The primary version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other blogs: "Tongue Tied" "Dissecting Leftism" "Australian Politics" "Education Watch International"
"Political Correctness Watch" "Greenie Watch" "Western Heart" (A summary blog)
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31 October, 2022
Ukrainian Refugees: Onward Migration and New Flows Are Likely
A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies paints a picture of the millions of Ukrainians who have fled their country, eight months after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Dr. Nayla Rush, a senior researcher at the Center, also makes predictions for future refugee and migration flows from Ukraine to the United States and other countries.
Those looking to learn more about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine should listen to the latest episode of the Center’s podcast, Parsing Immigration Policy. This week’s episode is a re-release of a recent panel discussion entitled, “The Ukraine War and Its Impacts on Migration,” in which experts from the U.S. and Europe examine the war’s refugee and internally displaced person (IDP) challenges faced by Ukraine, Europe, Africa, and the U.S.
Approximately seven million Ukrainians have sought refuge in European countries, in addition to about 2.5 million seeking refuge in non-EU countries. Most are women and children, as men aged 18-60 are not allowed to leave the country, but should that change, men will likely want to join their spouses and families outside Ukraine. Additionally, despite the U.S. expectations that they will do so, Ukrainians do not seem to be planning to return permanently. When they do return home, it is often temporary, and only ten percent of those who returned to Ukraine from abroad have stayed.
According to Dr. Rush, “As the crisis evolves into a likely stalemate, more and more will want to migrate onward looking for better opportunities or to join family members scattered further around the world (including in non-European countries).”
https://cis.org/Report/Ukrainian-Refugees
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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30 October, 2022
NYC’s 20,000 Migrants Are Fueling the City’s Underground Economy
It’s still dark out when the men in work boots start gathering by V&F Car Wash in the Bronx. They’re waiting along the highway in hopes of being picked up for construction jobs. The work is demanding and irregular, but it pays in cash and, crucially, doesn’t require work authorization.
The men are among the 20,000 migrants that have flooded into New York City since April, many of them bused from Republican-led border states like Texas and Arizona. Mayor Eric Adams declared a billion-dollar “state of emergency” and put up a tent city to temporarily house the influx of Central and South Americans that had overwhelmed the shelters.
A place to sleep is important. Finding work is equally urgent.
“I want to pay for my part,” said Rafael, 52, who lined up at the Bronx carwash on a recent morning looking for work. “The most important thing is that my wife and I can pay our bills.”
Bloomberg News is withholding the last names of migrants interviewed due to their immigration status. Under federal law, migrants won’t be authorized to work for months or years while they seek asylum, a designation that allows people who fear or suffer persecution to immigrate to the US. But that hasn’t stopped many migrants from seeking out work in New York, a sanctuary city where the minimum wage applies to undocumented workers and city guidelines say employees won’t ask about immigration status.
Underground Economy
Undocumented workers make up 7% of overall jobs in New York City and a third of construction laborers and around a quarter of dishwashers, cooks, housekeepers and cleaners, according to a 2017 city report with the latest available data. They help fuel an underground economy in a city that depends on immigrants to keep its construction sites, restaurant kitchens, delivery services and child-care services running.“These are people coming here hungry for work. They do the jobs many New Yorkers decline to do,” said Queens City Councilmember Julie Won. “These are the people we should be welcoming with open arms. These are the people that are going to continue to be the backbone of our economy.”
Immigrants make up 37% of New Yorkers, but 44% of the labor force, according to the city. Among undocumented workers, 78% were working or seeking work, compared with 65% of US-born New Yorkers. They contribute $40 billion to the state’s gross domestic product, or about 3%, and pay $1.1 billion in state and local taxes, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute.
It’s not just New York. In Florida, undocumented workers have stepped in to help the state rebuild homes and buildings that were destroyed during Hurricane Ian. In California, they make up about one in 16 workers in the state, many of which work in farming, food processing and other “essential” fields that worked in-person throughout the pandemic.
Many undocumented immigrants already worked in New York City’s informal economy even before the arrival of new migrants. Now many of the 20,000 new arrivals have joined them at the city’s so-called paradas, sidewalks outside of Home Depots and other hardware stores where day laborers line up as early as 5 am, swarming around cars as they stop by in hopes of contractors picking them up for a painting or construction job.“We’ve been looking for work for days,” said Rafael, who fled political and economic turmoil in Venezuela in May with his wife and three children.
After months of traveling through Central American jungles, Rafael and his family took a three day bus ride from Arizona to Washington, DC, in July. They spent two days at a shelter before boarding a second bus to New York, where US Customs and Border Protection had assigned the family a court appearance.
While the family of five has found temporary housing in a Bronx shelter and enrolled their kids in public schools, work has proven more elusive. Rafael took a 40-hour work site safety course offered by a local charity and found some construction work. This kind of work can pay as much as $130 a day. His son might join him on non-school days when he turns 18 next month, said his wife, Leydisbell, sitting in a park a few blocks from the shelter.“Because we don't have a social security number, we can't find permanent work,” she said.
Having a work record before asylum and authorization are granted could also hurt migrants’ cases because it violates federal law, said Diana Moreno, the deputy director of New Immigrant Community Empowerment, a nonprofit. Asylum seekers aren’t eligible to receive employment authorization for at least 180 days after they submit their application. Moreno called the paradox an “impossible situation.”
The Biden administration in October began a new program offering some new Venezuelan migrants so-called humanitarian parole, which creates a legal pathway to work for some 24,000 asylum seekers. But for other migrants, it could take years to get official work authorization, said Jodi Ziesemer, director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. The humanitarian parole program won’t apply to migrants like Rafael who are already in the US.
Meanwhile, the city is “obligated” to provide food, shelter, and all the other needs, Adams said at an October briefing. “The irony of it all is that while we're telling 21,000 working-age people that they can't work, we’re dealing with a shortage of jobs” that need to be filled, he said.When Masbia Soup Kitchen Network learned migrants were flooding into the city, the soup kitchen operator bought up 100 pairs of construction boots from Amazon at $100 a pop and lined up a donor to help shoulder the cost. Nonprofits have also been helping migrants enroll in construction site safety training, a must-have for contractors who may overlook immigration status but are wary of the city-enforced safety checks that come with heavy fines.“Giving people their dignity is very important,” said Masbia executive director Alexander Rapaport. “And dignity means they can fend for themselves and make a buck.”
Little Protection
These jobs, however, offer little protection when it comes to pay and security. Employers often pay immigrants for fewer hours than they worked, a practice known as wage theft, and such workers also face name calling and other forms of racial discrimination, according to a 2022 report by the Center for Migration Studies. Undocumented workers are also often in higher-risk jobs, the research found.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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28 October, 2022
Foreign-Born Population in USA Hits Nearly 48 Million in September 2022
The Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that the total foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal) in the U.S. hit 47.9 million in September 2022 — a record high in American history — and an increase of 2.9 million since January 2021. At 14.6 percent, the immigrant share of the U.S. population is now just slightly below the all-time highs reached in 1890 and 1910. If present trends continue, the foreign-born share will surpass the all-time highs reached more than a century ago next year. The CPS data is important because neither the record number of border encounters or figures for new legal immigrants actually measures the number of immigrants living in the country, which is what ultimately determines immigration’s impact on American society.
There is a good deal of variation month-to-month in the data, but the 2.9 million increase in the foreign-born population since President Biden took office is both very large and statistically significant. The dramatic growth is so striking because, for the foreign-born population to grow at all, new arrivals must exceed both return-migration and deaths, as all births to immigrants in the U.S., by definition, add only to the native-born population.
Among our findings:
The 47.9 million foreign-born residents (legal and illegal) in September 2022 is the largest number ever recorded in any U.S. government survey or census; and 2.9 million larger than in January 2021 when President Biden took office.
Immigrants from Latin American countries other than Mexico account for 60 percent of the increase in the foreign-born population since January 2021.
We preliminarily estimate that illegal immigrants accounted for 61 percent, or slightly less than 1.8 million, of the growth in the foreign-born population since January 2021.
As a share of the total population, the foreign-born now account for 14.6 percent of the population, or one in seven U.S. residents — the highest percentage in 112 years. As recently as 1990 they were one in 13 U.S. residents.
If present trends continue, the foreign-born share of the population will reach 14.9 percent of the U.S. population in August next year, surpassing the all-time highs reached in 1910 (14.7 percent) and 1890 (14.8 percent).
In addition to the immigrants themselves, there are also 17.2 million U.S.-born children (under age 18) with an immigrant parent — immigrants and their children now account for one in five U.S. residents (65 million).
Initially, the dramatic increase in the foreign-born population in recent months could be seen as a return to the long-term growth trend over the last decade that was disrupted by Covid-19. Now, the 47.9 million immigrants in September exceeds the trend line by 1.1 million.
At 143,000, the average monthly growth in the foreign-born population since President Biden took office is also significantly higher than the 76,000 per month in Obama’s second term, and the 42,000 per month under Trump before Covid-19 hit.
Of the 47.9 million immigrants in the country in September, 29.4 million were employed — two million more than in September 2019 before Covid-19.
While a large share of the recent increase in the total foreign-born population is due to illegal immigration, those in the country legally still account for three-fourths of all foreign-born residents.
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Population-Hits-Nearly-48-Million-September-2022
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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27 October, 2022
Ludicrous alternative to detention
The dramatic surge in illegal border crossings in the last 18 months has forced the Department of Homeland Security to get creative quickly.
To keep track of the whereabouts of the millions of crossers as they are released into the United States with only notices to appear before an immigration judge at a later date, DHS is using SmartLINK cell phones as one tool in the alternatives-to-detention toolkit, costing an estimated $407 million per year.
The number of SmartLINK users has exploded, now at 256,000, using facial recognition and GPS monitoring, according to Border Report. When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement requests, migrants must take photos of themselves, so they can be tracked through GPS.
The phones are used only for tracking someone who entered illegally, and don’t have internet access. The person in possession of the phone can only take a call when an ICE agent is trying to reach them, according to Border Report. Migrants also have access to calendar items with dates for upcoming court appearances.
Proponents tout SmartLINK monitoring as a less costly alternative to detaining someone. The cost per device, is about $4.36 per day rather than $140 to hold someone in detention. A bargain? With 256,000 in use that comes in at over $1.1 million each day, or $407 million per year.
