — which include $32 million from the city’s sanitation department, $74 million from the FDNY and $547 million from the Department of Education.

Adams is also getting rid of a number of street garbage cans in the outer boroughs, while 34 popular cultural institutions — including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Natural History — will see their funding reduced as the city’s Cultural Institutions Group budget will be chopped by nearly $6 million.

The City Council is expected to accept most or all of the cuts.

Adams has ordered another round of sweeping budget reductions to balance the Big Apple’s bulging $7.1 billion gap for next fiscal year — though the NYPD, FDNY and Department of Sanitation could be exempt.

“I think our responsibility is to care for the people of this city—the last thing we should be considering is slashing budgets for things like libraries and schools. We should be, if anything, looking at revenue raises: a pied-à-terre tax, vacancy taxes, things like that,” AOC told HellGateNY.

“But the idea that we’d be slashing some of the most essential services of the city, I don’t think is proper. We really should be pressing for much more scrutiny before a dollar of that is really taken away or touched.”

“Even basic things like trash collection in Corona, this is something that I hear a lot from our constituents,” the lawmaker added. “And it’s something that we try to get involved in, but it’s a little bit outside of my jurisdiction — these are city and municipal-level issues. But basic things, like sanitation, school resourcing, how many kids to a classroom. Those are the core issues that I hear about most often.”

Adams and the City Council have little ability to alter most taxes without support from Albany.

However, city lawmakers could directly raise property taxes, which would likely provoke a backlash from working-class and middle-class homeowners.

Asked to respond to AOC’s criticism of the proposed budget cuts, City Hall referred The Post to the mayor’s comments from his Tuesday press briefing.

“We’re not trying to negotiate with Washington. We’re trying to say 140,000 people — 3,000 to 4,000 [migrants] coming here a week, there is a cost,” Adams said.

“To constantly send out the signal that this is not impacting our city, I just think is wrong,” Adams said.

“New York City tax dollars should not be going to paying for a national problem. ..It’s unfair to New York City taxpayers.”

https://nypost.com/2023/11/22/metro/adams-right-to-hit-biden-for-migrant-crisis-wrong-on-budget-cuts-aoc/

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22 November, 2023

Geert Wilders’ anti-immigrant party could win most seats in Netherlands’ knife-edge poll

Dutch political leaders sought support from undecided voters in frantic campaigning Tuesday, on the eve of a general election that will change the face of the country’s politics after 13 years of leadership by Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

Pollsters were predicting a knife-edge vote with four parties across the political spectrum vying to become the largest bloc in the 150-seat lower house of parliament.

Long-time MP Geert Wilders, famous for his anti-immigrant rhetoric, is polling strongly.

Rutte’s fourth and final coalition resigned in July after it failed to agree on measures to rein in migration. Rutte subsequently said he would not seek re-election but he remains in power as caretaker prime minister until a new coalition is formed — a process that could take months.

The vote could provide the Netherlands with its first ever female prime minister — the new leader of Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) is 46-year-old Dilan Ye?ilgöz-Zegerius, a former refugee who now advocates cracking down on immigration.

But also polling strongly in the final days of the campaign is veteran MP Geert Wilders, who has toned down his trademark strident anti-Islam rhetoric in campaigning in favour of promoting policies aimed at halting asylum-seekers from entering the Netherlands and tackling the cost-of-living crisis and housing shortages.

One poll Tuesday even put Wilders’ Party for Freedom, or PVV, in first place, very narrowly ahead of the VVD.

A centre-left bloc of the Labor Party and Green Left also was in a three-way race to win the vote. Its leader, former European Union climate chief Frans Timmermans, was in his home city of Maastricht campaigning at the city’s university.

Were Wilders’ party to win the most seats, he would take the lead in moves to form a new ruling coalition in this nation where the voting system all but guarantees that no single party wins an overall majority.

If he does, he shouldn’t count on the support of Ye?ilgöz-Zegerius. Asked Tuesday on NPO Radio 1 if she would serve in a Cabinet led by Wilders, she replied: “I don’t see that happening.”

“The Netherlands is looking for a leader who can unite the country ... who is for all Dutch people, who can lead our country internationally,” she added. “I also don’t see that Mr Wilders could build a majority.”

Wilders said the comments were a sign that the VVD fears his party could win the vote.

“Panic at the VVD. The PVV is getting too big for them,” he said in a statement urging supporters to make his party the biggest. The closest Wilders has come to power previously was when he agreed to support Rutte’s first coalition without actually joining the Cabinet.

Meanwhile Thierry Baudet, leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy, was back in parliament on Tuesday after being attacked at a campaign event Monday night by a man who hit him on the head with a beer bottle.

“I was very lucky,” Baudet told reporters, saying the attack did not seriously injure him. A small wound was visible above his left eye.  “I see it as a political attack,” he said, adding that “we must continue with our campaign.”

Polls suggest that Baudet’s party, once seen as a rising star of the populist far right, will win a handful of seats Wednesday.

The New Social Contract party, set up over the summer by MP Pieter Omtzigt, was trailing slightly behind the top three contenders.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/geert-wilders-anti-immigrant-party-could-become-netherlands-biggest-in-knife-edge-vote-20231122-p5elu3.html

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21 November, 2023

Texas prepares a radical law criminalizing immigrants

The Texas Legislature approved this week some of the toughest laws against immigrants in the United States. The Republican majority in the state legislature approved a series of norms that criminalize people who cross the border from Mexico. These make it a crime to arrive in Texas illegally and allow state authorities to deport them, the legality of which has been questioned by some experts and human rights organizations. These laws are awaiting enactment by the state governor, Greg Abbott, a politician who has explored radical methods to combat the arrival of immigrants, including sending buses of immigrants to Democratic cities or installing buoys and barbed wire in the Rio Grande. The politician has already indicated that he will sign the initiatives into law.

House Bill (HB) 4 caused days of tension in the legislative body. The state House approved it in late October, on a Thursday at 4:00 a.m. The Republican majority prevailed over attempts by Democratic politicians to derail the proposal by Congressman David Spiller, who represents an upstate county. His proposal allows anyone to be detained at any time and place on suspicion of having illegally entered Texas, a state with a population of about 10 million people of Mexican origin.

The Texas Senate also recently approved an initiative that allows Abbott to use an extraordinary $1.5 billion to strengthen surveillance of the border with Mexico, an area that has seen record numbers of illegal crossings. The politician has said he will use some of the money to extend the state’s immigration wall with Mexico, as well as other barriers that could cut off the flow of arrivals. Abbott is expected to visit the border this weekend alongside Donald Trump, who is campaigning for 2024 on a promise to bring a tough hand back to the area.

The tension caused by the negotiation of HB 4 surfaced in a viral video recorded inside the legislative body. After the vote, Democratic Congressman Armando Walle, of Houston, visibly approached Republican lawmakers who voted for the measure in annoyance. “I can’t drive my brother, my cousin, OK. I can’t take them anywhere, bro? I can’t go to a boda [wedding], I can’t go to a baptism, because my community is being attacked? Y’all don’t understand, the shit that you do hurts our community,” the congressman is heard saying in the video. Republicans just nodded without responding to him.

The new law allows authorities to opt for the deportation to Mexico of anyone suspected of having entered Texas in an irregular manner. If he or she does not leave the United States, he or she could be charged with a new crime that could result in a prison sentence of between two and 20 years.

The Mexican government expressed its rejection of the measure this week. The Mexican Foreign Ministry issued a message on Wednesday, the same day the Mexican president began a visit to the United States to participate in the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, APEC. The criminalization of immigrants, says the Foreign Ministry, “will result in the separation of families, discrimination and racial profiling.” Mexico also rejects a measure that would allow state authorities to detain and return nationals or foreigners to Mexican territory, the statement said.

The López Obrador administration has been in a tug-of-war with its U.S. counterpart on immigration issues for months. That was the focus of the bilateral meeting between Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart on Friday. The two countries already have some agreements in place — at the federal level — for Mexico to receive citizens of some countries who are deported. Mexico, however, has not agreed to receive deportations from states individually nor any state police.

