Tag Archives: immigration

Bold Measures

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UN’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, wants the world to rise to the task of protecting refugees across the globe.

At this time of turbulence, the international community must do far more to shoulder this responsibility together. It is a moment to build a more equitable response to refugee crises through a sharing of responsibility.

Absolutely, the international community must, and the time is now.

However.

Taking in refugees ad lib is a fine feel-good measure, but it’s nothing more than virtue-signaling.  All this does is “help” those fortunate enough to escape, while the receiving nations cynically turn their backs on, and abandon, those who cannot escape and remain trapped in what those receiving nations agree—by their acceptance of refugees—are terrible conditions in the originating countries.

No.

If the international community truly wants to help refugees, the constituent nations will attack the problem at the source. They’ll enter refugee-creating nations and help them (or force them) to correct the ills that create such squalid, criminal, and otherwise dangerous conditions that citizens feel constrained to risk their lives trekking across vast deserts with inadequate supplies and security and floating across wide seas in inadequate boats with inadequate supplies to another, any other, nation. They’ll move to eliminate, or vastly mitigate, the need for people to become refugees.

Enter another nation to force changes—what about those nations’ sovereignty? That’s a valid consideration, but we must weigh that against the deprecation of sovereignty caused by accepting—encouraging—the brain drain and the economic drain, such as it is, that is created by encouraging the flight of what’s left of the best of those nations from those nations.

We also must balance those refugee-creating nations’ sovereignty against the sovereignty and human rights of the people themselves left in that squalor and those criminal and otherwise dangerous conditions.

Some Immigrants

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Mary Anne Marsh is a firm believer in the power of immigration into the US, and she’s right. However, the three examples she threw up to illustrate her position merely serve to deprecate it.

For background, she opened her op-ed with this:

[W]e are sorely tested by those who serve not the idea of America but an individual who acts like a tyrannical monarch and puts the wishes of Russian President Vladimir Putin before the best interests of this country.

Fortunately, though, that man no longer is in office. Ex-President Barack Obama (D) openly, nakedly promised “Vladimir” more flexibility once he—Obama—no longer had to worry about pesky, impertinent clingers-to-religion-and-gun American voters.

Then she named her three canonical immigrants: ex-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, NSC staffer LtCol Alexander Vindman, and ex-NSC staffer Fiona Hill.  Marsh, while lionizing these three, chose to elide certain other pertinent information about them.

Yovanovitch testified under oath, in response to Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff’s (D, CA) readout of a Trumpian tweet and question about it, that she found the tweet “intimidating.” The tweet? It was nothing more than a bluntly put performance review. Yovanovitch’s confession to being frightened by rude words sends a dangerous, emboldening signal to our enemies that we can be pushed around easily.

Vindman testified to concern about a telecon between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a telecon about which both Zelenskiy and his Foreign Minister have averred not only no concerns but positively that the telecon was a good and friendly one. Marsh chose to omit from her paean to Vindman that he had been reprimanded for—during a joint exercise with Putin’s Russia, yet—yocking it up with his Russian exercise counterparts about how foolish the US was and is.

Marsh quoted from Hill’s testimony:

Some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.  This is a fictional narrative….

The only fiction here, as was exposed during Republican questioning, was the bit about some on the committee believing Russia “did not conduct a campaign against our country.”  Examples were produced, and under oath Hill acknowledged their accuracy, of the Republicans on the committee having repeatedly sounded the alarm over Russian interference in our 2016 elections—especially with the complicity of the Democratic National Committee—and of their continued attempts to interfere with our 2018 and 2020 elections.

Hill also was exposed for her false dichotomy in her implication that because Russia had and was interfering, Ukraine must not be. A woman as intelligent and accomplished as Hill surely knew her dichotomy was false when she presented it, and her…error…was exposed, also, during Republican questioning.

The value of immigration to our great nation is vast, and it includes those who’ve fought in our defense from our beginnings down through today, serve in our Congress, and less glamorously “merely” work in our business enterprises, charity organizations, and governments at all levels.  Marsh’s three examples do not match these. At all.

Marsh’s keyboard is clacking. She might want to see to that.