ICE estimated the number of SmartLINK users has increased by more than 880 percent from the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, Border Report said.
On top of the SmartLINK monitoring, there are 41,000 people being monitored via GPS ankle bracelets, and 20,000 via telephone reporting, bringing the total of people under the alternatives-to-detention program close to 317,000, according to data tracking the program.
While the program is far less costly than detention, there’s no data to prove its effectiveness and what incentive migrants have for hanging on to the devices once they are released.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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26 October, 2022
What will Rishi Sunak becoming the the new prime minister mean for immigration and asylum policies?
Rishi Sunak has a political and professional background almost exclusively in business and finance.
But he made what he called his “plan for illegal immigration” core to his first run to become prime minister in the summer and has suggested no deviation from the ideas.
Hinting at economically driven policy, Sunak issued a written proposal saying he would make “aid, trade, and visas conditional” on countries’ willingness to accept returned asylum seekers and foreign offenders.
Forcing asylum seekers back to countries where they claim to be at risk is a breach of international law and international governments are likely to resist such conditions on trade deals.
In a polished campaign video released in July, Sunak called immigration the “second emergency” to tackle - then behind the NHS backlog - and repeated Priti Patel’s language on the “broken system” and out-of-control borders.
While speaking out against scapegoating and calling the issue “morally complex”, he backed a series of hardline policies and vowed to make the troubled Rwanda scheme happen.
“Our Rwanda policy is the right idea but only if it’s done properly,” Mr Sunak said. “I will make the Rwanda policy work. It is essential that anyone considering trying to sneak into Britain knows that their journey will end in Kigali, not King’s Cross.”
Three months on, that vow is looking increasingly hard to keep. Four legal challenges relating to the Rwanda deal are underway, no flights have taken off and asylum seekers selected for deportation have been freed from detention.
High Court battles have promoted a series of government disclosures, which showed that the Foreign Office and UK High Commissioner to Rwanda had advised against any agreement over the country’s human rights record and corruption allegations.
The costs are extortionate, with £140m already handed over in up-front payments and ministers refusing to disclose how much the UK will pay for each person flown to Kigali and supported to claim asylum there instead.
In his July video, Sunak did hint at discomfort over how the unprecedented scheme was drawn up behind closed doors and away from parliament, saying choices must not be “kept away from public scrutiny and debate”.
But he said small boat crossings were a “genuine emergency and must be addressed”, describing them as “boat after boat full of illegal migrants coming from safe European countries, with our sailors and coastguard seemingly powerless to stop them”.
“This must stop and if I become your prime minister it will stop,” Sunak said. “This is not just hot air or rhetoric.”
Priti Patel’s vow to make Channel crossings “unviable” became a political liability as numbers continued to break new records despite her attempt to start push-backs and claim that using Royal Navy patrols would be a deterrent.
Her successor Suella Braverman made no impact on the phenomenon during her short six weeks in office, while new home secretary Grant Shapps had been in post less than a day when Liz Truss quit.
He is expected to remain in the role under the new prime minister, who previously outlined a “10 point plan” to tackle Channel crossings and said he would invite all political parties to join forces on the issue.
It included a pledge to “reform our broken asylum laws”, including by “tightening our definition of who qualifies for asylum in the UK” and enhanced powers to “detain, tag, and monitor illegal migrants”.
Braverman had triggered work looking at changes to how the Human Rights Act and Refugee Convention apply to asylum seekers, with a view to enforcing the Rwanda scheme and deportations, but the policy was in the early stages of development when she resigned for breaching the ministerial code.
Sunak also wants to create a cap on the number of refugees accepted “via safe and legal routes”, but the resettlement schemes he was referring to already account for a tiny fraction of overall asylum applications.
British law dictates that people must be physically present in the UK to claim asylum, but there is no visa to reach the country for that purpose.
Sunak’s plan vowed that “no adult who enters the UK illegally will have a route to remain in the UK”, but Channel crossings by asylum seekers only became a criminal offence this summer. He has said he would deliver “thousands of new beds” for asylum seekers to stop the costly use of hotels, without giving details of how.
As chancellor, he was reported to have proposed the use of empty cruise ships during the coronavirus pandemic but the plan was not taken forward for a range of legal and financial reasons.
The new prime minister’s 10-point plan for Channel crossings did contain some more practical proposals, including increasing the number of asylum caseworkers to speed up the processing of claims amid record backlogs.
Mr Sunak said he would be “commissioning work to look at more fundamental Home Office and Border Force reform”, but such efforts may be less of a priority than dealing with known challenges.
Recent reviews have made numerous recommendations for improvement after finding the government’s response to small boat crossings had been “both ineffective and inefficient”.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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25 October, 2022
Smugglers and Scammers Use TikTok to Target Migrants
The TikTok video starts like most other travel snaps on the platform do, with selfie shots showing the user* and his companions sitting on a plane and walking through the airport.
But unlike the highly curated images of hotels and tourist attractions typical of this genre on TikTok, the video quickly takes an uncharacteristic turn, showing the user sleeping in camps, at one point traveling by horseback and ultimately scaling what he calls “la famosa frontera de la muerte” or “the famous border of death” between the US and Mexico.
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“We are ready to climb the wall and run like deer,” he narrates in Spanish over dark images that appear to show him and his companions climbing the border wall. “Run, buddy run, or immigration will catch you,” he later says.
The video, which appears to document one young man’s journey from Ecuador to America, has been saved 10,000 times, has more than 170,000 likes and nearly 2,500 comments – the vast majority of which are from people asking him for more information. “How much did you spend and when did you do it?,” one asks.
“Viajes a USA” or “Travel to the US.” That’s all you have to search to find a not-so-hidden corner of TikTok largely populated by videos and posts about migration, specifically from Latin America to the US.
Some of the posts, like the one from the user from Ecuador, appear to be from people documenting their own migrant journeys. But many purport to offer services and advice for people seeking to immigrate from countries including Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador and Honduras.
It’s hard to tell which of these posts are shared by real “coyotes” or human smugglers, and which are scams. In either case, there are risks of deep harm, and experts worry that these videos are spreading on the platform largely unchecked.
TikTok says it “strictly prohibits this content”, though the company did not specify whether that includes posts detailing people’s migration in addition to videos offering to help people cross the US-Mexico border.
“TikTok would immediately remove it from our platform and ban the account,” said TikTok spokesperson AB Obi-Okoye. “We use a combination of people and technology to protect our community and partner with intelligence firms in this area to further bolster our defenses.”
But typing in “viajes” into the TikTok search bar alone will surface suggestions like “viajes seguros a USA” or “viajes a USA garantizado,” which mean “travel safely to the US” or “travel to the US guaranteed.”
The posts offering services are usually simple. They often include hazy footage of a journey or a US cityscape, typically overlaid with a message that seeks to assure users the service is not a scam. Some posts go as far as to show videos and pictures of people who have supposedly successfully crossed with the help of those behind the account.
Usually, the videos don’t include many details and instead direct users to reach out to the account over private message or WhatsApp.
Many of the accounts don’t explicitly advertise their services as illegal, but strongly imply they help people without visas or documents across the border. Others are less subtle: one account posted a video with a picture of the American and Ecuadorian flag, the text over it reading “viajes seguros y sin estafas” or “travel safely and no scam.” Playing in the background is the song “El Illegal” by Ecuadorian singer, Bayron Caicedo.
Quantifying the proliferation of these type of posts on TikTok is difficult because the platform does not provide external tools that allow researchers to audit or analyze its data, unlike companies like Twitter and Meta.
The Guardian shared eight examples of posts advertising services to ferry people across the border and Obi-Okoye said the company took them down. Still, dozens of similar videos pop up when searching for these terms, including some that were posted in the last week.
The videos the Guardian reviewed show that TikTok has started to play a more critical role in the spread of posts targeting migrants than what researchers initially observed.
Studies on human smugglers’ use of social media by the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), the research arm of watchdog group the Campaign for Accountability, concluded that TikTok initially was primarily utilized as a video creation platform, while Facebook was the platform of choice for these organizations to recruit clients. Facebook groups and posts from people representing themselves as coyotes would include videos created on and then downloaded from TikTok, but the video app was less frequently used by migrants to engage directly with the services.
“Human smugglers that appeared to be connected to cartels were reposting TikTok videos to Facebook groups for migrants essentially laying out their journey to prove that they were in fact taking people across this route,” said Katie Paul, the director of TTP. “It’s free advertisement for their services, essentially.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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24 October, 2022
Feds Accuse Arizona of ‘Trespass’ by Plugging Border Holes at the Yuma Gap
On October 17, the local Fox affiliate in Phoenix reported that the Biden administration is demanding that Arizona Governor Doug Ducey (R) remove shipping containers his state moved in to plug the holes in border wall fencing at an illegal-entry hotspot known as the “Yuma Gap”. The White House is suddenly concerned about “trespassing” at the Southwest border — but only when it involves Republican governors, not illegal migrants.
The Yuma Gap. The Border Patrol’s Yuma sector is huge — it has responsibility over more than 180,000 square miles in southwestern Arizona and an adjacent portion of California — but only has jurisdiction over less than a tenth of the 1,954-mile Southwest border.
As I have explained in the past, there’s fencing along most of the border in Yuma sector — but not all of it. The uncompleted sections of fence directly adjacent to the Morelos Dam (which was built in 1950 across the Colorado River) are called the “Yuma gap”, and when I was down there in February, I was told that it’s the most heavily traveled area for illegal migrants into the sector.
That’s saying something because a lot of aliens have crossed illegally into Yuma sector this year. Agents there apprehended more than 284,000 illegal entrants in the first 11 months of FY 2022, 31 times as many as in FY 2020 (admittedly an outlier year due to Covid-19 shutdowns), but saliently more than three times as many as during the “border emergency” in FY 2019.
DHS never intended the gap to exist. Construction was nearly complete on the unfinished portion — fencing panels still sit stacked directly adjacent to the gap — when Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021, and “paused” all barrier construction.
Politics and Promised Construction. The midterm congressional elections are less than three weeks away, and control of the Senate hangs in the balance. That body is currently evenly divided, with both the Democrats and Republicans controlling 50 seats in the upper chamber. Vice President Kamala Harris, as president of the Senate, casts the tie-breaking vote, which is why Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) is majority leader.
