Taxpayers paid for the outfits, thanks to the generous Biden administration, and outgoing dollars for [...]]]>
Taxpayers paid for the outfits, thanks to the generous Biden administration, and outgoing dollars for invaders are just beginning. Wait till the hundreds of thousands of kiddies arrive in local schools and need special services for language, healthcare, food and whatever else they might require. We’ve been there, done that during the Obama administration, but now the border is wide open so there are many more foreigners sucking up resources that should go to citizen kids.
Here’s the accompanying article showing the costs charged to unwilling citizens are just beginning:
]]>U.S. taxpayers pay to reunite illegal immigrant families amid border surge, Washington Times, By Stephen Dinan, April 8, 2021
Taxpayers are footing the bill for illegal immigrant parents to collect their children from federal shelters, as the Biden administration tries to speed up the process of getting a record surge of juvenile migrants out of its custody.
Nearly 19,000 unaccompanied children were nabbed jumping the border in March, the Department of Homeland Security revealed Thursday, doubling the number from February and shattering the previous record of about 11,500, set in May 2019.
And while it wasn’t a record, the surge in families attempting to jump the border was also stunning, rising by more than 175% in just one month and suggesting that the unaccompanied children, while drawing the most attention, are not the biggest long-term challenge.
Combined, the families and unaccompanied children accounted for about 72,500 of the 172,331 illegal border encounters Customs and Border Protection recorded in March.
Troy Miller, CBP’s acting commissioner, suggested the situation was under control.
“This is not new,” he said of the surging numbers. “Encounters have continued to increase since April 2020, and our past experiences have helped us be better prepared for the challenges we face this year.”
But analysts said given the current trends, CBP is on track for 1.2 million encounters with illegal border crossers, which would be far above anything the country’s seen since the Bush years. (Continues)
The official California Department of Education page includes the rather challenging language statistics for Fall 2018:
● The 1,195,988 English learners constitute 19.3 percent of the total enrollment in California public schools.
● A total of 2,587,609 students (English Learners and Fluent English Proficient) speak a language other than English in their homes. This number represents about 41.8 percent of the state’s public school enrollment.
● The majority of English learners (70.2 percent) are enrolled in the elementary grades, kindergarten through grade six. The rest (29.8 percent) are enrolled in the secondary grades, seven through twelve, and in the ungraded category.
This is the larger background that contributes to the failure of California public education, driving students to sue the state. Citizen students stuck in diverse schools are really getting the short end of the stick in environments where diversity is more valued than excellence and achievement.
To give the Times its due, it did mention some of the diversity details which I’ve highlighted in the text following:
]]>California students sued because they were such poor readers. They just won $53 million to help them, Los Angeles Times, February 21, 2020
LOS ANGELES — Two years ago, a group of students and their teachers sued the state of California for doing a poor job teaching kids how to read — 53% of California third-graders did not meet state test standards that year, and scores have increased only incrementally since. On Thursday they won $53 million so that the state’s lowest-performing schools have the resources to do better.
Under the settlement with the state, most of the funding will be awarded over three years to 75 public elementary schools, including charters, with the poorest third-grade reading scores in California over the last two years. The agreement comes after the novel lawsuit contended that the students’ low literacy levels violated California’s constitutional mandate to provide all children with equal access to an education, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum at the pro bono law firm Public Counsel.
“We shouldn’t have to be filing lawsuits to establish a right to read,” Rosenbaum said.
The plaintiffs included current or former students and educators at La Salle Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles; Van Buren Elementary School in Stockton; and the charter school Children of Promise Preparatory Academy in Inglewood. La Salle and Van Buren will be among the schools that receive funding, Rosenbaum said, but not all the recipient schools have been identified.
“We know that literacy is the foundation for all learning, and it’s an essential part of participating in democracy. People who can’t read and write are often uninformed, are more easily manipulated and less likely to vote,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. This settlement is “just a step, and I think we shouldn’t exaggerate how big a step.”
A Los Angeles Times analysis of the 75 lowest-performing schools on the state’s English language arts test, based on California’s Common Core standards, illustrates the depth of the reading problem. Seven out of 10 third-graders in these schools did not meet the standards, according to state data from 2018 and 2019. The schools have about double the English learners of other elementary schools, and more than 90% of students at those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — a poverty indicator.
The schools with the lowest test scores also tend to enroll higher percentages of homeless students and foster students, Noguera said.
The settlement money to improve learning will exclude hundreds of elementary schools whose students are also struggling to meet reading standards.
In more than 500 of the state’s approximately 6,000 elementary schools, the majority of third-grade students scored Level 1 — the lowest — in English tests, according to the Times analysis. About 80% of the schools’ population are black and Latino, higher than the state average of 60%.
The scenario is also troubling in the fourth grade, with California students lagging behind the national averages in reading on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress, a standardized test taken across the country. (Continues)
Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew [...]]]>
Interestingly, Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts remarked to interviewer Mark Levin on Sunday, “The problem is that the educational establishment don’t believe in great men and women any longer. They see for ideological reasons of their own, and the idea that no one is greater than anybody else, and so they won’t teach about heroes.”
