There’s no new law or presidential edict involved, so presumably there are so many foreign bad guys who have illegally gotten citizenship that the [...]]]>
There’s no new law or presidential edict involved, so presumably there are so many foreign bad guys who have illegally gotten citizenship that the numbers require an organized unit to chase them down.
These are serious criminals, yet they felt secure enough in this country to get on paper. So much for the “nation of laws” mythology: the welcome mat has been there for years for some of the nastiest thugs on earth.
Breitbart News has more details:
]]>Trump Administration to Strip Citizenship from Foreign-Born Terrorists, Criminals, Breitbart.com, February 26, 2020
President Donald Trump’s administration announced a new Justice Department unit focused on revoking U.S. citizenship obtained through fraud.
The new section will function as another arm of the Department of Justice’s Office of Immigration Litigation. Its purpose will be the denaturalization of those who obtained citizenship “procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation.” Specifically, they will target those who neglected to disclose previous terrorist or criminal activities or affiliations on their “N-400” naturalization form.
Part 12 of the N-400 asks pointed questions about prior affiliations and activities. It includes questions about far-ranging potential involvement in anti-American interests: from Nazi, communist, and totalitarian loyalties, to involvement in torture, murder, and weapons trade. Those who were granted citizenship from lying in whole or in part on the N-400 will face a reckoning.
“When a terrorist or sex offender becomes a U.S. citizen under false pretenses, it is an affront to our system — and it is especially offensive to those who fall victim to these criminals,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said. “The new Denaturalization Section will further the Department’s efforts to pursue those who unlawfully obtained citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct.” (Continues)
One point of contention was Macron’s strange argument that nationalism was the opposite of patriotism. Not in my dictionary, [...]]]>
One point of contention was Macron’s strange argument that nationalism was the opposite of patriotism. Not in my dictionary, or President Trump’s.
MACRON: Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By saying, ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what gives it grace and what is essential: its moral values.
That’s a funny thing to say to the American president, when US soldiers have twice fought and died in France against its enemies.
Below, the Normandy American Cemetery, where more than 9,000 US soldiers are buried after being killed in France during WWII.
Back to the nationalism controversy, on Monday, Tucker Carlson interviewed Professor Nicholas Giordano of Suffolk Community College who explained the concept clearly:
Audio file:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: Tell us what nationalism actually is, if you could sum it up as crisply as you can — what is nationalism?
PROFESSOR NICHOLAS GIORDANO: Nationalism is important because it’s what links us together as a country. We are a nation state, and so when you’re looking at the concept of nationalism, it’s the acceptance of the American creed, the tenets of the American creed, as well as it helps us to motivate us to help our country. Nationalism is one of the most important concepts out there. Macron’s just wrong — it’s as simple as that.
CARLSON: The knock against nationalism is that there’s something racially exclusive or racist about it. Is it inherently a racial creed? Does it have anything to do with race?
GIORDANO: No, it doesn’t. What nationalism does, it fosters the democratic consciousness, and that’s an important point that people get wrong. We have a stake in the system, and we are the legitimate authority over the system as the people of the United States. Prior to nationalism, loyalty was to one leader; now it’s to the country as a whole, and nationalism fosters patriotism.
In my classroom I used Hurricane Harvey as a great example. During Harvey, you had people, citizens affected by the hurricane took their own boats, their private boats and they went and they helped out their fellow citizens. They didn’t say this is the black boat, and the white boat’s 15 minutes behind us. They didn’t say this is the Republican boat or the Democrat boat — they were just out there to help Americans, and that’s what nationalism fosters. If you look at countries without nationalism — nationalism defeats tribalism — so Afghanistan, Libya, those countries are where tribalism is enforced. There’s no loyalty to the country of Afghanistan as a whole or Libya as a whole and that’s why those countries have been engaged in tribal warfare for the last 3,000 years.
CARLSON: It’s so nicely put, what you just said, and it’s such an obvious point. Why would there be such a loud caucus against nationalism, against national unity?
GIORDANO: I think there’s two things going on. When you look at someone like President Macron of France, I think he likes the idea of trans-nationalism, trying to replace the idea of nationalism with this regional nationalism. And then for other people, if we look at the United States, the people that say that nationalism is a bad thing or nationalism is racist, I think they just aren’t necessarily proud of the country that the United States is. They focus on all the bad that the United States has done and they don’t look at the positives of how the United States has actually changed the world .
CARLSON: Well exactly. Professor, that was such a nice explanation. I hope you’ll join us again.
The vote is being framed partially by a debate on birthright citizenship because President Trump has challenged the long held interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The question of [...]]]>
The vote is being framed partially by a debate on birthright citizenship because President Trump has challenged the long held interpretation of the 14th Amendment. The question of meaning resides in the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of” written by Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan which is now under overdue scrutiny.
