SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others. Actually, the motive is more than altruism. They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage. But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.
California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count. They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line. Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky. For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.
The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat. Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed. With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.
Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power. Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!
You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.
William Barr at a press conference on Feb.11 announcing court filings against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey.
“All the indications are that this treasonable inflammation – ‘secessionitis’ – keeps on making steady progress week-by-week. If disunion becomes an established fact, we have one consolation. The self-amputated members were diseased beyond immediate cure and their virus will infect our system no longer.” — George Templeton Strong in his diary as Southern states voted to leave the union in 1861.
George Templeton Strong
Once again, we are replaying the scene in the immediate aftermath of the presidential election of 1860. Local and state entities, under the spell of radical multiculturalism, have decided shortly after the election of Donald Trump to effectively negate federal immigration law in their jurisdictions. “Sanctuary” cities and states have taken the place of South Carolina and the ten other Southern states of 1860-1. This time, the sanctuaries’ target is immigration law and not the tariff or the spread of slavery. Attorney General William Barr, like Lincoln before him, has decided to reign in the “diseased members”, in Strong’s words, by announcing federal court action against California, King County, Wa., and New Jersey for inhibiting federal enforcement of immigration law. Barr’s press conference was the equivalent of Lincoln’s call for volunteers after the firing on Ft. Sumter.
Hurray, it’s finally on!
The sham logic of the seceding jurisdictions goes something like this: we need to maintain the cooperation of immigrant neighborhoods by not assisting federal immigration authorities as we enforce our laws, so we will ignore Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996. Section 287(g) empowers state and local authorities to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with federal criminal violations. One of the sheriff’s elected in 2018 with the support of $175,000 from the ACLU was Gary McFadden in Mecklenburg County, NC. He crowed on election night, “287(g) is going to be history!”
McFadden runs for Mecklenburg County sheriff with the support of Maxine Waters (D, Ca.)
Leftists like McFadden use rationales that are invented to hide a real purpose, which in this case is the goal of advancing the idea of a nation of disjointed tribes (radical multiculturalism). Immigration law stands in the way of bringing about this utopia – or dystopia in reality.
If you think about it, the rationale succeeds at reaching new heights of silliness. Why single out immigration law for this exclusive treatment? The same logic could apply to federal larceny, counterfeiting, contraband, and kidnapping suspects who were taken into custody by local authorities on state charges. Illegal immigrants are by definition lawbreakers and are preternaturally nervous whenever ICE officers appear anywhere for anything. Whether it’s the receipt of stolen identities, drug dealing, the kidnapping of an adolescent girl across state lines, or nothing, by an “undocumented” neighbor, the rest of the “undocumented” will concentrate on remaining under the fed’s radar. The “woke” localists’ reasoning is actually a call for an abandonment of all federal law anywhere a large concentration of illegal immigrants exists. And we have massive concentrations of millions of the “undocumented” (10-22 million, anyone’s guess) since the spigot of immigration – legal and illegal – was first thrown wide open in 1965.
Migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. (photo: Photo: AP / US Customs and Border Protection)
The secessionists hang their hat on their interpretation of 287(g) as “voluntary”. Voluntary or no, a state or local government can’t inhibit the federal government from carrying out its constitutional powers. Court rulings have protected state and local governments from being forced to financially support a federal responsibility. But when does “voluntary” and “not being forced” stray into interference? Do these jurisdictions generally withhold cooperation with other local jurisdictions, other than the federal government on immigration law? Are the costs for holding a local suspect for violations of federal law so burdensome? In a federated republic, like ours, the police powers are shared; therefore, law enforcement in a governmental arrangement of overlapping layers ipso facto mandates the incurring of costs of cooperation since criminal activity strays across the nation and levels of government. Call it the costs of doing business in a federated republic.
In the end, we are left with radical left-wing localities and states who have in effect nullified federal immigration law as if they have the power to pick and choose the federal government’s constitutional powers that they will recognize. They refuse to share information and release suspects before the feds can get their hands on them. The behavior goes beyond the exercise of state and local sovereignty and into blocking the enforcement of federal law.
Segregationists of the old South would be proud. No state or local government has the power to act as if the 14th Amendment or federal immigration law has been repealed. The costs of intergovernmental cooperation aren’t burdensome when they are limited to briefly holding suspects or sharing information. It’s nonsense to conclude that any cost is the equivalent of the forceful conscription of local government for the benefit of the feds. Otherwise, we are the United Nations General Assembly and not the United States of America.
