Daily Archives: 24 February 2017

A Sense of Self-Importance

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That’s the sense of the European Union as it desperately seeks validation from the US for its existence—as if, as The Wall Street Journal put it, an American Administration is responsible for the EU’s fate.  Here’s European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker:

I do think the United States needs a strong, united European Union on all possible issues.

We’d certainly benefit from a united front on the continent on matters relating, for instance, to Russia.  But this doesn’t need an EU; it simply needs a common understanding by the continental nations of the threat posed by Russia.

Such a united front, also, isn’t likely in the form of an EU, as fractured and divided as that institution is on matters of border sanctity, immigration, national debts and who’s responsible for their repayment, taxing régimes, trade with nations outside the EU’s nominal boundaries, membership and desirability of membership, and on and on.

The EU’s overblown sense of its own importance is a sign of its entirely justified insecurity.

Immigration—Whose Rights?

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Here’s Mexican Secretary of Economy, Ildefonso Guajardo, on the question of whether NAFTA should be renegotiated:

Logically, there wouldn’t be incentives to continue collaborating on the issues most important to national security in North America, such as the issue of migration[.]

And this:

[T]he Trump administration’s effort to step up deportations have already prompted an aggressive campaign by some Mexican officials, governors and public figures to fight the policy by jamming up US immigration courts.

That particular bit of business has been noted earlier.

Because foreign individuals or those who are part of a flow of migrants have their own right to enter another country, or to be in another country, just because they want to or are on the move?

This is, in many respects, the obverse of my piece yesterday: does a foreign national retain his home country’s rights when he’s inside the US (for instance, Mexico has made it illegal to prevent a Mexican citizen from leaving Mexico)?  Does a foreign national have an intrinsic right to be in our country, independently of our wishes, even our law?

Note to Self: Delete notes to self before publishing a piece.