Tag Archives: illegal amnesty

What Are The Real Numbers?

Posted on by

Yesterday The New York Post posted an article about the push to grant all illegal aliens living in America for a certain period of time American citizenship. There seems to be some question as to how many people would be included if a law to do that were passed.

The article reports:

But how do our well-informed correspondents know how many immigrants live illegally in the US? That 11.3 million figure originates from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.” 

But these are the very residents notoriously averse to responding to census inquiries, regardless of assurances that being counted won’t lead to an unwelcome knock on the door from the cold-hearted immigration heavies at ICE. “Irregular” migrants have a vested interest in remaining invisible. Should you ask a crowd of such people, “Who’s not supposed to be here?” funnily enough nobody’s likely to raise a hand. 

A TRIO of academics affiliated with MIT and Yale University set about trying to reproduce that oft-quoted statistic by other means. Their results were published in 2018. Employing a range of operational stats (such as deportations and visa overstays) and other demographic data (such as death rates and immigration rates) from 1990 to 2016, they first fed their computer model the most conservative assumptions possible. 

As the study’s authors anticipated arriving at a number well below that eternally unchanging 11.3 million, confirmation bias alone would have helped produce a lowball estimate. Instead, even with all the inputs rigged at improbably low levels, the model still generated a population of illegal immigrants in the US of 16.7 million — 50 percent higher. 

There is a reason a country tries to control the rate of immigration. In order to prosper, a country needs immigration combined with assimilation. The idea is to bring people to your country who want to be part of your country–not to change it to the country they left. If the country they left was so good, why did they leave? Granting blanket amnesty to people who are here illegally is risky–it risks creating an electorate that can easily be swayed and does not understand America or its form of government. Legal immigrants have to study the Constitution. Many times legal immigrants know more about American history than those of us who have grown up here. Immigration needs to be controlled. Otherwise it is a threat to national sovereignty, regardless of the country involved.

 

Leadership Decisions Have Consequences

Posted on by

On Friday, Just the News posted an article about President Biden’s first 100+ days in office.

The article notes:

President Biden entered the Oval Office nearly four months ago and immediately signed dozens of executive orders and made sweeping legislative proposals aimed at rolling back the policies of former President Donald Trump. Early in the Biden presidency, the United States is now facing a series of emerging crises that critics attribute directly to these reversals of Trump-era policies and positions.

“Weak leadership is the cause of all of these crises,” freshman Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told the John Solomon Reports podcast, citing the surge of illegal immigration, the disabling Colonial Pipeline hack, and the flare-up of violence in the Middle East.

The article notes the actions President Biden took regarding America’s southern border:

…The legislation Biden has sent to Congress suggests he may wish to create a system that offers a pathway to citizenship to the illegal immigrants that have flooded into the country since January.

The number of people who would be granted citizenship without necessarily understanding the history or culture of America could change our country drastically. In the past, we have strongly encouraged immigrants to assimilate. The number of immigrants currently crossing the border illegally would be very difficult for America to take in and help resettle.

The article also notes the impact of the Biden administration’s policies on the American economy:

The strength of the economy was the crowning achievement of the Trump presidency, at least until the pandemic. President Biden inherited high rates of joblessness, mostly caused by continued COVID-19 restrictions that depress economic activity. In theory, job creation should increase as restrictions are lifted. However, last week’s dismal jobs report coupled with a current annual inflation rate of 4.2%, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, indicate that Biden’s economic policy measures may be misfiring across the board.

…Biden has repeatedly said that he does not believe the enhanced benefits had a “measurable” impact on the jobs numbers. Yet, even as he is dismissing widespread concerns about the disincentivizing effects of the enhanced benefits, he promised earlier this week that his administration is “going to make it clear that anyone collecting unemployment who is offered a suitable job must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits.”

“It’s just not a good deal for these workers to go back on the job,” said economist Stephen Moore.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. The policies of the Biden administration are not working for the benefit of all Americans. Simply ending the policies of President Trump has not been a wise governing strategy.

 

Policies Have Consequences

Posted on by

Just the News posted an article yesterday about one consequence of the sanctuary policies of California.

The article reports:

The recent arrest of a criminal alien on two murder charges came after multiple instances in which Immigration and Customs and Enforcement had lodged immigration detainers only to see him released by California authorities, officials said.

“The alleged perpetrator, Fernando De Jesus Lopez-Garcia, is a repeat immigration offender with a significant criminal history spanning back nearly 15 years that includes convictions for battery of a spouse, assault with a deadly weapon, inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, battery of an officer, and vandalism,” ICE said in a press release Wednesday. 

ICE recently lodged a detainer on Monday following the arrest Sunday “for two counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, battery on a spouse or cohabitant and violation of a protective order,” according to ICE. 

