Tag: immigration

Don’t Fence Me In?

Joe Biden, border wall, immigration, NIMBY

“The Biden administration on Thursday said it would expand former President Donald Trump’s wall,” informs The Gray Lady, with a stiff upper lip.

And do it lickety-split: “Biden criticized for waiving 26 laws in Texas to allow border wall construction,” the UK Guardian headlines its report.

In fiscal 2023, government data shows 245,000 people entered the United States from this Rio Grande Valley sector.

“There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated in the federal registry.

“Well, Mexico didn’t pay for the wall,” quipped the American Economic Liberties Project’s Matt Stoller, “Biden did.”

“There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration,” the president had promised to the contrary during the 2020 campaign. Now Sleepy Joe’s administration has so awakened to the need for action on immigration that it argues for fencing off the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act from getting in the way …

… of building that wall.

Fast!

The New York Times notes “intensifying” complaints coming from “Democratic leaders in New York, Chicago and elsewhere who say the influx is overwhelming their ability to house and feed the migrants.”

Want a nimble response to the border crisis?

Instead, we see a NIMBY response — from big-city politicians, as the buses arrive from down south.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access election law national politics & policies

Alien National Capital

Joe Biden, democracy, voting, illegal immigrants

While the 58th anniversary of the Selma, Alabama, Bloody Sunday seemed an apt occasion to address the right of all citizens to participate democratically in their government, leaving the job to President Joe Biden was … awkward. He said nothing of consequence.

But back in 2020, candidate Biden said this: “In order to be able to vote, it’s important that you be a U.S. citizen.” That’s consequential.

In 2021, however, when the New York City Council extended suffrage to foreign nationals living legally in the Big Apple, against the will of the majority of New Yorkers, I don’t recall hearing even the slightest peep from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now the wackos in Washington, D.C., have enacted a non-citizen voting measure that goes further. It allows Russian nationals working for Mr. Putin at their embassy in our nation’s capital to vote on city candidates and ballot issues and welcomes onto Washington’s voter rolls Chinese citizens here promoting Xi Jinping and the interests of his genocidal regime.

The District of Columbia’s ordinance extends the franchise even to people here illegally, allowing anyone from anywhere in the world able to avoid deportation to cast a ballot. Legally.

Thankfully, House Joint Resolution 24, which seeks to block the D.C. non-citizen voting ordinance passed the U.S. House last month, garnering support from every Republican present as well as roughly one in five Democrats. Action now moves to the Senate.

“After years of lamenting so-called ‘foreign interference’ in our elections,” argues Sen. Tom Cotton (R‑Ark.), “every single Democrat ought to join in invalidating this insane policy.”

But will they?

Congressional Democrats might claim that their support for local control in D.C. excuses them for allowing this non-citizen voting measure to become law. But it’s not even a fig-leaf after Biden declared he would sign the congressional Republicans’ repeal of another D.C. council enactment, a controversial crime “reform” law, which District officials then hurriedly withdrew to placate nervous national Dems.

Talk about awkward!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: Biden certainly has a cavernous credibility gap on election integrity. After he attacked Republicans as “un-American” and the 2021 election reform legislation enacted in Georgia as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” the Peach State saw “record breaking turnout” in last year’s election. Sadly, much of the media merely ignored reality; CBS News headlined one report, “Effect of Georgia’s voting law unclear, despite high turnout.”

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international affairs local leaders media and media people national politics & policies

Pawns in Their Shame

“Let me say loud and clear to Greg Abbott and his enablers in Texas with these continued political stunts,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told a September 1 news conference, “Gov. Abbott has confirmed … he is a man without any morals, humanity or shame.”

Abbott’s alleged shame is busing a small percentage of the migrants streaming into Texas on to Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The bussed are volunteers: the migrants can choose to go or not.

Not too shockingly, however, the mayors in all three cities are crying foul quite “loud and clear.” Which only makes the Texas governor’s point. Abbott wants to dramatize the cost, seeking federal help so Texas doesn’t bear the brunt of the massive influx of folks illegally crossing the border — a record 1.7 million last year, estimated to hit 2.1 million more this year.

What particularly peeved Mayor Lightfoot was the lack of any “level of coordination and cooperation” from Texas authorities. At issue? “Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the United States,” Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. explains, “usually arrive with empty pockets.” They have needs.

Last Wednesday, 147 more migrants arrived in Chicago, where Lightfoot has declared they will be welcomed. But … well … within hours she sent 64 of those individuals to a hotel in (Republican-voting) Burr Ridge, some 20 miles from downtown Chicago.

Bussed, no less.

Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso blasted the fact “that nobody from the city, from the state called and told me.”

“This isn’t about them, the migrants are fine,” he insisted, but went on to complain that “they’re being used as political pawns by the governor and mayor.”

Add U.S. congressmen and especially the president to that list of shameful bussers, for Abbott’s tactic mimics the federal government’s transporting of migrants from border areas to other parts of the country.

Sure migrants are pawns in their game. We citizens should sympathize, for we are pawns in their shame.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Chicago, immigrant, immigration, Lori Lightfoot

ballot access Voting

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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