If Republicans can gain one senate seat, Republican Mitch McConnell (Ky.) will replace Schumer, giving the GOP power to set the chamber’s legislative agenda and, as importantly, block Biden from appointing the most liberal judges to the federal bench.
One of the most hotly contested seats in the November midterms is currently occupied by Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat from Arizona. Summer polling in the Grand Canyon State revealed that 78 percent of respondents think illegal immigration is “bad for America”, while 62 percent of Arizonans supported building a border “wall” (with 45 percent “strongly supporting” barriers).
Given this, it’s likely not a coincidence that DHS announced in late July it would be closing the Yuma Gap, in a marked departure from the administration’s rather dour view on border fencing (then-candidate Joe Biden asserted on the campaign trail that “Building a wall will do little to deter criminals and cartels seeking to exploit our borders”).
In the two-plus months since DHS made that announcement, however, there has been no construction at the gap. That’s not to say that the Yuma Gap hasn’t been plugged — after a fashion. In August, Ducey took it upon himself to have “double-stacked and secured shipping containers” placed within the gap.
Bureau of Reclamation Letter. Which brings me to a letter Jacklynn L. Gould, P.E., regional director for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation sent to Allen Clark (director of Arizona’s Division of Emergency Management) and Tim Roemer (director of the state’s Department of Homeland Security) last week. Gould demanded that Arizona remove its containers from the Yuma Gap, as well as others placed on the exterior boundaries of the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s West Reservation.
That letter states: “The unauthorized placement of those containers constitutes a violation of federal law and is a trespass against the United States. ... That trespass is harming federal lands and resources and impeding Reclamation’s ability to perform its mission.”
So, to be clear, it’s the administration’s official position that the illegal entry of tens of thousands of illegal migrants through the Yuma Gap was not the sort of “trespass” that required a federal response for 17 months, but the placement of shipping containers to impede the progress of future migrants is.
To be fair, of course, none of those migrants intend to stick around the gap for long. Their plans are usually to surrender to Border Patrol as quickly as possible to be released into the interior of the United States, where they will be allowed to remain indefinitely (if not forever). The containers are stationary, at least until DHS fulfills its July promise to close the Yuma Gap.
Arizona’s Response. In any event, and not surprisingly, Fox News reports that Ducey’s administration was quick to respond. According to the outlet, Clark stated in his reply to the bureau:
The myriad of federal agencies that claim jurisdiction on the southern border but do nothing to prevent the public nuisance caused by illegal immigration and criminal activity that exploits the open border is quite frustrating to those that live, work and recreate on that border and in our state.
You can sense the Arizonan’s frustration.
It should be noted that DHS does not plan to begin closing the gap until “early 2023”, which raises the question of how much trespass and environmental degradation will occur in, on, and around the Morelos Dam if the bureau (whose mission “is to ... protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public”) gets its way.
Likely Headed to Court. Interestingly, however, Clark also contends that the state isn’t actually violating federal law. He notes that the regulation at issue, 43 C.F.R. § 429.4(c)(8), “provides that ‘activities authorized under other Federal statutes or regulations’ are not subject to regulation’’.
As Clark explains: “Since, the U.S. Constitution provides for the protection of the states (Article IV, section 4) and specifically reserves the right of states to defend themselves (Article 1, section 10), the regulation you cite does not prohibit Arizona’s actions.”
Article I, section 10 of the U.S. Constitution is the “invasion” clause, and as a lawyer I am somewhat reluctant to interpret that provision as applying to the illegal entry of migrants through the Yuma Gap.
That said, 56 percent of Arizonans polled believe that what’s occurring at the Southwest border is an “invasion” (38 percent said it wasn’t, and 6 percent weren’t sure), as do 53 percent of Americans.
Unless the Biden administration removes Ducey’s containers (which would be a bad look, especially before the midterms), the matter is likely headed to federal court. The courts, on numerous occasions, have ducked interpreting the invasion clause, but this time they may not have a choice.
Poor Political Timing. This dust-up likely could not have come at a worse time for Kelly’s reelection bid. The incumbent has been critical of Biden’s border policies, recently asserting: “I’ve spent a lot of time on our southern border, and let me just say it’s a mess. It’s chaos. It's crisis after crisis.” That said, he could have done more to ameliorate the dreadful state of the border, but hasn’t.
His Republican opponent, Blake Masters, is down by just one point against Kelly in a recent poll, and has been closing his own gap with the sitting senator in the past few weeks. The bureau’s current demands are like an in-kind contribution to Masters’ campaign.
Arizonans, like other residents of Southwest border states and Americans as a whole, are frustrated with a Biden administration that inherited a modicum of border security and squandered it. If the White House is newly interested in going after “trespassers”, it can start with the 284,000-plus migrants who have entered illegally through Yuma sector in FY 2022. But it should leave Arizona alone.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Feds-Accuse-Arizona-Trespass-Plugging-Border-Holes-Yuma-Gap
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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23 October, 2022
Record 856 migrants die at southern border in fiscal year 2022: CBP
A record number of illegal migrants have died crossing the border, according to Customs and Border Protection data obtained exclusively by Fox News.
The total number of migrant deaths at the U.S. southern border fiscal year 2022 total 856 – the highest and deadliest ever on record.
CBP data also shows that there have already been 25 migrant deaths recorded in fiscal year 2023 thus far. Fiscal year 2023 began on Oct. 1.
Those numbers show there were 227,547 ?migrant encounters in September. That figure is the highest September total in DHS history, and a massive increase over prior Septembers: 192,000 in Sept. 2021; 57,674 in Sept. 2020; and 52,546 in Sept. 2019.
Last month’s figures also saw an increase from August, when there were 203,598 migrant encounters.
The numbers show that fiscal year 2022 ended with a staggering 2,378,944? migrant encounters, the highest ever recorded in a fiscal year, and that does not include the 599,000 ?known “gotaways” that CBP sources evaded capture in fiscal year 2022.
“While failing regimes in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua continued to drive a new wave of migration across the western Hemisphere, the number of Venezuelans arriving at the southern border decreased sharply nearly every day since we launched additional joint actions with Mexico to reduce irregular migration and create a more fair, orderly and safe process for people fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis in their country,” CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said in a press release.
The CBP numbers also reveal there were 20 known or suspected terrorists arrested at the southern border in September, bringing the fiscal year 2022 total for terror watchlist arrests at the border to 98.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/record-856-migrants-die-at-southern-border-in-fiscal-year-2022-cbp/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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21 October, 2022
‘Root causes’ aren’t behind migrant surge — it’s open borders
So how’s that root causes nation-building project working out so far?
Short answer: About as well as the idea worked for European liberals who first concocted the root-causes doctrine in the early 1980s, resurrected it after the catastrophic mass migration of 2014-2015, and have seen it fail miserably ever since. Border Patrol apprehension numbers, widely regarded as the chief indicator of total crossings, is the ultimate progress report.
In 2020 when Donald Trump was in office, Border Patrol caught 106,762 Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans. By the end of fiscal 2021, they’d caught 701,049. Border Patrol caught another 505,448 this fiscal year with another month left to count.
Anyone endowed with basic critical thinking and research skills could have predicted this American policy failure, but it was never even lightly challenged. When the Joe Biden campaign first appropriated Europe’s failed liberal social engineering experiment as its chief immigration policy, star-struck American media never bothered to dig into its long, sorry history or demand details for how much it would cost. No one asked when, exactly, the White House would consider Central America “fixed” enough to declare U.S. border security success.
And most importantly, “root causes” ignores a simple equation: People decide to jump the southern border when federal government policies let them illegally cross and stay for long enough to earn back many times the smuggling fee money they borrowed. When they feel the odds of that happening are high, they come. They stay home when they see they’ll be turned away at the American border or be quickly deported to square one, with nothing to show for the smuggling money fortunes they gambled.
The vice president and her acolytes asked Americans to believe that the vast continuing influx that began right after she and Biden took office was all so very “complex.” During an April 2021 state visit to Central America, the border czar laid blame on “extensive storm damage because of extreme climate.” And kept going.
“We’re looking at drought in a region where agriculture is one of the most traditionally important bases for their economy,” she explained. “We’re looking at what’s happening in terms of food scarcity as a result of that.”
To somehow buy away those bad conditions but never explaining how, when or offering accountability benchmarking, the Biden administration pledged a $3 billion down payment to Central America over four years, including $860.6 million in fiscal year 2022 and $986 million in fiscal year 2023. Harris has boasted of coaxing some American companies to invest in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
But what the root-causes doctrine really does is act as a plausible-sounding cover story for opening the border. At the heart of progressive appreciation for this plausible-sounding strategy was that it would serve not as a complement to American deportation, detention, and deterrence — which cause immigrants to stay home — but as their total replacement. So, while those dollars somehow will rebuild three countries on no particular timeline (a dubious proposition), the Biden administration would leave the border gates open. Americans were told it would all prove out in due time.
But the problem with “due time” is that the European experiment proved that just testing the theory is a generational proposition. To find out, its purveyors would have Americans wait decades for a conclusion at a cost of untold billions of dollars from the national treasury, while foreigners pour across a border left unimpeded. Root-cause conditions certainly exist and encourage poor people everywhere to leave for greener pastures.
But European and American government can never hope to improve these conditions quickly enough to explain the monthly, quarterly, and yearly ebbs and flows of mass rushes and retreats.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/13/root-causes-arent-behind-migrant-surge-its-open-borders/amp/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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20 October, 2022
What the media tell you about illegal-immigrant crime is plain wrong
Media outlets constantly tell us that illegal immigrants have low crime rates — so no need to worry. “Migrants Less Likely to Commit Crimes,” one New York Times headline declares. To them, this somehow justifies not enforcing immigration laws. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas essentially made this argument in his infamous Sept. 30, 2021, memo that greatly curtailed interior enforcement.
Advocates also use their supposed low crime rate to justify releasing illegal immigrants from jails, even after they have been identified. Any local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement will keep immigrants from reporting crimes out of fear of being deported — or so the argument goes.