The article notes:

“Our deepest condolences go out the victims and their families in this case,” San Francisco ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Field Office Director David Jennings said. “Here we have catastrophic proof of the abject failure of California’s sanctuary policies. The only person this policy protected was a criminal; permitting him to reoffend over and over again. Had those immigration detainers been honored, or had ICE been notified on any of the other multiple occasions he was arrested and released from local jails, we would have taken him into custody. Regrettably, politics continues to prevail over public safety, the detainers were ignored, and De Jesus Lopez-Garcia was released to the street.”

The press release noted that ICE frequently does not know that a criminal alien is in custody before that alien gets released.

Not every person who breaks the law to enter this country is a criminal. However, some are. Any person who breaks the law needs to be kept in jail–regardless of their immigration status. Keeping this man in jail would have saved lives.

Distraction Or Scorched Earth Policy?

Posted on by

Today is the day that Jonathan Gruber is expected to testify at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee (The Hill), today is the day that Senate Intelligence Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein is scheduled to release a report on CIA interrogations of terrorists after the events of September 11, 2001 (The Washington Post), and to top it off, it has now been reported that President Obama has not actually issued an executive order to grant amnesty to up to five million immigrants (World Net Daily).

Which story is supposed to have the attention of the American people and which stories are we supposed to ignore? I am definitely feeling manipulated.

The Hill reports on the scheduled hearings:

After the videos went viral last month, President Obama dismissed Gruber as “some adviser who was never on our staff,” while House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she didn’t even know who he was.

Opponents of ObamaCare say Democrats are changing their story.

They note that Gruber has been to the White House 21 times and met with multiple members of the administration, including Obama, according to visitor logs. Pelosi’s office also cited his work in a 2009 policy analysis.

“Why was Mr. Gruber called an ‘architect’ of ObamaCare by The Washington Post, someone who was lauded by President Obama and cited by then-Speaker Pelosi, and is now just ‘some advisor’? ” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

As Gruber steps into the line of fire on Tuesday, he might find little protection from Democrats who once paid him nearly as much as the presidential salary for his consulting work.

Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, said he would use the hearing to mount a defense of the healthcare law, not Gruber.

Regardless of what Mr. Gruber says about the stupidity of the American voter, we need to get rid of ObamaCare. It may take a circus to wake up the American voter (however, when you consider that half of the Democrats who voted for ObamaCare lost their seats in the last election, Americans may already be awake).

The Washington Post reports on the release of the CIA interrogation report:

With the apparently imminent release of the Feinstein report on CIA interrogations of high-value terrorists a decade ago, let’s consider the situation of intelligence personnel who have been involved, not in that program but in drone strikes against terrorists, conducted in a variety of countries around the world.

They have four sources of direction and protection: Their strikes are authorized by the president, briefed to Congress, deemed lawful by the attorney general and determined useful by the CIA director.

Yet people in the drone program know that co-workers involved in enhanced interrogation had these assurances as well. And the drone program has some distinctive characteristics. Instead of employing waterboarding, stress positions and sleep deprivation, the targets are killed (sometimes with collateral damage to the innocent). President Obama dramatically expanded the use of drones, increasing the proportion of attacks that are “signature strikes” — meaning those authorizing attacks don’t know the identities of the targets, just their likely value.

Some may argue a subtle moral distinction between harshly interrogating a terrorist and blowing his limbs apart. But international human rights groups and legal authorities generally look down on both. The main difference? One is Obama’s favorite program. A few years from now, a new president and new congressional leaders may take a different view.

That is a very good point. Congress had been briefed on these interrogations when they happened. There is no reason to release this report. The report endangers Americans overseas and will cripple the CIA in dealing with future terrorism threats. I wonder how the restrictions put on the CIA today would compare to any restrictions put on the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II.

Meanwhile, about amnesty, World Net Daily quotes Senator Jeff Sessions:

In remarks made at the Washington office of the government-watchdog group Judicial Watch, Sessions said: “I guess they just whispered in the ear of (DHS Director) Jeh Johnson over at Homeland Security, ‘Just put out a memo. That way we don’t have to enforce the law.’”

The news that Obama had not signed an executive order to carry out the policy he announced to the nation in a televised address Nov. 20 was broken by WND Senior Staff Writer Jerome Corsi last week.

As a result of the president’s use of a memo instead of an official order, the senator observed: “We don’t even have a really significant, direct, legal direction that we can ascertain, precisely what the president is doing. It’s a stunning event in my view.”

…The senator dropped a bombshell last week when he revealed he had learned the Obama administration is opening a facility in Crystal City, Virginia, to implement the president’s amnesty plan.

Sessions discovered the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, is hiring 1,000 full-time and permanent staff members to quickly approve illegal immigrants’ applications for amnesty.

Sessions also learned the administration will provide work permits, photo IDs, Social Security and Medicare to illegal immigrants.

He noted that all of those benefits for illegal immigrants had been rejected by Congress.

The Obama administration had initially indicated illegal immigrants would not be eligible for Social Security benefits, but officials were forced to admit the plans after Sessions revealed them.

Welcome to Monday morning under the Obama Administration.