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GOP Congressman Calls Illegal Aliens "Undocumented Citizens", Trusts Obama Administration
| While holding a town hall meeting, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) was caught on video supporting amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, people he calls "undocumented citizens". In response to a question from a woman with illegal alien family members who have been in the country for over 13 years, he illustrated a lack of understanding of immigration policy and unjustifiable faith in the Obama administration to secure the border. Seven problems with his response are analyzed below. Here's his quote: Read more... |
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The GOP's Immigration Leverage; No, Really!
| The basic stance of many prominent members of the GOP establishment after the 2012 presidential election can be described as panic. The president's sufficiently successful effort to reenergize his base, including Hispanic voters, coupled with Mitt Romney's lackluster showing among that same group, plus instant but erroneous extrapolations of ethnic and racial population trends, led to almost hysterical worry that Republicans were in a demographic "death spiral" from which they could not recover. Read more... |
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Alleged Murderer Is an Illegal Alien, but Washington Post Won't Say So
| As so often is the case, the murder suspect on the front page of today's Washington Post is an illegal alien, but the paper does not report it. It was a particularly brutal, senseless murder of a good samaritan by an illegal from Guatemala, a now 27-year-old man. Julio Miguel Blanco Garcia was in a suburban Virginia shopping center with his one-year-old daughter; he asked a woman, apparently a stranger to him, to drive him to the hospital. She agreed; she made a wrong turn and this caused Garcia, apparently crazed by drugs, to think she was about to turn him in to the police. He then repeatedly stabbed her with a knife, as he told police investigators. Read more... |
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Let There Be Amnesty!
| There's still a real chance that the Captain Schettinos of the House Republican brain trust will rescue Obama's presidency by passing an amnesty. But some in the open-borders crowd are getting nervous about John Boehner's ability to achieve Obama's objectives. Read more... |
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Soros-Backed Sojourners Pontificates for Amnesty
| Jim Wallis, the head of the politically leftist "evangelical" organization Sojourners, has penned an op-ed that the L.A. Times ran. Wallis's op-ed claims biblical "compassion" requires Christian lawmakers to enact amnesty. He liberally employs the term, playing on emotions and sob stories from illegal aliens. He cites a recent Washington fly-in of 300 "evangelical Christians" who met with 110 legislative offices, mostly Republicans. Read more... |
The Speechifying of Charlie Rose and Concerns of an Immigrant's Grandson
| Two comments in different media venues last week grabbed my attention. The first came from PBS interviewer Charlie Rose. The second on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal", came from the grandson of an immigrant from Mexico. Rose's comment came in an interview with Max Levchin, the Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal whose family immigrated to the United States from the Ukraine when he was a young boy. Read more... |
Republican Establishment Swallows the Democrat Line on Immigration Reform - Hook, Line, and Sinker
| Isn't it interesting that both Democratic and Republican establishment types express great concern about the future of the Republican Party and that they both arrive at the same conclusion — the future of the Republican Party depends on granting 11 million illegal aliens legal status and a pathway to citizenship. In the case of Democrats and others on the left, the feigned concern is clearly self-serving and disingenuous. Read more... |
A SAFE Ending
| This is my seventh and last blog on the SAFE ("Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement") Act, a bill pending in the House of Representatives as H.R. 2278. In prior blogs, I discussed in some detail the benefits of the SAFE Act and explained why it is vastly superior to the bill passed by the Senate several weeks ago. Read more... |
The GOP's Immigration Leverage: The Power of Options
| House Republicans are providing an important public service for Americans by breaking apart the Senate's massive immigration bill in order to better consider the basic elements of the nation's immigration policy puzzle. They are giving the public, and themselves, information and options. Some ask: Why is this necessary? Haven't we been debating immigration for years? Read more... |
President Obama's Immigration "Bipartisan" Sophistry: Part 1
| Sophistry (soph·ist·ry) 1: subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation. Supporters of the Senate's immigration bill, including the president, have a simple response to the idea that immigration reform would benefit from a more careful and thoughtful consideration than it was given in the Senate: Been there, done that. The president says that he doesn't want the Senate's bill to get "bogged down in endless debate" and demands action because "We've been debating this a very long time." Read more... |
President Obama's Immigration Sophistry: Part 2
| Sophistry (soph·ist·ry) 1: subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation. President Obama is an artful communicator, but like some other smart, modern presidents (Bill Clinton comes to mind), not a particularly direct or truthful one. Read more... |
A New Immigration Policy Maker — John Sandweg, Acting Head of ICE
| John Sandweg, 38, an Arizona lawyer and Napolitano insider, was recently named acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following the resignation of John Morton whose extensive use of prosecutorial discretion led to heavy criticism. Sandweg's record would suggest that he will not seek to turn around the Morton legacy at the unit that handles interior enforcement of the immigration law and the department's detention operations. Read more... |
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Everything Ezra Klein Knows About Immigration Is Wrong
| Ezra Klein’s recent column on immigration (Here at Bloomberg, then reprinted in the Washington Post) starts this way: “Everything you know about immigration, particularly unauthorized immigration, is wrong.” He then goes on to retail the pet theory of immigration-expansionist sociology professor Douglas Massey to the effect that border Read more... |