Human rights organizations have made it clear that they will sue the Texas government as soon as Abbott signs this bill into law. The bill “supersedes federal law, promotes racial profiling and harassment, and unconstitutionally authorizes local law enforcement to deport people without due process, regardless of whether the immigrants are seeking asylum or other humanitarian protections,” said Oni Blair, the ACLU’s Texas director. The activist group claims that supremacist groups in the Republican stronghold have shown their support for these rules.

Congressman Walle pointed out this week that the law approved by the Texas Legislature is worse than the famous SB1070 passed by Arizona in 2010. This allowed the police to ask for papers to anyone they wanted and at any time in order to check their legal status in the territory. This rule was challenged in court, and its effects were eroded after several rulings by federal judges. In a landmark case in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local police are not authorized to detain a suspect based solely on his or her immigration status. This responsibility, that court determined, rested with the federal government. However, the ideological balances of the justices have shifted since then.

https://english.elpais.com/usa/2023-11-19/texas-prepares-a-radical-law-criminalizing-immigrants.html

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20 November, 2023

Finland shuts down multiple border crossings to stop migrants coming from Russia:

Finland shut down four of its nine border crossings with Russia late Friday to stop a sudden influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants — accusing the Kremlin of sending them in revenge for joining NATO earlier this year.

“It is clear that these people are helped and they are also being escorted or transported to the border by border guards,” Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo said Tuesday as he announced the coming crackdown.

At least 280 asylum seekers, mainly from Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Iraq, have arrived in Finland through Russia since September, Finnish authorities said Thursday — and 100 more swarmed the nation’s southern crossings on Friday ahead of the closures.

They arrive at the entry stations by bicycle or on foot after legally entering Russia from their home countries.

“It’s not about the number of asylum seekers, but about Finland’s national security and the change in Russia’s activities,” said Riikka Purra, Finland’s finance minister.

Finland, which shares an 830-mile border with Russia, became the 31st member of the NATO military alliance between Europe and the United States in April, in response to international tensions over Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Finnish authorities erected fencing at the Nuijamaa border crossing station to halt a flow of asylum-seeking migrants arriving via Russia.

European Union President Ursula von Leyen praised the new Finnish border policy.

“Russia’s instrumentalization of migrants is shameful,” she wrote on X. “I thank the Finnish Border Guards for protecting our European borders.”

Two border crossings far in Finland’s north will continue to accept asylum applications, Orpo said.

The shuttered entry points will remain closed until Feb. 18.

A Kremlin spokesman said that Finland was making a “big mistake.”

“The Finnish authorities have taken the path of destroying bilateral relations,” Dmitry Peskov told state news agency TASS.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/18/news/finland-shuts-down-multiple-border-crossings-to-stop-migrants-coming-from-russia-pm-petteri-orpo/

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19 November, 2023

Italy’s Albania plan

Italy has become the first European Union country to bite the bullet and set up a scheme to off-shore migrant asylum seekers to a country outside the bloc. Italy’s right-wing prime minister Giorgia Meloni says she hopes the scheme, signed off in Rome last week with Albania’s left-wing prime minister, Edi Rama, will become a model copied across the EU.

It is similar to the Tory government’s troubled Rwanda scheme, but more practical and less vulnerable to legal challenge. Italy will process asylum requests in Albania where it plans to send tens of thousands of migrants a year. Britain, meanwhile, plans to hand the task of deciding who gets asylum to Rwanda and to send only a few hundred a year.

Later today, the UK Supreme Court is due to deliver judgement on the Rwanda scheme, which was blocked in 2022 by the European Court of Human Rights but whose deterrent factor is vital to Rishi’s Sunak’s famous pledge to stop the boats. The Court of Appeal ruled in June that there was a risk migrants sent to Rwanda would be deported to unsafe countries where they faced persecution.

But Italy is not vulnerable to such a charge. It plans to send only migrants from safe countries to Albania, and by definition they have less chance of being granted asylum or facing persecution if deported.

Under the terms of Meloni’s deal, two detention centres will be built in Albania, paid for and run by Italy, where migrants will be detained while their asylum applications are processed. The centres, where migrants will effectively be jailed, will open next spring.

The scheme could prove the most effective measure ever taken by an EU country to stop illegal migrants. If it works – and that’s a big if. But Meloni has decided to go for it regardless.

Her left-wing opponents in Italy, primarily the Partito Democratico (PD) which is the main opposition party, have ridiculed the idea as unworkable and inhuman. Yet even Germany’s left-wing Chancellor Helmut Scholz promised – after an emergency meeting last week on his country’s worsening migrant crisis – to ‘examine’ similar schemes. Austria and Denmark are already doing so.

As Rama, whose Socialist party is the direct descendant of Albania’s Communist party, told the press: Italy’s PD is a ‘doomed’ political party because ‘it pursues the policies of those who never win.’

Certainly, effective solutions – few and far between till now – are urgently needed to stop the growing flow of illegal migrants into the EU, much of it across the central Mediterranean to Italy. So far in 2023, 146,095 migrants are known to have arrived in Italy by sea from north Africa compared to 90,229 last year and 57,466 in 2021. The record year was 2016 when 181,436 arrived by sea.

When it comes to the migrants from safe countries Italy plans to send to Albania, most will come from Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, which had the second and third highest number of migrants arriving in Italy this year.

One migrant centre will be constructed at the small port town of Shengjin in Albania to identify the migrants and receive their asylum requests. The migrants will then be transferred to the second centre, at a former Cold War air base near the village of Gjader, 12 miles inland, where they will be detained pending the result of their requests. The legal jurisdiction in the detention centres will be Italian but external security will be run by the Albanians.

The precise details of how the scheme will work have not yet been disclosed. But Meloni and her ministers have said that safe country migrants picked up in the Mediterranean by Italian flagged ships (naval, coastguard, or mercantile) will be taken directly to Albania. The scheme will not apply to pregnant women, minors, and others deemed vulnerable.

The two centres will be able to hold up to a combined total of 3,000 migrants at a time. The aim is to process 36,000 people a year – 3,000 a month. To do this, Italy will need to process each safe country asylum application within 28 days and appeals within one week. In theory, that is just about feasible as the detained migrants will be from safe countries. Migrants whose applications are rejected – presumably almost all – will be deported to their countries of origin.

Italy has repatriation agreements with both Tunisia and the Ivory Coast, and also with Egypt (where the fourth highest number of migrants to arrive in Italy have come this year) but not with Guinea which tops the list, nor with many other countries.

In theory, it should be relatively easy to send migrants back to countries with which Italy has signed repatriation agreements. But this could turn out to be the scheme’s Achilles’ heel.

In cases where it is not possible to repatriate quickly, Italian law allows the government to detain failed asylum applicants awaiting deportation for up to 18 months after which they must be released. In this case, they will be taken to Italy where they will freed awaiting deportation, which at that point is unlikely ever to happen.

Regardless of that, the prospect of 18 months detention outside the EU will act as a deterrent. It will also keep many thousands of migrants, who ignore the prospect of jail in Albania and cross the Mediterranean anyway, outside Italy and the EU – at least for 18 months.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/11/could-britain-learn-from-italys-albania-plan/

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16 November, 2023

New Report Shows Increase in Foreign Students, but Downplays the Costs

A State Department-funded study released today shows (an expected) increase in the number of foreign students by 12.4 percent, but masks the fact that American employers are given a nearly $1 billion tax break for hiring recent alien alumni of U.S. colleges and universities rather than American grads from the same institutions.

Open Doors, the annual report of the New York-based Institute for International Education, also overstates the number of foreign students, just as the administration understates the illegal immigrant population and the illegal flow across the southern border.

The report would have you believe that there are over a million foreign students in this country, when that is an exaggeration by about a quarter. The million-plus figure includes both some 858,000 actual foreign students, and also 199,000 recent alumni whose employers will get the tax break; these alumni are enrolled in the Optional Practical Training program, which is, in fact, a disguised — and subsidized — foreign worker program.