History bereft of humans — both heroes and villains — is pretty hollow, so PragerU fills a big hole.
Founder Dennis Prager testified before a Senate committee last summer about his purpose in creating the videos and dedication to defending free speech in America.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media treats PragerU like an insect being dissected in a high school biology class, analyzing the details at length while missing the big picture. That’s what appeared in the New York Times Sunday front page article titled, “It’s Fox News for Teenagers, in Short Videos.”
That title makes the PragerU videos sound dumbed down which they definitely are not. The most recent edition, from January 6, features a discussion by Brit Niall Ferguson about the life and influence of Margaret Thatcher, a piece suitable for an educated adult desiring a brief refresher on the unique prime minister.
Still, the article provides history I didn’t know, one example being that Dennis Prager initially envisioned a traditional college but a brick-and-mortar edifice would have be prohibitively expensive.
The Times article was reprinted elsewhere, so click freely on the link following to read the whole piece:
]]>Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time, New York Times, January 4, 2020
BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.
He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.
“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.
“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.
After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.
Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.
The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.
Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.
He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.
“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”
He did not graduate from college.
The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”
To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.
“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”
The way PragerU presents that “alternative voice” is in the measured tone of an online university, carefully avoiding the news cycle and President Trump. That is part of its power.
“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.
PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.
“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.
On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all. (Continues)
One of the newspaper’s lucky recipients is an illegal alien from Honduras, Miguel Angel Guity Mejia, whose goal is to mooch a college education — and readers are urged to donate to that cause.
Mejia’s goal for his future degree is to become a sports journalist and work for Univision or Telemundo — just what America needs, another soccer reporter. Does a more socially useless occupation exist?
Meanwhile, some Americans are not doing well even in the improved economy, and less globalist charities concentrate on their needs.
Naturally, the Times’ explanatory article is even more breathless and emotional than standard sob stories from the liberal press.
]]>After a Treacherous Trip From Honduras, Aiming for an Education, New York Times, November 25, 2019
After a harrowing journey to reach New York, Miguel Angel Guity Mejia is hoping to resume his college studies and establish a secure future.
When Miguel Angel Guity Mejia was 16, he packed his Bible, a pair of shoes and some clothes in a knapsack. In the dead of night, he left home without saying goodbye to his family. They had no idea he was fleeing Corozal, the coastal village in Honduras where he grew up.
He stayed in a hotel with three friends for about a week, until the border with Guatemala was clear of immigration authorities. Then they set out for the United States, eager to escape the reach of gang members who were hanging around soccer fields and basketball courts, trying to recruit youngsters like him.
“I was getting scared,” he recalled this month, four years after his journey began.
For more than two weeks, he and his friends walked, hitchhiked, took buses and hid between train cars. When they arrived at the border between the United States and Mexico, they had to swim across a river. “That was the moment that changed my life forever,” Mr. Mejia said.
Once they reached the middle of the river, the current was so strong and the water so deep that one of Mr. Mejia’s friends started drowning. Mr. Mejia tried pulling him up by his shirt, but to no avail. He also started drowning. “God, please,” he recalled thinking. “Please save me.” Suddenly, they reached a riffle and managed to cross to the other side.
The ordeal lasted minutes, Mr. Mejia said, but it felt like a lifetime.
They eventually approached Border Patrol agents, and Mr. Mejia was placed in a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Texas for about four months until he moved to New York to stay with his father and stepmother.
Before then, Mr. Mejia had almost no relationship with his father, who had left the family for the United States when Mr. Mejia was an infant and eventually settled in the Bronx. About seven years ago, Mr. Mejia’s father called him unexpectedly, and Mr. Mejia memorized the phone number. When he arrived in Mexico, he reached out to his father for help.
In the Bronx, Mr. Mejia, now 20, enrolled in high school and joined the school’s soccer team (he is a die-hard Real Madrid fan) in his junior year. While he was grateful to have left Honduras, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates and where more than half the population lives in poverty, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, the adjustment was challenging. His father went from being a stranger to his caregiver, and Mr. Mejia was homesick.
In the summer of 2016, he was so down that he considered returning to Honduras. Then he joined another soccer team, at a church in East Harlem, and started attending services there. It was a transformative experience, he said, and it gave him a sense of inner peace. The resentment he had felt toward his father for leaving him when he was a baby eased, and he began to appreciate how hard his father had worked to provide for his family.
As he became more comfortable in the United States, Mr. Mejia applied for an immigration designation that would make him eligible to seek a green card. He had help from Terra Firma, a project of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Terra Firma offers medical and legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children. Mr. Mejia’s application is still pending.
Mr. Mejia has since graduated from high school. Because of his immigration status, he is not eligible for many financial aid opportunities to attend college. After receiving a $1,000 scholarship through his high school, he enrolled at Bronx Community College in August with plans to major in media studies. The $600 that he had saved from a summer job at a carpet factory in Brooklyn ran out quickly, though, and last month, Mr. Mejia dropped out. (Continues)
Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today [...]]]>
Prager recently visited Martha MacCallum for a chat about the film where he discussed his concerns about the threat to free speech in this country today that starts with what young people are taught. As he remarked, “The university has substituted indoctrination for education.”
