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31 May, 2023

Latest Poll Shows Strong Disapproval for Biden’s Border Policies

On May 21, CBS News released the results of its most recent poll on the president’s performance, particularly as it relates to the ongoing disaster at the Southwest border, and on other border issues. It reveals a lack of support for Biden’s border policies, though nobody — the White House, congressional Republicans, or border-state governors — really comes out a winner. That said, it also evidences a lack of knowledge about how our current levels of massive illegal immigration will affect cities and towns across the United States.

The poll was conducted for CBS News by opinion outfit YouGov and involved 2,188 U.S. adults sampled between May 17 and 19 — that is, in the week after Title 42 expired. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

President Biden’s Approval Rating. The president received low marks for his overall performance, with just 41 percent of respondents approving of the job that he is doing compared to 59 percent who disapproved.

That may be why just 28 percent of those polled believe things are going well in the country (and a mere 5 percent stated they were going “very well”) compared to a dismal 72 percent who said they were going badly (a depressing 34 percent opined that things are going “very badly”).

Biden receives his worst marks when it comes to immigration — just 36 percent approved of the president’s handling of the issue compared to 64 percent who disapproved.

The Southwest Border. Curiously, the president did slightly better when respondents were asked what they thought of his handling of “matters concerning the U.S.-Mexico border” — tallying 37 percent approval versus 63 percent disapproval.

That said, congressional Republicans received the exact same marks on this issue: 37 percent approval versus 63 percent disapproval.

Many “inside the beltway” assume the average American assigns credit or blame to the individual branches of government and the respective parties regardless of the issue, but really the average voter expects his or her government writ large to make things work. When it comes to the border, few Americans like how things are going, so a pox on all houses until the situation there improves.

And they are increasingly focused on what’s going on there. The poll reveals that more than a quarter — 26 percent — of respondents are paying “a lot” of attention to the goings-on at the U.S.-Mexico line, while an additional 42 percent are paying “some” attention — 68 percent in total.

In contrast, a solid quarter — 25 percent — aren’t paying much attention to the situation at the Southwest border, and 9 percent aren’t paying any. In other words, more than a third of Americans have very little interest in what is happening on our nation’s southern flank.

U.S. Immigration Policy, Generally. CBS News/YouGov also asked the most important question on this subject in a long time — at least from my perspective: “If you could choose, what do you think U.S. immigration policy should generally be?” The bell-curve-shaped results were enlightening, to say the least.

At one end of the curve were the 20 percent of respondents who want to “stop most or all immigration”. Conversely, 17 percent fall on the opposite end of the spectrum, and want to “allow a lot of immigration, including most or all people who want to enter”.

Policy experts and opinion leaders should pay heed to the solid majority — 62 percent — in the middle. They want to “allow some immigration, based on strict criteria”. Of course, how many admissions annually constitutes “some immigration”, and what constitutes “strict criteria”, are subjective terms open to debate.

It would have been easy for pollsters to follow up on those two points, but they failed to do so. As a December Harvard-Harris poll revealed, however, the vast majority of registered voters underestimated the number of migrants who have crossed the Southwest border illegally by wide margins.

More than half the respondents to that poll — 55 percent — thought the total number of illegal entrants was 500,000 or fewer annually, and three-quarters — 75 percent — thought it was one million or less.

The real figure? More than 2.2 million illegal entrants were apprehended at the Southwest border after entering illegally in FY 2022, not counting 599,000 others known to have entered illegally but who evaded apprehension (“got-aways”). Just 9 percent of respondents in that December poll came anywhere close to the actual total.

Of course, that may be why CBS News/YouGov didn’t ask those two critical follow-up questions — they probably wouldn’t have liked the results.

Some elucidation on these points may be found in a separate question in that poll. Respondents were asked whether the Biden administration should generally be: (A) “tougher on immigrants trying to cross at the border”; (B) “easier on immigrants trying to cross at the border”; or conversely (C) is “handling things about as they should be” currently.

In response, 58 percent wanted Biden to be tougher on those migrants, compared to one-fifth, 20 percent who want the president to ease off, and 22 percent who think Biden has struck the correct balance. Plainly, respondents think the current rate of illegal entries is unacceptable, and that the criteria on which the administration is allowing illegal entrants into the country aren’t “strict” enough.

In that vein, consider the following question that CBS News/YouGov posed:

If you could choose, which of these is closest to what you would like to see happen with the U.S.-Mexico border? Should the border be a place where: [A] no one can cross into the U.S.; [B] only people who meet an [sic] approved U.S. criteria can cross; [or C] anyone can cross into the U.S.

The results: No one can cross, 11 percent; only people who meet an approved U.S. criterion can cross, 79 percent; and anyone can cross, 9 percent.

Given the fact that under U.S. law, no one without a valid visa or entry document may be admitted across the land borders into the United States, I would have to agree with the majority on that one — raising the question of whether most Americans have any idea what is transpiring at the Southwest border.

https://cis.org/Arthur/Latest-Poll-Shows-Strong-Disapproval-Bidens-Border-Policies

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30 May, 2023

British voters want more immigrants but less immigration

 
This article is too clever by half.  It ignores the distinction between illegal and legal immigration. Britons want more SELECTED immigrants, not people who arrive uninvited.  They want economic contributors, not more welfare clients.  What is incoherent about that?  

The writer below is just operating from the old Leftist idea that all men are equal --  and in the process ignores important and obvious distinctions:  Rather moronic. Leftists are incapable of dealing with anything but the broadest distinctions between people.  "The Economist" was once better than that but now seems to be in the hands of "progressives"


The biggest lie in British politics is that voters want honest debate. Whenever a policy problem emerges, sensible types call for the trade­offs to be laid out before an informed voting public who will carefully weigh the options. Anyone who has sat through a focus group or gone canvassing with a politician knows this is nonsense. When faced with an either/or question, British voters usually give a decisive answer: “yes”.

Nowhere is this more true than immigration. A majority of voters think migration is too high, according to most polls. Almost nine out of ten Conservative voters think this; a plurality of Labour voters agree. At the same time, British voters say they want more nurses, doctors and fruit­pickers. Carers, academics, computer whizzes and students are welcome, too. Big­hearted Britons thought the country was completely right to let swathes of refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong into the country. Britons may not much like immigration, but they are keen on immigrants.

If so, then the Tories have come up with an impeccably botched policy response. A Conservative government that has pledged to cut immigration at the past four elections has instead overseen an increase to a record level. Net migration hit 606,000 in Britain last year, according to figures published on May 25th, as people took advantage of a more liberal post­Brexit immigration regime. The British government has thrown open the country’s doors while complaining about the people who walk through them. It is utterly incoherent. But when it comes to immigration, so are voters.

Public opinion on immigration was not always so confused.

Attitudes used to move in lockstep with numbers. In the 1940s and 1950s Britain accepted workers from across the Commonwealth, who could enter the country as they pleased. By the 1960s eight out of ten people wanted lower immigration; hard­nosed and rather racist legislation followed. Likewise, when immigration increased during the 1990s and 2000s, so did concern. This trend reached its apex in 2016, when, with just a month to go until the Brexit referendum, the government announced a then­record net influx of 330,000 people. Britain voted to leave the EU, with immigration cited as one of the main reasons.

This tidy relationship has broken down. Immigration has increased sharply since the Brexit vote but concern about it has, if anything, gone down in the past decade. In 2012 a quarter of voters thought immigrants boosted Britain’s economy; half thought immigrants harmed it, according to British Future, a think­tank. Now those proportions have reversed. The number of people who cite immigration as the number­one problem facing the country has plunged, while issues such as lousy health care and high inflation top the worry­list.

Attacking immigration was once an easy win for politicians. In 2015 almost 70% of voters wanted immigration reduced. Now, only 42% do. At the same time, a hard­core minority of people now want migration to increase. In 2015 only one in ten wanted this. Now about a quarter do. James Dennison and Alexander Kustov, a pair of academics, label this phenomenon a “reverse backlash”. Politicians have tried to placate voters tempted by anti­immigrant populist parties and ignored others in the process. Once­silent liberal voters have started demanding to be heard. (Intriguingly, about half of people think the British public has become less tolerant overall, even though most polling points to the opposite; when discussing immigration, Britons think in irregular verbs: “I am tolerant; you are prejudiced; he is a complete bigot.” )

Conservatives are split on how to deal with this change. For some, the increasingly liberal views of British voters when it comes to immigration should be seized on. Dominic Cummings, the architect of the Vote Leave campaign in 2016, argued that voters would be happy with high levels of immigration as long as it was controlled. Judging by the positive shift in attitudes on immigrants, he was right. If the government can stop people crossing the English Channel in small boats (some 45,000 arrived last year in this manner) voters will not care about the larger numbers of migrants arriving through official channels. There are few benefits of Brexit. But Britain’s immigration policy could be one.

For other Conservative advisers—including those currently in Downing Street—immigration simply must come down if the government is to have any chance of surviving. In their view, the liberal turn is a mirage. When voters eventually notice that immigration has, in fact, hit an all­time high they will be furious. People have mistaken a drop in salience with an increase in liberalism. This hypothesis is about to be tested in real life: if voters want control rather than reductions, what if more than half a million arrive every year? Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, thinks he knows the answer to that question, and has pledged to reduce the numbers. Welcome. Now get out

Taking numbers down a little is easy. Unless another war breaks out in Europe, there will be fewer refugees next year. Bringing them down a lot is harder. If the British government wants fewer people to come, it can change the law and suffer the consequences. Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has already tightened rules on the number of international students who can bring dependents, even though voters are broadly comfortable with people coming to Britain to study and universities rely on their fees. The government could crack down on fruit­pickers, but farmers in Lincolnshire would scream. Few voters would thank a government that turns away nurses. Cutting immigration comes at a cost that voters show no willingness to pay.

Rolling out the welcome mat and then shouting at anyone who wipes their feet on it may be an imperfect approach. But from the government’s point of view, it will have to do. Voters do not want to live with the consequences of their opinions. When voters are hypocrites, politicians must be too.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/05/25/british-voters-want-more-immigrants-but-less-immigration

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29 May, 2023

UK: Don’t listen to the naysayers – immigration is the real Brexit success story

Marie Le Conte

There is one area in which Britain is excelling, but it is an awkward one. By June 2016, when the country voted to leave the European Union, annual net migration to Britain had risen to 336,000 a year. This, pundits and politicians agreed, was one of the main reasons why the referendum went the way it did.