The OPT program has two parts: All alien recent college graduates get a year’s legal employment following graduation; the Open Doors survey of American institutions of higher learning shows that there were 128,000 of them. Those alien grads who majored in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math get two additional years of benefits; the survey counted 71,000 of them this year.

The tax break for employers (enjoyed by some of the alumni as well) consists of the non-payment of payroll taxes, which the rest of us pay to support the Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment insurance programs; this comes to about 9.5 percent of payroll for the employer and for many of the workers, and means that those not paying the payroll taxes receive a subsidy at the expense of our elderly, sick, and unemployed.

The Bush II administration decided, without seeking the approval of Congress, that these recent grads should be defined as “students”, thereby eliminating the payroll tax. While I have not read every word of this year’s Open Doors — it became available at 9 a.m. — every version of the report in prior years was totally silent on this subsidy; the speakers announcing the report today were equally quiet on this subject.

Some alien workers do not get the tax break on the grounds that they have been in the States for five years or more and thus are no longer nonresidents for tax purposes.

Open Doors, again this year, showed that China (27.4 percent of the foreign student population) and India (with 25.4 percent of it) were the leading providers of foreign students.

The Calculation. Our nearly $1 billion tax break is estimated as follows: There are about 128,000 OPT workers in the first year; let us assume a conservative $50,000 a year as their salaries; that creates a payroll of $6.4 billion and 9.5 percent of that is $608 million. Assuming 37,000 workers in the first year of the STEM extension at $52,000, we get a payroll of $1,924,000 and a payroll tax of $182,780,000. Then, assuming 34,000 workers in the second year of STEM, each paid $54,000 a year, the payroll is $1,836,000 and the payroll taxes would be $174,420,000. Adding the three annual payroll tax elements, we get $965,200,000

https://cis.org/North/New-Report-Shows-Increase-Foreign-Students-Downplays-Subsidy

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15 November, 2023

DOJ Proposes New Regulations to Expand Immigration Judges’ Authority

CIS Comment: Proposal is Both Unsupported by Law and Bad Policy

Washington, D.C. (November 14, 2023) – The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) submitted a comment opposing the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)’s proposal to expand immigration judges’ and the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) authority to administratively close, terminate, or dismiss cases in removal proceedings. The proposal would also repeal numerous regulatory provisions issued under the Trump administration that reduced unnecessary delays in immigration court adjudications generally.

Elizabeth Jacobs, the Center’s director of regulatory affairs and policy and author of the comment, said, “The immigration courts’ overall backlog stands at more than 2.2 million cases, a 1060% increase since 2008. These extreme backlogs not only are eroding the credibility of our immigration system but the backlogs, themselves, encourage additional illegal immigration to the United States by ensuring that even those aliens who meet the Biden administration’s narrow enforcement priorities are, nevertheless, provided the opportunity to live in the United States for numerous years – longer than nearly all nonimmigrant visa categories’ periods of validity.”

CIS recommendations include:

DOJ should delay issuance of this proposal until it makes relevant information available to the public by updating data. Without such information, the public lacks the information necessary to properly analyze the impact the regulation will have on the immigration system or understand how these authorities will be used by EOIR adjudicators.

DOJ’s proposal to expand EOIR adjudicators’ authorities to administratively close, terminate, or dismiss cases in removal proceedings are overbroad and bad policy. Expanding these authorities will reduce credibility in the immigration system, increase the courts’ overall backlogs, and allow aliens without any lawful immigration status to continue to live in the United States indefinitely in “legal limbo” without a final disposition on their case.

Given the historic backlogs, EOIR should adopt simultaneous briefing schedules for both detained and non-detained cases. Expanding simultaneous briefing schedules to all cases will give the BIA another tool to address its historic backlog without undermining due process.

EOIR should impose firmer deadlines for background check requirements. As explained in detail in the comment, implementing additional measures to promote efficiency in the adjudication process is of utmost importance.

DOJ has an obligation to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires agencies to conduct an Environmental Assessment and an Environmental Impact Statement for major federal actions for which it is reasonably foreseeable that the human environment will be impacted. DOJ failed to cite an exception to NEPA when issuing this proposal.

https://cis.org/Regulatory-Comments/RE-Appellate-Procedures-and-Decision-Finality-Immigration-Proceedings

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14 November, 2023

Biden's migrant crisis will cost taxpayers $451 BILLION a year

Taxpayers have to front nearly half a trillion dollars each year because the Biden administration is not stopping migrants at the southern border, Republicans said in a report on Monday.

The cost of providing education, healthcare, law enforcement and other expenditure resulting from millions of extra migrants adds up to as much as $451 billion a year, says the House study.

The 49-page report comes as House Republicans push to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly failing to constrain the record numbers of migrants arriving at the US-Mexico border.

'Every day, millions of American taxpayer dollars are spent on costs directly associated with illegal immigration and the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border sparked by … Mayorkas' policies,' says the report.

'Mass illegal immigration, accelerated by Mayorkas' open-borders policies, now represents a massive cost to the federal government and state governments alike, as well as the pocketbooks of private citizens and businesses.'

President Joe Biden's administration has grappled with record numbers of migrants trying to cross the US-Mexico border illegally, a trend fueled by ever more people fleeing political chaos in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Since Biden took office in 2021, US border agents have made more than 5 million arrests of migrants making irregular crossings — that is, not through a controlled border station — over the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many claim asylum at the border and travel north looking for work in such sanctuary cities as New York City, Washington, DC, and Chicago, which are reeling from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the new arrivals.

Amid chaotic scenes of packed buses arriving from the border and migrants sleeping outside refuge centers, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said earlier this fall that the influx 'will destroy' the city.

The document, authorized by Mark Green, the Republican Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, brings together reports from these cities with estimates of the migration costs from think tanks and other public sources.

It includes the cost estimate of $451 billion from the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing think tank that favors sharply cutting people flows to the US, that was calculated by researcher Andrew Arthur in May.

It also includes another estimate, released in March by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), another research group, that taxpayers shell out at least $151 billion each year to cover the cost of illegal immigration.

According to FAIR, US federal and state governments spend $182 billion annually to provide services and benefits to non-legal aliens and their dependents.

That figure is only partially offset by the $31 billion in taxes that are collected by the estimated 15.5 million non-legal aliens living in the US, according to the group's president Dan Stein.

Some 3.8 million migrants have entered the country since Biden took office in 2021, says FAIR. Nearly half of them slipped into the country illegally and were never caught, it is claimed.  

The House will vote on Monday whether to advance or block a Republican charge to impeach Mayorkas for allegedly failing in his duty to secure the US-Mexico border.

The articles of impeachment, introduced by Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Thursday, contend that Mayorkas, violated his oath of office by failing to lock down the frontier.

The impeachment comes after months of threats from Republicans, who slam the Biden administration for rolling back harsh curbs on migrants and asylum seekers introduced under former president Donald Trump, a Republican.

The Republican-controlled House appears likely to impeach Mayorkas, but he will almost definitely be found innocent after a trial in the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority.

The department has previously bashed Republicans for 'their reckless impeachment charades and attacks on law enforcement' when they should be helping to reform the immigration system.

Both Biden and Trump are seeking another term in office in 2024, with Trump the leading candidate for the Republican nomination.

Should he win, Trump is reportedly planning a widespread expansion of his first administration's hard-line immigration policies, including rounding up undocumented immigrants into detention camps and deporting them.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12744497/Bidens-migrant-crisis-cost-taxpayers-451-BILLION-Republican-healthcare-accommodation-Mayorkas-impeachment.html

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13 November, 2023

Australia: Migration surge cuts living standards

According to the Reserve Bank’s economists, Australia’s population has grown by about 2.5 per cent in the year to September, almost double the four-decade pre-pandemic average rate.

That’s an extra 654,000 people to house, feed and move around our cities, with migrants accounting for more than 80 per cent of the biggest jump in residents in our history.

Right now, we are importing the equivalent of the entire population of Tuvalu every seven days.

