Category Archives: immigration

Foolishness

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Kate Cronin-Furman, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at University College London—that’s London, Great Britain, mind you, not London, KY—thinks our Border Patrol agents should be doxed and then shamed for doing their jobs in trying to keep our borders secure and detaining illegal aliens.

Of course, she denies that her demand is doxing.

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos.

Yet here she is, demanding they be doxed. With her doxing demand, too, she’s demanding that immigration lawyers violate client-lawyer privilege.

She went on to insist that the agents and others associated with detaining illegal aliens should not be allowed to have lawyers to defend them.

…the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession.

Her definition of mistreatment, mind you, not a jury’s.  Never mind the causes of the border situation.  Never mind that all defendants, no matter how despicable-seeming, are entitled to legal representation, are presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a jury trial—even in Great Britain.  Or, maybe it’s that she Knows Better than us ignorant colonials; our juries are not to be trusted.

Atrocity-doers, she calls them, saying the conditions in the detention centers amount to torture chambers.

Deplorable those conditions certainly are, but that’s not the agents’ fault.  What Cronin-Furman carefully elides (deliberately, I say; she is a professor at a prestigious British school, so she knows better) are the reasons for those conditions.

Reasons like the wholly unprecedented flood of illegal aliens across our border.

Reasons like their claiming asylum falsely, having already rejected the asylum—and work opportunities—that Mexico offered them on their way up from the Caravan Triangle.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts to reform our immigration laws to make it harder to enter illegally and much easier to enter legally while at the same time refusing to correct our asylum laws so that the combination of immigration and asylum law could remove incentives to try to enter our nation illegally.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts actually to secure our southern border with increased and improved security measures, including walls in key sections of our border.  Indeed, many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s current Presidential candidates have openly called for open borders, decriminalizing illegal entry.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—for far too long; it took an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the Senate to force the question to the House floor—to fund DHS so that Department could expand the detention facilities to meet the “demand” created by that flood of illegal aliens.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—until that Senate vote—even to allow money to be appropriated for beds and hygiene supplies for those children unless they also could get existing detention facilities disbanded.  “Let those children suffer,” the Progressive-Democrats demanded, “until we get our way.”

If there are atrocities going on on our southern border, they’re in those House Progressive-Democrats’ cynical, despicable dehumanizing of those children, using them as machinations for imposing Progressive-Democrat policies regarding our borders and immigration.  Those children are not human beings in the eyes of those Progressive-Democrats; those children are seen merely as tools to be used for a purpose.

The august personage of Cronin-Furman hasn’t been to our border; she just phoned her piece in (emailed it?) from the safety and comfort of her London school’s office.

Her behavior would be shameful were it not so foolish, or had this professor the grace to know shame.

Tariffs on Mexico

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There is some hue and cry over President Donald Trump’s threatened tariff on Mexico in an effort to get the Mexican government to take seriously its role in the crisis on our common border.

Critics of the tariffs, including those within the administration, have said the ratification of the pact would be threatened by the tariffs.

There’s no threat to ratification of the USMCA from these tariffs. There is a threat from the Progressive-Democrats who hate the treaty separately from this.  However, the lack of threat is illustrated by Mexico; since the tariff threat, that government has said it still intends to ratify the treaty.

On the other hand, critics of the present tariff threat are conflating the two purposes of tariffs. One is as protectionist devices; these are the tariffs that are targets of the USMCA, and they remain controlled by the agreement.

The other purpose is as a foreign policy tool used to induce another nation to do/not do the things identified by a particular tariff-as-foreign policy tool’s stated purpose.

The threatened tariff is not at all a protectionist tariff. On the contrary, it’s a foreign policy tool, a take-your-own-immigration-laws-seriously tariff.

Update: The foreign policy tool seems to have worked. Of course, we’ll have to see the realization over time, but that’s the case with all agreements.

Bad Policy

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Recall that President Donald Trump has threatened a sequence of rising tariffs on all Mexican goods in an effort to get Mexico to take seriously its broad contribution to the crisis we have on our border with that nation.

Republican lawmakers are gearing up for a vote to potentially override President Trump’s planned tariff on Mexico this month….

These lawmakers are concerned that the tariffs could jeopardize passage of the USMCA, and they’re worried that they will hurt Americans.  These folks have lost sight of some important facts.

One is that, after the announcement of the upcoming tariffs, the Mexican government said it intended to move ahead with ratification of the USMCA. The only ones in the way of its final acceptance are Congress’ Progressive-Democrats, who generally don’t like the deal in any event, and these Republicans.

Another is that international trade, including tools of international trade like tariffs, have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with foreign policy.

A third is the nature of conflict.  These Republicans need to understand that no conflict is bloodless for either side.   They need to stop worrying so much about their own stubbed toes and consider the effect these particular tariffs would have on Mexico and whether they just might have the intended effect.

Any attempt by Congress to get in the way can only undermine Trump’s foreign policy move to push Mexico to get serious about those whom Mexico is allowing illegally to cross its own southern border and the resulting flow of these illegal aliens north to illegally enter our country.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R, SD):

Congress is going to want to probably be heard from.