In fact, the evidence that illegal immigrants have lower crime rates than people born in America and the idea that immigrants don’t report crimes for fear of ICE are likely wrong. And noncooperation with ICE endangers public safety and makes a mockery of our immigration laws.
Let’s first examine the low-crime-rate argument.
It’s not so easy to determine illegal immigrants’ crime rate because most jurisdictions don’t carefully track the immigration status of those convicted or incarcerated. We do know that noncitizens, a large share of whom are illegal immigrants, represent a disproportionate share of federal offenders, but it’s not clear whether this is true at the state and local levels, where most law enforcement takes place.
Texas is an exception. The state’s Department of Public Safety keeps some of the most useful data on criminals’ immigration status, but it’s useful only if researchers understand its limits. In the last few years, widely cited studies by the Cato Institute and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science and a recent Cato update have misinterpreted the Texas DPS data to argue that illegal immigrants have low rates of arrest and conviction.
A new Center for Immigration Studies analysis shows that, when properly understood, Texas DPS data actually show that illegal immigrants have higher conviction rates than the general population for serious crimes such as homicide and sexual assault. (For less serious crimes, it is harder to say.)
The authors of the Cato and PNAS articles don’t appreciate that it typically takes years for DPS to identify convicts as illegal immigrants. As DPS recognizes more of them as illegal immigrants, their share of criminal convictions rises in the data. The figure above illustrates how counting only the illegal immigrants identified upon arrest produces a crime rate lower than the state average, but adding in the illegal immigrants identified while in prison shows the crime rate is actually higher than average.
There are some caveats. Since illegal immigrants are often not identified for years, the number of illegal-immigrant convicts in Texas is still undercounted. This is especially true for those convicted of lesser crimes carrying shorter sentences because they may be released before their status is ever discovered. And illegal-immigrant crime rates in Texas may not be representative of illegal immigrants nationally.
Perhaps most important, the relative crime rate of the illegal-immigrant population is never a reason for local jurisdictions to spurn cooperation with ICE by releasing arrested illegal immigrants before the feds can pick them up. The primary reason they should always cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is simple — doing so gets potentially dangerous people out of the community.
The argument against local law enforcement cooperating with ICE is that immigrants are reluctant to report crimes if they fear deportation. But there is very little actual evidence for this.
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which is specifically designed to measure the public’s willingness to report crimes, shows that immigrants, including noncitizen Hispanics, are actually somewhat more likely to report crimes than the native-born. This is true of immigrants even in the South and outside big cities, where cooperation with ICE is most common. There’s simply no indication local cooperation with ICE leads to less immigrant-crime reporting.
Of course, whatever the illegal-immigrant crime rate might be, it’s always the case that by cooperating with ICE, local jurisdictions both enhance public safety and aid the important national goal of enforcing immigration laws.
Despite all the media coverage to the contrary — Politico made the lower-crime claim just last month — the evidence from Texas suggests illegal immigrants actually have above-average crime rates, at least for the most serious crimes. This is a great reminder that just because the media keep asserting something does not make it so.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/19/what-the-media-tell-you-about-illegal-immigrant-crime-is-plain-wrong/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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19 October, 2022
An aide to Mayor Eric Adams has unleashed on Hizzoner’s ability to handle an influx of illegal migrants from the Texas border that is sending the city “broke.”
As the federal government continues to fly migrants from the border into the “sanctuary city” of New York and Texas Governor Greg Abbott sends busloads every week, “it’s flooded our system,” says City Hall staffer Chris Baugh, who was recorded on hidden camera by undercover journalism outfit Project Veritas.
“I think what Abbott has done has proven effective … We have more people in social services then we have ever had potentially in history.“
Ultimately [the city is] struggling to comply with our own law, the ‘right to shelter’ law.”
Abbott’s determination to keep sending migrants to New York has put Adams in a “perilous” political situation and has catapulted the city toward a $10 billion deficit by 2026, now that “free” federal COVID Money has dried up, Baugh says, in a recording obtained exclusively by The Post.
“We’re asking for it but I don’t think there’s federal help to be offered.
“I don’t think [President Joe] Biden is in a position where he is going to be like, ‘OK New York, here’s a billion dollars.”
Adams has rejected a plan to cap migrants at 20,000, and his staff would have quit if he had limited the numbers, according to Baugh, a member of the mayor’s advance team. “The optics of this are bad for Biden and they’re bad for the mayor. “I think Biden saying I’m going to give away money to New York City because they can’t take care of these migrants is going to be just bad politics for him — and frankly I don’t know how much Biden is going to appreciate a mayor saying, ‘hey you owe blue cities money because of this migrant crisis’.
“Eventually it’s going to make Biden look bad which we’re a month out from the midterms and he’s not going to like that.
“It’s a very perilous situation … and I don’t know that Eric Adams is capable enough to navigate it.”
https://nypost.com/2022/10/18/city-hall-official-admits-nyc-cant-afford-migrant-surge/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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18 October, 2022
White House keeps lid on El Paso’s emergency, addressing ‘optics’ instead of the actual crisis
Sources tell The Post that at least three of the eight members of El Paso’s City Council have been urging Mayor Oscar Leeser to declare a state of emergency over the thousands of illegal migrants dumped on the city daily — but “the White House asked him not to,” Councilwoman Claudia Rodriguez reports Leeser told her weeks ago.
In other words, President Joe Biden and his minions don’t want the embarrassment of a border town declaring an emergency, so they leaned on a fellow Democrat to protect their image.
And never mind the reality. (Then again, this is a prez who insisted inflation was just “transitory,” declared “Our economy is strong as hell” and keeps saying the border is “under control.” Not to mention the “great success” of his Afghanistan bugout.)
The impact of over 62,000 migrants since April, more than 16,000 in September alone, has pushed city services to the breaking point in the Texas town (legal population: 974,000). Yet official data show the feds have only reimbursed El Paso $2 million of the $8 million it’s spent on the migrants so far — and a federal memo says they’ll only cover 30% of the transportation costs to send migrants on their way, and nothing for city workers’ overtime.
New York City (pop. 8 million) has already declared an emergency over just 20,000 or so migrants (half of them bused from El Paso). But Leeser’s been holding off since May, vaguely telling Rodriguez and others that he might act “if things get worse.”
What, other than White House pressure, would have him hold off? (Leeser’s statement on the issue refers to the “crucial” role of the city’s partnership with the feds. Crucial to whom?) Here’s a bet: The White House will relent and let El Paso declare the emergency that’s existed for months after Nov. 8 — or possibly in December, if Georgia’s Senate race heads into a runoff.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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17 October, 2022
El Paso may stop sending migrant buses to NYC over Biden policy change
El Paso’s migrant bus program, which has flooded New York City with thousands of new border arrivals since August, could soon end, an official in the Texas city told The Post.
El Paso Deputy City Manager Mario D’Agostino said the Democrat-led border city may stop busing migrants to the Big Apple in light of the new Biden administration policy that would instead send asylum-seeking Venezuelans back to Mexico if they cross into the US illegally.
“We realize that we won’t need the charters, so at the point, we will start handling it differently,” D’Agostino said.
Migrants from Venezuela have been arriving in El Paso from Mexico in historic numbers, at about 2,100 a day. The migrants — who illegally enter the US, then claim asylum, leading to a lengthy court process — have been making up a vast majority of the immigrants bused to the Big Apple.
At its busing effort’s peak about two weeks ago, El Paso had been sending nine to 14 buses filled with migrants to New York City daily.
But since Biden announced that Venezuelans could be kicked out of the country under the Trump-era Title 42 rules, the bus numbers have dropped to four to eight vehicles daily.
Fewer buses would be welcome news to Big Apple Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat who declared a “state of emergency” earlier this month as he predicted the migrant influx would cost the city $1 billion by next year.
New York City is currently in the midst of controversial plans to build a “tent city” for the migrants on Randall’s Island.
The Post was on the ground in El Paso on Sunday as four charter buses with mostly Venezuelans departed from the city — two bound for New York and two for Chicago, another location El Paso has been sending migrants.
D’Agostino, who is in regular contact with the US Border Patrol and Mexican authorities, said El Paso officials have been told it will take seven to 10 days to see the number of Venezuelans being allowed to stay in the country to drop.
Currently, only some immigrants from Venezuela are being expelled to Mexico, and the criteria for who gets sent back and who gets to stay in the US is still unclear.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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16 October, 2022
Venezuelans expelled from US to Mexico vow to re-enter illegally
A day after Angie Pina was expelled from the U.S. to Mexico under a new rule from President Biden for Venezuelan asylum-seekers, The Post witnessed as she illegally crossed back into America again Saturday.
Pina claims she first stepped foot on US soil on Wednesday morning, before President Biden announced Mexico had agreed to take Venezuelans seeking asylum who had been rejected from the US.
In hopes of discouraging illegal crossings at the border, the Biden Administration announced it will grant 24,000 Venezuelans humanitarian entry if they apply online and arrive via air — rather by crossing the land border as hundreds of thousands have been doing, with El Paso alone recording up to 2,100 migrants in a single day.
Pina was held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in El Paso for a day and a half before she learned she and dozens of other Venezuelan women in the same holding cell would be sent back to Mexico.
“It was a crisis — we were all yelling and sobbing,” she said.
“One lady led us all in prayer, but that’s when reality set in. They never told us why we were being sent back but some Venezuelan men who crossed behind us got to stay.”
Friday, Pina was escorted across one of El Paso’s international bridges and released into Mexico, where a new world of uncertainty awaited.
“I’m a lesbian; I have one month trying to get here and I’m afraid,” the 33-year-old said. “I’ve gone through so much to get here. I’m broke. I try to lift my head up, but I feel like I’m losing strength to go on. I feel like I might as well step in front of a car.”
Pina and other expelled Venezuelans stood outside a Mexican immigration center where they receive basic services — like a place to shower and charge their phones. Early Saturday morning, she told The Post she was considering trying to cross the border again.
“I would like to try again because I can’t go back to Venezuela,” she explained, adding that she is an engineer in her homeland.
“I don’t have money to go back. I left because I have a three-year-old daughter I was unable to provide for because I was constantly discriminated against because of my sexual orientation.”