The influx of foreigners – who spend, study, work and travel – is pumping up our economy, with the RBA upgrading its forecasts for GDP growth this year from a miserable 0.9 per cent in August, to 1.6 per cent in its policy statement released on Friday.

That’s an economy expected to be almost $18bn larger, hence the use of the word “resilience” and its variant by Jim Chalmers and Treasury secretary Steven Kennedy to describe our performance while confronting global shocks and the central bank’s quick-fire rate rises.

But with more people to share our boundless plains, per capita incomes are shrinking.

Inflation will likely stay higher for longer, as will consumer spending, interest rates, home prices and rents.

One stunning figure from the RBA’s commentary is advertised rents (for new leases) are 30 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels, although the pace of growth has slowed, particularly in regional areas.

More people are squeezing into share houses, which will help to ease supply shortages.

At the start of last month, there were almost 2.3 million people on temporary visas with work rights in Australia, or about one in six of the nation’s entire labour force of 14.6 million.

Employers are filling job vacancies, especially in areas such as hospitality, where spending on dining and drinking is holding up despite exorbitant costs being passed on to punters.

Surge pricing indeed!

Services inflation is the bogey in the outlook, driven largely by wages, rents and energy bills.

The RBA is careful to say the additional labour supply and consumer demand due to migration eventually cancel each other out, but there are short-term inflation pressures for sure.

Our officials have been pitifully exposed by the demand-driven migrant surge, especially due to students, who are also staying longer on graduate visas.

Authorities knew foreign students would be back on campus when restrictions eased. But they did not anticipate they would reach these volumes.

The Department of Home Affairs confirmed on Friday that there were 664,178 foreigners on student visas at the end of September; in October 2019, the pre-pandemic peak, there were 652,462 student visa holders in the country.

In a section reviewing how the economic outlook had evolved compared with its guesstimates a year ago – its forecasting hits and misses – the RBA said “population growth has been substantially stronger than expected following the reopening of the border”.

“A year ago, the weight of evidence available suggested that a rebound in international student numbers was underway,” the RBA said.

“But a complete recovery was not imminent and there was substantial uncertainty about when China would remove its pandemic restrictions.”

Treasury’s budget forecasts on net overseas migration have been exposed as woefully behind the play.

They’re not the only slow learners out there.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/population-is-growing-much-faster-than-our-incomes/news-story/3d2743d196054260a291ed9a132fe437

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12 November, 2023

Mayorkas Won't Say How Many Illegal Immigrants Admitted Into US

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas's steadfast refusal to say how many illegal immigrants have been allowed by federal immigration officials to enter the United States in recent years, or their current whereabouts, shows he knows that it's a national security threat but won't acknowledge it, according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

“The security threat is that we don't know who these people are—1.7 million known gotaways," Mr. Johnson told The Epoch Times. "We're just detecting them coming in. Plus, we have no idea where these people are. We just let 6 million people in this country, and we don't know a thing about them, [or] what they may be up to.

"In a dangerous world, that's a real threat to our homeland security. The fact that Secretary Mayorkas won’t answer my question indicates he knows it's a national security threat but simply won't admit it."

He was referring to Mr. Mayorkas's Oct. 31 testimony at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee concerning "threats to the homeland."
“If Secretary Mayorkas had any integrity, he would faithfully execute the law," Mr. Johnson said. "Because he hasn't done so, the House should impeach him. And barring that, he ought to resign.”

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) also called for Mr. Mayorkas to resign.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and National Counterterrorism Center Director Christine Abizaid also testified during the hearing.

On the same day as the hearing, a nonprofit watchdog group at Syracuse University reported that record levels of individuals considered "inadmissible" to enter the United States under current law have nevertheless been allowed to do so.

"The number of people found to be inadmissible at U.S. ports of entry rose to an all-time high in the summer of 2023," according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). "In the two months of June and July 2023, Office of Field Operations (OFO) officers determined that a total of 199,535 were inadmissible, including 101,450 in June and 98,085 in July.

The total for the first 10 months of 2023 reached 788,953, according to TRAC, which uses the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to obtain data from government agencies that are then analyzed and made public.

"The number of inadmissible alien encounters at ports of entry is rising due to the Biden Administration directing illegal aliens to enter through them." an Oct. 23 report by The Heritage Foundation stated. "The administration is mass-paroling illegal aliens into the U.S. under the label of a 'lawful pathway,' but neither the pathway nor the aliens using it are lawful."

The monthly average of inadmissibles since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021 has increased 200 percent, compared to 2020, the last year of rigorous U.S. border enforcement operations ordered during the Trump administration.

The inadmissible individuals are typically given a "Notice to Appear" (NTA) at an immigration office at a later date for an official decision on their status and are then provided transportation to a location of their choice within the United States.

“We’ve experienced a rapid rise in CBP [Customs and Border Protection] encounters of inadmissible aliens at the ports of entry (POE) because, in January 2023, DHS Secretary Mayorkas instructed future illegal aliens to use the CBP Mobile One Application and make an appointment for their illegal immigration at a POE instead of crossing between the ports on the SW border," former DHS senior official Lora Ries told The Epoch Times.

"For it, Mayorkas rewards the inadmissible aliens with the temporary status of parole in the U.S. and work authorization for at least two years," said Ms. Ries, who now is director of The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center.

"When it comes to immigration to the U.S., if you offer it, they will come.”

The resulting flood of illegal immigrants in the country is creating political, social, and economic havoc. After more than 100,000 such illegal immigrants were shipped by federal authorities to New York City, for example, Mayor Eric Adams declared, "This issue will destroy New York City."

During the Senate hearing, Mr. Johnson repeatedly pressed Mr. Mayorkas to be specific about the magnitude of illegal immigrants entering the country during the Biden administration, referring to a chart based on DHS data showing more than 6.2 million.

"Secretary Mayorkas, I've asked you this in the past. What numbers are represented here? How many people has this administration let in by encountering, processing, dispersing, or that have come in as a known or unknown got-away? What approximately? I don't need an exact number. So what do we got?" Mr. Johnson asked in one such tense exchange.

“Senator, let me say at the outset—” Mr. Mayorkas said.

“I need numbers. Again, don’t filibuster me. How many people has this administration let into the country?" Mr. Johnson repeated.

“Let me say at the outset that our job would be a lot easier if the broken immigration system was fixed—” Mr. Mayorkas said.

“Mr. Secretary, I want a number. How many people have you let into this country?” Mr. Johnson asked.

“I should also comment—” the DHS secretary said.

“OK, I'll give you the number. It's about 6 million. About 1.7 million as known got-aways. Now, again, we don't know who these people are. We just know that they've come to this country and they're residing somewhere. Where are all these people residing? Where did the 6 million people go?” Mr. Johnson said.

"Senator, you speak of encounters. Let me—" Mr. Mayorkas said.

"Would you answer my questions? Where did these 6 million people go? Are you keeping track of them? To what extent do we have a handle on where these 6 million people are in America?" an increasingly exasperated Mr. Johnson replied.

"Senator, as you well know, when an individual is released, they are released into immigration proceedings and are subject to removal if they do not have a legal basis to remain in the United States," Mr. Mayorkas responded.

"You are not answering the question. Where do these people reside?" Mr. Johnson again asked. Shortly thereafter, the senator declared, "I am not going to get answers from the secretary."

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/mayorkas-doesnt-say-how-many-illegal-immigrants-admitted-into-us-during-tense-exchange-with-sen-johnson-5521163

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10 November, 2023

Biden Administration’s Illegal Immigration System

In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, the Center for Immigration Studies looks at the number of illegal aliens released into the United States by the Biden administration in FY 2023 and their pathways for entry.  Andrew Arthur, the Center’s resident fellow in law and policy, joins us for this episode to reveal how the administration permitted 140 percent more illegal aliens than legal immigrants with green cards to enter the country in FY 2023, despite the U.S. Constitution vesting Congress with the authority to regulate immigrant admissions.

Arthur outlines four pathways through which the administration facilitates the entry of illegal aliens.