The Left fears unrestricted speech from conservatives and moderates, so it has trained a victim class of overly sensitive liberal young people by posing any disagreement as an attack on their superior values and probably racist in some way.
Unfortunately the demand for politically correct speech doesn’t stop at the campus; instead the silly and distracting rules of the left have permeated our society up and down.
The Fox News segment begins with part of the movie trailer, then gets to the interview at around 1:35 in the video following:
]]>MARTHA MacCALLUM: Dennis Prager joins me now. Radio host of the Dennis Prager Show. Dennis, great to see you. Thank you for being on tonight.
DENNIS PRAGER: Great to be with you. Thank you.
MacCALLUM: So, I mean, just watching that trailer. And I watched, you know, pieces of the film today. It is so disturbing that we’ve gotten to a point where you can’t have these discussions on college campuses, which is exactly the place that you should be having them. When Art Laffer gets shut down — you know, the designer of the Laffer curve and the Reagan economy — you just have to wonder, what is so deeply upsetting and controversial about Art Laffer?
PRAGER: What’s deeply upsetting is that the man is not on the Left. That is all it takes. It’s unprecedented in American history that there is a such a large percentage of young people — or, of that matter, old people — who believe the First Amendment needs to be changed. And those are the polls. About 50 percent of millennials believe that the First Amendment should be modified to ban hate speech. But of course, the whole point of free speech is that what you consider hate speech is irrelevant. What I consider hate speech is irrelevant.
When I was a kid, Nazis — real Nazis — what I mean “real” is not people who were called Nazi by the Left because they don’t agree with them. I’ve been called “Nazi,” and I’ve devoted my life to Judaism and to the Jewish people, and write a Torah commentary, and built a synagogue. And I’ve been called a Nazi. Google has an email that declares Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and Prager U — my website, Prager University — Nazis.
But real Nazis wanted to march in Skokie, Illinois, where there were Holocaust survivors, because they’re such cruel human beings, these Nazis. Jewish groups and liberal groups all said, “Of course. In America, even real Nazis can march in a Jewish neighborhood.” That’s America.
It’s changed, and that’s the first time in American history that this is the case. And it started at the university. That’s what this film is about.
MacCALLUM: You say that it’s dangerous to send your kids to American universities.
PRAGER: That it’s what to send your kid to university?
MacCALLUM: That it’s dangerous.
PRAGER: What was the word? Oh, “dangerous.” Well, I have a very good motto on this. Sending your child to college is playing Russian roulette with their values. And I mean it. I’m not happy about it. I love the life of the mind.
I went to Columbia. I love intellectual work. I read and I write. But the university has substituted indoctrination for education.
MacCALLUM: What do you think — you know, we talk about triggers a lot, right? Triggers that send people into safe spaces. But what do you think triggered this? You know, when you try to sort of trace back the anthropology of how we got here, where do you think it begins?
PRAGER: Well, my theory is that there is a huge distinction — a gulf — between liberal and left. Liberals and conservatives agree on far more than liberals and leftists do. But liberals don’t want to acknowledge this because they’re afraid to. But this emanates from the Left. The Left, from Lenin to the present-day university anywhere on earth has never countenanced free speech. So, wherever it gains power — and there’s nowhere it has more power than at the university — it suppresses free speech because it can’t deal with free speech. We might actually prevail if we’re allowed to speak.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. I mean, if you — you know, if you are — if you feel strongly enough about your arguments, you should never be afraid to have someone present the other side because you shouldn’t worry that they’re going to able to poke holes in it because you feel so strongly about what you believe.
I want to ask you about something that happened today. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito wrote an opinion that he was defending — National Review went after a climate scientist named Michael Mann for his hockey stick theory. And National Review said, essentially, that the methodology that he used was debunked, in their opinion, in their analysis. And they tried to get that overturned, and the Supreme Court said they’re not going to hear that case. And Alito wrote a very passionate defense of freedom of speech on this. What are your thoughts on that?
PRAGER: It’s depressing to think that, if this did go to the Supreme Court, it wouldn’t be 9-0, as I said I have no issue — I mean, obviously, I don’t agree on everything liberals believe, but they’re my allies. And liberals need to understand, we are your allies on free speech. That’s why there are so many liberals in our documentary because this is a unity between us. This is a very serious thing that is happening. If so many young people think, “Oh, well, what I think is hate speech, that should be banned” — 2,000 demonstrators against Ann Coulter speaking at Berkeley last week? I mean, my God. They can have the furthest radical leftist show up and we don’t do that.
MacCALLUM: Yeah. Dennis Prager. “No Safe Spaces” is the film. I recommend everybody watch it. Thank you very much.
PRAGER: December 6th, goes national. Nosafespaces.com.
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a [...]]]>
The Times used the word “indoctrinate” to describe PragerU more than once, although it’s obvious the paper regards its own publication as a fair representation of the news despite its decided liberal orientation and open-borders philosophy.