Seven years on, the Office for National Statistics is now on the cusp of announcing that net migration has reached over double that figure, making it a record year. The people who arrived here in the past year weren’t, for the most part, refugees arriving on boats. They are migrants who came to Britain legally, from Afghanistan, Hong Kong, Ukraine and elsewhere.

They came because Britain was a safe haven, away from their war-torn or repressive countries. A large number of them also came to study in some of the world’s best universities. It should be seen as a success story. It is a success story.

The doomsters and gloomsters huffed and puffed and said that Britain would collapse after Brexit. They warned that the country was shutting itself off from the rest of the world and that it would be treated with scorn and concern by everyone else, and they were wrong. More people than ever are deciding to take a punt, move here and call the UK their home.

The weather may be bad and the taxes may be high, but you just can’t keep them away; Britain is where they want to be. It’s enough to make even my heart swell with patriotic pride, and I’m not even from here.

Of course, it is deeply ironic. Immigration is the one thing the Brexit vote was due to solve, and it is the one area in which the country is now thriving. Somewhere, in 2016, a monkey’s paw curled a finger, and here we are.

The government has predictably reacted by panicking and promising to get the numbers down again, but it doesn’t feel like the right approach. A good political class is one that seamlessly adapts to the hand it has been dealt, even if it isn’t the ideal one.

As successive Tory prime ministers found out, getting immigration down is easier said than done. Isn’t it time to try a different approach? We know from the past decade of polling that most people’s opinions on the topic are fairly malleable. Not too long ago, it’d fallen off the list of issues voters cared most about.

What would happen if this rise was spun as a great compliment paid to Britain by the world? What if it was seen as a sign that the UK actually is a brilliant place to live in?

Arguments should also be made about institutions like the NHS needing foreign workers to keep ticking along, but they won’t win hearts and minds. Being seen as a desirable country is far more flattering than knowing you desperately need new blood just to keep functioning.

Obviously, none of this will happen, at least not under this government. There is no point pretending otherwise. Still, isn’t it nice (if frustrating) to daydream about spin being used for good, for once? Isn’t it pleasant to picture a world in which immigration isn’t always treated as an embarrassing problem to be swept under the carpet?

Brexit has mostly been a failure so far but there is one way in which it has succeeded. Can’t that be celebrated?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/immigration-brexit-rishi-sunak-braverman-b2343427.html?r=22355

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28 May, 2023

Ron DeSantis Clinches Another Win for His State and It Has Illegals Worried

On July 1, new measures in the Sunshine State will greatly degrade the ability of illegal aliens to move and live among us freely. It’s a win for the state and for the country—and DeSantis should highlight this new law prominently if he wants to catch up with Trump in the polls (via Axios):

What's happening: A new law that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed this month to tighten restrictions on Florida's undocumented community is driving immigrants out of the state.

The legislation voids out-of-state driver's licenses for those without proof of citizenship, bars municipalities from using state money to issue identification cards for undocumented immigrants and requires most companies in Florida to verify the immigration status of new hires, among other restrictions.

It also repeals a state law that allowed some undocumented immigrants to obtain a license to practice law in Florida.

[…]

State of play: Some undocumented workers in South Florida are not coming to work or they are leaving job sites because of the law — which will come into effect July 1, CBS Miami reports.

No one has the right to come to the United States illegally. That is a fact, and it’s also the law when enforced correctly. The Trump administration stopped the flow of illegals that got out of hand under Obama but has become a total circus under Biden. If the federal government won’t enforce the law, it’s up to states, like Florida, to do the heavy lifting.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/05/24/why-some-illegals-are-fleeing-florida-n2623659

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25 May, 2023

Biden’s Border Chaos Is Neither an Accident, Nor Incompetence. It’s Intentional.

President Joe Biden became president largely by promising to Make America Normal Again.

The shambolic U.S.-Mexico “border” confirms how Biden shattered that promise. There is nothing normal about the coast-to-coast disaster over which he governs, thanks largely to his deeply abnormal definition of border security.

Under Biden, the southern “border” has become a giant, open-air staging ground from which illegal aliens bludgeon U.S. territorial integrity and national sovereignty.

U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 1,671,266 illegal aliens during President Donald Trump’s final 27 months in power. In Biden’s first 27 months, they encountered a breathtaking 5,249,144 illegal aliensup a skin-crawling 314%.

In fiscal year 2020, the last one that Trump fully controlled, 69,000 illegal migrants were detected on the “border” but got away into America’s interior. In fiscal year 2022 (entirely on Biden’s watch), “gotaways” hit 599,000—up a mind-blowing 768% versus fiscal year 2020.

Federal agents busted an Afghan illegal alien on May 10 at Otay Mesa, California, near San Diego. His fingerprints confirmed his spot on the terrorist watchlist.

This fanatic is hardly alone. Terrorist-list designees arrested at the “border” have exploded from three in fiscal year 2020, with Trump fully in control, to 15 in fiscal year 2021, 98 in fiscal year 2022, and 85 through April—just halfway through fiscal year 2023. And these were those who were intercepted. Aside from the 183 suspected terrorists apprehended on Biden’s watch, how many walk America’s streets today? Who knows?

As though the U.S. needed more homeless people, illegal aliens who get waved into America now clog the sidewalks and alleys of El Paso, Texas, and other cities.

Even more illegal aliens receive court dates for asylum hearings—in 2026, 2027, and beyond. What will they do until then? Who knows?

Free bus rides whisk illegal aliens to Chicago, where some have slept on the floors of local police stations. A plan to house 250 to 500 illegal aliens in the abandoned South Shore High School enraged predominantly black locals.

“Send them back!” some yelled at a community meeting on the matter. One protester’s placard read: “Build the Wall 2024.”

“We have no jobs in our community, and we have been fighting for jobs for decades,” resident Natasha Dunn told the Chicago Sun-Times. “So, please tell me, how is this fair?”

Rather than instruct illegal aliens on incoming buses to return to the southern “border” and swim home, New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, tried housing them in government-school gymnasia. Parents erupted, and Adams backed down.

Regardless, he still shoehorns illegal aliens into luxury hotel rooms that cost taxpayers an estimated $8,000 a month each—some $258 per night. Cost to aliens: $0.00. Midtown Manhattan’s legendary Roosevelt Hotel is becoming an illegal-alien shelter.

“Almost 50% of those hotel rooms are taken up by migrant asylum-seekers that [sic] we are paying for,” Adams said. “So, instead of monies coming from people who are visiting us and spending in our tourism, in our Broadway plays, instead of them using those hotels, we are using those hotels.”

“New York’s combined state and local hotel taxes total 14.75%,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform’s Ira Mehlman observed. “So, not only is the city paying to house the migrants, they are losing substantial revenues on hotel occupancy taxes.”

These are just a few glimpses of the chaos that flows downhill from Biden’s busted “border.” Worst of all, this is neither an accident, nor incompetence. At the current pace, Biden’s deliberate policy will vacuum an estimated 9.3 million illegal aliens into America by the time his current term ends.

Biden and his comrades are betting that these illegal aliens are Future Democrats of America who will be so grateful for being allowed to invade the USA that they will vote Democratic, flip GOP states Democratic, permanently transform the White House into the private property of the Democrat National Committee, and devolve America into a neo-Marxist, one-party state.

Biden and the Democrats deserve to vanish beneath a cascade of national scorn that is anything but normal.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/22/border-where-bidens-normalcy-goes-die/

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24 May, 2023

A Bipartisan Bill on Border Security and Immigration Emerges in the House

A bipartisan group of House legislators announced Tuesday their intent to try something Congress hasn’t managed to pull off in nearly four decades — reform the politically toxic and tangled mess that is America’s immigration system.

Representatives María Elvira Salazar, a Cuban American Republican of South Florida, and Veronica Escobar, a Democrat of South Texas who is co-chairwoman of President Biden’s re-election campaign, announced the 500-page Dignity Act, which they say would, among other things, cut visa backlogs, overhaul asylum processing, funnel billions of dollars into border security, and provide a clear path to citizenship for millions of immigrants living in the country illegally.

“Two members of Congress — one Democrat, one Republican — have decided to work on one of the most divisive topics in this country: immigration. Who wants to do that? Very few people. But we’re doing it,” Ms. Salazar said at a press conference on Capitol Hill announcing the bill.

The measure is co-sponsored by Republicans of Oregon and New York, Democrats of North Carolina and Michigan, as well as the delegate of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González-Colón.

The effort comes following recent polling suggesting that Americans are dissatisfied with both parties on immigration amid the crisis at the border, which is somewhat more subdued than it was just a few weeks ago.

Despite what both elected officials and the press believed would be a surge in migration following the end of a pandemic-era mass expulsion provision, Title 42, the number of migrants arriving daily at the border has roughly halved since the provision expired on May 11.

According to reporting from NBC, much of this decrease is attributable to the migrants facing a five-year ban from entering America if they are deported under another immigration rule, Title 8, as a result of not following the proper procedure for entering the country.

Whether this relative decrease in migration will hold through the campaign season isn’t clear. What is clear is that, despite the Democrats’ victory lap, voters still disapprove of Mr. Biden’s handling of the situation. They also disapprove of congressional Republicans’ handling of immigration matters.

The survey, conducted by CBS News and YouGov, found that Mr. Biden and congressional Republicans enjoy an identical disapproval rating on their handling of the southern border, with 63 percent disapproving of the situation and 37 percent approving. The survey of 2,188 American adults had a margin of error of plus or minus three points.

In general, Americans tended to favor tougher restrictions for crossing the border, with 58 percent backing them, 20 percent thinking it should be easier to cross, and 22 percent thinking the situation is being handled “right.”

The group most critical of the situation at the border is Republicans, with 66 percent thinking the situation is a crisis and 18 percent thinking it is “very serious.” Another 12 percent reported feeling it is “somewhat serious.”