CHNV Parole Program. In January, to curb illegal entries at the Southwest border post-Title 42, the Biden administration announced a new scheme under which 30,000 nationals per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are allowed to fly to the U.S. in lieu of entering illegally. Nearly 250,000 foreign nationals have been paroled in under this program.  

CBP One App Interview Scheme. The administration’s CBP One scheme, the topic of a recent podcast episode, allows inadmissible aliens from all over the world – including countries of terrorism concern – to pre-schedule their illegal entries to the United States. The administration is using this scheme to parole up to 1,450 inadmissible aliens into the country every day, with 235,172 paroled in for FY 2023.

Ports of Entry. Aliens are also allowed to present themselves to CBP officers at the ports of entry and then be released on parole. The administration is using its very limited parole powers far outside the strict limits set by Congress.

Got-Aways.  With Border Patrol agents overwhelmed processing more than 5,600 illegal entrants a day, 600,000-plus other aliens entered illegally and evaded apprehension in FY 2023.
“More than two million inadmissible aliens have been allowed entry into the country in just one year –a population that would qualify as the 37th largest state in the country,” said Arthur. “This undermines the rule of law and puts tremendous pressure on local and state governments to provide housing, food, education, and medical care to those joining their communities.”

In his closing commentary, Mark Krikorian, host of the podcast and executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, draws attention to the International Network for Immigration Research. This newly created network establishes a cooperative arrangement between research organizations, including the Center, from four countries that share similar perspectives on immigration.

https://cis.org/Parsing-Immigration-Policy/Biden-Administrations-Illegal-Immigration-System

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9 November, 2023

Nightmare on Martha’s Vineyard

by Ann Coulter

 Based on MSNBC’s recent special, “Martha’s Vineyard v. DeSantis,” even award-winning documentarians cannot produce a propaganda film about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “political stunt” of sending illegals to this wealthy liberal redoubt without the residents coming across as clueless, entitled douchebags.

     The documentary is the celluloid equivalent of stepping on a rake and having the rake hit you in the face.

I will dispense with correcting the usual immigration lies scattered throughout the documentary. (No, the Venezuelans did not enter our country “legally”; and no, Venezuela’s economic disaster isn’t something that happened to them — they did it to themselves. Can’t wait to have these Aristotles voting here.)

I’m more interested in the prodigious entitlement of the Martha’s Vineyarders.

The documentary begins with a bunch of New Englanders bustling around a dock, and a ruddy-faced woman holding up a fish for a picture (the closest liberals ever get to the working class). She is then introduced as Lisa Belcastro, director, Harbor Homes Shelter.

Belcastro: “So I get a call at around 4 o’clock and I was like ‘What? We have about 50 Venezuelans in the parking lot? And I … why? What do you mean?’”

Her befuddlement was echoed by Geany Rolanti of Martha’s Vineyard Community Services, who said, “I saw them walking across from the high school to the bus stop. I was confused. I was confused. Because, I was like, how did you get here?”

Wouldn’t it be great to live in a place where the sight of unkempt third worlders is confusing? Not too long ago, that was America. But by now, there aren’t many towns left where it would be considered unusual.

I envy their utter obliviousness to what’s happening in the rest of the country.

The Biden administration has dumped nearly 4 million illegals on the U.S. in the past three years alone. Martha’s Vineyard — which voted 80% for Biden — got 49 of ‘em and immediately called the police. Within 36 hours, the National Guard had removed the unsightly newcomers.

Could we put Martha’s Vineyard in charge of border security?

Venezuelan illegal: “They didn’t know what to do with us. We arrived unexpectedly.”

Unexpectedly! Whereas the hundreds of thousands of illegals showing up in other people’s towns were totally expected!

No, I’m sorry. That’s incorrect. Biden has been furtively sending planeloads of illegals on late-night “ghost flights” to U.S. airports with absolutely no advance warning, no resources and no right of refusal. Even in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, the Department of Homeland Securityredacts the names of the luckless cities. Martha’s Vineyard: 80% for Biden.

The Democratic sheriff in San Antonio, Texas, Javier Salazar, perhaps hoping for an invitation to the Vineyard someday, is all over the documentary, making hilariously obtuse comments based on his expertise of having the 49 Venezuelans pass through his town first.

“If I want to make a point by inconveniencing not just the people I’m dumping, but inconveniencing the people I’m going to dump them on, that’s a perfect place to do it.”

Imagine the cheek of DeSantis inconveniencing Martha’s Vineyard! Salazar should be the keynote speaker at the next Democratic National Convention to elaborate on this point: Do NOT inconvenience the rich!

How did this nitwit get elected anywhere, much less in Texas? Oh, I see: San Antonio: 67% Hispanic, who vote about 70% for “D,” no matter what. (You’re definitely going to win the Hispanic vote, Republicans. Just keep trying!)

Most bizarrely, Salazar demanded to know, “What business is it, quite frankly, of the governor of Florida or anybody in Florida, what’s going on in my county?” The sheriff seems sublimely unaware that illegal immigration is affecting the whole country, not just his county.

Weirdly, Salazar — so proprietary about “what’s going on in [his] county” — flew to Massachusetts to oversee the illegals’ new accommodations after they got booted off the island.

Singing their praises, he talked about what great housekeepers they were. “They cleaned the barracks from top to bottom.”

Any engineers or surgeons in there, or are the rich still clamoring for more maids?

In a total coup, the documentary producers somehow got a living, walking, hectoring exemplar of “Karen” to participate in the documentary! Rachel Self, Martha’s Vineyard resident and immigration lawyer, keeps popping up, screeching about “crimes,” “victims,” “survivors,” “grooming” (isn’t that word a hate crime?), and people being “kidnapped.” I said, salad dressing on the SIDE!

Her immediate response to 49 illegals on the Vineyard was to call the chief of police to report a kidnapping.

— A governor sending 49 illegals to Martha’s Vineyard: KIDNAPPING.

— Homeland Security Director Alejandro Mayorkas dumping millions of illegals on towns throughout America (not Martha’s Vineyard): a Democratic hero!

— Ms. Self loading illegals onto a bus and personally ushering them off the island: Good Samaritan … and I’d like to speak to the manager!

Perhaps realizing that their blind hysteria about 49 illegals sounded a little Trumpy, the Vineyardites kept making excuses for their rush to get the illegals off the island.

First, they bragged about how wildly “diverse” Martha’s Vineyard is. Did you know the year-round population is one-quarter Brazilian?

That’s not true, at least according to any liberal’s definition of “diverse.” Only 0.19% of the population moved from abroad. Eighty-six percent of the year-rounders are American-born U.S. citizens. The median household income (off-season) is $74,000 — and $1 billion during summer — compared to $57,000 in Florida and $68,000 in Texas.

Next, the put-upon residents kept insisting that they bent over backward to help their beloved Venezuelans — “my 49 people,” as Self put it.

Massachusetts State Rep. Dylan Fernandes: “I hopped in and started blowing up air mattresses.”

You’re right, Dylan. No one could have done more.

Belcastro: “People wanted to help. People wanted to give. People wanted to donate.”

Yeah — donate to the buses to get them the hell off the island.

Rolanti: “They got hugs, they got kisses, they got clothing, they got food, we did everything we could, but unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of resources. … We have a lot of people who need food, who need shelter.”

Luckily, no one else in the entire country needs food or shelter. Only Martha’s Vineyard.

Fernandes: “It’s a very small island.”

Yes, small, but somehow big enough accommodate an extra 180,000 people during the summer — unlike the hundreds of towns and cities in less well-connected parts of the country that have been compelled to accommodate 4 million illegals just in the last three years.

I’ll let Karen write the epitaph to this column, as she seems so eager to do for the country.

“Martha’s Vineyard,” Self said, “has a year-round population of 17,000 people total, so 49 people for us being dropped here was the equivalent of 24,000 people being dropped in downtown Manhattan. That is not my America.”

See? Clueless. In the last year, more than 113,000 illegals have been “dropped” on New York City, with no end in sight.