As an influential provider of conservative-leaning ideas, Dennis Prager has come under a lot of criticism from the left, particularly Silicon Valley.
On July 16, Prager appeared before a Senate hearing titled Google and Censorship through Search Engines to defend his work — see my report including video and transcript, Dennis Prager Responds to Google Censorship against PragerU.
To critics who call his videos biased, he remarked during his testimony:
DENNIS PRAGER: PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime-ministers, four Pulitzer-Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO, or the former prime-ministers of Norway, Canada, and Spain, or the late Charles Krauthammer, or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
PragerU presents a variety of historical subjects, from the current failure of Europe to confront hostile Islam to the importance of the Protestant Reformation in creating modern freedoms. Most are essays presented by experts, from well known persons to professors you never heard of. All are interesting, and their Monday morning appearance is a good start for the week.
How a Los Angeles-based conservative became one of the internet’s biggest sensations, Los Angeles Times, August 23, 2019
WASHINGTON — Earlier this summer, as Donald Trump assembled online activists at the White House to thank them for their role in getting him to the Oval Office and – Trump predicted – keeping him there, one guest didn’t rush to claim credit.
Los Angeles-based Prager University, a registered charity, is legally prohibited from politicking. It isn’t truly a university and doesn’t have a campus. But the digital empire created by Dennis Prager, a 71-year-old conservative radio host and erstwhile Never Trumper, is having more success rallying young people to Trump’s side than many campaign committees aligned with the president.
The concise videos PragerU launches onto the internet every week to indoctrinate and motivate conservatives have been watched more than 2 billion times, according to the group’s own count. Independent analysis done for The Times by Tubular Labs, a video measurement company, largely backs up that claim. PragerU consistently spends more on Facebook advertising than major political campaigns and national advocacy groups. It ranks among the top 10 biggest political spenders on the platform.
Its videos are becoming a staple on college campuses, where Prager is dead set on overturning liberal orthodoxy. PragerU boasts that thousands of college and high school teachers screen its videos in their classrooms.
All that has caused considerable consternation on the left.
“It is a sophisticated campaign to indoctrinate young people,” said Tara McGowan, chief executive of Acronym, a nonprofit that advises progressives on digital campaigning. “The amount of money they are putting behind it is alarming and significant. They seem to have created a savvy way to push an ideology onto an audience and get a tax break in the process.” (Continues)
The article goes into great detail about funding, including the identities of major contributors. If you are interested in Prager’s philosophy of education, the Times article provides almost nothing. For that, the best introduction is probably his Senate testimony:
]]>Plus, state universities prefer the full tuition that [...]]]>
Plus, state universities prefer the full tuition that foreigners pay rather than the lower amounts paid by residents: in 2016 it was reported that the University of California lowered standards for more lucrative out-of-staters including non-Americans. In the fall 2018 enrollment, only 76 percent were California residents.
Interestingly, foreign students are seen by some as a wonderful affirmation of America’s educational excellence, but their presence has no value at all for US students. The university elites like to talk about the benefits of diversity, but they never mention its financial advantage from foreign students to the institution.
Below, the UC Berkeley campus where diversity is believed to be a strength. The school also has a program of support for illegal alien students — California taxpayer dollars at work.
Furthermore, as the CIS panel points out, there are larger dangers to the nation when the university money grubbers admit even America’s worst enemies from around the world. As Dan Cadman mentions in his presentation, students can get into convenient positions to steal secrets and strategies for the dear homeland. It’s crazy to make it so easy for our enemies to steal America’s important knowledge.
President Trump complains about Red China’s theft of intellectual property, and he has fought back with higher tariffs. But it would be more effective for him to end foreign student visas from China and some other places like Iran and North Korea (!).
Here’s Dan Cadman’s discussion of the national security risks associated with crazy liberal acceptance of foreign students:
]]>DAN CADMAN: The United States, by virtue of its technological prowess, by virtue of its openness, has always been a beacon to people coming to study. And that brings with it a great deal of good for the United States. There is no doubt that when people come to the U.S. and study here for a significant period of time, a matter of years, they get to know something about our society, our culture. Hopefully, that translates into a positive sense of the U.S. and its peoples. And that bodes well particularly when those individuals go back and become in their own countries leaders, political influence makers. But by the same token, because of the size of the nonimmigrant population in the United States at any one time, it poses unique questions and problems of control.
Foreign students are nonimmigrants; that is to say, temporary visitors. But unlike other temporary nonimmigrants, who may be admitted for 90 days or six months, in point of fact, when a foreign student or a research scholar is admitted to the United States they’re admitted for the duration of their status, which is to say for a period of years until their studies conclude, which might be at the undergraduate or at the graduate and postgraduate levels. What that translates to is that an individual may be here anywhere four, six, or eight years and be operating in, for U.S. society, the most open of environments, which is to say institutions of higher learning.