A Thought on Brexit

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Supposedly, Great Britain and the EU are close to agreement on a deal governing the former’s departure from the latter. Absent a deal, Great Britain will leave the EU on its own terms.  That last is, I maintain, the best way out.

However.

There remain, as of Wednesday morning, three sticking points to any sort of deal, according to EU Chief Negotiator Michel Barnier.

  • Customs arrangements for the island of Ireland
  • The issue of giving Northern Irish authorities a greater say over regulatory arrangements, and the ability to veto them
  • Guarantees of a level playing field—that Britain will not be at an unfair advantage when it comes to business regulation

Customs arrangements for the entire island—even though one part of the island is a sovereign nation and EU member and the other part is a member country of the United Kingdom.  There should be nothing to discuss here. A major reason for the successful Leave vote was for Great Britain to regain control over its own borders—including its national border across the island of Ireland.

Giving Northern Ireland—that part of Great Britain—veto authority over the national government’s “regulatory arrangements”—devolution hasn’t gone that far, nor should it. This sticking point is nothing more than a naked early step in dismantling Great Britain in punishment for its effrontery in voting to leave the Holy Brussels Empire.

Guarantees of a level playing field—Great Britain is justified in seeking such guarantees, but it won’t get them, unless it accedes to what Brussels will define as “fair.”

These…sticking points…illustrate with crystalline clarity the EU’s bad faith in dealing with Great Britain—and they illustrate with equal clarity why a no-deal-Brexit is optimal for Great Britain.

Unfortunately, British PM Boris Johnson, in an agreement just concluded with Barnier, appears to have surrendered to the EU on the matter of Great Britain’s border with the Republic of Ireland:

Northern Ireland will remain part of the UK’s customs territory and will be an entry point into the EU’s single market. No customs checks will be done on the border between [the Republic of] Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Johnson surrendered on the second sticking point, also:

The Northern Irish assembly will have to give consent after Brexit for the region’s continued alignment with the EU regulatory regime every four years.

This cedes control of the British border to the EU, with all that that portends for the nation’s future. British sovereignty now hangs, ironically, on whether Labour MFWIC Jeremy Corbyn can deliver his party’s no vote.  Nigel Farage, Brexit Party head and strange bedfellow of Corbyn’s on this, also has come out against the deal, as have the Democratic Unionist Party, which in coalition with the Tories give Johnson a one-vote majority on most things, and the Scottish National Party, which have been NeverLeaveNoWay all along.

It could be, of course, that Johnson has included these poison pills so as to get this last minute agreement rejected by Parliament, and he can get his no-deal exit from the EU. That raises the question, though, of whether Johnson is that Machiavellian.

Johnson wants an up-or-down vote from Parliament Saturday.

Continued Intransigence

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European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker makes it clear.

Britain has still not proposed any workable alternatives to the Northern Ireland “backstop” within the Brexit withdrawal agreement, the EU said on Monday.

And

President Juncker underlined the commission’s continued willingness and openness to examine whether such proposals meet the objectives of the backstop. Such proposals have not yet been made[.]

Juncker knows full well that the “backstop” is not just a deal-breaker, it’s a non-starter for the British. It demands that a core feature of the Brexit vote three years ago was so that Great Britain gets control of its own borders back, yet the “backstop” requires Great Britain to surrender its Irish border to the EU.  That can only be taken as a first step to dismantling Great Britain.

What demonstrates the cynicism of the EU and of Juncker is that they, and he, have steadfastly refused even to offer their own “workable alternatives.”  It’s the EU’s backstop.  Full stop.

In place of counter-offers, Juncker is offering only vapid, uselessly rhetorical pretense and empty willingness to “discuss the next steps.”

He plainly wants Great Britain to drop its Brexit plans and meekly beg for forgiveness for its effrontery. Despicably, so do Labour and too many so-called Tories.

In Which Joe Biden Defends Himself re His Gaffes

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…with a bodacious gaffe.  He went on Stephen Colbert’s show and the host asked him about his gaffes.  The Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate, in answering, insisted

 I don’t get wrong things like, you know, we should lock kids up in cages at the border.

It was his BFF and mentor, ex-President Barack Obama (D) who started locking children in wire cages away from their parents.  All while Biden sat meekly by, uttering not a peep in protest.