“Approaching the fowl with stalking-horse”, an 1875 illustration. (en.wikipedia.org)
Stalking horse: noun; a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions. (Oxford Dictionary)
In the context of the verbal brawl that occurs in today’s America, the eagerness for gun control and large-scale immigration is a stalking horse for deeper and mostly urban cultural trends. The popularity of gun control takes place in the urban womb of government services. Think of it as mass infantilization. Nearly unrestrained immigration is fashionable in districts whose knowledge of immigrants is limited to the domestic help of the cheap nanny, housekeeper, and landscaper. Do you really think that they ever venture into the blighted neighborhoods that the hired help retreats into after work? Ignorance of guns and the actual lives of immigrants plagues our cultural “betters” in our cities and their academic playgrounds, and ironically informs (“informs”, maybe a bad choice of words) their political enthusiasms.
In May of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker (D, NJ) called for national gun registration.In August, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed the willingness to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. (Washington Examiner)
What brought this personal reflection to mind was Michael Lind’s piece in American Affairs, “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise” (Summer 2018, Vol. II, Number 2).
The article is about the large scale social, economic, and political trends mostly affecting native blue collar workers. In it, Lind makes the point that nearly unfettered immigration has led to the evisceration of native low-skilled and blue collar workers, no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds. He writes, “… globalization, operating mainly through corporate-orchestrated labor arbitrage—in the form of offshoring jobs to foreign workers or importing immigrants to compete with native workers—weakened the bargaining power of immobile native workers in the developed democracies.” Do you think that the loss of bargaining power for the native lower-skilled worker crossed the minds of upper-middle-to-upper-class urbanites? For them, it’s simply a matter of compassion and nannies.
Victorina Morales, undocumented worker at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
Also, I must admit that it could be something more sinister. For everyone else outside their pampered social circles, though, massive immigration had a devastating effect.
Think of it this way: open borders is a stalking horse for gutting the power and influence of the hoi polloi, knowingly or unknowingly. Regarding the stalking horse of gun control, it’s a matter of everyone being forced to adopt an urban lifestyle with its norms, expectations, and requisite politically correct views, no matter its unfitness for folks outside the suburban/urban bubbles.
A group of migrants gather at the Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana, Mexico, Sunday, Nov. 25, 2018, as they try to pressure their way into the U.S. Rodrigo Abd/AP
The citizenship question should be on the ballot, and please don’t psychoanalyze repressed racism as is the wont of the pseudo-Freudians in the Democratic presidential field. It’s simply a matter of pure reason. However, there’s more to the story according to John Yoo (UC Berkeley law professor) and James Phillips (Stanford law professor). They see a silver lining in the Supreme Court’s decision (Dept. of Commerce v. New York) blocking the inclusion of the citizenship question for those concerned about rule by unelected administrative apparatchiks (“Roberts Thwarted Trump, but the Census Ruling Has a Second Purpose”, The Atlantic, see here).
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts and Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan listen during U.S. President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., January 30, 2018. REUTERS/Win McNamee/Pool/File Photo – RC183E07BA00
First, pure reason dictates the presence of the question. The Democrats’ lollapalooza of giveaways includes the extension of benefits to citizens of other nations in residence here, legal and illegal. How could you determine the fiscal impact of the lunacy if you can’t count the beneficiaries? Mayor Pete (Buttigieg) pulls 11 million out of the hat for the undocumented alone. MIT says its more like 22 million. A range of double means that we don’t know. Though, who would you trust for scientific rigor, Mayor Pete or MIT?
Mayor Pete
An additional reason cries for the inclusion of the query. I suspect that the foreign-born make up a huge slice of the population. If you want a data base on the nature of the current population for policy reasons – which is one of the reasons for having a census – to exclude a descriptor that stares at you as you drive through almost any hamlet, town, or city in California (and Chicago, New York City, etc., etc.) would limit the census to only being a tool to inflate Democrat representation in Congress. Get real, ferret out the non-citizens and their status.