This can be a good thing, but the reality for government security officers is that it creates, as Mao Zedong once said, a sea in which fishes can swim. And although Mao was speaking about guerrillas among the people, it’s equally true that foreign student and exchange scholar populations, by virtue of their size, their diversity, and the openness of the campus environments, act as a perfect place in which people who are engaged in espionage or people who are of malintent can conceal themselves without any real serious possibility that they’re going to be detected, at least not until in the fullness of time. There are just too many people for government officers and government intelligence agents and counterintelligence agents and law enforcement to keep up with. And that basically is the sum and substance of the problem, or at least one dimension of the problem.
The other dimension is that over the course of the past few decades, because of the cost of higher education particularly for people who are paying at the highest levels, which international students are, it becomes very lucrative for universities to fill their campuses with people whose governments are often paying the cost of their tuition and the cost of them living in the United States for that period of time. And the consequence of that is that it has the de facto effect of over the course of time squeezing native-born citizens out of a lot of positions. And this is particularly of concern where STEM – science, technology, engineering, mathematics – subjects are concerned.
It is leading, in a sense, to an atrophying of U.S. native-born graduates in those studies. And the consequence is for industry and government afterward, including the Defense Department, the Energy Department, there is a dearth of people who they can bring on who are in a position to pass government security checks because those aren’t going to be available to foreigners. And this has caused a great deal of concern over the course of some number of years.
Touching on the concerns about espionage, it’s significant that every FBI director going back several decades, when they speak about national security concerns, has addressed the unique problems that they confront with the foreign student population. And that is because they acknowledge that functionally it’s beyond their capacity to monitor and control the number of people who come into the United States to study every year.
And by way of example, every year from 2013 to 2017 there were more than 2 million admissions per year of nonimmigrant students and exchange scholars. Now, it’s important for me to point out that an admission is not the same as a human being because, obviously, a human being could leave temporarily – say on vacation or to go visit family – and then come back. But even if you were to assume that each individual departed and came back at least once, that still means at any point in time a population of foreign students and scholars in the United States exceeding 1 million, and that’s on the low side.
It is without doubt a problem for U.S. security and counterintelligence officers to keep track. And it’s not just the number, but the diversity of the places that these individuals come from because, surprisingly, many of them come from places that are either actively hostile to the United States or are in fierce global competition with the United States for predominance, whether that’s militarily or in trade or technology.
By way of example, the International Institute for Education says that during the 2017-2018 academic year there were 363,341 Chinese students enrolled. And that’s just students; that’s not the exchange scholars. And that probably didn’t include vocational students who may be attending things like pilot school or even maritime schools of various kinds. There were almost 13,000 Iranian students here, 7.5 thousand Pakistani students, 5.5 thousand Russian students, 44,000-plus Saudi Arabian students. There were more than 10,000 Turkish students. There were even 726 Syrian students. And those are just touching the surface. In addition, you have students from Afghanistan, from Cuba, from North Korea.
And an interesting thing when you look at the Department of Homeland Security’s Statistical Yearbook, when you look for the numbers some of them are categorized as “D.” And when you look at “D,” that means “data is withheld to limit disclosure.” Why would the Department of Homeland Security exhibit an interest in withholding information about North Koreans studying in the United States? I find that curious in the extreme – and disturbing, frankly.
You have more than 18,000 Venezuelan students here, and probably a good number of those are opposed to the Maduro regime. But then a good number of them will also be advocates of the Maduro regime because one constant about governments that are particularly authoritarian or are particularly focused on what they want is that they find it in their own interests to seed the foreign student population with people who are sympathetic with their aims.
And a good example, although not the only example of that, is China, because China is very focused on where it wants to go, what it wants to achieve, where it wants to be with its global dominance. And for the Chinese government, espionage is, you might say, a family affair. Everything is geared toward accruing technological advantage. And if that means they can short-circuit the time and money on research by stealing secrets, whether that’s in the defense and military sector or in the trade secrets sector, they’re going to do it.
And not all of the people who come here by any means, of course, engage in espionage, but some do. And not all of them are government security or intelligence officers. Some of them are spies of opportunity. They are inculcated into the idea that it is patriotic for them, if given the chance, to take advantage of things that are open to them. And they are encouraged when the opportunity arises to fit themselves into niches where they’re going to have the opportunity to see those secrets that they can pass back home. And if even only one in 10 or one in a hundred people are doing this, when you have hundreds of thousands of people studying inevitably you’re going to accrue very large benefit from that.
And while I’ve talked about China, even more aggressive in that regard is Iran. And Iran, it would less likely be spies of opportunity. Iran is going to be salting its foreign student population, after it’s thoroughly vetted them, to make sure that their beliefs and interests coincide with that of the theocracy of the Islamic Republic. That is where I think the difficulty lies.
It’s compounded by the fact that in recent years, in truth, the Department of Homeland Security and even its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, walked away from any kind of meaningful enforcement and control of the student population or of the university systems that host these individuals. In theory, the federal government holds in its hand the ability to withhold or withdraw from an institution of learning the right to host foreign students. In practice, that almost never happens. And David will speak to that I’m sure, can speak to that very effectively. But the point is that unless and until something is done, this unfettered situation that we find ourselves in will remain, and that’s untenable.