The survey suggests that, though Republicans have been the most verbose critics of American border policy in recent decades, voters don’t appear to trust them any more than they do the Democrats to handle the issue.

Ms. Escobar suggested in an interview with Politico that Republicans have refused to “acknowledge their own role” in inaction on the border. “In fact, many of the people complaining the loudest about what’s happening at the border have been in Congress the longest and have done nothing on this issue,” Ms. Escobar said.

House Republicans passed a border security bill earlier this month but did not make an effort to find a compromise that could pass the Democratic Senate, in part because the House members could not agree on an immigration policy within their own conference.

While many members of the Republican House conference, including Speaker McCarthy, have made trips to the border this year, few have pursued common ground between Democrats and Republicans in an effort to deal practically with the issue.

Ms. Salazar and Ms. Escobar say they are willing to buck the leadership of their respective parties to get their measure through Congress. The last time Congress attempted to tackle immigration reform, 10 years ago, a measure passed by the Democratic-led Senate died in the Republican-led House. The last time Congress successfully passed an immigration bill was 1986.

“We understand that we are trying to open the Red Sea,” Ms. Salazar said in an interview with the Washington Post. “But someone has to try it. Moses did it. Maybe we can do it a second time.”

https://www.nysun.com/article/a-bipartisan-bill-on-border-security-and-immigration-emerges-in-the-house?

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23 May, 2023

American and British voters are being failed by the same big immigration lie

Some political issues stand on their own, hardly overlapping with other areas of government. Then there are those which affect almost everything else. Immigration is one such issue. Because immigration is not just a matter of people coming into the country. It affects the NHS, education, crime, housing, law, foreign policy and national identity. To name just a few.

That is why all developed countries are struggling with it. In America, millions of people are now flooding annually across the southern border. Donald Trump never did finish building his wall, and certainly never got Mexico to pay for it. But President Biden has both allowed an increase in the flow and pretended that he is trying to stop it. It is not dissimilar to what is happening in Britain. The Conservative Government has said that it is going to cut both legal and illegal migration at the same time as overseeing a historic surge in both. The public in both countries can see this and its consequences.

In the US migrants are being bussed north by the southern states. Cities like New York and Chicago are being overwhelmed when the equivalent of just one day’s flow of people across the border into Texas is sent their way. Last week, service personnel were reported to have been turfed out of their accommodation in New York to make way for the latest migrants. In the UK, illegal immigrants are dispersed around the country and put into hotels that the average taxpayer pays for, but could not afford for themselves.

In the US some cable news networks carry drone footage of the huge lines of people wading across the Eagle Pass to make it from Central and South America into the United States. In the UK, broadcasters occasionally care to note boatloads of people breaking into our country. Though some – the BBC in particular – seem queasy about showing how these customers of the smuggling gangs are carefully ferried by our own border authorities.

Why is it happening? The overriding factor fuelling illegal migration is the vast technological changes of the past few decades. Never has there been such ease of movement or communication. People who make it into America, Britain or Europe can send texts and pictures back to their friends and family in their countries of origin. Those who have been trafficked from the developing world into the developed can pass on tips to others about how to game the system. They can send news on how to get in and how to get on once here.

But the other reason it is happening is because governments like those in Britain and America have simply lost control not only of their own borders but of their own arguments. When it comes to the legal variety of immigration, the UK Government has consistently said that it wants to bring the figure down. The latest net migration statistics, released next week, are expected to show that the total could be triple what it was just a few years ago.

Some people see all this as evidence that you cannot restrict immigration. That the situation simply is what it is. It is the nature of the modern world. Nothing you can do about it.

Of course, the people making that presumption have to contend with a number of counter-examples. One is that in the Covid period, our country (and other developed countries) effectively closed its borders for months. Although liberal politicians had spent years saying that immigration was just a fact of life, people like Justin Trudeau and Jacinda Ardern turned out to be able to enforce borders very sharply indeed when a global pandemic was around. So they can do it. Why not in “normal” times?

Ask members of the British Government and they will explain it away with one-off examples. This week, when questioned about immigration levels, Rishi Sunak once again threw in the case of the Ukrainian refugees who have been given sanctuary in Britain since the Russian invasion began.

But if net migration is – as is rumoured – now as high as one million, the Ukrainians may account for perhaps a seventh of that total at most. Ministers also like to mention Hong Kong nationals. But at this point we get to a very important basic question. Is the answer to every problem in the world the relocation of people to the UK? Sadly these “once-in-a-generation” challenges seem to happen several times a year now. So will the answer always be “come to Britain”?

What ministers don’t want to mention is that the historic numbers we are talking about are the consequence of students coming into the UK legally, workers coming into the UK legally, the unwillingness of more than five million people in our country to work, and the Government losing the ability to police both legal and illegal immigration.

It is the same in the US, where politicians simultaneously pretend that migrants bring huge economic benefits and that they are the only people who are willing to take up low-paying jobs. Their arguments make absolutely no sense, especially in combination with their other favoured policies. Left-wing states have been pushing minimum-wage requirements for years only to then import millions of people willing to work off the books, in the black market, for far below the minimum wage. Take those who speed around New York delivering take-aways on bicycles. They are recent recipients of a minimum wage fight. Or at least they were until they were all replaced by cash-in-hand illegals. Where is the sense here?

The real problem is that on neither side of the Atlantic and on neither political side is there a willingness to face an obvious question: who do we not need? Advocates for high levels of migration always pretend that arrivals are either doing jobs nobody here will do, or that all arrivals are brain surgeons. So who do we want? High achieving migrants, or low-level workers? Are middle-class professionals the only people who we do not want? In that case let us say so. And say at the same time why we think that minimum-wage jobs are now beneath anybody already living in this country.

But too many politicians do not want to address such questions because every time they restrict immigration – especially illegal immigration – they are accused of heartlessness by the vocal critics to their Left. They perceive a reputational price for restricting immigration, but none whatsoever for allowing it to run away from them.

Well, here is a brutal but necessary truth. Neither America – and certainly not Britain – can save the rest of the world by taking in even a modest percentage of the global population. In the UK alone we have nowhere near enough houses, nowhere near enough money and nowhere near enough social capacity to absorb millions of people like this. You can have open borders or a welfare state – but you cannot have both. The public knows this and, although there is no political way to express it yet, in time there will be. There is only so much time you can keep being lied to.

In the meantime, the political classes continue to hold a debate on the issue that is not only detached from reality but also from what most voters want. The Labour Party has even started to say that migration might go up under them. Or at least that is what Anneliese Dodds conceded yesterday. Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, has said she is “hugely proud” that at least 600,000 foreign students are coming to the UK every year. A target she was not expecting to hit until 2030. Good luck saying that on the campaign trail.

Caught between the incompetent and the stone-deaf, who knows where an increasingly disenchanted public might wander?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/american-and-british-voters-are-being-failed-by-the-same-big-immigration-lie/ar-AA1bqbkP

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22 May, 2023

Mayor Eric Adams said Friday that 900 migrants arrived in New York City in a single day this week — and warned that the influx of new arrivals will cost over $4 billion

During an appearance on Caribbean Power Jam Radio, the exasperated mayor said an average of 300 to 500 migrants are arriving in the city each day.

“Last week and a half ago, we got 4,200 people in one week. This week, we got 900 people on one day … We’ve run out of space, you know, where to put people and then whenever we try to find creative ways, people are pushing back and say, ‘Well, we don’t want it on our block. We don’t want it in our community,’” he lamented.

“The federal government has now created this crisis and it’s really undermining our whole city. That’s what I needed New Yorkers to understand. This is undermining all of the progress we have made because of the failure of our federal government.”

Adams added that the surge of arrivals — some of whom are being welcomed at the storied Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown — comes with a $4.5 billion price tag.

“Listen, but the bottom line is we have to go somewhere. And if we don’t go somewhere that people are going to be living like in other municipalities on the streets, in train stations, all that we’ve done to get people off the streets, out of our train stations,” he said.

Adams also responded to allegations that asylum seekers are getting special treatment while New York’s own homeless population languishes without resources.

“I was at a homeless shelter on Randalls Island and [a man] said, ‘You know, asylum seekers are able to have all these things that I’m not able to get here in my shelter.’ I said, ‘Brother, you could go to the same shelter they’re in.’

“You know, the shelters are not — wherever the asylum seekers are, it is not only for the asylum seekers — anyone could go there … There’s nothing asylum seekers are getting that any other person who was here beforehand can’t, and anyone who’s a new arrival can get.”

Adams blamed the misconception on “different sources” dead set on creating “chaos” in the city.

Hizzoner’s latest comments on the migrant situation come just one day after he slammed the New York City Council for its apparent lack of support. “We’re not going to be disrespected,” the former NYPD captain said during the tense video conference.

“There is too much work that needs to be done. My team has sacrificed too much time, energy and dedication to this city.”

https://nypost.com/2023/05/19/mayor-adams-900-migrants-in-one-day-will-cost-nyc-over-4b/

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21 May, 2023

Democrats Claim Florida Will Face Economic Chaos After DeSantis Bans Illegal Migrants From the State

Democrats, failed politicians, liberal media, and progressive activists claim that Florida's economy will wreak havoc due to Gov. Ron DeSantis's (R-Fla) new pro-American reform policy of excluding illegal migrants.

Last week, DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1718, making it more difficult for illegal aliens to enter the state. Going into effect July 1, the new law imposes "[h]arsher penalties for transporting undocumented immigrants into Florida," "invalidates driver's licenses" for those who can't prove their legal status, requires hospitals that receive Medicaid to confirm patients' immigration status and allocates $12 million "to send migrants out of Florida."

Meanwhile, Democrats— who seem to like illegal migrants more than American citizens— believe the governor's new law will cripple the state's economy and declare war against immigrant workers in Florida.

Florida failed gubernatorial candidate and current Democratic Party chair, Nikki Fried, claimed 800,000 illegal migrants would leave the state in boycott of DeSantis's law.

"I don't know who is going to be doing the picking of the fields during the harvest and who is building all these new homes for everybody who is moving to our state," Fried told MSNBC host Joy Reid.