Secondly, Yoo and Phillips see a positive in the Court’s majority opinion for those with qualms about omnicompetent administrative governance, particularly the promiscuous delegation of Congressional authority to the president and his administrative minions. Since Wilson and FDR, it has been the dream of “progressives” to supplant popular sovereignty with the rule of “experts”, never mind that the rule of experts can resemble the rule of Boss Tweed (“collusion” anyone?). The decision could be interpreted as a slap at “Chevron deference” (courts deferring to administrative judgment) and power-hungry power centers like the EPA.
If we still are prevented from knowing much about the people who are flooding into our country, at least we might be comforted by the realization that the EPA can’t kick us out of our house.
Read the Yoo and Phillips article.
RogerG
Postscript: On Friday, 7/12/2019, Pres. Trump issued an executive order to use other data bases to determine residency status of the population for the 2020 census. Expect more lawsuits in attempts to obscure the actual number.
On Jan. 30, 2017, CNN’s Jake Tapper was critical of White House spokesman Sean Spicer’s words in describing Trump’s executive order restricting some Muslim immigrants.
We are not well-served by our telegenic punditry class on cable TV nor our increasingly demagogic hucksters running for high office in order to gain power to tell us what to do. Particularly irksome is the collection of verbiage to avoid using “illegal immigrant” to refer to those who crossed our borders in violation of our laws. The rhetorical gymnastics are astounding, and misleading.
A favorite euphemism is the phrase “the undocumented”, meaning those “without papers”. Yes, in a superficial sense, these words work. Even “illegal immigrant” works, but all have an important ingredient missing. What’s absent is any indication that the objects of the phraseology are citizens. Yes, they are “citizens”, but not of here. These people are the citizens of other countries. They are not stateless people.
Central American migrants attempt to rush the border fence between Tijuana and San Diego and are dispersed with tear gas by the Border Patrol, 2018.
Putting it all together: “the undocumented” are citizens of other countries who willingly broke our laws to reside in our nation. The fact that they are the citizens of other countries puts the issue of what to do with them in an entirely new light.
So, extending universal health insurance coverage as some have proposed, subsidized by American citizens, to citizens of Guatemala (or any country for that matter) in our country in violation of our laws is an invitation for them to get here by any means available and partake of our fantastic medical professionals and facilities. American citizens get the honor of paying for the healthcare of Guatemala citizens. If the point is to rub away the distinction between foreign citizens and American ones, the idea accomplishes the feat in a quick stroke.
Patients wait to be seen in the emergency room of an LA hospital, 2012.
Trump’s citizenship question might have to be reworded. He’ll have to replace “United States” in front of “citizen” with “world” since U.S. citizens, functioning as taxpayers, become the world’s taxpayers for the world’s needy. Thus, “Are you a world citizen?”
I present the point not as mere sarcasm. If your concern is the treatment of a bleeding Guatemala citizen in our country in violation of our laws, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 takes care of it. The hucksters, though, are brandishing cradle-to-grave healthcare for … Guatemala citizens, or any country’s citizens who happen to get here by any means available. American citizenship be damned.
Ludicrousness continues in the call for non-citizens to vote in local elections. Imagine the spectacle of city council elections turning into UN affairs. Citizens of Guatemala – or Honduras, El Salvador, Russia, etc. – if they account for a majority in a district due to the laxed enforcement of our immigration laws, get to tell US citizens what to do. So, nonmembers – national membership is the essence of citizenship – govern members. How does that make sense?
From now on, please clean up the language. All people are born in some country and therefore citizens of it – with but a few arcane exceptions. The anomalies are probably focused on the jet-set rich who can afford to be above it all. For the rest of us, citizenship goes with our presence on the earth. Let’s talk like we understand the fact.
CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 27, 2019.
Remember the cry from Republicans that “character counts” during the Clinton impeachment battle? Now, nary a word of condemnation from them about Trump’s present public and past private (and not so private) behavior. Don’t worry, the Dems are a mountain of hypocrisies too. Remember Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.) and her U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform of 1994-1996? Her restrictionist views on immigration once found a home in the Democratic Party. If alive today, not only would she never make the stage in either of the recent Dem debates, she would be wiping spittle off her face after a visit to a local DC restaurant.
Don’t expect either party to offer a duplicity-free environment. Maybe it has to do with life constantly throwing monkey wrenches into our preconceived notions. What we once condemned – or loved – turns around and bites us in our posterior.
Barbara Jordan (D, Tx.)