]]>Tucker Carlson Tonight, Transcript, October 30, 2018
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST: Good evening and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Just a week to go from tonight until the midterms and Election Day is finally becoming a referendum on something that really matters, immigration. Who gets to live here? What does citizenship mean? What kind of country do we want? These are not small incidental questions, which you are watching is not an argument about Russian Facebook ads or Stormy Daniels or her creepy lawyer or some other diversion designed to prevent you from thinking clearly. These are core debates. These are the arguments that every functioning democracy must have and yet ours rarely does.
Consider the question of birthright citizenship. Under current interpretations of American law anyone born on our soil automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. Context is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if your parents were terrorists or illegal aliens or foreign saboteurs, if their plane was forced down to refuel and you emerged. It doesn’t matter. If you were born on our property, you are a citizen.
In a recent interview with Axios, President Trump suggested, this is not a great deal for America. He pledged to change it with an executive order.
As of tonight, it seems likely that order would abolish so-called birth tourism. That’s where people travel to the United States solely for the purpose of having kids and winning citizenship along with the many benefits that follow from that. We’ll know more about it soon and of course we’ll tell you when we do know.
But nobody else in Washington is waiting for details. They hate it already. The very same people who have spent decades trying to gut the Bill of Rights are now lecturing the rest of us that the idea is — brace yourself — unconstitutional.
Paul Ryan for example, he is the outgoing speaker of the House. He announced his opposition to this immediately. The very idea he said is ridiculous. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE PAUL RYAN: Well, you obviously cannot do that. You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well obviously, obviously. Note the phrasing. Obviously, that’s what people say when they don’t feel like making a rational case for their positions, usually because they can’t. Is it really “obvious” that the Constitution requires us to give citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. Paul Ryan has no idea. He just doesn’t want to have a conversation about it. He wants you to be quiet.
In fact, as a legal matter, it is an open question. The Supreme Court has never ruled on it. But there is ample reason to believe the law does not apply to illegal immigrants or birth tourists.
Birthright citizenship arises from the 14th Amendment that was passed just three years after the Civil War and it was passed to guarantee citizenship to freed slaves. The senator who wrote the citizenship clause in the 14th Amendment, Jacob Howard of Michigan, explained the point of it on the Senate floor at the time.
“The Amendment will not of course include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”
Again, the Amendment was designed to ensure that newly freed slaves would be treated as the American citizens they were. The point was to enfranchise African-Americans. The point was not to enable the rest of the world to scam our system, to abuse our generosity. Trump’s proposal would get us closer to the purpose of the 14th Amendment. And for that he is being denounced naturally as a racist. Listen to some of the dumb people on TV:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What used to be five years ago, 10 years ago, dog whistles to appeal to the fears of white voters now are just stated openly.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The principal debate in Europe, in the United States, the real fault line that gets people going is this issue of openness. How open are we to people? How open are we to trade? And it’s this issue of national identity versus internationalism, globalism if you will. So what Donald Trump is doing is he is mining that fault line. He is working it, whether it’s birthright citizenship, whether it’s sending troops to a border that’s not under siege. We’re no longer arguing serious issues about how to regulate our economies. We’re no longer arguing serious issues say about how to fight the Cold War.
We are arguing questions about national identity and that’s not that far to get from that to issues of racism.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: So, let’s get this straight, defining citizenship is not “a serious issue”, only in New York and Washington where serious is where to find good Barada or how to get to the Hamptons in under three hours on a Friday night. These people are total buffoons.
In fact, there is no more serious debate than the debate over citizenship. And it’s long overdue. Globally. birthright citizenship is the rare exception. It is not the rule. Canada and the U.S. are the only developed countries that have birthright citizenship. Not a single European country allows it. Out of the 54 countries in Africa, only two offer birthright citizenship. Are the other 52 racists?
How about Harry Reid, is he a racist too? Watch the former Democratic Senate Majority Leader explain his views on birthright citizenship.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER SEN. HARRY REID: If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough. How about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that. Right. Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission to give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship and guarantee a full access to all public and social services this society provides and that’s a lot of services. Is it any wonder that two-thirds of the babies born at taxpayer expense in country, county-run hospitals in Los Angeles are born to illegal alien mothers?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Now as a factual matter, that’s tougher than anything Donald Trump has ever said. Keep in mind that just four years ago that man, Harry Reid, was the top Democrat in the Senate. Try saying that today, he’d be called Bull Connor and shouted off the stage. But the questions he raised are still fair questions. Is unlimited birthright citizenship helping this country or is it hurting this country?
Under our current system, illegal immigrants who come to the U.S. and have children are eligible to receive tax credits, food stamps, other welfare benefits. Those are huge incentives. Not surprisingly, one in every 12 births in this country right now is to someone here illegally, and that total does not even include birth tourism.