Trying to criticize the popular governor again, Fried said DeSantis has "got such a distaste and distrust for people that don't look like him and pray like him." She continued to suggest that DeSantis is trying to turn Florida into a "Christian White ethnostate" as the alternative to the state's migrant economy.

Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman (D-Fla) also attempted to take shots at DeSantis, claiming that there will be rotting vegetables in the fields and no one to pick the crops once the illegals were gone.

However, DeSantis's reforms are expected to raise Americans' wages in the state where half of households earn less than $58,000 annually. The reforms will also boost productivity investment by companies and even slow the rising cost of housing.

"Nobody has a right to immigrate to this country. We determine as Americans what type of immigration system benefits our country, but when you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners; it's for your benefit as Americans," DeSantis said while signing the reform. "So if there's legal immigration that's harming Americans, we shouldn't do that either. For example, some of these H-1B visas would fire American tech workers and hire foreigners at lower wages. I don't agree with that. I think that's wrong."

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/05/20/democrats-claim-florida-will-face-economic-chaos-for-desantis-after-exit-of-illegals-n2623501

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18 May, 2023

Democrats’ New Rule: Migrants First, Everyone else Last

Gary Moretti and his fiancee booked 30 rooms at The Crossroads Hotel in Newburgh, New York, for their bridesmaids and guests for a June 24 wedding. But New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ migrant-first policy demolished their plans.

Over the last two weeks, Adams has rolled out a scheme to bus hundreds of migrants to upscale motels in Newburgh, Orangetown and Yonkers, pleading that New York City is out of space. It didn’t matter that many of the motel rooms were already occupied or booked. Money talks. New York City pays above-market rates to house migrants, averaging $8,000 per room, per month, taxpayers be damned. The motels acted fast to clear their rooms.

“We had a legal contract to have those rooms,” Moretti said. Nearly two dozen struggling homeless veterans also got the boot, including some who had served in Vietnam or Afghanistan.

People staying at the Ramada Inn in Yonkers were told to clear out as well. Up to 100 migrant families are expected there within a week. Savannah Harp, who’s been living there with her 18-month-old son, resents that she’s had to pay for her room, while the migrants displacing her will get rooms for free.

Big city Democrats like Adams give migrants top priority. Protest and you’re called “racist” or “xenophobic.”

Even so, some local leaders are fighting back against Adams’ takeover of hotels and motels in their counties.

Rockland and Orange counties are in court, arguing that Adams doesn’t have the right to set up shelters outside New York City.

Other counties are putting Adams on notice to not even try it. Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, made it clear, “we are not a sanctuary county.”

The battle unfolding in New York will likely be repeated in many locales. Connecticut alerted towns to prepare for migrants.

The immigration industrial complex — a web of Democratic politicians, immigration lawyers and nonprofits that survive on public funding — pushes relentlessly for more money and more “rights” for migrants.

Adams plans to house migrants in upstate hotels and motels for up to four months, with shuttle service provided three times a day to wherever they want to go. What a deal.

Democrats promised migrants sanctuary from immigration law enforcement, luxury accommodations, three meals a day, and health and legal services. Now they express surprise at the deluge of people heading to New York City, and insist all counties share the burden.

The New York Civil Liberties Union is suing Rockland and Orange counties, claiming the counties’ resistance amounts to “xenophobic harassment and discrimination.” That’s a cheap shot and untrue.

It’s not about race. It’s about money. Caring for migrants will force counties to cut services to their own residents.

Adams’ city budget for the coming fiscal year is proof. It cuts every department, including police protection and education, to offset spending on migrants.

The generous handouts to migrants are also causing resentment.

A Hispanic American woman from Port Chester who has three kids and works cleaning houses said she’s furious to see migrants getting free housing. Why not her family, she asks.

Where is New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul? Mostly MIA. Her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, says Hochul should “come down here and pick up these people and disperse them across the state.” That’s ridiculous.

The answer isn’t to foist the problem on other communities. It’s to stop making New York a magnet for migrants.

Democrats don’t get that. Last week, Adams announced that the landmark Roosevelt Hotel on 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue will become the city’s migrant welcoming center and large shelter. Movies such as “The French Connection” and “Wall Street” were filmed there. The lobby is exquisite. A security guard told the New York Post, “the migrants are going to think they came to like Hollywood or something.”

Upscale lodging — whether it’s in Manhattan or along the Hudson — encourages migrants to make New York their destination. Worse, it sends a message to the rest of us, including Gary Moretti and his bride, that we’re saps.

Tell Adams to house migrants in barracks and tents and provide only bare necessities. Be humane, but not stupid.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/97390-democrats-new-rule-migrants-first-everyone-last-2023-05-17

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17 May, 2023

Thousands of migrants risk death on Mexico’s ‘Beast’ train to border

For more than a decade, desperate migrants crossing Mexico on their way to the US border have risked their lives to hop a series of fast-moving freight cars — referred to collectively as La Bestia or “the Beast” — that are so dangerous they are known as “death trains.”

Every year up to 500,000 migrants from Central America, but also lately from Venezuela, ride on top of box cars that normally transport grain, cement and other industrial materials to the US border. Many have been killed, or lost limbs when they have fallen off the roof and under the steel wheels of the rapidly moving freight cars.

And as Title 42 — a Trump-era policy that allowed US Border Patrol to immediately send back migrants to Mexico — comes to an end, there have been numerous reports of migrants increasingly taking to the rails to join the thousands of asylum seekers along the nearly 2,000-mile US southern border.

“The cargo trains, which run along multiple lines, carry products north for export,” reads a report from he Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based think tank that studies immigration policy. “As there are no passenger railcars, migrants must ride atop the moving trains, facing physical dangers that range from amputation to death if they fall or are pushed.”

They also face extreme cold on top of the cars at night, and blistering heat on blazing summer days.

Despite the danger, thousands of the poorest migrants and those who do not have the temporary visas required by the Mexican government to travel through the country are hopping on the moving trains, some with infants and small children in tow.

The appeal: Migrants do not pay for their journey to border towns such as Piedras Negras, across from the US border at Eagle Pass, Texas, or Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso.

“It’s very dangerous,” said Robert Almonte, a security consultant who uses a video of migrants hopping the trains in his lectures to law enforcement officials across the country. “When they are on top of the trains some of the migrants push each other off because there is so little space. I show a video in my talks of one person being sliced in half after he falls off a train and onto the wheels. It just goes to show the lengths people go to to get through Mexico.”

In addition to reports of amputated limbs and deaths, there have also been reports of physical abuse, kidnapping and rape.

In 2014, one of the trains derailed with some, 1,300 migrants on board.

Once they make it to a northern Mexican border city, migrants face shakedowns by transnational criminal groups, such as the Juarez cartel, in order to approach the US border, Almonte said.

“It’s easy money for the cartels because they get paid right away,” said Almonte, a former US Marshall and El Paso police chief. “With drug shipments, cartel members have to wait sometimes months to get paid, but with the migrants it’s fast cash.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute report, “Train conductors are also part of the chain of extortion, sometimes demanding bribes, particularly of women and families with children, who want to board before the train starts moving.”

In Mexico, little has been done officially to dissuade migrants from riding the rails, Almonte told The Post.

Mexican authorities monitor the trains in the southern parts of the country, where migrants congregate once they cross the Guatemalan border,and in the north before they cross into the US, but the country has limited resources, said Ariel Ruiz-Soto, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/11/mexicos-dangerous-beast-trains-take-migrants-to-us-border/

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16 May, 2023

Another Busload of Illegal Immigrants Is Dropped at Kamala Harris’s Doorstep as VP Tells High-Priced Fundraiser That Border Situation Is Going ‘Smoothly’

Amid the fallout of the end of Title 42, Vice President Harris is defending the administration’s response to the border surge even as Texas sends busloads of migrants to her official Washington residence.

During a fundraising trip to the wealthy Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead on Friday, Ms. Harris downplayed the flow of migrants at the border and laid blame at the feet of Congress just hours after Title 42 expired.

“You know, I hear that everything in the last couple days is going rather smoothly, given what the concerns were,” Ms. Harris told a reporter from WSB-TV. “The bottom line, however, is that this issue of immigration falls squarely within the responsibility of the United States Congress.”

On Sunday evening, the state of Texas shipped 80 migrants to the Naval Observatory at Washington, D.C. — the vice president’s home. Previously, two buses arrived at Ms. Harris’s home on Thursday night as Title 42 expired. In total, the state of Texas has sent more than 9,000 migrants to the nation’s capital, all sent by the governor, Greg Abbott.

“Until President Biden steps up and does his job, Texas will continue busing migrants to sanctuary cities to provide relief to our overwhelmed border towns,” a spokesman for Mr. Abbott told the Texas Tribune after last week’s migrant deliveries.

Mr. Abbott had previously delivered buses of migrants to Ms. Harris during the holiday season last year. In all, Texas has sent 17,000 migrants to so-called sanctuary cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington. Mr. Abbott began his campaign of sending buses of migrants to liberal sanctuary cities in April 2022 to pressure the Biden administration to stop the border crossings.

A member of the D.C. city council, Robert White, told FOX5 that Washington has been strained by the inflow of migrants mostly sent north by red state governors. Mr. White said Congress must appropriate funds so that the nation’s capital can better house these migrants.

Red state governors have deployed this new tactic as a way of raising awareness about the immigrants crisis they face daily, while the sanctuary cities declare themselves as refuges perhaps without understanding the burden illegal immigrants create.

Last year, Governor DeSantis — in an even more theatrical production — flew dozens of migrants to the liberal island getaway of Martha’s Vineyard. Just this month, the Florida legislature authorized $12 million to continue sending migrants to the exclusive Massachusetts island home to the likes of President Obama and a “Seinfeld” co-creator, Larry David.

Early in his administration, Mr. Biden tasked his vice president with a number of high-profile assignments, including solving the immigration crisis, securing federal voting rights legislation, and leading the executive branch’s interstellar research and development. After the Dobbs decision, Ms. Harris was also empowered to handle the federal government’s protection of abortion rights — an assignment she took on with vigor.