That’s not our America, either.

https://anncoulter.com/2023/11/01/nightmare-on-marthas-vineyard/

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8 November, 2023

The Biden administration is hiding the real scale of the migrant crisis

US Customs and Border Protection logged a record 269,735 migrants encountered in September. That figure came on the heels of a record-breaking fiscal year, in which CBP reported nearly 2.5 million migrant encounters.

The numbers could have been much higher if not for the introduction of an app, CBP One, allowing unauthorized migrants to schedule their arrivals before claiming asylum, and new parole programs.

(Parole, in the immigration context, refers to an exception in the law that lets some noncitizens who would otherwise be ineligible for such protections work and live in the United States without fear of deportation.)

Today, thanks to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and inquiries initiated by the House’s Homeland Security Committee, we know that these programs started earlier than the Biden administration admitted and that they involve many more migrants and countries, including terrorism hotbeds, than it has revealed.

Existed pre-rollout

On Jan. 5, the administration released a fact sheet detailing its efforts to manage the historic flow of asylum seekers with a new parole program. It advertised the program as being for citizens of four countries — Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti.

President Biden spoke about it that day in the context of a surge of Venezuelan migrants.

Then, in May, at a White House press briefing, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claimed that CBP admitted about 740 people per day through the plan, mostly Haitians.

He claimed that the number would soon rise to 1,000 per day; two months later, DHS announced that it would rise to 1,450 per day.

Here’s what we now know. The program wasn’t new when it was announced — the documents CIS obtained show that it existed 19 months before January’s public rollout.

The administration paroled more than 10,000 migrants from 29 countries in 2021, most from Mexico, Honduras and Guatemala.

It paroled over 13,011 migrants from 35 countries in 2022, including, curiously, more than 5,000 Russians.

Then, in the first eight months of this year, the number of parolees skyrocketed to nearly 250,000, only 136,000 of whom came from the four countries advertised as the program’s beneficiaries.

The rest came from 93 other countries, including more than 7,300 from “countries of national security concern,” including Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Mauritania, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, China and elsewhere.

Were these migrants subjected to additional screening? We have no idea.

Humanitarian cover

According to the House Homeland Security Committee, CBP approved 93% of Mexican parole applicants, even though, according to the Department of Justice, it approved only 4% of Mexican asylum applicants in the first half of FY 2023.

The fact sheet describing the program made it sound like its purpose was to allow migrants to enter and make “protection claims” — i.e., an asylum application. If so, why are 93% of Mexican nationals and at least 96% of other foreign nationals simply being waved in without regard to the potential legitimacy of their claims?

The CIS FOIA dump also revealed that aside from the quarter-million migrants paroled this year at the US southern border, CBP has paroled another 221,456 citizens of Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, who were allowed to fly directly into their preferred port of entry.

Before the Biden era, humanitarian parole was granted to migrants only on a case-by-case basis and typically only for special cases, often for people who needed lifesaving medical treatment.

Now, Texas is spearheading a 21-state lawsuit to stop the program.

The courts will decide the program’s legality, but if Democrats want to expand immigration, they should introduce legislation to do so, rather than cooking up dubious schemes like mass parole.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/08/opinion/the-biden-administration-is-hiding-the-real-scale-of-the-migrant-crisis/

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7 November, 2023

After Attack on Israel, Terror Threat Looms Over US Southern Border

Earlier this month, Hamas launched the largest coordinated attack against Israel in more than 50 years, leaving over 1,400 dead in its wake. To carry out its heinous attack, Hamas penetrated one of the most secure borders in the world.

Over 6,000 miles away, we, too, face a crisis at our borders. Americans have lived through the crime, fentanyl deaths, and human trafficking that have come with an open border. The atrocities committed by Hamas highlight yet another threat to America posed by our own border crisis: terrorism.

Customs and Border Protection has encountered over 7 million illegal aliens since January 2021 who have poured across President Joe Biden’s open border. This does not include the more than 1.5 million known “gotaways” who evaded the Border Patrol.

At least 172 migrants that Customs and Border Protection has apprehended between ports of entry matched those on the terrorist watchlist during fiscal year 2023. This compares to three in 2020. That’s an increase of over 5,000%.

On Monday, it was reported that at least two Iranian nationals on the watchlist had been apprehended in the first two weeks of October. So concerning is the threat of terrorists entering the United States that the president of Guatemala is highlighting the dangers posed by inaction to secure the border. And yet, the Biden administration has continued to ignore the crisis.

In fact, just two days before the attack on Israel, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas released a statement reaffirming the administration’s opposition to border walls. Since the attack on Israel, there has been no indication of a change in course from the Biden administration.

As the administration has continued down its path of unlimited illegal immigration, the door has been wide open for the terrorists to come in and broaden their operations in the U.S. Charles Marino, former senior law enforcement advisor at DHS, alerted members of Congress that terrorist groups “can and will exploit our open borders with help of the Mexican cartels.” If you thought the border crisis couldn’t get any worse, … it can.

Perhaps the most worrying part of the debate is that there really should not be much of a debate. The need to address this issue is not a new one, and it should not be partisan. The American people have suffered from the historic border crisis. Congress knows how to solve this problem and mitigate threats posed to the homeland—by securing our borders.

The House passed the historic Secure the Border Act earlier this year. The legislation takes steps to ensure terrorists cannot freely enter the United States through our southern border. As the bill directs, to restore our national security, America must resume construction of the border wall, increase the number of Border Patrol agents, prevent asylum fraud, and ramp up interior enforcement to remove illegal aliens who may pose a threat to Americans.

Strong steps must be taken to ensure that those who would do harm to the United States are no longer able to freely enter the country and that those who may already be here are removed. Failure to act to keep Americans safe represents not only a dereliction of duty by those in power but a dereliction of common sense.

The reprehensible attack carried out by Hamas began with an incursion across a border Israelis assumed was secure. As Americans stand with their families, friends, and allies in Israel as the Jewish state responds to the massacre, Americans must question those in power about what is being done to secure our own borders and ensure that anyone who would threaten American lives cannot freely pass into, or remain in, the country.

We know how to do it. Now, more than ever, it is imperative to national security that America secure its borders.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/27/terror-threat-looms-us-southern-border-after-attack-israel

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6 November, 2023

More than 200K African, Asian migrants crossed US southern border during ballooning crisis: data

The crowds of migrants pouring across the U.S. southern border include hundreds of thousands of people from as far away as China, India and Africa, recent federal government statistics show.

Arrests of migrants from countries such as Senegal, Mauritania, China and India entering via Mexico tripled to 214,000 during the fiscal year that ended in September, from 70,000 in the prior fiscal year, according to US Customs and Border Protection data.

In fiscal 2021, there were less than 19,000 migrant “encounters” from Asia and Africa, according to CBP statistics.

Overall, in fiscal 2023, CBP counted nearly 2.48 million encounters at the southern border, up 4% from 2.39 million the previous year.

“The increase in migration from Asia and Africa is remarkable,” said Enrique Lucero, head of the migrant support unit of the Tijuana city government, across from San Diego in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “These days, we are dealing with 120 nationalities and 60 different languages.”

It was the second consecutive year “encounters” along the length of the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico topped two million, according to CBP statistics. Most of the migrants continue to be from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The new groups, known as “extracontinentals” are posing a challenge to federal authorities because deporting migrants back to Asian and African countries is time-consuming and expensive, according to the outlet.

“That puts a lot of strain on our operations because we just don’t have longstanding ties or agreements in place with many countries in order to facilitate quick removals,” a US government official told the newspaper. “We are actively working on that.”

In Mexico, authorities reported a four-fold increase of migrants from Asia and Africa this year, the Journal reported. Travelers said they use TikTok and Facebook to share information and videos of their routes, while others use the details they find online to launch their own trips.

Chinese migrants typically make their way to the US southern border after flying into Brazil, Ecuador or Nicaragua, which have limited visa requirements for some nationalities.