Every year tens of thousands of foreign nationals come to this country on tourist visas solely to give birth to children. The Chinese are strongly overrepresented in this. One ad in China offers “high end U.S. birth tourism specialists” for just 20 grand, these experts navigate clients through the process of having a child in America.
In return for that 20 grand, their kids gain the right to Social Security, Medicare and countless other federal programs. If they come back to the U.S. for college, they get in-state tuition, federally backed student loans, financial aid, all the benefits that ought to be going to actual Americans who are drowning in college debt. This is a scam. There is no other word for it.
And by the way don’t blame the Chinese or the Russians or the Salvadorans or anybody else using the system, we’re the ones offering it. Why wouldn’t they take it? The blame lies with us. No other country would allow itself to be relentlessly exploited like this for decades and no other leadership class would side with foreigners over its own people. And yet ours does every time and that tells you everything.
So now he is back, flacking a book. Harper Collins’ book page headlines, “Whether you were born in the U.S., just recently immigrated, are a Dreamer or undocumented citizen, we are all Americans.”
Obviously, he is still unclear on the concept of American citizenship, just as he was when Time chose him as the magazine’s illegal alien cover boy in 2012:
Jose the Filipino is certainly one of the media’s favorite illegal aliens, since he has no violent crimes to cover up (that we know of), only the ubiquitous job and benefits theft.
Harper Collins also shows a book tour scheduled at least through the end of September, so there is an opportunity for ICE to easily catch and deport him, an action that would be a great service for the nation.
The New York Times apparently remains fond of Vargas, as shown by its review of the book:
Not every day that a writer who happens to be undocumented gets a review in the @nytimesarts section of @nytimes #DearAmerica pic.twitter.com/roC50Bp4rV
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) September 20, 2018
Here’s that review, reprinted elsewhere:
]]>Living the American Dream — in Hiding, New York Times, September 19, 2018
Jose Antonio Vargas comes from a family of gamblers, and in his new book, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” he’s upping the ante — or maybe, given the current executive’s predilection for travel bans and family separations, he’s going all in. Vargas recalls the enormous wager his family made 25 years ago, when his mother brought him to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila and put him on a flight to California. He was 12 years old, and he would go to America first. Mama, as he calls her throughout his memoir, promised to follow.
Twenty-five years later, Mama is still in the Philippines, and Jose is still in the United States — no longer based in Mountain View, Calif., where he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, but traveling around the country as an activist filmmaker and a writer, without a fixed address where he might be apprehended.
In 2011, he was a young journalist with an enviable résumé when he published an essay in The New York Times Magazine that revealed his undocumented status. Immigration lawyers warned him against going public; one called it “legal suicide.” In “Dear America,” Vargas writes that talking to lawyers “made me feel like I was carrying an incurable disease.”
Filipinos living in the United States have a Tagalog term for the undocumented immigrants who go to their churches, live in their communities or reside in their homes: tago ng tago, “hiding and hiding” — T.N.T. for short, like a secret waiting to explode. Vargas’s grandparents, both of them naturalized citizens, expected him to keep hiding until he didn’t have to. The plan was for Jose to find under-the-table work, like cleaning bathrooms at the flea market, so he could save enough money to pay an American woman to marry him. Maybe, his grandmother hoped, he wouldn’t even need to pay anyone, because he would fall in love.
But he wasn’t about to toil in the shadows to marry an American woman; Vargas is gay, and he’s also extremely, exuberantly ambitious. The constant dissembling was unbearable, he explains; he feared losing sight of who he was.
Vargas came out as gay when he was 16. Coming out as undocumented took longer. He wanted to dream big, even when his family was telling him that a life out in the open was not only fanciful but dangerous. “You are not supposed to be here,” his grandfather would remind him.
“The dream that Mama, Lolo and Lola had for me was dictated by their own realities, by their own sense of limitations,” he writes, using the Tagalog words for grandpa and grandma. “The America they dreamed for me was not the America I was creating for myself.”
The moments when Vargas describes how profoundly alienated he feels from his own family are the most candid and crushing parts of the book. He admits that he felt much closer to what he calls his “white family” — the caring grown-ups who mentored him in high school; the seasoned journalists who gave him career advice; the generous benefactors who offered him material support — than to the blood relatives who made extraordinary sacrifices in order to bring him to the United States. As a teenager, he could barely bring himself to call Mama in the Philippines. “I couldn’t talk to my own mother while I was collecting mother figures,” he says, in one ruthlessly honest line.
His grandmother and grandfather raised him, but they couldn’t see him. They warned him against taking up too much space, telling their cub-reporter grandson he was “getting fancy now.” In 2008, when Vargas was cited as part of a team for The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize, his grandmother called to say how worried she was. “What will happen if people find out?” she asked.
