Tag: immigration

Citizenship Not Required

voting, democracy, alien, illegal, immigrant, noncitizen

Noncitizen voting is coming to New York City.

Tomorrow, the city council is expected to approve a measure permitting more than 800,000 noncitizens to vote in city elections.

Noncitizens will need to have a green card or the right to work in the United States, and will need to have been resident in the city for at least 30 days.

Opponents include Councilman Rubén Díaz, a Democrat. He observes that the requirements for becoming a naturalized citizen and thereby earning the right to vote, which include “understanding the basics of [our history] and how our government functions,” would thus be bypassed.

Whether the granting of American citizenship to newcomers has been too lax or too cumbersome is a separate question. But if a particular noncitizen deserves to vote, he or she surely deserves citizenship. Why not start with citizenship?

Opt in. Become an American before you vote in America. This seems basic.

Which is why de-linking voting from formal citizenship conjures up two worrisome questions:

What agenda does this serve? and What’s next?

Next steps could include extending the franchise to those who do not “have the right to work” (as is already the case in San Francisco) and extending this new right, noncitizen voting, to state and federal elections.

That many Democratic congressmen are eager to obliterate any practical distinctions between citizen and noncitizen is shown by their support for HR1, the misnamed “For the People Act,” an assault on state-level laws intended to ensure that only (living) citizens are voting (only once) in elections.

Fortunately, that federal legislation has been blocked. For now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment national politics & policies

ICE De-Taloned

Occasionally, an outlier appears in politics, someone who follows through on campaign promises. Many people say that Donald Trump was one of those outliers, being someone who actually delivered to his voters the most conservative administration of our lifetimes.

I have heard precisely the opposite, too. But that is not an outlier: in politics, opposite opinions appear right next to each other all the time. Yet, however we judge a politician for letting voters down, when we do see a pol keeping a promise, it is worth noting.

So now that President Joe Biden has nixed Operation Talon, scratch a mark upon the wall.

One of Mr. Trump’s major concerns was immigration — “the Wall” being the most infamous notion. Somewhat less well-known was Trump’s aim to put Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) back on a law-and-order footing, cracking down on actual criminality associated with (and piled on top of) “mere” illegal entry into the country. Operation Talon was an attempt to do just that, cracking down on sex trafficking crimes among the illegal alien set.*

It was a very focused ICE program.

AOC’s wing of the Democrats, on the other hand, want to abolish ICE entirely.

Now, the likelihood of either a Democratic Congress or President Biden following through on abolition seems about zero. But something could be done. ICE could be made to stop going after real criminals.

And so Mr. Biden has. Attorneys general in 18 states have formally complained about it, though, stating that Operation Talon was actually useful in their states’ core mission of fighting crime.

But, hey: no matter; Biden delivered on a promise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It is worth remembering that the U.S. Marshals have also made many successful operations, during the last administration, against domestic child sex trafficking rings, as covered here last year.

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ideological culture political economy too much government

Ex-Californians

Texas, California, democracy, migration, immigration,

California, “the U.S. state most synonymous with all varieties of growth — vegetal, technological, and human — is at the precipice of its first-ever population decline,” writes Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. And folks in other states like Texas and Idaho are none too happy.

You see, the Californians fleeing are finding new homes elsewhere. Especially in Texas and Idaho.

Oddly, Mr. Thompson breezes by the biggest source of anxiety: ideology. “Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a warning on Twitter to Californians moving to his state: ‘Remember those high taxes, burdensome regulations, & socialistic agenda advanced in CA? We don’t believe in that.’ The sentiment was echoed in various warnings in Dallas newspapers about the awful ‘California-ing’ of North Texas.” Thompson quickly moves on to interrogate how real the general exodus from the Golden State is.

Which is interesting — but much more important is the main worry about all immigration: will these new citizens vote to overturn the order that attracted them in the first place?

There is certainly anecdotal evidence that this can be a real problem.

Also not mentioned in the The Atlantic squib is just how messed up California now is.

What can be done? The idea humorously floated by an Idaho politician — a “$26 billion wall to keep out people moving from the Golden State” — is just a joke.

And secession/expulsion of the 23rd state in the union is not realistic, either.

What is realistic is for non-California politicians to float in the U.S. Congress a willingness to break up the state into separate pieces, creating at least two new states. At least then, Jefferson State citizens could put up with West California émigrés.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. There are very serious political problems of representation in California that breaking up could help fix, by increasing the number of legislators and minimizing the ratio between representatives and the people they serve.