Two major complaints about leftist bias concerned the course’s anti-semitism and the idea that “capitalism inherently exploits people of color.”
Who could have predicted that from far-left California Democrats??
One interesting item was an incomplete photo (see below) of an ethnic studies class project that showed an explanation of Maya math (so far, so good) and also two drawings of imaginative transportation — a bicycle and a scooter, even though the wheel did not exist in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere. Whatever are they teaching the kiddies in their diversity classes?
And of course, you can’t have diversity without victimhood, so one article had a hispanic student learn from her research that her father was actually an illegal alien. But Angela’s ethnic studies class assured her that she was still valuable and could feel “comfortable” with herself, even though her family’s presence in America was stolen from the start.
]]>Ethnic studies may soon be mandatory. Can California get it right?, Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2019
Angela Warren always assumed her father, a native of El Salvador, entered the United States via airliner. It took an assignment in her high school ethnic studies class to learn that he crossed the border alone at 14, terrified of being caught. When he reached the American side, he fell to his knees and gave thanks.
That eye-opening view of her family’s past inspired Warren’s mission to change the present. At a time when watching the news can make her feel anxious and helpless, Warren, now an 18-year-old college student, said it’s the lessons of her ethnic studies class that generate intellectual awakening and empowerment.
“It made me feel comfortable with myself knowing my family history and knowing the history of our people,” said Warren, who attends Marymount California University.
In actions that would affect more than 6.5 million California students, state lawmakers are poised to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high school and at Cal State universities, raising the stakes for a team of educators drafting the model curriculum, those who are arguing for changes to it, and also for critics — who see an academic field dominated by one-sided, insular political correctness and separatism.
Warren’s former teacher Ron Espiritu believes ethnic studies classes have become an educational imperative. He sees his students grapple with weighty issues — inequality, hate speech, police brutality, polarized political discourse, immigration raids and mass shootings.
“How do we not talk about those issues on Day 1 with our students?” the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy teacher asked. (Continues)
Indeed, the money sent [...]]]>
Indeed, the money sent back as remittances is a lifeline to the poor country: Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the US, sent $9.5 billion home last year — 12 percent of the country’s GDP.
The local priest is quoted as supporting illegal immigration because “it serves a fundamental human need to survive.”
That’s right — stealing jobs from poor American citizens and generally driving down wages in the whole low-skilled sector in the US is sanctioned by the Catholic church which calls such Marxist views “Liberation theology”, and the church supports such lawbreaking because it benefits their own people.
Of course, the article has no mention of the harm caused by the influx of millions of Third-Worlders into the United States. The economy is booming, but wages are not rising because of the millions of foreign workers who compete against citizens by working cheap.
Plus, the Guatemalans now work as “menial laborers” but when automation becomes more widespread in a few years, they will not be cheap enough as the smart machines become even less expensive. At that point, their advantage as cheap illegal labor will evaporate and they will become jobless.
The foreigner invasion is also harmful to American students because schools are forced to reallocate their budgets to serve often illiterate, non-English-speaking foreigners.
As an example of the Guatemalan effect, the New York Times reported earlier this month:
Last year, the Palm Beach County school district enrolled 4,555 Guatemalan students in kindergarten through 12th grade, nearly 50% more than two years earlier. Many of the students come from the country’s remote highlands and speak neither Spanish nor English. The number of elementary school students in kindergarten through fifth grade more than doubled to 2,119 in that same period.
But the Los Angeles Times thinks that we Americans should celebrate the Third World invasion because it is a big benefit to Guatemala. The United States as the World Welfare Office is not questioned, nor is homemade reform abroad even considered.
]]>To folks in this Guatemalan town, success stories start with a trek to the U.S., Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2019
This mist-shrouded mountain town in northwest Guatemala exudes a bustling air of good fortune, even prosperity, that may seem at odds with the landscape of subsistence cornfields and vegetable plots.
Concrete and stucco houses of three and even four stories tower over traditional dwellings crafted from adobe bricks and wooden planks.
The source of the housing boom isn’t income from crop sales or occasional tourism. Rather, Todos Santos runs on savings sent home from the United States.
“The United States helped me more than the Guatemala government ever did,” said Efrain Carrillo, 40, outside the three-story house he built with three years of savings from working in the north as a laborer a decade ago. “I was deported, but I am grateful to the United States.”
The house features a ground-floor grocery store to provide income, while Carrillo and his wife live upstairs and their two teenage children live with relatives in the United States.
Fluttering from a balcony is the Guatemalan flag, and next to it another common sight here: the Stars and Stripes.
The proliferation of U.S. flags is a testament to the importance of illegal migration here — and the difficulty of curtailing it.
For the moment, Mexican authorities, under pressure from the Trump administration, are cracking down on U.S.-bound migration from Central America, deploying Mexican National Guard troops along roads leading from the country’s southern frontier and stepping up deportations.
The effort appears to be yielding results, with apprehensions in June along the U.S. Southwest border down 28% compared with May.
But in the long term, such campaigns may do little to stop the exodus from places like Todos Santos.