“Dear America” covers some of the same ground as Vargas’s essay for The Times Magazine, as well as his 2013 film, “Documented.” He details the fake papers his grandfather purchased for $4,500. He recalls how the local library enabled his teenage self to become a connoisseur of ’90s pop culture on the cheap. (What truly mystified him were the cartoons in The New Yorker: “Were they supposed to be funny?”) He briefly recounts the colonial history of the Philippines, first under the Spanish, then under the Americans, as well as the stark betrayal of the 1946 Rescission Act, which reneged on the American promise to offer citizenship and veterans’ benefits to Filipino soldiers who fought on behalf of the United States in World War II. (Continues)
One measure proposed to deal with Obama’s sabotage was Congressman Lee Zeldin’s bill to remove citizenship from foreign gangsters, submitted earlier this year.
But President Trump has a different idea, that crooks who wangled citizenship for evil purposes should have it removed.
Consider a couple of recent examples:
Take Iyman Faris (pictured), an aspiring jihadist who plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge 15 years ago. Born in Pakistan, the convicted jailbird recently had his bogus US citizenship protected by a lunatic judge. So he presumably won’t be deported when his prison term is up in 2020, thereby giving him another swing at violent jihad in America. Convenient for him, but dangerous for Americans.
Judge rules against stripping convicted terrorist of US citizenship, Fox News, July 21, 2018
A federal judge ruled against stripping away the U.S. citizenship of a convicted terrorist tied to a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, citing a lack of evidence to prove that the status had been granted based on misrepresentations.
Iyman Faris, 49, was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting al-Qaida by scoping out the iconic New York bridge as a part of a plot to cut through the cables supporting the structure. He had met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. . .
The New York Times is leading the leftist cadre shrieking over denaturalizations of obvious criminals. It recently used Peruvian Norma Borgoño as an example of America’s cruelty under the Trump administration — even though she pleaded guilty to assisting her employer to defraud the Export-Import Bank of the United States of $24 million. Somehow, the Times construes that enormous theft as a non-major crime, though we can imagine that a born-here American would be jailed for a lengthy stretch for such a robbery.
The Times published an opinion piece denouncing the uptick in denaturalization — which was reprinted in a Nigerian (!) website, linked below:
Opinion: Congratulations, you are now a U.S. citizen, unless someone decides later you’re not, Uncova.com, July 23, 2018
MIAMI — Norma Borgoño immigrated to the United States from Peru in 1989. A single mother with two children, she set roots in the Miami suburbs, finding work as a secretary, dedicating herself to her church and, earlier this year, welcoming her first grandchild, a girl named Isabel, after Borgoño’s middle name.
She took the oath of citizenship in 2007, a step she felt would secure her status in her adopted homeland. But hers, it turns out, is not a feel-good immigrant story: The Justice Department has moved to revoke Borgoño’s citizenship, an action that could eventually force her to return to Peru.
Federal prosecutors in May filed a rare denaturalization case against Borgoño, 64, accusing her of committing fraud when she applied for citizenship and failed to disclose that she had taken part in a crime of which she had not even been accused. In 2011, Borgoño pleaded guilty to helping her boss, to no benefit of her own, defraud the Export-Import Bank of the United States of $24 million. . .
Finally, the Times continued its defense of improper citizenships on Monday, railing about the “politics of fear” even though a top job of government is to protect public safety, not to service foreigners with criminal intent toward Americans. The opinion piece goes so far as to recommend that the US should “make citizenship permanent and irrevocable” by passing an Amendment to the Constitution, which would certainly count as a new extreme in liberal pandering to unlawful foreigners.
The article was reprinted:
Trump’s New Target in the Politics of Fear: Citizenship, ReviewJournal.ca, July 23, 2018
The president has embraced McCarthy-era scare tactics. We may need a constitutional amendment to guarantee that citizenship can’t be revoked.
Surveying the wreckage of McCarthyism in 1957, the political theorist Hannah Arendt wrote about efforts to denaturalize American citizens suspected of Communist ties.
“It seems absurd,” she concluded, “but the fact is that, under the political circumstances of this century, a constitutional amendment may be needed to assure American citizens that they cannot be deprived of their citizenship, no matter what they do.”
It no longer seems so absurd. Citizenship is squarely in the Trump administration’s cross hairs. It has organized a Citizenship and Immigration Services task force to denaturalize American citizens, the first effort of mass expatriation contemplated since the McCarthy era. In a recent op-ed article for The Washington Post, Michael Anton, a former national security official in the administration, even proposed getting rid of birthright citizenship — by dictatorial fiat, no less: “It falls, then, to Trump. An executive order could specify to federal agencies that the children of noncitizens are not citizens.”