Other Venezuelans agreed that they too would try to get back into the US, even if that meant turning to dangerous people-smuggling cartels.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/16/venezuelans-expelled-from-the-us-vow-to-re-enter-illegally/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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14 October, 2022
Lies, Damned Lies, and Mayorkas
It’d be a shame if Alejandro Mayorkas resigned. A low-down dirty shame.
On the one hand, it’d be an official acknowledgement by the Homeland Security secretary that he’d failed the American people. And that’s the truth. He has, and disastrously so. But on the other hand, it’d deprive the citizenry of a great civics lesson about the real and proper use of our Constitution’s impeachment remedy — as opposed to its deeply disgraceful and purely political use by Democrats against President Donald Trump.
As if Mayorkas’s months-long border-security malfeasance weren’t impeachable enough, we learned yesterday that he lied about a notorious incident from last September involving Border Patrol agents and illegal immigrants in the border town of Del Rio, Texas. There, agents on horseback were said to have whipped the illegals, and a photograph of the incident purported to show the whipping. Adding fuel to the Left’s fire was the racial component of the story: The agents were white and the illegals being “whipped” were blacks from Haiti.
None of it was true, though. And Mayorkas knew it wasn’t true prior to denouncing the incident as “horrific” shortly after Joe Biden, the man whose job it is to secure our nation’s borders, had said the following:
It was horrible what you saw. To see people treated like they did, horses barely running over, people being strapped — it’s outrageous. I promise you, those people will pay. … There will be consequences. It’s an embarrassment. But beyond an embarrassment, it’s dangerous. It’s wrong. It sends the wrong message around the world. It sends the wrong message at home. It’s simply not who we are.
What a disgrace, this Uniter-in-Chief of ours.
Then came Vice President Kamala Harris: “There needs to be consequences and accountability. Human beings should not be treated that way and as we all know, it also invoked images of the worst moments of our history, where that kind of behavior has been used against indigenous people in our country and used against African-Americans in times of slavery.”
Mayorkas, though, is a coward. He’s a vile, agenda-driven leftist bureaucrat who helped this defamatory lie race around the globe despite having been told in advance of his own presser that the photographer who captured the image had said that the incident was being “misconstrued.”
How do we know this? Because an email from Assistant Secretary of DHS Public Affairs Marsha Espinosa, which was obtained by The Heritage Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act request, makes clear that the agents didn’t whip anybody.
“I didn’t ever see them whip anybody,” photographer Paul Ratje said at the time. “That’s something that can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.” Espinosa even highlighted Ratje’s exculpatory comments in the email to Mayorkas.
“Two and a half hours after receiving that email,” Fox News reports, “Mayorkas joined White House press secretary Jen Psaki at a White House press conference, where he continued to push the narrative: ‘Our nation saw horrifying images that do not reflect who we are. We know that those images painfully conjured up the worst elements of our nation’s ongoing battle against systemic racism,’ Mayorkas said.”
“It clearly shows they are willing to lie to the American people for their self interests,” said National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd. “They withheld facts and anytime you withhold facts from the American people … you should step down from your job. Better men step down. This clearly shows they are not better men.”
No, they’re not better men. One of those men, Joe Biden, no doubt in an attempt to deflect attention from his administration’s smears of our Border Patrol agents, announced that he’s arranged to have some asylum-seeking Venezuelans stay on the Mexican side of the border while their case is adjudicated — or at least through Election Day.
Meanwhile, the chorus calling for Mayorkas to resign is growing louder.
“No,” writes constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley, “it is not because of the record level of border crossing with millions pouring into the country. It is not the obvious lack of confidence of the rank and file officers in Mayorkas. It is not even past controversies like his Orwellian ‘Disinformation Governance Board.’ No, Mayorkas must resign because he betrayed not just his agents but his oath to ‘well and faithfully discharge’ the duties of his office in his handling of the ‘whipping scandal.’”
The professor is right, of course. But we’d just as soon see this guy stick around. If only to properly impeach him.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/92050-lies-damned-lies-and-mayorkas-2022-10-13
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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13 October, 2022
El Paso launches online dashboard to track ongoing migrant crisis
El Paso has launched a new online migrant dashboard as over 60,000 border crossers have passed through the overwhelmed Texas city in the last six months.
The city’s new Migrant Situational Awareness Dashboard provides weekly statistics on the number of migrant encounters reported by federal agencies as well as data on those released into the community and the number of migrants provided services at El Paso’s Migrant Welcome Center.
The new data center was introduced as El Paso has extended an emergency declaration as it struggles to handle its ongoing migrant crisis as people cross the border in record numbers.
According to the city, more than 62,000 people passed through El Paso from April 2022 to mid-September 2022. In September alone, over 13,000 have passed through El Paso — the highest number the city has experienced.
Agents from US Customs and Border Protection are encountering a weekly average of 2,100 migrants per day, data shows. Approximately 70% of the individuals and family units come from Venezuela.
The city has served over 16,600 migrants at its welcome center, where they are given food, water and assistance to get to their desired destination.
The crisis influx has been a major economic burden for El Paso, costing the city as much as $10 million per month, prompting the officials to begin sending migrants to sanctuary cities such as New York and Chicago.
Last month, the City of El Paso was spending $300,000 a day to shelter, feed and send asylum-seeking immigrants to New York City — with the blessing of mayor Eric Adams — as well as Chicago.
City officials said El Paso is chartering nine to 14 buses a day, according to KFOX. The city is expecting $2 million in federal assistance money to help with the situation.
So far this year, the city has chartered travel for over 12,000 migrants — 9,350 bound for New York City and another 2,664 for Chicago, according to the dashboard.
The number of migrants sent to New York City from Democrat-led El Paso is double the number of migrants shipped to the Big Apple by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbot, accounting for 42% of the migrants that have arrived since May.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/12/el-paso-launches-online-dashboard-to-track-migrant-crisis/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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12 October, 2022
Biden Administration's Refusal to Enforce the Border Is Breeding Dangerous Vigilante Sentiment
By Todd Bensman
AUSTIN, Texas — During a recent speech I delivered in early September, two separate members of my audience here in Texas openly voiced a desire to take their firearms to the border and kill illegal immigrants. The two men in my audience had gotten angry with my explanation, during the question and answer part, for why Texas Governor Greg Abbott probably would not be able to legally deport immigrants on state legal authority. One of the men, clearly angry and not quipping, named a particular long-range rifle he thought would work well, as though some thought had gone into this.
As soon as I was alone, I reported what I heard to federal and state law enforcement intelligence.
From my nine years working as an analyst and manager for the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division, I recognized what I’d heard as an indicator of domestic terrorism that had to be reported. The next day, I called around among a community of those who advocate for an end to the current mass migration crisis, the worst in American history. I asked if they too were hearing frustrated Texans speak of a compulsion to murder illegal immigrants.
Two of them told me they’d been hearing that extremist sentiment a lot in recent months. They said it came from the fact that President Joe Biden’s administration fomented and encourages the historic torrent through the state’s border with Mexico and Abbott doesn’t seem willing to stop it.
I feel compelled now to write about this brewing, dangerous extremism in light of recent news that the Hudspeth County, Texas, Sheriff’s Office and the Texas Rangers arrested two brothers from Sierra Blanca, Texas, for opening fire September 27 on a group of 13 illegal immigrants who were drinking from a reservoir just off a highway. Mark and Michael Sheppard, who works as a warden at an area ICE detention facility, face manslaughter charges in the shooting death of one immigrant just south of town and of critically injuring another migrant woman. The suspects claim they thought they were shooting at wild javelinas, a species of wild native pigs. But surviving witnesses told police someone in the truck first yelled out in Spanish, “Come out you sons of bitches, little asses.” Liberal illegal immigration proponents immediately alleged the brothers were domestic terrorists who acted out of racial animus.
The investigation, which at least initially included the FBI, hasn’t revealed an undisputed motivation as of this writing. The brothers deny any intentional wrongdoing and were allowed to bond out of jail.
They are innocent until proven otherwise. But I won’t be surprised to learn, if they are judged to have wittingly shot the immigrants, that frustration with state and federal government motivated the brothers and will motivate others.
Sheena Rodriguez, a proponent of ending the mass migration crisis who spends much time on the border as president of Alliance for a Safe Texas, told me she won’t be surprised either. Something terrible is brewing in the Texas tea.
“I’ve heard that a lot — a lot,” Rodriguez said when I asked her if she’d been hearing frustrated Texans talk of murdering illegal border-crossers. “You get a lot of the comments, people making statements that ‘These are desolate areas and everyone’s got a back hoe and a lot of acreage.’ They will say, ‘People need to strap on guns and go down to the border.’ You know, what they’re trying to say, is that no one will ever know if they go on a killing spree.”
“I think we’re getting to the point where, because the state [of Texas] is limited in what they’re willing to do and the federal government is incentivizing this, that tensions are really high, and people are willing to fill a gap that they feel their state and government are unwilling to do,” Rodriguez said.
Some of the extremist thinking seemed aimed at law enforcement officers who they see welcoming the immigrants in over the border, under orders from above to do so, she said.
“A lot of people on the, quote-unquote right are upset with law enforcement officials, where they’re calling them traitors as though they’re going to fill the gap and go Batman.”
Another advocate who speaks a lot publicly and spends a lot of time along the border also reported hearing Texas residents on the conservative side of the political spectrum speak of taking matters into their own hands with firearms, out of intense frustration that no one will stop the illegal border crossings. This person declined to be interviewed on the record but the stories sounded similar to what I and Rodriguez have picked up.
In my current capacity as a writer, researcher, and speaker about border security, I feel obliged to call out this apparent tilt toward extremist violence in Texas for condemnation and to challenge anyone else who discerns a willingness to murder illegal immigrants to report those intentions immediately to authorities here.
Anyone who favors rational, good-faith border security need not be reminded that violent vigilantism is not part of their movement. But I’ll remind all advocates of border security that they must not only condemn vigilante murder as an option the moment they hear it, but also help law enforcement separate them from the movement — just as mainstream Democrats should have condemned and rooted out Antifa rioters from their movement during nationwide 2020 riots, but never did.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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11 October, 2022
Low Refugee Resettlement Admissions Under Biden: Don’t Point to Trump
Only 25,465 refugees (20 percent of the 125,000 ceiling) were resettled in the United States in FY 2022 (October 1, 2021 to September 30, 2022). Low refugee admissions under the Biden administration are by now expected. And as expected, the Trump administration is being blamed.