Jordan said the following about immigration policy: “… it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” Further, she wrote, “For immigration to continue to serve our national interest, it must be lawful. There are people who argue that some illegal aliens contribute to our community because they may work, pay taxes, send their children to our schools, and in all respects except one, obey the law. Let me be clear: that is not enough.” From there on, she continues to sound more and more like Trump.
The hood ornament for open borders is our giddy sophomore class president, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY). Lately, she strode into the land of Nazi-shaming about our immigrant holding centers, calling them “concentration camps”. It’s true that when a person resorts to making anything a clone of the Nazis, you’re close to admitting the sterility of your point. Game over, Alexandria.
What does she do when confronted with her banality? She dodges. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, she was questioned, “… there were also ‘concentration camps’ under Obama and under Bill Clinton…. did you call them concentration camps at the time when Obama was president?”
Her awkward response was, “Well, at the time, I was working in a restaurant.” She tried to recover by additionally saying, “… I absolutely was outspoken against Obama’s immigration policies and the detention of families then.” He didn’t ask her about her past opposition. He queried her about equating our detention centers under Obama to what is colloquially understood to mean Auschwitz. She rhetorically zigzags like an Allied troop ship in a u-boat killing zone.
Quibbling is another favorite tactic when caught tasting your feet. She attempts to bring up a more benign and arcane definition of “concentration camp”. The over-caffeinated Ocasio-Cortez exhibits all the signs of a zealot caught being a zealot.
Baffoonishness is now a qualification for the political limelight.
Read the story of the Tapper/Cortez interview here.
U.S. workers are seen next to heavy machinery while working on a new bollard wall in El Paso, Texas, as seen from the Mexican side of the border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico September 26, 2018. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez.
Too much heat can destroy things. The same is true of political heat. It wreaks havoc on the language. For instance, take the word “old”, like walls being “old technology”.
I was thinking this morning of the amazing things that we are doing with technology. I bluetoothed my phone with my bedroom radio/receiver for the umpteenth time to listen to Pandora. It’s wonderful to know that we have crammed so much capability in a cellphone smaller than a chest-pocket notepad. In the end, though, the cellphone functions as a radio of days of yore. All the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities are just radio signals. It’s “old” in today’s corrupted parlance.
Radio and its signals weren’t understood until a nerdy and inventive kid, Edwin Howard Armstrong, figured out how it worked and came up with the components in the 1910’s-1930’s to make AM and FM radio, and television for that matter, possible. Apple and Android are riding on his back.
Armstrong explaining the superregenerative circuit, New York, 1922.
The cellphone has a lot more of “old” in it. Thanks to the gang at Bell Labs and Robert Noyce and his band of lusty fellows at Fairchild Semiconductor of the 1950’s and 1960’s we have the semiconductor and planar process. Without these things, no cellphone … and our kids would be normal.
“Old” is all around us. It seems foolish to call them “old” because they are as fundamental as gravity. It sounds jarring to speak of gravity as “old”. Newton and Einstein didn’t invent gravity. They attempted to understand it. Armstrong didn’t invent the EM spectrum. He just found a way to use it. Bell Labs and Robert Noyce didn’t invent silicon or electricity. They just found ways to use it for sending electrical signals (the integrated circuit).
Noyce and Gordon Moore in front of the Intel SC1 building in Santa Clara in 1970.
“Old” is everywhere. If it wasn’t for another “old” process, we wouldn’t be here … if we escaped the clutches of Planned Parenthood and our parents ignored the loony congresswoman from the Bronx (AOC).
“Old” is one of those words facing disfigurement by our partisan hotheads. Trump wants a wall; the Dems want power. Power to do what? Power to remake America. “Old” is attached to “walls” to frustrate efforts to limit and manage the human tide crashing our borders. Walls do work; ask any celebrity seeking privacy. The Dems, in their heart of hearts, don’t want anything that really works. That’s because they are predisposed to be more comfortable with open borders than they are with controlled borders.
Of course, the Dems need an alternative or surrender the field. Their favorite rejoinder is to attach “more” and “new” to “technology” and “more” to “personnel”. Sounds great, and is. The only problem is that the other side has long wanted this stuff … and walls.
The gambit of only “new technology” and “more personnel”, though, serves the Dems’ interests in two ways. First, the tech stuff can be easily turned off and the personnel moved away from the border if the political winds should blow their way. Secondly, it’s a hot opportunity to funnel some taxpayer cash to their rich donors in Silicon Valley. Construction companies and their workers building a wall aren’t likely to be a rich source of support anyway.