Yes, you’re reading that right: A high-ranking former member of the state security apparatus seriously believes that it is good policy to revoke citizenship by executive order.
Nor is this is just the oddball notion of some eccentric former staff member. As far back as August 2015, Mr. Trump himself has trotted out similar ideas, telling CNN, “The 14th Amendment is very questionable as to whether or not somebody can come over and immediately that baby is a citizen.” He also suggested that “you can do something fast” to end birthright citizenship. It may be time to revisit Arendt’s proposal.
For Arendt, the prospect of mass statelessness was particularly alarming. Since states are the only institutions able to guarantee rights, she wrote, “A stateless person is not just expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries — none being obliged to receive and naturalize him — which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently could be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category, in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations.”
The idea of “mass statelessness” is more lefty hysteria: denaturalized persons would merely revert to their original citizenship.
Seriously, the Times and other left-wing shriekers need to chill out, for their already questionable mental balance if nothing else.
]]>
As Breitbart.com headlined on March 29, 2020 Census: Counting Citizens Likely to Shift Power from Illegal Alien-Flooded Coasts to Middle America.
The Rasmussen poll shows the the people want citizenship to count.
Americans Strongly Support Citizenship Status on Census, Rasmussen Reports, March 30, 2018
The U.S. Census Bureau released their 2020 census questions, including one that asks whether respondents are legal U.S. citizens. Americans recognize the importance of the census and are on board with including the question moving forward.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 89% of American Adults agree it’s at least somewhat important for the government to get as accurate a count of the U.S. population as possible in the U.S. Census, including 69% who say it’s Very Important. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Mark Krikorian tweeted out a detail from the longer version of the poll:
]]>Americans Strongly Support Citizenship Status on Census https://t.co/oKNxGrYsjn Full report notes that “Two-thirds of Americans (66%) also agree that the census should ask respondents whether they are citizens of the United States. Just 25% disagree.”
— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) March 30, 2018
That accusation is not an overstatement: the Washington Times reported on May 24, 2017, Obama admin knew gang [...]]]>
That accusation is not an overstatement: the Washington Times reported on May 24, 2017, Obama admin knew gang members were part of illegal immigrant surge: Whistleblower. The “unaccompanied children” flooding north across the border a few years back included some truly dangerous characters to the point where American kids have been terrified to go to school because of the MS-13 gangsters now present. President Trump’s State of the Union speech included recognition of American parents whose children had been murdered by MS-13 gangsters.
One measure proposed to deal with Obama’s sabotage is Congressman Lee Zeldin’s bill to remove citizenship from foreign gangsters.
That topic was discussed when Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies appeared on Fox News recently (spare video):
STEVE DOOCY: This gang really burst into the American consciousness during the Obama years because of why?
JESSICA VAUGHAN: Yes the gang had been here before but definitely had a rebound during the Obama years because first of all, immigration enforcement declined in the interior of the country deliberately under the Obama administration. They they put restrictions on ICE officers on who they could arrest. And also during this time, there was this influx of illegal arrivals from Central America, mostly teenagers but also some families with kids who benefited from the catch-and-release policies that the Obama administration had in place, and they were resettled in places all over the country which happened to be those very same places where MS-13 has seen a resurgence. And the gang knew about the lenient policies and was deliberately taking advantage of them to build its ranks here and they’ve been on a horrific crime spree ever since.
DOOCY: No kidding, we’ve got some facts: 207 murders have been tied to MS-13 since 2012; 500 MS-13 members charged for major crimes since 2012 as well, and I understand that since January of 2016 there have been 17 people killed by MS-13. But here’s the thing, it’s hard to deport a lot of these people, Jessica, because they are in sanctuary areas.
VAUGHAN: That is a problem. We found about half of the cases we looked at took place in sanctuary jurisdictions, and these places are a magnet for illegal settlement and especially for transnational criminal organizations because they know that police are forced to look the other way at their immigration status they can’t work with ICE, so it’s that’s a great deal for them. It gives them sanctuary.
DOOCY: You’ve got to like the proposal by Lee Zeldin, the congressman from the great state of New York. He’s introduced the Protecting Our Communities from Gang Violence Act. It would revoke the citizenship of people who acquired citizenship and who’re involved in a gang like MS-13. Does this bill have a chance to make it to the President’s desk?
VAUGHAN: I think it might because the House is going to hopefully be moving on some good immigration legislation, the Goodlatte bill, Securing America’s Future Act, and I think it’s important to include this provision to denaturalize gang members. We don’t want them being citizens if they benefit from an amnesty or marry an American citizen. It’s a good tool for immigration to have and there may be a way to do that.