They then travel by bus or cars to hotels or houses where they are put up by smugglers. Many wear disposable bracelets like those used at resorts, with details naming the groups that coordinated their trip, Mexican authorities told the Journal.

Migrants from India more often fly to Mexico City from Europe, or cross the border through Canada, according to reports.

CBP data shows there were 189,402 encounters at the northern border in the fiscal year that ended in September, a 73 percent leap from the 109,535 the prior year and a nearly sevenfold surge from two years ago.

U.S. and Mexican authorities are also seeing a growing number of Russians arriving as they flee their homes — about 12,500 since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, compared with 509 the year before the war.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/04/news/more-than-200k-african-asian-migrants-crossed-us-southern-border-during-ballooning-crisis-data/

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5 November, 2023

More Terror Suspects Reaching the U.S.: Here Are 'Known Unknowns' of the Biden Border Crisis

Hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have almost certainly slipped into the United States amid millions of other illegal immigrants during the last three years, according to former federal officials and experts.

“You have to be extremely naïve to not be significantly concerned about this,” said Rodney Scott, former chief of U.S. Border Patrol from 2020 to 2021. “Regardless of what the Biden administration may claim, what it said during the campaign and the executive orders taken in January 2021 have been interpreted around the world as the border is open. You’re insane if you don’t think terrorists will use that to their advantage.”

In the aftermath of Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, President Biden, without mentioning the border, told “60 Minutes” that the threat the U.S. could face from terrorists in the country had escalated.

Although the terrorist threat linked to the border crisis is impossible to quantify, some experts find the available numbers alarming. During Biden’s first three years, a record-shattering 6.5 million-plus immigrants have been “encountered” by border authorities. That pace is increasing: The most recent monthly figures, September’s, showed another record number of monthly encounters – 269,735.

At the same time, federal officials have seen an alarming increase in border crossers listed on the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset, the official name for what is commonly called the “terrorist watchlist.”

In fiscal 2023, which ends this month, Border Patrol agents have apprehended 172 such people, all but three of them along the southwest border. When all U.S. places of entry are added – by land, sea and air  – another 564 people on the watchlist were caught, bringing the total to 736.

By way of comparison, between fiscal 2017 and 2019, Border Patrol agents apprehended a total of 11 people on the terrorist watchlist. Scott sounded an alarm to Congress in the 2021 period when the total jumped to 16. “When a number doubles it gets your attention, and we’ve moved way beyond that,” he says now.

Yet the “known unknowns,” to use Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s famous phrase, indicate the problem is even worse, according to experts. For one, the “terrorist watchlist” is only as good as the information that has been entered into it.

“Not everybody’s on the watchlist,” said Todd Bensman, who has tracked Central American immigration routes and the southern border for years with the Center for Immigration Studies and is the author of “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

“There have been thousands and thousands – tens of thousands – of people from the Middle East who have entered and it’s completely reasonable, even the president has acknowledged it, to worry that some of those could be, or could become, terrorist threats,” Bensman said.

Scott, who spent a half decade in counterterrorism at the Department of Homeland Security before moving to Customs and Border Patrol, said that as legal immigration channels dried up, criminals and terrorists began to seek people who would not appear on any intelligence agency’s datasheet.

“They’re looking for what they call ‘clean skins,’” Scott told RealClearInvestigations. “People with no type of record who can operate freely. They are continuously looking for new channels they can exploit, and they’ve shifted their ports of entry and increased those coming with no prior record.”

Mark Morgan, a former chief operating officer and commissioner with Customs and Border Patrol, echoed that point, telling RCI that “the fact someone isn’t on that list could just mean they haven’t dipped their toe in the pond yet.”

Using a hypothetical, Morgan said border authorities might ask a 30-year-old man from Lebanon if he has any association with Hezbollah, and in some rare cases do a check with the country of origin.

“What’s he going to say? And not every other country has precise, up-to-date information or maybe a good relationship with the United States,” he said. “We can’t even verify the ones we encounter.”

But experts warn that the number of “encounters” is only the known part of the equation. Far more frightening, they say, are the unknown numbers who have snuck into the country.

Through the use of surveillance videos from blimps, drones, and satellites, along with old-fashioned gumshoe work of studying footprints, CBP produces a figure it calls “known gotaways.” That stands at 1.7 million during the Biden administration. Morgan said he considers the “absolute floor” for the real figure is the public number plus 20%.

That would put the total over 2 million. Those unknown hundreds of thousands are uniquely disquieting, in part because so many took measures to dodge border patrol agents. Most current border crossers know that under the Biden administration’s policies, if they surrender at the border they can apply for amnesty or some other favored status and will simply be processed and released to await a distant court date. Thus, most people trekking into the U.S. from Mexico now give themselves up, or simply sit down on U.S. soil and await Border Patrol, according to current and former agents.

“And they’ve lost track of people that already came in,” Scott noted

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/10/31/more_terror_suspects_reaching_the_us_here_are_the_known_unknowns_of_bidens_border_policy_989442.html

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3 November, 2023

Emboldened Global Jihad Is Final Nail in Coffin of Mass Migration Delusion

The weeks since the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel—in which the most Jews were slaughtered in a single day than at any time since World War II—have seen an astonishing rise in global Jew-hatred.

One might have thought that the mass carnage and unspeakable barbarism of the Hamas Holocaust would instead galvanize a concerted pushback against Islamic jihadism, but it is the ancient scourge of antisemitism—and not so-called Islamophobia—that is once again the world’s most politically correct and fashionable form of bigotry.

“In every generation, they rise up to destroy us,” Jews read in the Haggadah text every Passover, “but the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands.”

Now, less than 80 years since the defeat of Nazi Germany, today’s Nazis, an Islamist Reich hellbent anew on Jewish genocide, rises up to try to finish what Hitler could not. Like their brownshirt forebears, the jihadists will fail.

Our comfort in the Lord does not necessarily ameliorate the profound pain of the last few weeks, though. For many Jews, the appalling and disgusting mass demonstrations of support for the Hamas terrorists have been just as devastating as the Oct. 7 pogrom itself.

In Berlin—yes, Berlin—a synagogue was firebombed. In Vienna, a one-time hub of Nazism, a synagogue was attacked and vandalized. In Paris, a Jewish couple’s apartment door was doused with gasoline and set on fire. In Los Angeles, a knife-wielding madman trespassed into a Jewish home while shouting, “Free Palestine.”

At George Washington University in the nation’s capital, student jihadists projected “Glory To Our Martyrs” onto the side of a school library. At Cooper Union, Jewish students were locked in a library by pro-Hamas student demonstrators banging on the doors; the NYPD had to evacuate the students via underground tunnel.

In the heavily Muslim town of Dearborn, Michigan, Islamists thronged the streets while waving today’s swastika, the so-called Palestinian flag, and shouting for extermination of the Jews of Israel “from the river to the sea.” Other examples abound.

There are many reasons for this dire state of affairs.

First, the chickens of once-fringe, leftist ivory tower piffle—such as critical theory and intersectionality—have come home to roost in a very menacing way. The avant-garde leftism of a half-century ago has led many to now justify, or outright cheer on, genocide perpetrated against the most genocide-d people in world history.

As this column observed in May 2021 during the last major Israel-Hamas conflict: “The American Left and the media organs it controls are exporting their paroxysms of ‘1619 Project’ rage onto a foreign stage, expiating their ‘white guilt’ sins and armchair-quarterbacking a foreign conflict on a cosplayed chess board.”

It’s all just fun and games—no matter how many “eggs” are broken to make the “omelet,” to paraphrase Stalin-apologist New York Times bureau chief Walter Duranty.

But there is a second lesson from the past few weeks in addition to the harrowing real-world consequences of obscure leftist academic theories: the complete and total failure of mass migration.

For years, liberals and globalists have pushed for open-ended migration of people across borders, as if borders are entirely arbitrary (if not outright atavistic) and all cultures and ways of life are interchangeable.

