Regarding Illegal Aliens Applying for Asylum

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The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving the Trump administration’s limitation on illegal aliens’ ability to apply for asylum. The case, Noem v Al Otro Lado, centers on the meaning of “arrival in the United States” within the meaning of federal immigration law: does an alien “arrive” on meeting with immigration officers when the meeting occurs on the Mexican side with no actual entry into the US.

This should be an open-and-shut case. Here’s what 8 US Code § 1158 – Asylum, paragraph (a)(1) says on the matter:

Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section 1225(b) of this title.

That’s clear. Present in the United States and brought to the United States means inside—being within the borders of—the United States. Nothing more, nothing less. In particular, this statute makes clear that “on the Mexican side” plainly is not inside the United States (to say nothing of the affront to Mexican sovereignty if “on the Mexican side” were taken to mean inside the US.

Section 1225(b) only specifies the process for granting or denying asylum, but this is what its paragraph (a)(1) says that’s relevant to Otro Lado:

An alien present in the United States who has not been admitted or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters) shall be deemed for purposes of this chapter an applicant for admission.

This is, in its essence, a repeat of the Asylum paragraph above. In the United States explicitly excludes being still on the Mexican side of the border. An alien, illegal or otherwise, must be on the US side of the border—within the US—before he can apply for asylum

Full stop.

The obvious alternative, though, should the Court rule wrongly on this, is to withdraw all US immigration officers from the Mexican side of the border.

It’s Really Pretty Straightforward

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The House Select Committee on China has laid out the breadth and complexity of the People’s Republic of China’s cornering of the rare earth production, refining, and manufacturing markets. The report allegedly

provides a roadmap on how the US can stop—or at least slow—the effort by its biggest global economic competitor to prevent the US from breaking into the market.

A road map? It’s really quite straightforward, if politically difficult.

The US has vast supplies of rare earths within our own borders. Canada, who would be better for us (and themselves) as a trading partner than as a State, has similarly vast supplies. We’ve just concluded a trade deal with Australia to export rare earth to us from its vast supplies. African nations have similarly vast supplies, although doing deals there would have more value in denying those earths to the PRC than in getting exports to us, vast as that value would be.

What’s needed, and this is the straightforward but politically difficult part—though the difficulty lies in timid politicians not those determined to do what’s best for our nation—is getting regulations, environmentistas, and climatistas out of the way of each of the mining, processing, and manufacturing phases of getting to the products of rare earths: primarily, but not exclusively, magnets and chips.

The report recommends a variety of market-manipulating measures, and those might be near-term effective, but the problems with government market interventions center on two things: the “government” part, and government interventions are open-ended; they don’t die. The best way for our government to manipulate our economy, our market, is to get out and stay out of the way.

And there’s be nothing at all that the PRC could do to stop us from doing any of that.

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance”

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Jenna Norton, Program Director of the NIH’s Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, has strongly encouraged, in deed and writings,

“individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance” to stop President Trump and valorizes those “willing to ‘break the law’ when the law is evil.”
“To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world” and “small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers[.]”

Such acts, in fact, vary from civil disobedience to outright insubordination.

Civil disobedience, though, demands consequences be applied to the civil disobeyer, else the disobedience is just insubordination, or worse—vandalism or sabotage—with no message of value involved. Insubordination requires its own punishment separately from any attached to claimed civil disobedience.

And so: Norton was put on “non-disciplinary” administrative leave as of 2 pm Thursday [13 November].

She claims

I was not given a reason…but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing[.]

Yet the reason, even if not explicitly stated (and that has not been established), seems obvious; certainly it should be, even to the most ardent, blindered Leftist.

Some—the Left—will decry the evident unfairness of such retaliatory behavior by her employer. They will be, of course, badly mistaken, even as they revel in their Precious dudgeon. Individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance are not limited to one direction. Employers are allowed—and correctly so—to take explicitly individualized, person-to-person acts of resistance against those employees politically and socially resisting them. To that end, employers acting to resist insubordination couched in political and social resistance terms are necessarily acting, in part, politically and socially in their resistance to their employees’ misbehavior.

Indeed, the individualized part is mandated by law, and the person-to-person part is simply optimal business practice. The acts by the employer in such cases also are nothing more than enforcement of the inherent nature of the employer-employee relationship and an emphasis of who works for whom.

An Iron Curtain Descends on Seattle

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Seattle’s newly elected mayor, Socialist Katie Wilson, has announced that she

will not allow private grocery stores to close….

She also wants city government-run grocery stores to operate. Shades of the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain that was erected—physically on the boundary between then-East and West Berlin and functionally in its travel document issuance and withholding—to keep people from leaving that communist paradise. Not being allowed to close a store is the same as saying to the store’s operator that “you’re not allowed to leave.”

Those government stores also are reminiscent of the USSR’s government establishments and its nominally independent icon of Soviet socialism, GUM, best known for its ubiquitous presence around the nation and its equally ubiquitous empty shelves, except for those with access exclusively for the Soviet elite.

It’s likely that Federal courts (and it will likely end up in front of the Supreme Court) will not allow any bar to a private entity deciding to close an outlet or to cease operation altogether. However, the uncertainty that will occur and build over the years until that final judgment will wreak havoc on Seattle’s economy and its unemployment rate.

Seattle voters have done this to themselves. They’re the ones who elected the woman. They’re welcome to their enforced stay in the meantime.

Maybe Take the Hint

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Regarding the Georgia case against President Donald Trump (R) from when he’d lost his reelection campaign in 2020 and a slate of alternate Electors was created and offered to the US Senate: Fani Willis brought a criminal case against Trump and others over that alternate slate, never minding that doing so is entirely illegal, if only rarely done. As a result of Willis’ own nefarious behaviors, she was thrown off the case by Georgia courts. Now we have the State’s Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council (the body charged with finding a successor to Willis) Executive Director Peter Skandalakis assigning himself to the case.

His selfie appointment is because of ACE’s

The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case. Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment[.].

Maybe Skandalakis should take the hint. It’s a bogus beef, and he would do well to drop it with prejudice.