In an article and related twitter thread, the CBS News immigration reporter explained why we are seeing low refugee admissions under Biden and relayed the insights of a "top State Department official" on that matter. I’d like to address a number of affirmations made by this anonymous official.
CBS immigration reporter: The main reasons behind low refugee admissions under Biden “is the decimation of the resettlement program under Mr. Trump, whose policies led the non-governmental organizations that assist refugees integrate into American communities to close local offices and lay off staff.”
This is inaccurate. Low refugee admissions under Biden (despite high ceilings) are becoming a trend not because of Trump but because the Biden administration is choosing to prioritize other entry categories and give them the same benefits as resettled refugees.
Federal agencies’ resources are not unlimited. The border crisis and its illegal crossings, along with other new entrants in need of processing and assistance, such as Afghan and Ukrainian parolees, are overwhelming the system and diverting federal resources away from refugees in need of resettlement.
In fact, the mandate of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) keeps expanding, adding both new benefits as well as new beneficiaries. The nine resettlement agencies that are paid by the government to resettle refugees here alongside their hundreds of local affiliates are very much alive, except that they are busy providing services (including placement, support with housing, community orientation, help accessing health services, enrollment in various benefits and welfare programs, employment, etc.) to other populations. The Biden administration has admitted so far around 80,000 Afghan parolees and 100,000 Ukrainian parolees and made them (and those who will follow) eligible for the same services and benefits as resettled refugees.
If, with every crisis it faces (whether it’s the southern border, the Afghan or the Ukrainian ones), the Biden administration is choosing to create alternative pathways to expedite admissions from the countries involved – while redirecting the agencies in charge of helping resettled refugees towards assisting those thousands of new entrants – one should not be surprised if the numbers of resettled refugee admissions under Biden are (and are likely to remain) low.
CBS immigration reporter: The announced FY 2023 ceiling of 125,000 refugees seems “improbable”.
Correct, the Biden administration set the FY 2023 refugee ceiling at 125,000 (similar to FY 2022’s ceiling). But, this ceiling, yet again, will not be reached, as a State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration official told CBS:
We are going to do everything in our power to welcome as many refugees as we can this year [FY 2023], recognizing that 125,000 remains a very ambitious target and it will take some time to get there. (Emphasis added.)
So, can expect 50,000 resettled refugees next year? And, if this administration knows that the ceiling is unattainable, why set it so high to begin with? Back in May 2022, when President Biden raised the refugee ceiling from 15,000 (set by his predecessor) to 62,500, he warned about its unattainability: “The sad truth is that we will not achieve 62,500 admissions this year [FY 2021].”
Do Biden’s refugee ceilings look more like smokescreens aimed at appeasing potential critics than they do actual roadmaps? And if refugee admissions are to remain low next year (if not as low), does this mean that the Biden administration intends to keep opening the door to new categories of people (including those who want, but do not necessarily need, to come to the United States) while continuing to overlook refugees in real need of resettlement?
CBS immigration reporter: There was a sharp increase in refugee admissions in September 2022: 5,546 refugees that month, “an 149% increase from August and the highest monthly total since 2017.”
Correct, but this is common. Almost every September as the fiscal year is coming to its end, admissions skyrocket in a last attempt to reach (or come closer to) that year's ceiling.
The last month of FY 2021, September 2022, saw the admissions of 3,774 refugees (up from 1,363 in August), an increase of 177 percent. The last month of FY 2020, September 2021 saw 2,626 admissions (up from 1,283 in August), an increase of 105 percent. The last month of FY 2019, September 2018 was an exception: 1,944 refugees were admitted down from 3,358 in August. The reason here is because, with 1,944 refugees added that September, FY 2019 30,000 ceiling was reached and those in charge did not need to push for more admissions to try and reach the ceiling. The last month of FY 2018 saw 2,592 admissions vs. 1,685 in August. FY 2017 saw 2,324 refugee admissions in September 2018 (up from 913 admissions in August) – an increase of 154 percent.
CBS immigration reporter: U.S. refugee admissions in FY 2022 increased across all regions from FY 2021.
Well, yes. If you increase refugee admissions from its lowest number since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, admissions across all regions are bound to take place.
In FY 2021, only 11,411 refugees (18 percent of Biden’s announced target of 62,500) were resettled in the United States. These were the lowest refugee admissions since the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980. They are even lower than any year under Trump, including FY 2020, which saw the lowest refugee admissions during that administration (due to travel restrictions and the suspension of the worldwide refugee resettlement program following the Covid-19 pandemic).
Blaming Trump is easy. Somehow, it’ll always fall (or be whispered) into good ears. What the Biden administration needs to clarify is whether the refugee resettlement program (which acts as a lifeline for refugees with urgent needs in their country of refuge) is on their priority list. Or if they’d rather keep designing alternative pathways for other entrants while giving those non-refugees full refugee benefits.
https://cis.org/Rush/Low-Refugee-Resettlement-Admissions-Under-Biden-Dont-Point-Trump
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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10 October, 2022
Contract Suggests Florida to Continue Relocating Illegal Immigrants for Months
A Florida Department of Transportation purchase order shows that the Sunshine State will continue relocating illegal immigrants for at least eight more months.
The purchase order signed at the beginning of September by the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) with Vertol Systems Co., a comprehensive transportation service provider, states that the contract will be executed “until June 30, 2023.”
However, it’s stated in the contract that FDOT could cancel the order if the department finds the company’s performance to be unsatisfactory.
Vertol was retained to provide “transportation-related and humanitarian relocation service to implement a program to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens,” according to FDOT.
“The proposed Services include, but are not limited to, Project management, aircraft, crew, maintenance logistics, fuel, coordination and planning, route preparation, route services, landing fees, ground handling and logistics, and other Project-related expenses,” the contract reads.
The document was first obtained by Sun Sentinel through a public records request.
It shows three tiers in the price schedule: $325,000 per flight for up to eight passengers, $485,000 per flight for up to 25 passengers, and $625,000 per flight for up to 65 passengers.
The total budget for the illegal immigrant relocation program is $12 million.
Vertol completed flights of up to 50 passengers each for Florida on Sept. 7 and Sept. 15 and requested payment of $615,000.
NYC Declares Emergency
President Joe Biden has been employing a de facto “open border” policy since he took office.
It has caused huge numbers of illegal immigrants to enter the United States without many difficulties.
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported that their agents made more than 2 million apprehensions at the southern border this fiscal year until August—up by 24 percent from the previous fiscal year.
Texas and Florida, two states governed by Republicans, have begun to relocate illegal immigrants to high-profile Democratic cities or places.
Destinations that Texas chose include New York and Vice President Kamala Harris’s neighborhood in Washington. Florida has sent 48 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, where former President Barack Obama bought a mansion in 2019.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott bused illegal immigrants to a location near Harris’s Washington residence after the vice president said the border is secure.
New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, declared an “asylum seeker state of emergency” on Oct. 7, citing the surge in the inflow of bused illegal immigrants from other states.
Adams called for the federal and state government to grant emergency aid to handle the continued influx of asylum-seekers, which may cost the city $1 billion in the current fiscal year.
“With more than 17,000 asylum seekers bussed to the city since the spring, the Adams administration estimates that once the asylum seekers from today’s buses are provided shelter, the city will surpass the highest number of people in recorded history in its shelter system,” New York City Hall said in a statement. “If the pace continues, the city’s shelter census will surpass 100,000 in the coming year.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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9 October, 2022
Feds sent dozens of unaccompanied migrant children to NY "sanctuary city"
Hours after Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency over the ongoing flood of migrants into the Big Apple, airplanes carrying dozens of unaccompanied teen asylum seekers arrived in New York with little to no advance notice.
Two planes each carrying about 24 unaccompanied minors arrived at Orange County Airport in Montgomery around 6 p.m. Friday, County Executive Steve Neuhaus said.
Upon landing, the kids were put on shuttle buses and sent to locations in New York City, Kingston and Poughkeepsie, according to Neuhaus. Both the buses and flights were chartered by the feds.
Neuhaus, a Republican, told The Post Saturday he believes the Biden administration needs to do a much better job managing the ongoing crisis and be more transparent about its relocation operations.
“It has been absolutely wild, he said. “I have never seen anything like this.”
He said both the county airport and nearby Stewart International Airport in New Windsor had earlier received additional planeloads of migrant passengers with little warning or help from the feds.
https://nypost.com/2022/10/08/feds-send-child-migrants-to-ny-after-adams-emergency-declaration/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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7 October, 2022
Enriched by Loose US Immigration Policies, Mexican Cartels Are Now Global Enterprises
The extensive criminal and political power of Mexican cartels is a topic largely ignored by the American media and thus unknown to most Americans. Strengthened and enriched by the Biden administration's border crisis, the cartels have evolved into global criminal enterprises impacting America through epidemic levels of drug overdoses, human smuggling and trafficking, and increased risks to public safety and national security.
"Parsing Immigration Policy" brings together two terrorism and border authorities to discuss the powerful Mexican cartels and their new business model, which has made them a clear national security threat to the United States. Todd Bensman, the Center’s senior national security fellow, is joined by Jaeson Jones, an expert on Mexican cartels and a retired Captain from the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Division.
Jones says the cartels have diversified their business model and now make more money from human trafficking than from narcotics. They have turned human smuggling (which is voluntary) into human trafficking by the widespread use of debt bondage, allowing them to control migrants living all over the U.S. for years after they have crossed the border.
Jones describes how cartels have taken advantage of the Biden administration's border policies to earn billions of dollars a year – one estimate puts it at $13 billion. This money allows them to bribe more people, buy more military-grade weapons, and expand their international empires.
Jones explains his view that the United States should declare the Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations so the federal government can go after more of their money and prevent their use of air travel. He will unveil a Threat Assessment on October 16 that will include recommendations for winning the battle against the cartels.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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6 October, 2022
Federal appeals court rules Obama-era DACA program illegal, buts says 600,000 already in US can stay
A federal appeals court determined that the Obama administration didn't have the authority to institute the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program but declined to dismantle it, allowing more than 600,000 immigrants to continue to enjoy its protections.
The 5th U.S. Circuit ordered a review of new changes by the Biden administration to DACA, telling a Texas federal judge to review the program.