Gang violence and political persecution — two of the most common reasons that Central Americans give when they claim asylum at the U.S. border — are not major problems here. The migration is driven by economics.
It has become deeply ingrained in the culture and a rite of passage for many young men and increasingly for women and children. Seemingly every family here has a close relative in el norte, from California to Florida, Oregon to Virginia.
“What would we do without the United States?” asked Julian Jeronimo, a 49-year-old teacher who spent four years in the San Francisco Bay area — working in restaurants and a fertilizer supply store while sharing an apartment with a half-dozen other migrants — before returning in 2004 to build a home. “We understand that the United States wants to control immigration. Of course, Trump is worried about criminals coming into the country, about terrorists. But people from Todos Santos go north to work.”
Estranged from Guatemala’s central government, the town seems closer emotionally to Oakland — a popular destination — than to Guatemala City. There is deep respect, even reverence, for the United States.
In recent years, Jeronimo has watched as parents have systematically taken their children north, diminishing enrollment in his rural school.
“This year we lost six children who left for the United States,” he said, adding that others plan to leave once they complete elementary school.
“They see that their brother has a new house or new car and they say, ‘I want that too.’ That is a very difficult mentality to change.”
In the United States, migrants from Todos Santos have traditionally been menial laborers — toiling in agriculture, landscaping, restaurants, and in meat- and poultry-processing plants.
But back home, they are something else: Pillars of the community, success stories to be emulated, trend-setters who finance lavish homes, sometimes with gated entrances, driveways and even lawns, mimicking suburbia USA in a grandiose style known as remittance architecture.
“There’s not a lot for people to do in Todos Santos to make a living,” said Jennifer L. Burrell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Albany who has studied the town for more than two decades. “So if you have aspirations, if you want to send your children to school, to educate them, to buy land and so forth — the only way you can accomplish that is by migration.”
The sprawling municipality of 33,000 people, nestled in the cool embrace of the Cuchumatanes mountain range, 8,000 feet above sea level, qualifies as a “transnational village,” Burrell says.
Residents marvel at the U.S.-reared sons and daughters of expatriates who return for visits.
“They are all grown up and they tell us they are still going to school, to the university!” said Fortunato Pablo Mendoza, a 67-year-old retired teacher. “Imagine that! Here there was nothing to do after finishing primary school but working in the fields.”
In Todos Santos, even tombs in the cemetery bear U.S. flags.
: :
Many Guatemalan migrants hail from rural outposts like Todos Santos, where most residents are of indigenous heritage and speak Mam, a Mayan tongue, while still donning traditional dress — embroidered skirts and blouses for women, striped pants and shirts and straw sombreros for men.
Officially, nearly 90% of Todos Santos residents live in poverty, but those statistics don’t take into full account the substantial income from remittances. Last year, Guatemalans abroad, mostly in the United States, sent home $9.5 billion, or 12% of the country’s gross domestic product.
People here expressed contempt for the Guatemalan government, which is notoriously corrupt and, according to the World Bank, spends less on health, education and other social services that most other Latin American countries.
Migration is the social safety net: Older migrants return as younger ones head north.
[. . .]
Father Edgar Tarax , who presided over the Mass, later expressed skepticism that Mexico’s current enforcement efforts — which have prompted some residents to put emigration plans on hold — could slow the movement north in the long term.
“How can emigration be stopped when it serves a fundamental human need to survive?” the priest asked in the church courtyard as worshipers nodded in approval. “Our people go north and work day and night, to send money back to build homes, to buy land, to help their families. That is the life of Todos Santos.”
More than that, the Democrat shriek-out over a lawful action to remove aliens has demonstrated how little Dems care about Americans’ safety and quality of life. The presence of many millions of illegal aliens has brought more crime, decreased quality of education and lowered wages for citizen workers.
The truth is, Democrats have now outed themselves as preferring foreigners over American citizens. Hopefully voters will remember in 2020.
On Friday, Tucker Carlson considered the Democrats’ pro-lawbreaker reactions along with Buck Sexton, who helpfully enumerated the various crimes being committed by the illegal aliens and their friends in the Democrat party.
Too bad none of the treasonous pols will ever be held to account in any serious way.
Spare Audio:
]]>TUCKER CARLSON: After several weeks of delay, this weekend, starting tomorrow, the Trump administration is planning to do something that it ran on back in 2016, enforcing the immigration laws of this country.
ICE is expected to launch raids in several American sanctuary cities. It’ll be seeking people who’ve received final orders of removal from this country, from a court.
According to the President, most of these people have already been convicted of other more serious crimes.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s not something I like doing, but people have come into our country illegally. We’re focused on criminals. We are focused on — if you look at MS-13. But when people come into our country, we take those people out and we take them out very legally. They all have papers, and it’s a process and I have an obligation to do it.
CARLSON: Now, the Democratic Party has been committed to keeping the borders open for — well, really all of Donald Trump’s presidency so far — but they usually hide their intentions at least a little bit. They’ll say that people deserve their day in court first or they will argue that only criminals ought to be deported.