By contrast, she was criticized for failing to visit the border. Early in the Biden administration, Ms. Harris traveled to Central America to offer funding and diplomatic support to countries that were the source of many of America’s illegal immigrants. Little has come of those efforts.

Since the end of Title 42, the number of migrants crossing the border has fallen. One Fox News reporter who has long followed the border story in Texas, Bill Melugin, tweeted that illegal crossings in Texas have fallen “off a cliff” since the end of Title 42 Thursday.

“After a peak of 3,300 on 5/8 in the [Rio Grande Valley] earlier this week — under 500 in RGV last 24 hours,” Mr. Melgun wrote on Sunday. “CBP contacts tell me they do not expect this lull to last. They expect numbers to crank back up again — but not to the record-setting levels we saw this week of 10,000+ per day.”

During an appearance on the Sunday talk shows, the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, called on Congress to work on a solution while also defending the vice president’s record on immigration and her attempts to stem the “root causes” in Central America.

“That effort began in the Obama-Biden administration,” Mr. Mayorkas said. “It was terribly taken down during the Trump administration and Vice President Harris has led an extraordinary effort to address the root causes of why people flee their homes in the first instance — violence, poverty, corruption, authoritarian regimes, extreme weather events, persecution and the like.”

Mr. Biden is reportedly disappointed by the vice president’s lack of progress on stemming the inflow of migrants. Author Chris Whipple, who wrote a book on the White House chiefs of staff as well as one on America’s spy chiefs, recently penned a book on Mr. Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office. In it, Mr. Whipple disclosed the president’s frustration with his second-in-command, calling Ms. Harris “a work in progress.”

When Mr. Biden heard that the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, had been complaining about his wife’s assignments, the president was “annoyed,” according to several sources. “He hadn’t asked Harris to do anything he hadn’t done as vice president,” Mr. Whipple wrote.

https://www.nysun.com/article/another-busload-of-illegal-immigrants-is-dumped-at-kamala-harriss-doorstep-as-vp-tells-high-priced-fundraiser-that-border-situation-is-going-smoothly

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15 May, 2023

This may mark a terminal stage of President Joe Biden’s time in the Oval Office

On Thursday, the Biden administration finally will drop Title 42, a public health policy implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Trump administration that allowed for the quick deportation of illegal immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The policy has been kicked around like a football for a while now but what’s happening this week is significant. It signals to future illegal border crossers that there is virtually no obstacle to their breaking U.S. law, entering the country, and ultimately being allowed to stay because the Biden administration is intent on not enforcing immigration laws.

You don’t enforce the laws, and the people will come.

We have seen other low points during the Biden tenure. This is, after all, the participation trophy of presidencies. Biden is expected to do little more than show up at public events and mumble a few incoherent sentences before his next trip to the ice cream shop, while the deep state runs the country. Lately, he’s struggled even to do that.

Nevertheless, the DEFCON 1 border catastrophe we appear to be on the eve of witnessing goes along with the president’s other troubles, including his all-time low approval ratings of 36%.

According to that Washington Post-ABC News survey, 68% of Americans say they think Biden is too old for another term as president.

Crises appear to be piling up. The war in Ukraine continues, China is more belligerent than ever, inflation is destroying the wealth of the average American, and we appear to be in the beginning stages of serious banking turmoil. There’s even a congressional probe into bribery accusations aimed at Biden and his family.

Some media outlets have portrayed what’s now developing at the southern border as the beginning of a border crisis.

“At 11:59 pm on Thursday, May 11, one emergency will officially end and another may begin,” writes Brian Bennett at Time magazine. “That’s when the Biden administration has scheduled the end of the COVID-19 health emergency, which also means the expiration of a pandemic-era practice that began under the Trump administration of immediately expelling people trying to cross the border without allowing them to request asylum.”

That’s wrong.

The border crisis isn’t just about to begin; it began when Biden became president. Almost immediately after Biden was sworn in, he took steps to signal—through rhetoric and executive orders—that it was open season at the southern border.

“We’re going to work to undo the moral and national shame of the previous administration,” Biden said when he signed executive orders undoing Trump policies that stemmed illegal immigration.

Among the most important policies that Biden fought to undo was the “Remain in Mexico” rule mandating that asylum-seekers stay on the other side of the border as they awaited a decision on their claims. This both deterred bogus asylum-seekers and created a more orderly situation at the border.

After a long legal battle, the policy effectively was done away with. Republicans in Congress want to bring Remain in Mexico back, but Democrats largely are uninterested.

Instead of border security, the Biden administration promised to target the “root causes” of illegal immigration. That hasn’t worked out.

An estimated 2.76 million illegal border crossings occurred in fiscal year 2022, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, shattering the previous record by over 1 million. The previous record was set the year before, at 1.72 million illegal border crossings. It’s looking like 2023 will be worse.

Congrats to Biden for setting records in lawlessness in every year of his presidency. A historic presidency, truly.

What’s happening now isn’t the crisis. It’s merely the secondary explosion following a massive chemical fire of a crisis that’s been building for years.

Axios and other outlets reported that 150,000 migrants were headed toward the border in preparation for Thursday’s lifting of Title 42. Border Patrol agents have been arresting over 10,000 illegal immigrants a day in the week before Title 42 goes, setting single-day apprehension records.

These numbers almost certainly will go up, maybe significantly, in the days ahead. How will the government deal with those arrivals?

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/10/border-crisis-about-to-explode-and-biden-wont-be-able-to-hide/

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14 May, 2023

Solution to Biden’s Southern Border Catastrophe – Simple, Cost Effective, Quick

“1,500 active-duty Army troops to augment the 2,700 National Guard to enforce the sovereignty of the US Border with Mexico.”  So screams current headlines in multiple and lengthy stories in our corrupt 5th Column media.

Without congressional approval, Brandon ordered 1,500 more soldiers to bring the military augmentation for DHS and our hard-pressed Border Patrol to 4,200 soldiers to stop 18,000 to 20,000 migrants per day surging across our southern border when Title 42 ended midnight yesterday,  May 11th, is an absurd mobilization. If the proper congressional authorization were made for use of military force on the border, the number mobilized would need to be 42,000 or more and not 4.200.

Because the Biden government has refused to enforce the many effective immigration laws currently on the books, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas has acted against the invasion of his state by mobilizing more than 2,400 Texas National Guard soldiers now augmented by an unreported number of Texas Tactical Border Force of specifically trained National Guard soldiers.

The official Texas State governmental website reports:

Texas has deployed thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and DPS troopers to the border and apprehended more than 373,000 illegal immigrants, arrested over 28,000 criminals, and seized more than 400 million lethal doses of fentanyl—enough to kill every man, woman, and child in America. The Texas Tactical Border Force and Operation Lone Star are part of Governor Abbott’s comprehensive border security strategy that includes providing relief to overrun border communities by busing migrants to sanctuary cities, as well as building our own border wall.

The current augmented troops on duty at any time would be less than 2,100 at the most due to 12-hour rotations, sick call and authorized military leave. Granted all the troops are currently asked to do are administrative tasks to support the Border Patrol and not actual “policing” to stop illegals in droves crossing into the USA. 2,100 troops could not sufficiently police the border within the city limits along the border of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas.

What is really needed will never be implemented by the gutless criminals of Biden’s administration. Here is what should be done:

Mobilize 30,000 to 40,000, minimum, troops, Infantry, Armor and Special Forces of all appropriate services to include sniper teams, military police, psychological operations, civil affairs, and Judge Advocate General units along with sufficient logistics tail to support all the troops. Create, publish and broadcast in multiple media and appropriate languages, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and Cantonese for the Chinese, French for the Haitians, and other translations for the more than a dozen other nationalities of foreign illegal immigrants now crossing our border. Release printed copies, perhaps with dramatic color illustrations for the illiterate, by Psychological Operations aircraft and broadcast over all appropriate radio, television and social media on both sizes of the border.

Thirty (30) days from today, any immigrants crossing into the USA by other than a legal, designated crossing portal will be shot. There will be no exceptions.

This strong, clear, unequivocal message could be further augmented with the statement:

All foreign nationals requesting to immigrate to the United States through designated border crossing points, must have pre-approved, by our State Department, immigration permission in writing. All other immigrants attempting to cross the United States border will be detained for as much as two years to afford time to review their appeal for any justified asylum.

Yes, inevitably some immigrants will die. I estimate less than 10 would die by military action before all on the Mexican side of the border would clearly understand the United States means exactly what was announced. However, far fewer would be killed than have already died in horrendous and increasing numbers. Those gross numbers of  fatalities will end.

CBS News and other MSM report that from 1998 to 2021 the average number of illegals who die crossing our southern border is 350 to 400. In 2022, that number doubled to 853 or more than 16 per week. Reuters reports more than 1,000 died in 2022. CBS admitted that their number was most assuredly low.

Such is the cost of true and essential national sovereignty after so much inept failed enforcement specifically directed by the White House perpetrating the gross mismanagement of our border laws. As stated, I believe that number would be quite low before it is clearly understood deadly force is in use. The number would assuredly be less than the ten or more that die weekly now attempting to cross the border illegally.

In less than a week following implementation, there will be NO illegal border crossings – zero, nada…guaranteed.

This plan will never be implemented. Biden and the Democrats have not the courage or the resolve to take the necessary steps for border sovereignty. Moreover, the utter chaos and tragedy of the crisis on our southern border is only one of many premeditated and consistently expanded actions by the liberals to systematically destroy what little is remaining of our constitutional republic

https://townhall.com/columnists/billwenger/2023/05/13/solution-to-bidens-southern-border-catastrophe-simple-cost-effective-quick-n2623202

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12 May, 2023

White House Revives Trump-Era Policy, Limits Asylum Eligibility Ahead of Title 42 Expiration

The Biden administration stated on May 10 that it has rolled out a new regulation to coincide with the end of Title 42, under which many people who plan to illegally cross the southern border will be rendered ineligible for asylum.

Under the finalized rule (pdf), which essentially brings back a Trump-era travel policy, illegal immigrants will be disqualified from applying for asylum in the United States if they didn’t first seek protection in countries that they traveled through on their way to the United States, with limited exceptions.