For more about the CIS investigation of MS-13 infiltration into America, see its report, MS-13 Resurgence: Immigration Enforcement Needed to Take Back Our Streets.
]]>Senator Cotton has recently been positioning himself as a major leader in the Senate for sensible policies of immigration control and reduction, particularly with his [...]]]>
Senator Cotton has recently been positioning himself as a major leader in the Senate for sensible policies of immigration control and reduction, particularly with his submission of legislation with Senator Perdue of the RAISE Act — Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. The top points include cutting legal immigration by about half, eliminating the insane Diversity Visa and reducing refugees to 50,000 annually. All of the measures would benefit American workers and improve public safety.
The proportion of foreign-born workers in the American labor force was 16.9 percent in 2016, or nearly 27 million in numerical terms according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
(Note: Imprimis is a small monthly, usually with one medium-length article of a conservative nature. The content is drawn from speeches delivered to Hillsdale College hosted events — see its YouTube channel for a sampling. You can subscribe online for the free paper edition by sending your address via this link.)
In the video below, Senator Cotton’s speech starts at around 18 minutes in, following introductory comments by Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn.
]]>Immigration in the National Interest, by Senator Tom Cotton, Imprimis, October 2017
Last year, for the first time in our nation’s history, the American people elected as president someone with no high government experience—not a senator, not a congressman, not a governor, not a cabinet secretary, not a general. They did this, I believe, because they’ve lost faith in both the competence and the intentions of our governing class—of both parties! Government now takes nearly half of every dollar we earn and bosses us around in every aspect of life, yet can’t deliver basic services well. Our working class—the “forgotten man,” to use the phrase favored by Ronald Reagan and FDR—has seen its wages stagnate, while the four richest counties in America are inside the Washington Beltway. The kids of the working class are those who chiefly fight our seemingly endless wars and police our streets, only to come in for criticism too often from the very elite who sleep under the blanket of security they provide.
Donald Trump understood these things, though I should add he didn’t cause them. His victory was more effect than cause of our present discontents. The multiplying failures and arrogance of our governing class are what created the conditions for his victory.
Immigration is probably the best example of this. President Trump deviated from Republican orthodoxy on several issues, but immigration was the defining issue in which he broke from the bipartisan conventional wisdom. For years, all Democrats and many Republicans have agreed on the outline of what’s commonly called “comprehensive immigration reform,” which is Washington code for amnesty, mass immigration, and open borders in perpetuity.
This approach was embodied most recently in the so-called Gang of Eight bill in 2013. It passed the Senate, but thankfully we killed it in the House, which I consider among my chief accomplishments in Congress so far. Two members of the Gang of Eight ran for my party’s nomination for president last year. Neither won a single statewide primary. Donald Trump denounced the bill, and he won the nomination.
Likewise, Hillary Clinton campaigned not just for mass immigration, but also on a policy of no deportations of anyone, ever, who is illegally present in our country. She also accused her opponent of racism and xenophobia. Yet Donald Trump beat her by winning states that no Republican had won since the 1980s.
Clearly, immigration was an issue of signal importance in the election. That’s because immigration is more than just another issue. It touches upon fundamental questions of citizenship, community, and identity. For too long, a bipartisan, cosmopolitan elite has dismissed the people’s legitimate concerns about these things and put its own interests above the national interest.
No one captured this sensibility better than President Obama, when he famously called himself “a citizen of the world.” With that phrase, he revealed a deep misunderstanding of citizenship. After all, “citizen” and “city” share the same Greek root word: citizenship by definition means that you belong to a particular political community. Yet many of our elites share Mr. Obama’s sensibility. They believe that American citizenship—real, actual citizenship—is meaningless, ought not be foreclosed to anyone, and ought not be the basis for distinctions between citizens and foreigners. You might say they think American exceptionalism lies in not making exceptions when it comes to citizenship.
(Continues)
Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times front-paged the story, under photos of the catastrophic California wildfires.
Who can blame them for skedaddling en masse when the [...]]]>
Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times front-paged the story, under photos of the catastrophic California wildfires.
Who can blame them for skedaddling en masse when the lights don’t turn on? What’s perplexing is how an island of hispanics with no cultural similarity or connection to the United States whatsoever got to be citizens. Interestingly, a March poll found that only 47 percent of Americans believed that residents of Puerto Rico are actually US citizens. Those 47 percenters must have missed the sentence in their high school history book where the US took possession of the island in 1898 following the Spanish-American War.
Say, perhaps Spain would like to have the island back. . . they could at least talk to each other. The US Census found that 95 percent Puerto Ricans do not speak English at home.
A Wikipedia article titled Puerto Rican Citizenship states, “On March 2, 1917, the Jones–Shafroth Act was signed, collectively making Puerto Ricans United States citizens without rescinding their Puerto Rican citizenship.”