A three judge panel from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that while the Obama administration lacked the authority to create the immigration policy which affects over 600,000 people, it didn't dismantle the program, and people can continue benefiting from the policy.
The panel ruled that the U.S. government cannot process new applicants for individuals seeking DACA benefits.
"A district court is in the best position to review the administrative record in the rulemaking proceeding and determine whether our holdings as to the 2012 DACA Memorandum fully resolve issues concerning the Final Rule," the opinion states.
Several Republican-led states are suing the U.S. government, arguing that they are being harmed financially by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on services such as education and health care for people who are being allowed to stay in the U.S. illegally.
The Biden administration presented changes to DACA in August which were open to public comments, but don't contain substantial modifications to the Obama-era policy and are pointed at legal challenges in relation to the program.
The rule would begin on Oct. 31.
In July 2021, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that DACA was illegal and said that it wasn't put through public notice and comment, which is a requirement by the federal Administrative Procedures Act.
When President Biden took office in 2021, he signed a memo aiming to protect DACA and ordered the Department of Homeland Security to take "all appropriate actions under the law" to protect the program.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that he's disappointed by the ruling.
"I am deeply disappointed by today’s DACA ruling and the ongoing uncertainty it creates for families and communities across the country. We are currently reviewing the court’s decision and will work with the Department of Justice on an appropriate legal response," Mayorkas said.
"As a result of the stay that remains in place, no one who currently has DACA will lose their protection from removal or work authorization. Consistent with that stay, DHS will continue to accept the filing of both initial and renewal DACA applications, but will process only the DACA renewal requests."
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 October, 2022
DHS Revokes Trump-Era Asylum Reforms That Were Tied Up in Court
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently canceled reforms made in 2020 to modernize the asylum system. The regulations reflected the substantial increase in "credible fear" claims made at the border in recent years, and were intended to discourage illegal entry and to reduce incentives for aliens to file frivolous or fraudulent asylum applications merely to obtain work authorization. DHS revoked the crisis-mitigating reforms without exploring alternatives, such as reissuance, that could preserve the reforms without engaging the legal issues found by the federal courts.
DHS published a final rule last month to revoke the reform regulations issued by the Trump administration that were vacated by a Federal district court in February 2022. DHS’s rule removed all reforms made by Removal of 30-Day Processing Provision for Asylum Applicant-Related Form I-765 Employment Authorization Applications (Timeline Repeal rule) and Asylum Application, Interview, and Employment Authorization for Applicants (Broader Asylum EAD rule). Both rules went into effect in August 2020.
In the recent final rule, DHS said that because the rule merely implements the vacatur and restores the original regulatory text before the 2020 policy changes, DHS is not required to go through a notice-and-comment rulemaking process or delay the final rule's effective date. DHS also claimed to have good cause to skip usually mandatory notice and comment procedures, claiming that it was in the public interest to immediately replace the 2020 regulatory text with the version on the books before the Trump administration finalized the rules.
What Was in the Regulations DHS Revoked? Notably, the 2020 Broader Asylum EAD rule extended the waiting period before asylum applicants may apply for an EAD from 180 days to 365 days. The Immigration and Nationality Act prohibits USCIS from issuing EADs any earlier than 180 days from the date an alien files an asylum application for the very purpose of discouraging the filing of fraudulent or frivolous applications for the sole purpose of receiving an EAD. Because of the extreme increase in credible fear claims made at the border in the past decade, and corresponding growing backlog, aliens are nearly guaranteed to receive work permits in the United States.
Additionally, the Broader Asylum EAD rule required asylum applicants to submit biometrics with their EAD application. It also prohibited asylum applicants with certain serious criminal convictions and who failed to file for asylum within one year of entry into the United States, consistent with the statutory one-year bar to asylum. To curtail the border crisis, the rule barred aliens who had illegally entered the United States, rather than entering lawfully through a port of entry on the border, from work authorization (but not asylum) eligibility while their asylum applications were pending. (Aliens with approved asylum applications would be able to work, and with the “last in, first out” processing USCIS employed at the time, applicants would not be forced to wait long for a decision.)
The 2020 Timeline Repeal rule, on the other hand, removed the outdated regulatory requirement that USCIS adjudicate an asylum EAD application within 30 days. This regulatory deadline was enacted by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1994, and does not account for the current volume of applications and types of fraud handled by USCIS in recent years. As a result, the outdated deadline forced USCIS to devote substantial agency resources to quickly turning out EADs for asylum applicants ahead of other urgent tasks.
To address legal challenges to the Timeline Repeal rule, Secretary Mayorkas ratified the rule in May 2021. The rule had been challenged in a Maryland federal court on the basis that former Acting Secretary Chad Wolf, leading DHS at the time of issuance, lacked the authority to issue the rule because he had not been confirmed to office by the Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution.
Why Were the Rules Vacated? On February 7, 2022, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia vacated both rules in a case called Asylumworks v. Mayorkas, No. 20-CV-3815, 2022 WL 355213 (D.D.C.). The court ruled that Mayorkas could not legally ratify regulations issued by Wolf, and therefore that ratification of the DHS Timeline Repeal rule did not cure the defect that Wolf's tenure created.
These Crisis-Mitigating Reforms Could Have Still Been Salvaged. The federal court ruling did not require DHS to “abandon ship”. Even if the District court is correct that 2020 regulations may not be ratified by Mayorkas, this decision does not prevent DHS from reissuing these regulations. While generally regulations take numerous months, and oftentimes years, to complete, the work for these regulations has already been largely completed. Data and administrative histories would have to be updated, but the text has already been negotiated between the government’s stakeholder offices. Additionally, the general public is unlikely to submit drastically new arguments in support of or against the rule during the public comment period. DHS’s refusal to continue to defend or simply reissue the rules signals a larger issue regarding the administration’s willingness to solve this crisis with reforms aimed at deterrence.
https://cis.org/Jacobs/DHS-Revokes-TrumpEra-Asylum-Reforms-Were-Tied-Court
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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4 October, 2022
Dangerous Afghans
The Biden administration has failed significantly in bringing Afghan evacuees into the country after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
According to a new inspector general’s report from the Department of Homeland Security, the administration had no contingency plans to support emergency operations, no proper vetting procedures for refugees, and no standardized policies.
Because of this, the report concludes: “DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”
President Joe Biden, who ironically refers to the processing of Afghan refugees as “Operation Allies Welcome,” likely allowed some of the nation’s enemies to infiltrate the U.S.
The lack of intelligence available about Afghan evacuees directly correlates with Biden’s removal of America’s presence from Afghanistan. The withdrawal of U.S. forces resulted in a power vacuum that quickly was filled by the Taliban.
Thousands of Afghans sought to flee their country and the U.S. immediately put them on planes and brought 79,000 of them, inadequately vetted, straight to the interior of our country. All of this was orchestrated, regardless of the fact that a lack of an American footprint in Afghanistan equates to a lack of intelligence and verification on the ground there.
Much like what happened in former President Barack Obama’s Syrian migrant fiasco, the Biden administration is cutting corners to “streamline” the vetting process in the same way.
Then-FBI Director James Comey, referring to Iraqis and Syrians accused of terrorism-related crimes making it into the U.S., said: “There’s no doubt that was the product of a less than excellent vetting.”
“If we don’t know much about somebody, there won’t be anything in our data,” Comey added. “I can’t sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that there’s no risk associated with this.”
As inadequate as the security vetting is for applicants seeking refuge, it is better than the vetting that Border Patrol agents are able to do with the millions of illegal aliens crossing our southern border. The influx of illegal migrants in the past 18 months has resulted in 81 individuals on the U.S. terrorism watchlist being encountered at the border.
In previous years, when border security actually was enforced, fewer than five encounters occurred with individuals on the terrorism watchlist.
“The sharp rise in apprehensions of the watchlisted individuals coincides with a significant rise in overall border encounters,” according to the Border Patrol.
Because the Biden administration has compromised border resources, the nation’s domestic security also is compromised. Reports suggest that nearly 1 million “got-aways” are roaming the country, unvetted, undocumented, and possibly dangerous.
According to Department of Homeland Security sources, that is over 55,000 “got-aways” every month.
Appallingly, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre recently stated that illegal immigrants are not simply walking across the southern border, even though media footage tells another story. Border Patrol agents were quick to respond, asking: “How out of touch can this administration possibly be? Well, I guess this is a new level.”
Expressing disbelief, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said of Jean-Pierre on his podcast: “There are two and only two possibilities … either she is deliberately ignorant—she has no idea what’s happening at the border—or she’s deliberately lying. There’s not a third possibility. It is one or the other.”
Cruz went on to invite Jean-Pierre and Biden to the southern border at any time of the day to witness rampant illegal crossings.
“You can pick any damn hour of the day you want,” the Texas Republican said. “You can come at 2 in the morning, you can come at noon. You will see them coming because they are coming every single hour.”
Not long after, the White House press secretary clapped back, saying that she had been to the border before and didn’t need “lectures or invitations from Republicans about the border or border policy.”
Clearly, the White House can’t make solving Biden’s border crisis a bipartisan effort.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas insists that the southern border is secure. On the record, he has stated this multiple times; each time, it has been a downright lie.
The fact that our southern border is open and unsecured is not and never should be a right versus left or conservative versus liberal issue. It is simply a fact.
Securing the border is a “historic challenge,” Mayorkas said. This was a rare moment of truth and transparency from the homeland security secretary.
However, border security has been historically challenging only because of the Biden administration’s dismantling of the Trump administration’s border policies.
In fact, Biden even disposed of Obama-era border policies, such as the routine removal of illegal aliens who pose national security threats and who obstructed immigration controls through visa fraud, identity fraud, and illegal reentry, or who didn’t leave when legally instructed to do so.
Because of the removal of sensible border policies, over 2 million encounters with illegal aliens have occurred at the border since fiscal year 2022 began Oct. 1, 2021. The year also saw over 20,000 searches and rescues, over 25,000 encounters with previously convicted criminal illegal aliens, over 400 pounds of fentanyl seized, over 600 apprehensions of known gang members, over 300 apprehensions of individuals on the terrorism watchlist, and over 3,000 weapons and ammunitions seizures.