It will take effect as soon as the Title 42 public health order ends on May 11, along with the national emergency declaration over the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice, the regulation is meant to decrease human smuggling activities at the southern border by encouraging asylum-seekers to use “lawful, safe, and orderly” pathways, such as seeking refuge in a third country that they’ve passed through.

“This Administration has led the largest expansion of legal pathways for protection in decades, and this regulation will encourage migrants to seek access to those pathways instead of arriving unlawfully in the grip of smugglers at the southern border,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said.

The rule was first proposed in February and has undergone a 32-day public comment period. Its finalization comes as tens of thousands of migrants are arriving at and gathering along the Mexican side of the southern border, waiting for Title 42 to expire.

The move has triggered frustration among immigration activists, who see remarkable similarities between Biden’s rule and the Trump administration’s 2019 “third-country asylum” rule.

“The Biden administration’s pivot back to the Trumpian policies is complete,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, wrote on Twitter.

“These new asylum restrictions mirrors [sic] in large part one of the Trump administration’s harshest anti-asylum policies, the 2019 asylum transit ban—which two separate federal courts struck down as unlawful.”

He pointed to court decisions that sided with the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) challenge against the Trump-era rule.

The ACLU also joined the criticism over the new policy, hinting that it may sue again.

“The ban closes off a pathway to safety for the majority of refugees in desperate need of it,” the organization wrote on Twitter. “At its core, the new rule mimics two Trump-era policies that were blocked by the courts. “Make no mistake: The fight is far from over.”

Feds Surging Personnel to Border

Mayorkas says the federal government is increasing manpower at the border in anticipation of the expected influx of illegal immigrants at the May 11 expiration of Title 42.

Specifically, the administration is in the process of “surging personnel to the border, including more than 1,400 DHS personnel, 1,000 processing coordinators, and an additional 1,500 Department of Defense personnel,” Mayorkas said at a press conference.

“All of these individuals will allow our law enforcement officers to stay in the field and focus on their critical mission,” he told reporters.

“Our overall approach is to build lawful pathways for people to come to the United States and to impose tougher consequences on those who choose not to use those pathways.”

However, Mayorkas also warned that the operation might not go as well as planned due to the sheer number of people waiting to rush the border.

“Our plan will deliver results, but it will take time for those results to be fully realized,” he said.

Mayorkas also blamed Congress for not allocating resources needed by his department.

“I cannot overemphasize that our current situation is the outcome of Congress leaving a broken, outdated immigration system in place for over two decades, despite unanimous agreement that we desperately need legislative reform,” he said. “It is also the result of Congress’s decision not to provide us with the resources we need and that we requested.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-admin-revives-trump-era-policy-limits-asylum-eligibility-ahead-of-title-42-expiration_5255896.html

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11 May, 2023

Just How Many Illegal Immigrants Have Entered the U.S. Under Biden? Here's an Idea

It's no secret that the United States' border is anything but closed, secure, or under control as President Joe Biden and his administration claim. The record number of illegal immigrants being apprehended since Biden took office — and the number of known "gotaways" — is sobering, yet it goes almost completely ignored by the Biden administration and mainstream media.

After so many months of new records for the number of illegal immigrants being encountered or witnessed slipping into the country, it can be easy to lose sight of the staggering scope of President Biden's ineffective immigration and border policies that have enriched criminal cartel syndicates, led to the violent abuse and deaths of illegal immigrants, and allowed individuals on terror watch lists or carrying deadly drugs to cross what is essentially a border open to all.

According to Customs and Border Protection, since January 2021 when Biden took the oath of office, there have been 5,118,661 encounters with illegal immigrants along the southern border. Add to that the number of known "gotaways" — illegal immigrants who were either spotted visually by border agents or detected via unmanned monitoring equipment and not apprehended — since Biden took office, and the number of illegal immigrants who've entered the country is even greater.

Through the first half of Biden's term from January 2021 through January 2023, Customs and Border Protection reported 1.2 million "gotaways." That is, at least 1.2 million illegal immigrants were confirmed to have unlawfully crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. The actual number of illegal immigrants who entered the country unimpeded is, by nature of the crime, unknown. It could be double the number of known gotaways, it could be three times worse, or more. We just don't know, thanks to Biden's border policies.

So with 5.1 million encounters of illegal immigrants since January 2021 and at least 1.2 million known illegal immigrant "gotaways," that's a confirmed minimum of 6.3 million illegal immigrants entering the U.S. since Biden took office with the promise to "build back better."

For added context to such a number, Biden has allowed a greater quantity of illegal immigrants into the United States than the number of people who live in each of the following 33 states (and two territories):

Alabama, population 5,024,279.
Alaska, population 733,391.
Arkansas, population 3,011,524.
Colorado, population 5,773,714.
Connecticut, population 3,605,944.
Delaware, population 989,948.
District of Columbia, population 689,545.
Hawaii, population 1,455,271.
Idaho, population 1,839,106.
Iowa, population 3,190,369.
Kansas, population 2,937,880.
Kentucky, population 4,505,836.
Louisiana, population 4,657,757.
Maine, population 1,362,359.
Maryland, population 6,177,224.
Minnesota, population 5,706,494.
Mississippi, population 2,961,279.
Missouri, population 6,154,913.
Montana, population 1,084,225.
Nebraska, population 1,961,504.
Nevada, population 3,104,614.
New Hampshire, population 1,377,529.
New Mexico, population 2,117,522.
North Dakota, population 779,094.
Oklahoma, population 3,959,353.
Oregon, population 4,237,256.
Puerto Rico, population 3,285,874.
Rhode Island, population 1,097,379.
South Carolina, population 5,118,425.
South Dakota, population 886,667.
Utah, population 3,271,616.
Vermont, population 643,077.
West Virginia, population 1,793,716.
Wisconsin, population 5,893,718.
Wyoming, population 576,851.

For more comparison, the 6.3 million (known) illegal immigrants who've entered the United States since Biden took office is equal to the entire population of El Salvador, one of the countries whose residents Vice President Kamala Harris told not to come to the U.S. It's also close to the number of people who live in Nicaragua (6.9 million) and more than half the population of Honduras (10.3 million).

Biden's border crisis has gotten so grave that he's allowed the equivalent of an entire Central American country worth of people to illegally enter the United States. A quantity of illegal border crossers that is greater than the population of 35 different states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

That's just since January of 2021, and now the Biden administration is facing down the expiration of Title 42 on Thursday night at 11:59 p.m. ET. The mainstream media has even had to take note of the problem that's only going to get worse along the southern border, but the problem has been getting worse since Biden's first day in office in January 2021. To think that the United States hasn't even seen the worst of Biden's immigration policy is a stark reminder of the very real consequences of President Biden and his administration's abdication of duty and denial of responsibility along America's border.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2023/05/09/more-illegal-immigrants-entered-the-us-under-biden-than-live-in-these-33-states-n2622970

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10 May, 2023

What We Know About Unaccompanied Children Arriving at Southern Border

 A 10-year-old girl from Honduras arrived at the southern border unaccompanied by adults. She told Sheena Rodriguez that she hoped to stay in America, and wanted to “color and get to know my father.”

The Honduras girl is like so many other unaccompanied alien children, says Rodriguez, founder and president of Alliance for a Safe Texas.

These kids arrive at the border with “pieces of paper with handwritten numbers on it,” she says, “and these children are going to people that they have never even spoken to.”

About 85,000 migrant children have entered the U.S. and been placed with a sponsor, but the federal U.S. government now doesn’t know the children’s location or status. Through her work at Alliance for a Safe Texas, Rodriguez seeks to raise awareness about how the border crisis has led to the exploitation of children, and to offer solutions to lawmakers who are trying to fix policies that led to the current situation.

Rodriguez’s desire to find out what was really going on at the southern border began about three years ago. She says she needed to see the situation for herself, so she planned a trip. Rodriguez left her home in North Texas and arrived around midnight in Laredo, about 160 miles south of San Antonio on the Mexican border.

“We encountered about 60 different men, all young men, to the one Border Patrol agent,” Rodriguez says, adding: “And he looked at me, didn’t know me from anywhere, and said, ‘I need help. We’re being invaded.’”

At that moment, Rodriguez says she committed to doing something to address the border crisis.

Since that first trip, Rodriguez says, she has taken nearly three dozen trips to the border and spoken with many illegal aliens, including unaccompanied migrant children.

Rodriguez joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to share stories of these unaccompanied children and explain what we know about how minors are arriving alone at the border.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/08/what-know-unaccompanied-migrant-children-arriving-southern-border/

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May 9, 2023

Migrant kids mixed with single men in NYC shelter sparks safety concerns

In yet another disturbing twist to the migrant crisis in New York City, families with young children are sleeping alongside adult single men at a makeshift shelter inside the NYPD’s old Manhattan police academy gym — a move asylum seekers and officials have both slammed as unsafe, The Post has learned.

The former police academy building, located on East 20th Street, was suddenly transformed into a shelter last week after the Adams administration declared the city had hit its “limit” amid the recent surge of migrants flowing into the Big Apple.

While hordes of adult men were among the first to take up residence on the rows upon rows of green cots, migrants told The Post on Monday there are now more than a dozen young children staying there too.

Several elementary and middle school-aged migrant kids were spotted by The Post coming-and-going from the Gramercy Park facility with their relatives on Monday.

Gutierrez Yorman, a 14-year-old from Venezuela, said children are sleeping alongside non-family members inside the first-floor gym.  “I am with my family and there are strangers too,” the teenager said, adding that he has been at the NYPD facility for one day and doesn’t know when he and his relatives will be relocated.

Alan Cardena, a migrant from Panama who is staying at the shelter with his mom, estimated there were about five teens and a dozen children under 7 years of age currently staying at the shelter.

He stressed that having kids sleeping alongside complete strangers wasn’t 100% safe — especially for “little girls.”

“We have inside single men. We don’t know if it’s safe,” Cardena, 29, said. “We sleep on the basketball court. So it’s just one floor for everybody.”

Department of Social Services Commissioner, Molly Park, acknowledged the presence of migrant kids at the shelter on Monday, testifying during a City Council budget hearing that the agency was working to relocate the families to “alternative placements.”