So if this curious statement is accurate, the United States could divorce Puerto Rico without any harm to the residents because they are already bi-national and have a spare citizenship, so they wouldn’t be stateless. Puerto Rican independence would work out fine on the citizenship front and might be the only way to keep the whole bunch from moving here.
]]>Puerto Ricans fleeing their hurricane-ravaged island are pouring into the U.S. mainland, Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2017
More than 700,000 Puerto Ricans had migrated to the mainland between 2006 and 2015.
When Sinthia Colon’s sister-in-law called from Orlando offering plane tickets to flee Puerto Rico, she did not hesitate. Hurricane Maria had destroyed her small farm, wrecked the local power grid and spurred her town of San Lorenzo to impose a curfew to combat looting.
In a few hours, she was bound for Florida.
“It was, like, all of a sudden … I’m going,” Colon, 42, said shortly after arriving at a disaster relief center at Orlando International Airport with her daughter, son and mother-in-law. “I didn’t have time to make plans.”
Two weeks after the storm devastated Puerto Rico, tens of thousands of hurricane evacuees are packing scheduled flights and charter jets in what officials there and in states across the U.S. fear is the beginning of a mass exodus of historic proportions.
The mainland had already been absorbing record numbers of Puerto Ricans fleeing economic decline and a mounting debt crisis, with more than 700,000 migrating between 2006 and 2015. Some people also moved back over that time, but after decades of population growth, the island saw the total number of residents drop from about 3.8 million to 3.4 million — or more than 10%.
The majority of those who moved were of working age, compounding the economic damage.
Now that cycle is poised to accelerate in a migration that could have profound implications for the rebuilding of the island and for U.S. politics.
“This has no historical precedent for the United States,” said Jesse Keenan, a Harvard professor who specializes in climate adaptation and resilience.
“If just 10% of people leave, it’s going to have a huge impact, both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland,” he said. “If as many as 20% left, which wouldn’t surprise me, it would completely collapse the island’s economy and burden jurisdictions across the United States.”
As U.S. citizens, the evacuees have a legal right to move anywhere in the country. Many are bound for Florida, which is already home to more than a million Puerto Ricans, or nearly a fifth of the 5.4 million living in the 50 states.
(Continues)
A distracted student is news?
This is pretty weak gruel, even for Carlos Slim’s Amnesty Gazette.
[...]]]>
Friday’s New York Times front page included a whiner about a college student who claimed she was too busy to obtain proof of citizenship required to vote in Kansas (where sovereignty warrior Kris Kobach [pictured] is Secretary of State).
A distracted student is news?
This is pretty weak gruel, even for Carlos Slim’s Amnesty Gazette.
A 21-year-old because miffed when his visit to the DMV didn’t produce the voting card he expected, so he is part of a lawsuit. The characters presented by the Times seem like slackers at best, and are not very sympathetic. Doesn’t anyone tell the kids these days that becoming an adult requires getting all your official papers?
The Times must think that actually requiring people to prove citizenship to vote is too hard for young and/or diverse people.
However, the public still regards law and sovereignty as valuable: a Rasmussen poll last year found that 78 percent favored proof of citizenship before being allowed to vote. The survey was prompted by a federal judge upholding the right of states to require proof of citizenship in order to register for voting.
]]>Kansas Voter ID Law Sets Off a New Battle Over Registration, New York Times, October 15, 2015
Amelia Flores, a high school senior with plans to become an electrical engineer, eagerly filled out a form to register to vote for the first time at the Kansas State Fair last month. But she left the fair without registering, stymied by a state law championed by Republicans who dominate elected offices in Kansas that requires her to provide proof of citizenship.
“I think it’s ridiculous and restrictive,” said Ms. Flores, who later received a notice in the mail informing her that she must produce a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship to complete the registration. “A lot of people are working multiple jobs, so they don’t have time to get this stuff done. Some of them don’t have access to their birth certificate.”
Ms. Flores, who said she was born in Washington State, unwittingly joined a list of more than 36,000 people in Kansas who have tried to register to vote since the law went into effect in 2013, but then did not complete their registration. This month, under a rule adopted by the Kansas secretary of state’s office, county election officials throughout the state began to cull names from the voters list, removing people who had been on it at least 90 days. Those removed from the list must start the registration process over in order to vote.
The move has touched off a new battle over voter registration, pitting the Republican secretary of state, Kris W. Kobach, an ardent supporter of strict voting rules, against Democrats and advocates of voting rights who say the law was intended to suppress voter turnout. Mr. Kobach was named in a federal lawsuit filed in September by two plaintiffs who had applied to register to vote in Kansas but were added to the roll of incomplete registrants when they did not submit proof of their citizenship.