But this case is unambiguous. Every person being targeted by ICE starting this weekend has already received a final order for removal. In other words, they’ve had their day in court. They’re not being held in ICE facilities at the border. Many of them have criminal convictions.
At this point, it’s a simple matter of enforcing America’s laws. Bill Clinton did it. Barack Obama did it. But that was before. So these Democrats have made their decision. American laws do not matter. Nobody should be deported, ever.
BETO O’ROURKE: These massive raids and internal enforcement operations, they are going to separate potentially thousands of families, many of whom have committed no crime against this country, pose no threat to the United States of America.
REP. OCASIO-CORTEZ: I’d hope that we can come together as a party and stand up against what should be seen, I think universally as a cruel regime.
SEN. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: Innocent people who may be swept up and arrested in massive raids across the country.
MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: If rumors start going on about raids, let alone if it starts actually happening, it immediately makes the community less safe.
SEN. CORY BOOKER: We could be using these law enforcement resources to really go after the folks that are a real threat to our communities. This is all kinds of wrong, and we’re better country than this.
SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Families belong together. Every person in America has rights.
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: And so he is going to create, as he often does, this distraction. I agree with you — and do these raids, which is — it is a crime against humanity.
CARLSON: Telling people who’ve been told by a court, by a judge, they must legally leave the country, enforcing that is a crime against humanity, says Kamala Harris.
Hillary Clinton meanwhile, piped up from retirement or whatever she’s doing these days. The same woman who claims that Russian Facebook trolls are a threat to democracy, decided to actively assist smuggling people into this country.
She posted a guide to evading ICE on Twitter, and added “Por pavor comparte,” that’s “Please share” in Spanish.
In the State of California meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom has released an instructional video informing his States’ criminals on how they can avoid law enforcement. Watch.
GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM: I just want to say to folks that are anxious about a knock on the door, when we talk about knowing your rights, no abras la puerta. Without a warrant, you don’t have to open the door. Without a warrant, you do not have to open the door.
CARLSON: So picture a Republican Governor making a video used with taxpayer money telling voters how to — I don’t know — cheat on their taxes or how to buy illegal guns. What would the reaction be? Well, CNN of course, will call for them to be imprisoned. But it wouldn’t, because they care about the law, obviously, Republicans do.
On the left, a new reality is now explicit. Our laws and our Constitution are only valid if they’re in accord with current Democratic Party talking points. Otherwise, you can ignore them.
Buck Sexton is the host of “The Buck Sexton Show” and he joins us tonight. So Buck, you know, you hate to be continuously outraged over the same story. But every week, it seems to get crazier and crazier. And now we have lawmakers calling enforcement of the law a crime against humanity. Where does this end?
BUCK SEXTON: There’s a momentum to the insanity at this point, Tucker.
It’s quite clear that they are engaged in mass nullification of immigration law, that that is what is happening now. At any stage of the process, whether it’s in sanctuary cities, we’re talking about enforcement for people with final deportation orders. And this is all part of the con.
Initially, there were no caravans, and there was not going to be any problem, no crisis to the border. And then it was okay, there’s a lot of people at the border, but we just have to let people go through their process. And if they don’t get to stay after that, we promise we’ll be okay with them being sent home. And now we know that that was a lie all along, too.
They keep telling lies about this. And they’re honestly running out of room at this point. And that’s what — we’re facing nullification. And by the way, when you put up those lists, they’re getting very close to violating another statute over immigration — I’m sure they wouldn’t care – – which is aiding and abetting.
You can’t actually harbor illegal immigrants. You can’t actually employ illegal immigrants. There are all kinds of laws out there and some of these Democrats seem to think that they should do whatever they can to obstruct law enforcement efforts. They want to talk about danger to the public? This is dangerous.
CARLSON: It’s crazy. But it’s also unfair on one level, I mean, so they’re telling foreign nationals they don’t have to abide by American law. They can ignore our laws, but they’re telling me that I have to follow every American law. And if I step outside the bounds of those laws, I go to jail. It’s like, why am I paying my taxes? Sincerely? Why can’t I buy a silencer? Why am I paying attention to all these laws, when they’re telling residents of Guatemala and Honduras like they don’t have to follow the law? I’m not kidding.
SEXTON: There’s so much illegality that actually gets piled up when you look at the real statutes. It’s against the law to lie to federal officers at the border about what you’re fleeing. It’s against the law to lie about your age. It’s against the law to have a fake Social Security card. It’s against — you go down the list. It’s against the law to engage in document fraud.
There is an entire subset of U.S. Federal Law that is being violated all the time with impunity, and people seem to think on the Democratic side they can just ignore all of this.
CARLSON: At some point, somebody is going to make a defense in court along those lines. Like these people don’t have to follow the law. Why should I? That’s when things really will start to fall apart.
SEXTON: I wish the Democrats would just be honest about what they want. If no one should get deported, if nobody should have immigration law enforced against them, the people like AOC, the legislative body in charge of these laws, they should just say, “We want to be open borders.” Stop pretending that’s not what they want. It is so clearly is.