Category Archives: immigration

A Border Crisis Stop-Gap Immigration Bill

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Late Friday, the House passed this—along party lines, because the Democrats in the House wanted no part of it. The bill provides roughly $700 million, less than a quarter of President Barack Obama’s original $3.7 billion do deal with the situation. What it does is this:

  • increases funding, to $70 million, for the relevant States’ National Guards, with the funding to go directly to those States, bypassing the Federal government. This alone is anathema to Democrats
  • provides $400 million for border security
  • provides $200 million for housing and “humanitarian assistance”
  • adds more immigration judges and detention spaces
  • alters a 2008 anti-trafficking law to permit Central American kids to be sent back home without deportation hearings

Yet the Democrat-controlled Senate has gone on vacation, refusing even to consider the bill. Apparently their time off is more important than their duty. But then, this Reid satrapy has been on vacation since 2010, with some 350 House-passed bills, including more than 40 directly related to putting out-of-work Americans back to work and others related to immigration reform, simply moldering on the Democrats’ collective desks—as they refuse even to allow debate on the bills, much less actually vote on them.

Further, Obama has vowed to veto the lately passed House bill were it to make it to his desk. No surprise there; it’s a largely Republican bill, and that alone makes it unacceptable to him.

The Border Children Crisis

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“The president of the United States is the world’s sugar daddy and that has to stop. That’s the incentive for those kids to come here” protested Congressman Mo Brooks (R, AL) one of the most-conservative voices in the House. “To spend billions of dollars on foreign children that we don’t have is financial insanity.”

As someone noted earlier, the House should appropriate the funds, or most of them, with suitable spending reduction offsets, and with the vast bulk of the funds block granted to the border states for their use in dealing with the crisis and with border control, and the remainder allocated to the Federal government for the mandated purpose of transporting the present children back to their countries of origin.

Amnesty and Rights

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Attorney General Eric Holder now is claiming amnesty to be both a civil and a human right. In his rambling way, he makes says this [emphasis in the cite]:

Creating a pathway to earned citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country is essential. The way we treat our friends and neighbors who are undocumented—by creating a mechanism for them to earn citizenship and move out of the shadows—transcends the issue of immigration status. This is a matter of civil and human rights.

I’ll leave aside the distinction and lack of overlap between civil rights and human rights, except to note that a distinguished lawyer such as our Mr Holder should know better.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) has a response in a larger speech on the Senate floor. The part relevant to this subject begins at around 0+50.

The Obama administration officials have gone so far as to describe amnesty as a civil right. That’s an argument against the very idea of a nation state and the idea of a nation’s borders. Of course, there can be no civil right to enter a country unlawfully and then to demand lawful status and even citizenship. Of course, there’s not. How can this possibly be that the Attorney General of the United States would assert that people have a Constitutional right to enter unlawfully and be given amnesty? That’s the kind of thinking that’s got us into this fix, and it’s encouraged the unlawful flow of immigration. The actual legal rights that are being violated here, today, I suggest are the rights of the American citizens, and as Civil Rights Commission Member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, Peter Kirsanow, warned, our African American citizens often are the ones that are hurt the most and also recent immigrant arrivals and working Americans. So what about their rights? … What about the right of every citizen to the protection of immigration laws that we have in America today?

One small part of this larger question, as an aside: the Attorney General asserts that people have a Constitutional right to break the law? Well, that is consistent with this President’s cavalier attitude toward American law, even toward the supreme Law of our Land.

A Thought from the Border Crisis and Immigration Generally

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…it’s not limited to those topics, but it was triggered by a quote by Dr Manny Alvarez in his piece about the bias of the Latino press in its coverage of the current children border crisis. What Alvarez said was this:

The crisis reminds me of that old saying: “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.”

Alvarez offered this aphorism in the context of needing to address the root cause of the crisis, not merely treat the symptom that is what the crisis is.

Let me modify the aphorism slightly; it’ll illustrate another part of the root cause.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime and deny the donor man the opportunity to maintain the dependency of the recipient on him.

What is this Administration Trying to Hide?

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Or, of what is this administration so terrified?

Nebraska’s governor says 200 children who entered the country illegally were sent to his state this week without warning and that federal officials are refusing to identify them or their locations.

Governor Dave Heineman (R) said federal officials also wouldn’t answer questions about public school attendance by the children and the potential costs to taxpayers.

“Governors and mayors have the right to know when the federal government is transporting a large group of individuals, in this case illegal immigrants, into your state,” Mr Heineman told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Saturday. “We need to know who they are, and so far, they are saying they’re not going to give us that information.”

An Obama administration official on Saturday said the Central American children now in Nebraska aren’t at a facility but are being housed with family members and sponsors while they await immigration proceedings.

“There are concerns that this type of activity—placing children in locations across the country—is occurring throughout the United States, and information is not being shared appropriately with states,” the Republican Governors Association policy director, Marie Thomas Sanderson, wrote in an email to members on Friday….

Why is this administration so reluctant to tell anyone what they’re doing with these children? Why do they think the receiving state governments have no need to know who these kids are or the housing arrangements being made for them? About school attendance expectations? About the health status of these children? About the costs these moves will impose and who’s expected to cover those costs? What else is this administration doing with these children that it won’t say anything about their disposition?