In an interview, Mr. Kobach said culling the list would help address complaints from county clerks that notifying people of the law’s requirements was costly and often ineffective. He asserted that most of the people on the list had moved since their initial registration or “never had any intention of voting in the first place.” And he defended the law as necessary to prevent voter fraud.
“We now live in a society where there is a record number of noncitizens who live with us,” he said. “This is a common sense way of ensuring that only U.S. citizens are able to vote.”
But advocates of voting rights said the Kansas law, like about a dozen similar voter identification laws passed in Republican-led states since 2011, is intended to depress voter turnout among groups that lean Democratic, including low-income and minority voters.
Douglas Bonney, the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas, said the Kansas requirements might particularly discourage young voters who do not have ready access to the required documents. “It has caused a massive wall for them,” he said.
An analysis by The New York Times of the list of voters showed that more than half of them were under 35, and 20 percent were from 18 to 20 years old. Fifty-seven percent of the people on the list did not declare a party; 23 percent were Democrats; and 18 percent were Republicans. The vast majority — 90 percent — had never voted before.
“This disproportionately hits 18- to 24-year-olds,” said Jamie Shew, a Democrat and the county clerk for Douglas County, Kan. “For a lot of them, they say, ‘I’m not going to worry about it.’ They’re busy and this is just one more thing to do.”
Under the law, which was passed in 2011, registrants must prove citizenship by producing a document from an approved list, which includes birth certificates, passports and naturalization records. They may bring the document to a county clerk’s office or email a photo of it. Under Mr. Kobach’s new rule, if they fail to do so, they would be removed from the voters list after 90 days. Residents can try to register again even after being removed from the list.
The 36,000 people on the list represent about 2 percent of the state’s 1.7 million registered voters. The Wichita Eagle reported in September that more than 16 percent of people who have tried to register to vote since the law went into effect in January 2013 have been placed on the list.
Several people on the list who were contacted by The Times said that they did not remember trying to register to vote and had no idea why their names were on the list. Two people said that they had moved out of state since they began the registration process, so had not bothered to complete it. Several others said they had wanted to vote but felt hamstrung by the requirement to provide proof of citizenship, and eventually gave up.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Cody Keener, 21, said that he tried to register to vote while renewing his driver’s license last year and assumed that his registration was complete. Mr. Keener, a full-time student at Baker University who lives in Lawrence, Kan., said he later received a notice from the Douglas County clerk’s office that he had been marked as “in suspense” because he had not submitted proof of citizenship. Angered by that requirement, he decided to join the suit.
“I walked out of the D.M.V. under the impression that I was registered,” he said. “When I found out later that 36,000 other people were on the list, I thought about how many people would be in my shoes, and how many tens of thousands of people would show up on Election Day thinking they were registered to vote.”
Mr. Shew, the clerk for Douglas County, whose most populous city is Lawrence, which is home to the University of Kansas, said many people had expressed frustration with the law. “The part that’s disheartening to me is, you hear a lot of people on the phone say, ‘This is just too much to deal with, forget about it.’”
Mr. Shew said that before the proof of citizenship requirement, a provision of the law known as the SAFE Act, went into effect in January 2013, registering to vote required no identification.
Kansas is one of four states that require proof of citizenship to register to vote, along with Alabama, Arizona and Georgia. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, only Kansas and Arizona are currently enforcing the law. In Georgia, officials said they were still smoothing out legal and technological requirements and did not yet have a timeline for when the law would take effect. In Alabama, the secretary of state’s office said that its proof of citizenship law conflicted with a federal law and could not currently be enforced.
Though advocates of the laws contend that they prevent illegal voting, critics assert that voter fraud is rare. Even Mr. Kobach said in the interview that he knew of fewer than a dozen cases of noncitizens who had successfully voted in Kansas in the last seven years. But last Friday, he moved to prosecute three cases of suspected voter fraud, the first time in Kansas history that a secretary of state had prosecuted a voting crime, his office said.
Michael Smith, an associate professor of political science at Emporia State University in Kansas, said that the list was populated by many young people who were “very skittish, very skeptical” of the voting process and who would be less motivated than others to vote.
“I have no doubt that if this population was fully registered, the turnout rate would be on the low side,” he said. “But we’re still talking about enough voters that they could swing a close election.”
Zachary Lamb, 22, one of the would-be voters on the list, said he remembered trying to register, but disregarded a follow-up notice in the mail reminding him to complete the process.
It directed him to go to a building and bring paperwork, said Mr. Lamb, a football coach and a Republican, but he had never found the time.
But he said he agreed with the law demanding proof of citizenship, a requirement he did not believe was too much to ask.
“Honestly, I think I’ve just been lazy, and I’ve been pretty busy,” he said. “I don’t think it’s too difficult of a process to go through.”