The recidivism rate for illegal reentry is 27%, a higher rate than in the previous six years.
However shocking these statistics may be, Biden’s border crisis is much worse. These statistics represent what is known. What is statistically unknown is the true amount of illegal aliens within the U.S. interior, the actual amount of life-threatening drugs smuggled into the U.S., how many gang- and terrorist-affiliated individuals are in the U.S., and just how high the recidivism reentry rate truly is.
When the southern border is as unsecured and porous as it is now, there is no possible way to gauge the actual number of illegal aliens within the U.S. at any time, nor is there a way to gauge crime associated with illegal aliens.
It needs to be noted that Biden’s self-made border crisis was never only his. It belongs to all American citizens. The onslaught of illegal immigration has drained public funds, raised taxes, and created more competition for jobs.
Legal immigration does the exact opposite; in fact, it allows for the flourishing of western society via a robust economy. That is why Biden’s open-border policies burden only those who are legally and rightfully citizens of the U.S. These policies also disincentivize individuals who were eager to enter America legally but decided not to, based on Biden’s message: The border is open, come as you wish, and we will take care of you.
Mayorkas, as homeland security secretary, has not upheld his oath to protect America from foreign enemies, nor has he defended the tenets of the Constitution or the laws of the U.S. He, along with others in the Biden administration, has done the complete opposite.
The purposeful dismantling of the concept of border security, coupled with direct assistance to illegal aliens from taxpayers and allowing unvetted Afghans into the country, proves one thing: Biden and Mayorkas have compromised the security of the U.S. and may be the biggest known threats to the homeland.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 October, 2022
Illegal Immigration Continues at a Blistering Pace in August
CBP released its latest numbers this week on Border Patrol apprehensions at the Southwest border for August. Those statistics reveal that illegal entries continued on a blistering pace last month, during a time of year when they should be falling. Worse is the news that expulsions of illegal entrants under CDC orders issued pursuant to Title 42 of the U.S. Code in response to the Covid-19 pandemic have fallen to their lowest level of the Biden administration. Biden feared two million illegal entrants, and those fears have become reality.
Apprehensions. Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended 181,160 illegal entrants in August, a .03 percent decline (605 apprehensions) from July. In prior years, there has been a significant drop as summer rolls on and the weather heats up at the border, but while there has been a slight decline in apprehensions of late, a major decrease has largely failed to materialize in the last three months.
(Some media reports may have slightly higher numbers because they include aliens with no right to enter the U.S. who were "encountered" at ports of entry; the numbers in the post are only those who crossed illegally between ports of entry and were "encountered" by the Border Patrol.)
Last month also marked the second-largest number of apprehensions at the Southwest border for the month of August in history (records go back to FY 2000). The largest number of apprehensions at the line? Last August, when agents apprehended more than 196,500 illegal entrants. When the only improvement in Biden’s performance at the border is compared to his own horrid track record, there are problems.
That said, expect the administration to trumpet these numbers as proof that it has “turned the corner” on bringing control to the Southwest border. Don’t believe it. The latest August numbers simply add to what was already a record number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico line in FY 2022, boosting total Border Patrol “encounters” there to 2,231 short of two million.
By way of comparison, the pre-Biden record for Southwest border apprehensions was set in FY 2000, when agents nabbed just less than 1.644 million. That dubious record was set more than a year before Congress beefed up security at the border in response to the September 11th terrorist attacks.
Biden’s Worst Border Fear. A month before he was sworn in, in December 2020, Biden vowed to "keep his pledge to roll back” what he termed “the Trump administration's restrictive asylum policies”, but cautioned that he would do so “at a slower pace than he initially promised, to avoid winding up with '2 million people on our border.'”
He instead almost immediately ditched his predecessor’s successful border policies, and rather than implementing promised “guardrails” on the border to keep apprehensions low, he broke with all of the former occupants of the Oval Office and abandoned deterrence of illegal entrants as a border strategy.
Consequently, more than two weeks into September, apprehensions have already easily surpassed the two-million migrant mark President-elect Biden claimed he feared. He has plainly gotten comfortable with the whole thing in the interim, however, because he shows no signs of changing his dreadful border policies.
Keep in mind, however, that CBP’s apprehension statistics do not include an estimated half-million-plus “got-aways”, illegal entrants who have successfully evaded agents and entered the United States illegally. Adding in those numbers brings the total to at least 2.5 million, roughly 150 percent more people than live in the president’s home state of Delaware.
Drop in Title 42 Expulsions. The sole Trump policy at the border that Biden kept in place was Title 42, which was actually a public-health, not a border, policy per se. In the early spring, however, Biden announced that he would be ending those CDC expulsion orders, too, on May 23, only to be rebuffed in this effort by a federal district court judge who enjoined that decision on May 20.
Even though that injunction remains in effect, the number of illegal entrants who were apprehended by Border Patrol and expelled under Title 42 has plummeted. In August, just 71,122 illegal entrants caught by agents at the Southwest border — fewer than 40 percent of the total number of apprehended aliens — were expelled under those CDC orders.
That is the lowest monthly total of Border Patrol expulsions under the Biden administration, trailing even February 2021 — Biden’s first full month in office — when 72,318 of the 97,643 migrants (74 percent) stopped by agents at the Southwest border were expelled. So much for respect for the federal judiciary.
The Effects Republican governors have been pushing the formerly overlooked humanitarian disaster at the Southwest border into the headlines by transporting small numbers of migrants (fewer than 13,000 at last count) who were apprehended at the border and released by DHS into sanctuary jurisdictions.
That effort seems to be having an effect. In a recent NBC News poll of 1,000 registered voters conducted between September 9 and 13, 27 percent of respondents stated that the United States is headed in the right direction, compared to 68 percent who believed it was “off on the wrong track”.
When asked why they believed the country was on the wrong track, 16 percent said that it was because of “border control/illegal immigration”, tied for the second leading reason with “divided nation/political division”. Not surprisingly, “economy/inflation” was in the top spot among those who believe that the United States is headed south, with 41 percent identifying it as the reason for the nation’s ills.
Notably, illegal immigration and the border came out ahead of “Joe Biden” and “gas prices” (tied at 14 percent of wrong-track respondents ), “crime/violence/killings” (13 percent), and “women’s reproductive rights debate” (5 percent).
The November midterm congressional elections are just weeks away, and the president’s fellow Democrats likely wish the border would just go away. The latest CBP apprehension statistics reveal, however, that the border disaster is going nowhere fast. Odds of a GOP wipeout are diminishing, but if Republicans can capture one or both chambers, (1) immigration will be a leading issue why, and (2) Biden will likely be forced to erect his promised “guardrails” on the border, whether he wants to or not.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Illegal-Immigration-Continues-Blistering-Pace-August
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 October, 2022
Biden’s open borders will cost taxpayers $100 billion — and counting
It’s good that the average household income in Martha’s Vineyard is $133,000 a year because, hoo-boy, the illegal immigrants who arrived there from Florida this week are going to cost taxpayers a bundle. Over their lifetimes, all the illegal immigrants Biden has so far added to the United States will cost us about $100 billion.
Immigrants don’t create such a large cost for taxpayers because they’re bad or lazy. Immigrants, legal or illegal, are just regular people trying to make it through the day. But their relatively low level of education means the kinds of jobs they can get don’t pay much. That in turn means they pay relatively little in taxes and use more in government services.
The costs at the state level come mainly from children in illegal immigrant-headed households using Medicaid and enrolling in public schools, plus births to illegal-immigrant mothers. Florida alone spent an estimated $1.6 billion in 2019 on public schooling for children from illegal immigrant-headed families — and the number of such students has certainly increased since then.
But immigrants, even illegal ones, also pay taxes. So what’s the bottom line?
The congressionally chartered National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine looked at this question in 2016. Using their numbers, we estimate the lifetime cost to taxpayers of an illegal border-crosser is $75,000 — that’s services used minus taxes paid.
We also estimate that since Biden’s inauguration, the illegal-immigrant population has increased by at least 1.35 million. When you multiply the two numbers, you get a lifetime fiscal cost of the illegals Biden has let in so far at more than $100 billion.
And he has two years to go in the White House.
Nobody voted for this. Candidate Biden implicitly acknowledged that today’s situation would be unacceptable when he pledged to put up “guardrails” to make sure his rollback of Trump’s policies didn’t result in “2 million people on our border.” Sure enough, this year we’re going to have more than 2 million “encounters” of illegal border-crossers (though not all get in). Where is the debate over this? Vice President Harris is supposed to be the border czar, and yet brooks no discussion of the border crisis. The administration basically ignores the pressure its border policies put on the public purse and sticks the states and cities — Texas and New York, Del Rio and Martha’s Vineyard — with the cost.
The solution to this is not to somehow wall off immigrants from the welfare system. We tried something like that back in the 1996 welfare-reform act, placing what were billed as strict limits on even legal immigrant use of welfare.
It was a failure. Whatever the overall impact of welfare reform, within five years the rate of immigrant welfare use bounced right back up to where it was before the law.
The fact is a civilized society is not going to let children starve or old people die on the steps of the emergency room, even if they’re illegal immigrants.
The answer, then, has to be to keep out people likely to be a burden on taxpayers. As far back as the 1600s, colonial Massachusetts prohibited the settlement of people unlikely to be able to support themselves. That was the start of what in the law is called the “public charge” doctrine — only people who can carry their own weight should be let in.
As you can imagine, the Biden administration has little interest in keeping welfare-users out of the country, as seen in a recent rule rolling back Trump-era restrictions on welfare use by legal immigrants. But illegal immigrants aren’t supposed to be here at all and aren’t even eligible for most welfare programs, and they still cost taxpayers a bundle, mainly because of their kids.
That means if you want to limit the costs to taxpayers, you have to keep illegal immigrants out of the country in the first place. Unfortunately for us, the Biden administration is the first in history to have an official policy of not deterring illegal immigration.
As a result, there are now a record 8,000 illegal-immigrant “encounters” on the southern border per day. And that could rise to as many as 18,000 a day if the Title 42 public-health order is lifted, which the White House is trying to do.
And you’ll be stuck with the bill.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/16/bidens-open-borders-will-cost-taxpayers-100-billion/
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.
The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:
1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.
2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.
3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.
4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.
5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.
6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.
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