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Good Reason to Say "No" to Amnesty: It Helps South-of-Border Tyrants
| Leonel J. Castillo, Jimmy Carter's INS commissioner, and I tangled on a number of issues, but he was absolutely right on one thing — the outflow of illegals from Mexico assured the continuation in power of Mexico's despots. His notion was that if the poverty-stricken in that country did not have the option of immigration to the United States, legally or illegally, they would form a critical mass that would force change — perhaps violently — on the Mexican government. Mexico, after all, has an even more lop-sided distribution of income than we do. As long as the migrants were in the United States they would not disturb the Mexican establishment, but they would send back remittances to family members, providing a social safety net to their relatives that the state did not offer. The whole thing was a win-win situation for Mexico's rulers. Read more... |
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Asylum Antics
| While media grannies are getting their knickers in a twist over the antics of a Missouri rodeo clown, a cascading, Mariel Boatlift-style immigration emergency may be brewing on the Mexican border. Fox reports: A sudden influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico requesting asylum is overwhelming immigration agents in San Diego, forcing agencies to rent hotel rooms for some undocumented families and release others to cities around the U.S. Read more... |
Mark Zuckerberg's Clever Response to Steve King
| Sure, Mark Zuckerberg is advancing his own economic interests with an ad campaign that expresses concern only for fairness and the national interest. Sure, he would rather hire young foreign computer experts than similarly skilled Americans over 30. But give him some credit. The organization he founded to advocate for Gang of Eight-style immigration reform, FWD.us, is a lot more effective at messaging than Republican Iowa Rep. Steve King. Read more... |
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Would U.S. Gain Financially if Illegals Joined the Tax System?
| Part of the pitch for "comprehensive immigration reform" is that it would bring many illegal aliens into the tax system. The newly legalized would be forced to pay their back taxes, according to S.744 supporters. Read more... |
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Home Sweet Home
| The Economist recently ran an interesting article about the Conservative Party in Britain and its longer-term strategy in preparation for the next general election to be held May 7, 2015. Three policies have emerged in the Conservative Party as central and believed to be popular with the people, and consequently destined to "put the opposition on the wrong side of popular opinion". Economics, of course, loom large. The policy of interest here, however, is not economic, strictly speaking: that of reducing immigration. In the UK, 11.3 percent of the total population is foreign-born, and there are some estimates of almost 900,000 illegal immigrants. Read more... |
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Media Misleads on True Nature of H-1Bs
| If you follow an issue closely in the news, you get a clear picture of how useless the American media is. A few weeks ago I contacted the writer and editor of a wire story on H-1B visas that had a dozen clear factual errors. They responded that they were trying to tell a story. In other words, these writers were not going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. Here is a example from ABC News. Read more... |
RNC Head: U.S. Sovereignty "Horrific", Doesn't Have "Anything to Do with Our Party"
| Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus came out against encouraging illegal aliens to return home, signaling an apparent opposition to U.S. sovereignty and the rule of law. Speaking at a RNC meeting in Boston this week, Priebus explained his support for maintaining open-border policies to a reporter, saying: Using the word "self-deportation", I mean, that's uh, it's a horrific comment to make. I don't think it has anything to do with our party. When a candidate makes those comments, obviously, it hurts us. And so, I think that's a big deal. Read more... |
A Mexican Actor's View of Hollywood's Projection of Illegal Immigration to 2154
| The current issue of Tiempo Latino, the Spanish-language weekly paper that the Washington Post distributes for free, has an article in which Mexican actor Diego Luna talks about the warning issued by "Elysium", the new movie about illegal immigration on a cosmic scale. Read more... |
A Trifecta of Non-Immigrant Worker Programs
| There have been three little-noticed (in the United States) actions recently about the non-immigrant worker programs that have denied so many jobs to American workers. A U.S. shipbuilding firm in the South has been charged in our courts with "enslaving Indian workers"; a brave American lawyer in the North is trying to use the class action approach to attack the H-1B program; and a major U.S. user of the H-1B program is laying off U.S. workers while seeking to expand the flows of H-1Bs. Read more... |
New Twist on Immigration Fraud — Employers Are the Victims!
| Immigration fraud comes in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is massive, sometimes just one-on-one; sometimes it is crude and direct, and sometimes very complex. But usually employers of aliens are not the victims, and the population of the United States usually is illicitly expanded. The last two generalizations were not true in a half-million-dollar case brought in federal district court in New Jersey recently. Read more... |
Univision Reports Pressure on Obama to Take Direct Action on Immigration
| "Under immigration pressure" read the graphic that showed a photograph of President Obama on Univision's evening news Monday. It was the theme of a story that Univision anchor Jorge Ramos introduced by noting that "some activists want the president to do much more for the undocumented." Read more... |
The President's Immigration Villains: Part 2
| The president has a long and substantial rhetorical history of harshly singling out and criticizing individuals and groups that disagree with his policy preferences. And no group has been on the receiving end of more of his ire than Republicans. On the GOP in general, he has said "Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules." Read more... |