“We anticipate that we will be moving those families in the next 24 to 48 hours,” Park said.

“The intent is that this is a short term overflow facility, so the initial people who were placed there have already been moved out and we’re working closely with the NYCEM team that is operating the site on a day-to-day basis to make sure there is a flow of individuals.”

Legal Aid lawyers slammed the housing of migrant kids in the facility, insisting the shelter was “only appropriate for single adult men.”

“The City cannot shelter families with children in congregate settings,” they said in a joint statement with the Coalition for the Homeless.

“Private sleeping quarters are required for families’ safety, for mothers to privately nurse newborns, to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases, and to prevent sexual assault.

“The city assured us that these families would receive appropriate shelter placements today.”

“We currently have no other options but to temporarily house recent arrivals in gyms, said Fabien Levy, City Hall spokesman. “We’ve been asking for support for a year, and now with Title 42 being lifted this week and with hundreds of asylum seekers already arriving in New York City every day, we desperately need federal and state support more than ever to quickly manage this crisis.”

City Councilman and Minority Leader Keith Powers (D-Manhattan) said that although the Big Apple is grappling with the ongoing challenge of housing asylum seekers, the city has to be “extremely careful about housing children with families alongside single individuals.”

“Children with families have both legal protection and specific requirements where they should be housed all together rather than housed with a larger population because there’s a host of issues,” Powers said.

“We are in the middle of an absolute crisis when it comes to housing asylum seekers, but we still have to meet our legal requirements,” he continued, adding “we are headed to a very dire situation when it comes to space and services for these people.”

It comes after Mayor Adams’ Chief of Staff, Camille Joseph Varlack, sent a desperate plea to all city agencies on Sunday — begging them to assess the space they currently have to see if there’s any vacancies to house incoming migrants, according to an internal memo obtained by The Post.

“With more asylum-seekers arriving daily, this influx has pushed our shelter system to a breaking point and we need to create emergency temporary sites,” the chief of staff’s memo said.

“We ask that city agencies conduct an internal review of any properties or spaces in your portfolio that may be available to be repurposed to house asylum-seekers as temporary shelter spaces. If there is current programming please include programming that is.”

Currently, there are 126 emergency shelters operating as emergency shelters across the city, as well as another eight barracks-style facilities, according to City Hall’s latest figures.

Nearly 61,000 migrants have flooded into the city since last spring and more than 37,000 of them are currently living in the city-operated or city-funded shelter facilities.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/08/migrant-kids-adult-men-in-nyc-shelter-sparks-safety-concerns/

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May 8, 2023

Cartel Will Control the Border After Special Rule Expires in a Matter of Days, Border Patrol Union President Warns

Looming chaos at America’s southern border will make Mexico’s drug cartels the big winner, according to the president of the union representing Border Patrol agents.

A health regulation known as Title 42 that took effect in 2020 has been used at the border to expel illegal immigrants, nominally as part of federal COVID-19 health policy. Although the Biden administration tried to end the policy, Title 42 remained in effect due to multiple court decisions. It is now set to expire on May 11 when the federal COVID-19 health emergency officially comes to a close, according to Reuters.

That means drug cartels will be in control, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said, according to Just the News.

“Once Title 42 goes away and the explosion happens, they’re going to control our entire southwest border,” Judd said.

He said the end of Title 42 will mark the time when cartels “are going to be able to bring in all of their products such as the fentanyl, the dangerous drugs, the criminal aliens, and the aliens from special interest countries. All of that is going to go up and it’s going to be Americans that are going to pay for it.”

Judd said as the numbers of illegal immigrants rise, Border Patrol agents are pulled away from border duties to process illegal immigrants.

“If we’re apprehending 3,000 people, that means that we have about 70 percent of our resources on the border,” he stated. “If we’re apprehending 5,000 people, then we have about 50 percent of our resources on the border. Right now we’re apprehending 7,700 people every single day. That means only about 35 to 40 percent of our resources are on the border. Once that number goes up even more, once Title 42 goes away, we’re going to be down to about 10 percent of our resources.”

Judd said he expects the number of illegals crossing the border to go up by the thousands.

“It’s a minimum of 11,000. But we could see up to 16,000. It just depends on how the cartels go out and advertise their services. If the cartels are very aggressive in advertising their services, that number could go up to 16,000. But we will see a minimum of 11,000 people per day,” he said.

Troy Miller, a top official at Customs and Border Protection, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, has projected up to 10,000 illegal immigrants per day crossing the border once Title 42 ends, according to CBS, which noted that other sources have pegged the flood of illegal immigrants as high as 13,000 per day.

The Biden administration has already approved sending 1,500 troops to the border to assist Border Patrol agents.

In December, prior to a court ruling that allowed Title 42 to remain in place for a few more months, Judd had warned that cartels were licking their chops for what the future without the rule would hold.

“For years, ruthless criminal cartels have responded to U.S. policy to maximize profits. The cartels don’t thrive in times of tough enforcement policies. They thrive and generate record revenue by efficiently smuggling dangerous drugs, criminal aliens and aliens from countries who wish to do us harm during times of soft enforcement policies like we currently have,” Judd wrote in a December Op-Ed on Fox News.

“Never in our history have the cartels generated more revenue than they do now. And it all starts by using illegal immigration to overwhelm Border Patrol resources. And while President Biden’s policies have already allowed the cartels to overwhelm resources, the chaos is about to get much, much worse,” he wrote.

Retired DEA agent Derek Maltz agreed, telling Fox News, “The end of Title 42 will add a huge revenue opportunity for the cartels.”

“It’s going to increase the deadly supply of fentanyl and this tsunami of these lethal substances that are entering the country daily,” he said.

“They’re just going to take advantage of the volume of distractions to our brave men and women on the front lines, and they’re just going to continue to move high-value targets into America,” Maltz added.

https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/cartel-will-control-border-special-rule-expires-matter-days-border-patrol-union-president-warns

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May 7, 2023

What happened to Kamala’s push to fix ‘root causes’ of border crisis?

The Biden administration assured us that addressing the “root causes” of illegal immigration would solve the problem (not a crisis!) at the border.

The thinking was that as people had more opportunities in their own countries, fewer would want to leave.

Oops.

It should be clear by now that the focus on root causes was just a PR stunt, to make it appear as though the administration were responding constructively to the border crisis without actually, you know, enforcing the law.

Vice President Kamala Harris, the Root Causes Czarina, announced in February investment promises by some corporations for the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), that send many illegal immigrants north.

I suppose an “online learning platform” and “microloans to female entrepreneurs” might help some people, but the press release uses the words “commit” or “commitment” 30 times in a four-page document, literally in every paragraph, highlighting the fact the root-causes push is what in the tech industry they call vaporware — all press release and no substance.

But even if the vice president were competent, there’s no way the root-causes approach could ever be a substitute for actually enforcing the border.

Vice President Biden himself was Obama’s Root Causes Czar, and things have only gotten worse since then.

There are several reasons the root-causes approach is no substitute for muscular border and immigration enforcement.

First of all, it’s not clear development aid actually does any good.

Industrialized countries have transferred trillions to the developing world in aid over the past 60 to 70 years, and while there have been some successes, generally it does more harm than good.

Much of the money is siphoned off by international organizations and kleptocratic governments, and the top-down projects are often irrelevant, at best.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/05/what-happened-to-kamalas-push-to-fix-root-causes-of-border-crisis/

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5 May, 2023

Mark Morgan Calls Out Hypocrisy of Corporate Media’s Silence Over New Photos of ‘Kids in Cages’

The Biden administration is holding migrant children in cages and the leftist media is silent. “Where Is the mainstream media? Where is their outrage right now?,” Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, asks.  

Morgan, who is also a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, confirmed Monday to The Daily Signal that Newsmax border correspondent Jaeson Jones shared the photos with him. An anonymous source took the photos Thursday at a migrant detention center operated by the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley sector in Texas. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Morgan described Jones as a “good friend,” noting that the two work together at Newsmax, where Morgan is a contributor.  

One photo that Jones shared on Twitter, Morgan said, shows a group of unaccompanied migrant children from various countries.  

A second image, which includes a child sleeping on the ground, shows a group of Chinese children, Morgan said.

Morgan said it was confirmed “through source information, people [Jones] talked to, they confirmed that they were all, in fact, minors.”

Border Patrol agents are placing children in holding facilities because processing centers are overcrowded, Morgan said, noting that “segregating out the unaccompanied children is actually the right thing to do, the safe thing to do.”

“You do not want unaccompanied minors … in the general population area with single, adult men,” he said.

When the Trump administration used similar holding facilties for unaccompanied minors who crossed into the U.S., corporate media ran headlines such as “Trump migrant separation policy: Children ‘in cages’ in Texas” (BBC) or “Trump and Biden’s debate over kids in cages underscores the stark choice facing Americans” (NBC News). One image that went viral showed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., crying outside a Texas detention center for migrant children.  

“Look, when Border Patrol facilities are overrun, they’re overcrowded because of this administration’s policies. You can’t blame Border Patrol for doing everything they can to deal with what this administration has forced them to deal with,” Morgan said.

And “the issue is the hypocrisy,” he added. “Because where is AOC and her white pants and her crocodile tears? Where’s everybody that was yelling out ‘kids in cages?’”  

Morgan pointed out that the holding facilities actually were first used before Trump, during the Obama administration.  

Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, U.S. Customs and order Protection reports that agents have encountered about 5 million illegal aliens at the southern border. Since the start of fiscal year 2023 on Oct. 1, the agency has encountered a record 1.2 million illegal migrants.

The Center for Immigration Studies estimates that since Biden became president, about 1.3 million illegal aliens successfully have evaded the Border Patrol and are “gotaways.”  

The surge of illegal aliens crossing the southern border into the U.S. is expected to increase when the public health measure known as Title 42 expires. Title 42, set in place by the Trump administration during the COVID-19 pandemic, has allowed the Border Patrol to quickly expel some illegal aliens from the country.

When the nation’s public health emergency ends May 11 as scheduled, Title 42 also will be lifted, triggering an expected surge of migrants at the border.   