If Congress wants to be heard from, it should get serious about immigration, beginning with immigration legislation, that beginning with something akin to Trump’s offer of a year or so ago that offered a path to legalization for DACA beneficiaries plus a million more who were similarly situated.  Along with the means to better physically secure our own southern border.

The Racism of the Left

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Here’s another example, this one from Progressive-Democrat Ilhan Omar (D, MN).  No link to her remark, she tweeted it and then didn’t have the courage to leave it up; she deleted quickly deleted it.

A “merit based” immigration policy is fueled by racism towards the Latinx community….

Sure.  Because Hispanics are inherently inferior and wholly incapable of competing with other Americans or other immigrants without special treatment.  That’s worse than the soft bigotry of low expectation which President Bush the Younger so rightly decried.  That’s outright racism.

That silence you hear from the Progressive-Democratic Party is their open, straight-up agreement with Omar’s racist sewage.

AMLO Wrote a Letter

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…to President Donald Trump on Trump’s decision to begin, early this month, imposing tariffs on Mexican exports into the US.  The letter can be read at The Wall Street Journal here.

I have a couple of thoughts on that letter.

We base our immigration policy on this thought. Human beings do not abandon their town for pleasure but for need.

For the most part, that’s true.  However, those departing the Caravan Triangle of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala are not coming to the US for their need, whether amnesty or other—and neither are most of those who’ve left other nations and are trying to enter the US from Mexico.  Mexico—Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Mexico and that of his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto—have offered these “migrants” amnesty and opportunities for jobs.  These persons, though, have rejected those offers, insisting on entering the US instead.  Their rejection demonstrates they are not seeking amnesty or satisfaction of any other need at our border.

I proposed you to opt for development cooperation and help the Central American countries attract productive investments to create jobs and resolve this painful issue in depth.

What is Mexico doing along these lines?  Neither AMLO nor Nieto have identified any Mexican effort.  It is not the US alone who must act here.  And: what does AMLO propose, specifically?  The US already spends billions in American treasure, and none of it gets to those who need the help.  The money instead is intercepted by Triangle oligarchs and by NGOs whose ability to operate at all depends on their cooperation with those oligarchs.  What programs that actually would facilitate the ability of the citizens of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to help themselves does AMLO suggest—and what would Mexico’s role be such programs?

You are also aware that we are fulfilling our responsibility to stop immigration, as effective as possible and without violations to any human right, through our country.

I’m aware of no such thing.  I am aware that Mexico’s police and soldiers along Mexico’s southern border did erect barriers, ostensibly to prevent Triangle citizens from illegally entering Mexico (illegally under Mexico’s laws, which are—on paper—much more stringent than our own).  I am also aware that those police and soldiers then stood aside at the first bit of “migrant” pressure and allowed those people to tear down some barriers and bypass others and enter Mexico illegally. This was done on the orders of Mexico’s government.

I am also aware that those now illegal immigrants are actively aided on their travels north in their quest to illegally enter the US rather than collected and returned south of Mexico’s southern border.  It’s true enough that a couple of hundred travelers were rounded up and returned, and a big splash was made of this.  Out of the tens of thousands of such illegal aliens on the move, though—in easily tracked caravans—this roundup was purely for show and not anything serious.

I am also aware that no human right allows anyone to enter another nation without that nation’s prior permission, nor does the receiving nation have any obligation to grant that permission.  The human right AMLO so piously references does extend to helping these unfortunates in their home countries, and their fellows (and family members!) who stayed behind.  Which brings me to my first question: What is Mexico doing along these lines?

…you transform the country of fraternity for the world’s migrants into a ghetto, a closed space, where migrants are stigmatized, mistreated, persecuted, expelled and the right for justice is canceled….

This cynically offered ad hominem slur does Mexico no credit; although it does reduce AMLO’s credibility on the matter.  Our “closed space” enthusiastically accepts far more immigrants, persons who enter our nation legally, than any other nation on the planet—including Mexico.  Nor are any immigrants stigmatized: on arrival, they are welcomed with open arms and aided in assimilating.

Not even the illegal immigrants who make it past our border checkpoints—often with Mexican help—are mistreated or persecuted; although AMLO does choose to conflate requiring illegal aliens to comport with our law—including detention pursuant to deportation—with mistreatment and persecution.

Nor is illegal aliens’ right for justice in any way tampered with, and neither is the right for justice of our citizens and immigrants legally present tampered with—a right AMLO carefully elides.  Further, as AMLO surely understands, justice—true justice—includes consequence for illegal behavior.

With all due respect, even though you have the right to express it, the slogan “America First” is a fallacy because until the end of time, even over national borders, universal justice and fraternity will prevail.

With all due respect, even though AMLO has the right to express it, this distortion of the meaning of “America First” is a fallacy because, as Trump has said many times, America First does not mean America Alone or America Only.  We need the assistance of our friends in all endeavors on the world’s stage.  Including Mexico’s, but see the foregoing for the level of effort Mexico has been expending.