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Tags California, democracy, immigration, migration, Texas

ideological culture

The Milkshake of Human Unkindness

Post author By Redactor
Post date May 24, 2019
No Comments on The Milkshake of Human Unkindness

milkshake, political violence, New Republic, Nigel Farage, Brexit, right, immigration,

“The biggest topic in British political circles on Monday … was milkshakes,” writes Mike Ford in The New Republic, “or, rather, one milkshake in particular.…”

Milkshake, you ask?

Yes. Milkshake.

The shake in question “was lobbed by a bystander in Newcastle at Nigel Farage, a Brexit Party candidate in the European Parliament elections later this week.” And Mr. Ford goes on to note that infamous Internet figures Tommy Robinson and Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin (the latter inaccurately dubbed “alt-right”) have received multiple hits of thrown cold, frothy confections.

It is “a thing.” A meme — a replicable operation.

Burger King has even encouraged the fad, if in a bizarrely mercenary way.

“Throwing a milkshake at someone is rude at worst,” Ford asserts. “It may also qualify as assault in some jurisdictions, especially in the United States.” That second sentence contradicts the first. It is assault “at worst.”

Ford’s op-ed, entitled “Why Milkshaking Works,” has a tagline: “The far right fears nothing more than public humiliation.”

Really? Look, no one wants the inconvenience of these stupid attacks, but it is the unhingedness of the left that shines through, here — a threatening, punching, shouting-down, spilling-upon movement that I suspect mainly grows the ranks of the anti-left.*

The New Republic has long been a progressive rag: the “new” in the title referred to the magazine’s support for progressivism.

Fitting, then, to see it cheer on, this week, the idiotic, unkind extremism of current progressive culture.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Of course, to some on the left all non-leftists are “far right.” This is called the phenomenon of “the left pole.”

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Accountability ideological culture national politics & policies Popular

The Obstruction

building a divide, wall, immigration, ideology, Trump, Pelosi

The federal government “shutdown” — now on reprieve — has been and continues to be a rather strange charade. Various political players make motions towards one another, and we, the people, are supposed to guess the real meaning.

Which is usually conceived as

All about President Trump’s “Wall”;
All about the Pelosi-Schumer commitment to never letting Trump get away with his Evil Agenda; or
The great huge, honking divide in America that grows every day.

I suspect it is about all these things and more — which is easy to say, since these three issues are intimately related.

And as if playing a subtle joke on us all, the standoff that appears as obstructionism is about a proposed obstruction at the southern border: literally a “Mexican standoff.”

Meanwhile, a different security measure has received attention.

Americans have, rather spontaneously, been taking canned and packaged foods, and even fresh produce, to unpaid but “forced-to-work” TSA agents. A heartwarming story. Sure. But the Transportation Security Agency, cobbled together in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is spectacularly ineffective, an example of “sec urity the ater.” TSA agents repeatedly fail internal tests.

Congress could, of course, take this opportunity to disband this airport security worker agency. If managed by the airlines or any entity but the federal government, TSA wouldn’t have suffered through the shutdown.

Tragically, Congress long ago ceased being functional, responsible, or even the eensiest, teensiest bit respectable. And a divided public stands little chance of forcing a change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies

Full Frontal Negotiations

Pence, Vice President, sleeping, transparency, negotiations

Last week’s political circus reached a new level of Big Top.

Or three rings, as President Donald Trump hosted two Democratic leaders in the White House, debating border security and government shutdown — in public. House Minority Leader, soon-to-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D‑N.Y.) were somewhat uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s decision to hash out their differences in front of the cameras and the American people.

It was quite the comedy. Yet Vice President Mike Pence all but snored. While many pundits once again expressed their frustrations with a lack of solemn decorum from Trump, Pence provided not solemnity but somnolence.

The idea of government negotiations being done out in the open isn’t new. Transparency is good, if rarely practiced. But it did not take long for Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer to express alarm at this foray into Reality TV.

“We’re here to have a conversation the careful way,” Pelosi informed the president, “so I don’t think we should have a debate in front of the press on this.”

Once upon a time, Dems promised transparency. Barack Obama campaigned on negotiating health care reform on C‑SPAN — only to renege on that pledge when the negotiations got going.

In olden days, Democrat President Grover Cleveland practiced political transparency when he was governor of New York (1883 – 1885), pointedly leaving the door to his office open whenever discussing any subject whatsoever with anyone.*

And let’s tip the hat to Mike Pence. Ridiculed when it came out that he would not meet in private with any woman not his wife, upon the arrival of #MeToo and the Kavanaugh hearings, Pence appeared genius.

If a sleepy one.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Cleveland was not so transparent when, during a crisis in his second presidency, he secretly had his jaw operated upon in a boat in international waters.

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