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/01/mark-morgan-calls-out-hypocrisy-of-corporate-medias-silence-over-new-photos-of-kids-in-cages

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4 May, 2023

New busloads of migrants arrive in NYC from Texas

Two fresh busloads of migrants rolled into New York City after being shipped in by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday — as the number of asylum seekers arriving in the Big Apple continued to surge.

The first bus — carrying 41 migrants, including 15 kids — arrived at Manhattan’s Port Authority terminal at about 7 a.m. from the US border town of Laredo, Texas, migrant advocates told The Post.

A second busload of asylum seekers, which carried 27 adults and 23 children from the same Texas town, pulled into the station just after 1:30 p.m.

The buses were sent to the Big Apple by Abbott, his office confirmed Wednesday – just days after Mayor Eric Adams said the Lone Star state would be ramping up how many migrants it would ship to the sanctuary city.   

“What Gov. Abbott is doing is clearly shameful,” Manuel Castro, Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, said after greeting the migrants as they hopped off the buses.  “He is using children, migrants to make political points.”

The latest influx came as Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul both continued to insist Wednesday they were powerless to stop the flow of migrants into the city, which has so far topped 59,400 over the last year.

Roughly 1,100 asylum seekers arrived in the city over a four-day stretch last week between Wednesday, April 26 and Sunday, April 30, the latest City Hall figures show.

“It calls for a federal solution. Absolutely calls for a federal solution. And the mayor is doing the best he can,” said Hochul when asked about the new busloads of migrants after an unrelated press conference with the mayor.

“It’s really been a real challenge.”

Adams has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of turning its back on the city and last week called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop other states from shipping migrants here.

Hizzoner also made the explosive allegation this week that Abbott, who is white, was trying to “hurt black-run cities” by shipping migrants to NYC, a charge Castro reiterated Wednesday.

“He’s also targeting cities that are led by African-American mayors, and that’s just disgraceful, but what’s disappointing is that the federal government is allowing this to happen,” Castro said.

His claim comes even though El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser, who is a Democrat and of Mexican descent, has shipped more than twice the number of migrants to the Big Apple and Chicago.  Also, Abbot has sent migrants to places such as Philadelphia, whose mayor, Jim Kenney, is white.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/03/new-migrant-buses-arrive-in-nyc-from-texas/

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3 May, 2023

Repeatedly Deported Illegal Murders Five

An intentional invasion of our southern border has been welcomed and enabled by Joe Biden's administration. Democrats are politically invested in the results of millions of migrants making their way to the U.S., and they are increasingly ideologically committed to the idea that a national border is fundamentally unfair and wrong.

Sometimes the people illegally crossing our border do other illegal things, sometimes horrific things.

Such was the case with Francisco Oropesa, the Mexican national accused of murdering five of his neighbors in Texas Friday night after they asked him to stop firing his gun because of a sleeping baby. They called police and were assured help was on the way, but not before Oropeza reloaded and headed for their house.

"I never thought that he would shoot," said Wilson Garcia, whose wife and son were murdered. Oropesa also tried to shoot Garcia but missed. "Then he went room to room, looking for people."

Sonia Argentina Guzman (25), Diana Velazquez Alvarado (21), Julisa Molina Rivera (31), Jose Jonathan Casarez (18), and Daniel Enrique Laso (8) were all shot in the head execution style. Two of the women shielded three young children who survived. All five were from Honduras, though their legal status is unclear.

What is clear is that Oropesa was here illegally this time, and he'd been deported as many as five times previously. As we go to press, American authorities are still searching for him, with a combined $80,000 reward for tips leading to his apprehension. He's considered armed and dangerous.

As for that open border, 87% of Americans know exactly where to put the blame: on the federal government.

U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents encountered nearly three million illegals in 2022. No one knows how many they didn't encounter, and no one seems to know where they end up whether they escaped detection or were caught and released.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told Congress two weeks ago that the border is "secure." Meanwhile, he's telling the news media that it's Congress's fault that the border is not secure.

"Within the constraints of a broken immigration system, we are doing so much," he insisted. "We have got to fix it," he added. "We need legislative reform."

Mayorkas and others in the administration have also repeatedly blamed Donald Trump for "breaking" the border. That's a lie, of course — Trump secured the border, and Biden's first order of business was undoing as much of that as he could.

So, what of legislative reform? Republicans are working on what's being called the "strongest border security package" on record. "We're going to bring a border security package and pass it through this House of Representatives," said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. "And we challenge President Biden to work with us to solve this problem."

Good luck with that.

In fact, Scalise still has some work to do with his fellow Republicans. Dan Crenshaw, for one, isn't happy that the current legislation "doesn't talk about the cartels," and he's a "no" until it does. "So the people who have operational control of the border, the people who are killing 80,000 Americans a year by trafficking fentanyl through the border, are completely unaddressed in this bill."

Republican strategists are no doubt using that disagreement to leverage a bill that's as strong as possible — or at least we'd like to hope they are. But Mayorkas's blame-shifting notwithstanding, we also don't have an administration that wants a secure border. Biden, Mayorkas, and "border czar" Kamala Harris just want you to think they're doing everything they can.

Voters will have a choice next year between continued humanitarian crisis and murderous mayhem brought by Joe Biden's open border or any number of Republican candidates who believe that a secure border is a fundamental responsibility of a presidential administration.

How many more innocent people have to die before that choice becomes a bit easier?

https://patriotpost.us/articles/96936-repeatedly-deported-illegal-murders-five-2023-05-01

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2 May, 2023

Over 90% of Democrats and Republicans Blame the Federal Government for the Border Crisis

A recent poll found that nearly 90 percent of American voters blame the federal government for the ongoing border crisis.

According to a Trafalgar Group for Convention of States Action poll, 91.4 percent of Republicans say the Biden Administration is at fault for the high surge of illegal migrants at the border. In comparison, 82.9 percent of Democrats and 84.5 percent of Independents agree that the government is responsible.

President of Convention of States Action Mark Meckler said he has never seen a poll where the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is a few points.

"I've never seen a poll like this — 87% of the American public blames the federal government for the problem at the border," Meckler said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "What was most interesting is you dig into ... the crosstabs — all the Democrats, breakdowns by age, party, race — what you saw was no difference within a few points across the board. "So it's almost 90% of people blame the federal government. And they expect that the states are going to have to fix it. They don't believe that the federal government will fix the problem."

Additionally, over half of the respondents— 53.4 percent— said they have little to no confidence the federal government is willing to or will be able to fix the ongoing issue at the border.

The poll comes as Chicago announced it is facing a humanitarian crisis amid a renewed surge of illegal migrants flooding the city.

Chicago city officials said they would soon have to spend $53 million from the city's budget surplus to care for the nearly 81,000 migrants who have already made their way to Chicago.

The city is preparing for even more illegal migrants to arrive once Title 42 ends on May 11. Officials said it would cost Chicago $124.8 million to care for the migrants between January and June, leaving Chicago financial officials no choice but to ask the City Council to earmark an additional $53 million from the city's surplus to cover the costs.

https://townhall.com//tipsheet/saraharnold/2023/04/30/majority-of-voters-blame-federal-government-for-border-crisis-n2622642

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1 May, 2023

El Paso to issue new state of emergency as border facilities hit capacity ahead of Title 42 expiration

El Paso, Texas will declare a new state of emergency on Monday as border facilities have reached capacity due to migrants flooding in from Mexico before Title 42 expires on May 11.

Mayor Oscar Leeser warned that his border city could buckle under the pressure of thousands of migrants seeking aid, with more expected to come as the US ends the federal pandemic-era policy which has allowed officials to kick millions of people back to Mexico.

Leeser said the declaration, which would likely last 30 days, will call on additional US government aid to provide shelters for the asylum seekers, as well as security for the whole community.

The city has already received $22.5 million from the feds.

“The reason we’re declaring a state of emergency is to make sure we can stand up and prepare for May 11,” Leeser said during a news conference Sunday. “To make sure we have public shelters, public housing… and two schools in place.”

This will be the second time in six months that an emergency has been declared in the beleaguered city, with recent local data showing more than 1,000 people a day are arriving at the border.

Officials predict 10,000 to 12,000 migrants will try to seek asylum at the border on May 11, with the volume expected to rise, Leeser said.

Leeser, who has long bemoaned the crisis at the US-Mexico border, added that El Paso would not be providing permanent homes to the migrants, and that the shelters would be temporary as the city helps asylum seekers reach their intended destination.

El Paso has made headlines over its busing program — with thousands of migrants sent to the north, including New York City, over the past year — much to the headache of Mayor Eric Adams, who condemned the program.

US Customs and Border Protection said that as of Saturday, more than 20,500 migrants were in custody along the southern border, with nearly 7,000 caught in the Rio Grande Valley sector alone.

There have been about 7,000 daily encounters in late April, with CBP officials warning that the number will rise in the coming weeks.

Along with the need for aid, Leeser called on the government to make serious changes to America’s immigration and border laws to curb the flood of migrants coming though the southern border.

“There’s no endgame to this, and we can’t continue as a city or as a country without the federal government changing federal laws.,” Leeser said. “The process right now is broken and it has not been fixed for many, many years.”     

El Paso’s declaration comes as the border town of Brownsville, Texas, issued its own emergency, with Border Patrol Chief for the Rio Grande Valley Sector Gloria Chavez saying the city has seen over 15,000 Venezuelans arriving in the last eight days, CNN reports.

Like Leeser, Brownsville commissioner for District 1 Nurith Galonsky Pizana said the city will do its best to help the migrants transition through the town to reach their intended destination.

“These migrants who are making their way through Brownsville, they are not here to stay,” Galonsky Pizana said earlier this week. “They have a final destination outside of Brownsville, and we will manage this with due process as these individuals seek asylum.”

Although it seems counterintuitive for the migrants to try and cross the border illegally or seek asylum while Title 42 is still in place, it likely comes from a fear that it’ll be harder to get into the US once the policy expires.

With Title 42 gone, the US will revert to its decades-old protocols that were set up during mass migration in the US, including legal ramifications for people who repeatedly try to cross illegally.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/30/el-paso-to-issue-new-state-of-emergency-as-border-facilities-hit-capacity/

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