Sometimes such words are combined with others to produce nonsense, as in “diversity” combined with “is our strength”. What football team achieved BCS ranking by allowing the offensive line to be “diverse” in their blocking? It’s balderdash.
Bastardize is defined as “change (something) in such a way as to lower its quality or value, typically by adding new elements”. “Old” and “diversity” have been bastardized beyond recognition. Simply by affixing “old” to anything has convinced the Dems that they have won the argument. No, they’re just playing fast and loose with the language. Now there’s a scandal, a linguistic one with disastrous consequences.
Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum. It’s called “world citizen”. It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.
As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed. Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both? Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws. The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.
These Democrats aren’t kidding. They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident. The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev. 12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.
Robert O’Rourke at a rally at the El Paso border.
That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here. Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason. The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine? Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade. “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.
Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall. She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus. And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee). Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.
Federal District Court Judge Jessie Furmam.
“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country. That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file. Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens. Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc. With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?
Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US. Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections. SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE). They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes. In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions. The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration. Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship. They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.
Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen. And why not? It’s a rich vein of votes. It works to elect Democrats. In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard). Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic). In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.
If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen? Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise. For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant. Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.
Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?
RogerG
* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.
Just watched Chris Wallace’s interview of presidential adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News Sunday. Wallace pressed Miller with numbers as “facts” to contradict the claim of an emergency on the southern border. They are facts-as-numbers, not facts-supporting-the-conclusion. The rhetorical hocus pocus plagues the immigration debate so much that it’s hard to think straight on the subject.
About the “facts”: they are numbers produced by a formula. The formula is overly reliant on tabulations at 48 border crossings along the 1,954 miles of the US/Mexico border because that’s where the bulk of counters are located. Border crossers are channeled and monitored there to profoundly influence whatever sum total happens to result. The vast voids between will contribute very little due to the emptiness.
The Tijuana border crossing.
It’s like limiting the threats to life and property to the number of reports making their way to the DA’s desk. The number is shaped by public perceptions of law enforcement’s effectiveness, personnel, bureaucratic behavior, social norms, and political will. See, there’s more to the number than the number.
Conclusions about “no emergency” are leaps and bounds beyond what the numbers can support. The presence of anywhere from 11 million to 21 million illegals should tell you something. The huge range means that we don’t know, and if we did, that would imply the complicity of government officials to allow illegal entry so illegals could be counted. Absurd … I think.
The reality should instill some humility, but it doesn’t. The battle of the numbers becomes the battle of tomfoolery.
I watched PBS’s Frontline “The Gang Crackdown” on MS-13 till I couldn’t take it anymore, roughly ¾ of it. The program was a goulash of logic that raised more questions than it answered. And when it tried to answer some, the explanations resembled Alice going down the rabbit hole. The thing was an affront to common sense.
The broadcast tried, in the tradition of the world’s best sleight-of-hand magicians, to associate the presence of MS-13 to reactionary American public officials. As they did so, anyone watching it would be blinded by one basic question. Where do we find these MS-13 miscreants? They reside within the suddenly blossoming enclaves of immigrants, many of them “undocumented”. Suddenly blossoming! We wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t lost control of our borders. Dahhh!
MS-13 murder scene.
Such logic apparently never dawned on the script writers – or at least there’s no evidence of it. Instead, they steered the viewer into a sojourn of the crime and poverty of third world countries, the reactions of law enforcement, and the unchallenged opinions of open-borders activists. Clearly, the program could have benefited from more of the kind of pushback that was only reserved for Trump and federal and local law enforcement.
Activists protest the Trump administration’s approach to illegal border crossings in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2018. (AP File Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The lambasting of American authorities was partnered with an unstated inference. Call it innuendo with a light touch. Bad conditions everywhere in the world obliges the US to accept nearly anyone needy. Why else the hackneyed reference to the plight of El Salvadorans, et al? Everyone living in a dirt floor hut is now to be recast as a “soon-to-be-American”. Emma Lazarus’s poem is sentiment, but it is also suicide as public policy in the era of a gargantuan welfare state.
Frontline added nothing to the immigration debate but the tired Democratic Party talking points on the issue du jour. A little more honesty would help, as well as a little more rationality.