As the West grapples with the very radical Muslims it voluntarily imported—hundreds of thousands of whom march in the streets of metropolises such as London and Chicago calling for Jewish genocide and thousands of others who lead vile “Students for Justice in Palestine” statements praising the Hamas massacre as a “liberation” of “stolen land”—it has become obvious that assimilation of huge numbers of non-Western immigrants into Western society is simply not working.

A shocking new poll found that 57.5% of American Muslims believe that the Hamas pogrom of Oct. 7 was at least “somewhat justified.” That is simply disgusting. Jewish day schools are canceling classes due to fear; the security needed at synagogues is now unprecedented. Jews all across America and Europe have not been this terrified since World War II. And the open-borders dolts who have peddled the insane notion that “all cultures are equal” bear much of the blame.

Many leading Islamists, such as the infamous “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, long counseled immigration to the West as one of the most effective ways of spreading the global jihad. For decades, Western liberals have been all too eager to assist.

Mass migration was always delusional; all cultures are obviously not equal, let alone interchangeable. Now, given the emboldened forces of jihadism the world over, it has never been more important to turn off the spigot. And for those subversive, fifth column actors already here, deportation and denaturalization must be on the table as the law permits.

There are monsters in our midst. They must be dealt with accordingly.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/10/27/emboldened-global-jihad-is-final-nail-in-coffin-of-mass-migration-delusion

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2 November, 2023

Adams and other Dem mayors demand ‘urgent’ meeting with Biden on migrant crisis

Mayor Eric Adams and several other Democratic mayors from big cities across the country are demanding that President Biden meet with them and provide additional aid to cope with the growing migrant crisis.

Hizzoner — alongside Los Angeles’ Karen Bass, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, Houston’s Sylvester Turner and Denver’s Mike Johnston — specifically, and in bold type, requested “an urgent meeting” with Biden to “directly discuss ways we can work with your administration to avoid large numbers of additional asylum seekers being brought to our cities with little to no coordination, support or resources.”

The letter requests that the president provide additional federal funding to help offset the cost of providing housing and social services to the new arrivals, speed approvals for their work papers, increase the number of migrants eligible to work and calls for a “coordinated entry and distribution process of newcomers once they arrive.”

“We believe we have a unique opportunity to work with the White House and Congress over these next few weeks to create an immigration and asylum system that will treat our newcomers with dignity and be fair and equitable to cities and neighborhoods across the country,” the mayors concluded.

“Given the urgency of this issue, we are all willing to travel to DC next week to sit down and discuss our shared interest in finding a successful resolution.”

Late Wednesday, Adams said he was heading to Washington with the other mayors to meet with federal lawmakers and the White House, though a City Hall spokesman declined to say who he would be meeting with from the Biden administration.

The two-page missive from the mayors, dated Oct. 28, is new evidence of mounting frustrations between some of the nation’s largest — and most Democratic — cities and Biden over his slow-footed response to the waves of migrants arriving from Central and South America.

Many of the migrants plan to seek asylum and were driven northward to flee violence — including death squads sanctioned by their home countries — and dire economic circumstances.

More than 133,000 people have arrived in New York City alone since the onset of the crisis last spring, according to tallies City Hall provided reporters last week.

Adams recently flew to Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia to tour the conditions in those countries and mount an effort in the local Spanish-speaking media to discourage people from attempting to come north.

However, the trip was heavily criticized back in New York after reporters who traveled with the mayor revealed that few potential migrants had gotten the message — and that Adams failed to deliver it himself during conversations with residents at a shelter for the needy in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito.

City Hall has said that it expects the crisis will cost the Big Apple an estimated $12 billion between 2023 and 2025 and could his administration to cut spending in city-funded programs — like policing, parks, trash pickup and road repairs — by as much as 15 percent.

The mounting price tag has turned Adams, once a Biden surrogate, into one of the president’s loudest critics and resulted in a major rupture in their relationship.

The feds have provided or promised just $142 million in aid so far, compared to the $1 billion set aside by state lawmakers in Albany.

Federal officials, at one point, also promised to provide a liaison to improve cooperation between City Hall and the federal immigration authorities over the combined response to the crisis, but that position has still not been filled.

Under fire, the White House expanded the number of Venezuelan migrants eligible for work papers, provided they arrived in the United States before July 31, though City Hall has pressed for more.

However, on Thursday, the Adams administration tempered its criticism to thank Biden for reviving a clinic to help migrants apply for work papers that ran for two weeks in September — and got 1,700 people registered and in the system.

The White House, too, pointed to the clinic as evidence of improved cooperation in a statement responding to the letter from the mayors — and said the revived center would be able to handle 300 migrants a day.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to supporting local jurisdictions hosting recently arrived migrants and we will continue working to deliver support in every way we can,” said White House spokesman Angelo Fernandez Hernandez.

“Starting this week, the Biden-Harris Administration, in partnership with New York City and New York State, will be scaling operations of its first-of-its-kind work authorization clinic to help thousands of migrants living in New York’s shelter system apply for work permits,” he added.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/metro/eric-adams-other-dem-mayors-demand-biden-meeting-on-migrant-crisis/

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November 1, 2023

GOP senators bash Biden's immigration policies after trip to border: 'Increased threat for terrorist attack'

GOP Sens. John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Ted Cruz and Pete Ricketts railed against the Biden administration's border policies as migrants continue to enter the U.S. illegally.

"We have just returned from our southern border, and it is painfully clear that with Joe Biden's open border policy, our country is really at an increased threat for a terrorist attack," said Barrasso, the Senate Republican Conference chairman, during a press conference Tuesday.

Border Patrol agents seized immigrants carrying with them explosive devices "tailored for terrorism," he said.

Following the border trip last Thursday and Friday, Ricketts added that the country is "opening ourselves up for a terrorist attack."

Cruz, who has led several groups of lawmakers to southwest Texas, said Border Patrol agents are "frustrated" because "they risk their lives catching dangerous people, and they turn around and their political superiors just let them go."

"And the next day, they go back and catch the same people all over again," he said.

Minors are often accompanied by older men, and it is unclear whether they are actually related to the child, Cruz said.

"We know under the Trump administration when they DNA tested grown men with children about 30% of them were not related to the kids. That's because you get preferential treatment if you arrive as a family unit," Cruz said.

Meanwhile, Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed there were more than 600,000 known gotaways at the border in fiscal year 2023 during a hearing in the Senate Homeland Committee Tuesday morning.

The Biden administration recently called on Congress to provide an additional $14 billion in funding for border operations, including for processing, support for states and communities into which migrants have been released, and additional agents.

The White House says the money includes funding for transportation, including removal flights and resources for alternatives to detention. It also includes money for "non-custodial housing options" for those in expedited removal, including facilities with housing, legal services and medical care.

However, Republican lawmakers contend Biden's request will only speed up asylum processing without fixing the problem of flowing migrants by restoring Title 42, a COVID-19-era provision that allowed for faster expulsion of illegal entrants.

"What the Border Patrol tells us… is there's no consequences associated with illegal entry in the United States," Cornyn said. "And these criminal organizations that smuggle people and drugs are smart. They know how to exploit our system."

Barrasso said the Biden administration's goal with the supplemental funding is to provide "money to make people come in easier."

Border Patrol released over 900,000 illegal immigrants into the interior of the United States in fiscal year 2023, including more than 150,000 in September alone, according to data on the Customs and Border Protection website.

The figure does not include any ICE releases or migrants encountered at ports of entry. Those released were primarily given a NTA/OR (notice to appear on own recognizance), meaning they were released into the U.S. with instructions to appear in court, often at a date years in the future. A minority were released under humanitarian parole between October 2022 and January 2023.

As Congress gears up to negotiate a supplemental funding package, GOP lawmakers — including Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — are urging for a "number of changes" that ensure tighter border security.

"It's pretty clear that the supplemental that was set up is just a starting place," McConnell told reporters following the leadership conference's weekly luncheon last week. "We're going to go over it with a fine tooth comb, as you can see is a lot of passion among our members without having a credible border security provision in there, and we're going to make other changes as well."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-senators-bash-bidens-policies-trip-border-increased-threat-terrorist-attack

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