WASHINGTON – Passage of the omnibus budget bill by the House of Representatives includes a provision providing $1.6 billion for resettlement of illegal immigrants crossing through the U.S. border through the year 2018.
“Out of an abundance of caution, the Office of Refugee Resettlement at the Department of Health and Human Services has begun a process to expand its temporary capacity to house unaccompanied children,” the Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement earlier this month.
Government statistics from October and November of 2015 show a two fold increase of the number of unaccompanied immigrant children, 10,500, crossing the southern border from Mexico over the previous years totals for the same period according to the Washington Post.
To cope with this influx, HHS plans to open a pair of shelters totaling 1,000 beds in South Texas with an additional facility of 400 beds in Southern California.
The total sum of the provisions approved by Congress- $1,645,201,000- will be utilized to assist in this process, along with the funding of “refugee and entrant assistance activities authorized by section 414 of the Immigration and Nationality Act and section 501 of the Refugee Education Assistance Act of 1980, and for carrying out section 462 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002, section 235 of the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (‘‘TVPA’’), section 203 of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005, and the Torture Victims Relief Act of 1998.”
The Department of Health and Human has enlisted the Department of Defense to make an additional 5,000 beds available as needed.
The DoD also noted in a statement on the matter that “The entire administration has been closely monitoring these current trends and coordinating across the whole of government to ensure an effective response to any changes in migration flows.”
Again, innocent citizens of a broadly liberal, secular West, die at the hands of those who self-identify as Islamic purists, but are rejected by most of the rest of their faith.
How many Westerners who changed updated their Facebook profiles with a Tricolore on Friday updated them with the Lebanese flag the day before, when dozens of Lebanese were killed in Beirut in another Islamo-extremist attack?
If you did the one and not the other, don’t feel bad. You – like they – are victims of the Western media, just as much as of Western foreign policy.
With all the usual (but nevertheless important and true) qualifiers that those who bear all the moral responsibility for the recent deaths in Paris are those who pulled the triggers and detonated their suicide vests, it must be said that we, the West, are collectively doing nothing to help ourselves.
On the contrary, we continue to make it worse – in two main ways. And importantly, the reason we cannot stop doing making it worse, it seems, is that across the West, the political Left are committed to making things worse in one way, and the political Right are committed to making things worse in the other.
What are these two things we are doing to exacerbate the actions of extremists against us?
The first is the one already mentioned – favored by the standard neo-con sensibility (Bush, Hillary Clinton et al.) – to go pound the hell out of (or into) cultures and countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya etc. ) that we don’t control, to affect the dynamics of long-standing conflicts that we don’t understand, in ways that do damage that we cannot contain.
Ron Paul for years was warning us about blowback. It’s a real thing – and, it always has been, throughout history – because human nature is largely constant.
Don’t take my (or Dr Paul’s) word for it: take the word of the United States’ own Department of Defense, which commissioned a study, headed by Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, that collected and analyzed huge amounts of data on suicide terrorism — which is 12 times more dangerous than other forms of terrorism when measured by the number of people killed per act. In this U.S. government study, speakers of the local languages of the families of suicide bombers were sent to speak with family members of the terrorists to gain as much information as possible about the context and the people involved. The database thus obtained on suicide terrorism is, as far as we know, the most comprehensive in the world.
The most astonishing conclusion of this work was as follows; 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks — going back to the 1980s — are against countries that the terrorist deems to be occupying (in the sense of a military presence) physical territory that that the terrorist regards as a homeland. The reason this is astonishing is that this 95 percent figure includes all those radical Islamic groups who have attacked Israel and the USA, but it explains why the U.S., for example, has only experienced such attacks (such as 9/11 itself), from citizens of countries in which it has a military presence: that’s why, says the DOD study, we were hit by Saudis on 9-11, but not Iranians, Sudanese or representatives of other countries with a large radical Islamist contingent.
So one way of helping to protect ourselves from extremists might be just to stop with all those self-righteous “Freedom bombs” that kill children in places whose names we cannot even spell.
Of course, one might object that France is hardly intervening globally on the scale that America does, so isn’t the fact that Paris is getting hit more than, say, New York or D.C., evidence against the thesis?
No – because not imposing one’s will on others in their homes is only half the story: it’s only the “Let Live” part of “Live and Let Live”.
In the West, we have also forgotten that “Live and Let Live” has a first part, which is usually overlooked: that is simply “Live”.
The same Western polities that feel perfectly (and illiberally) righteous in intervening with physical force in other countries are paradoxically caught up in a faux progressivism at home that prevents them from defending their own.
It’s an absolute contradiction that goes like this: “we must attack them over there because they are dangerous and evil – but we don’t need to monitor and control those who flow across our borders because to do so would be intolerant, prejudicial and even racist”. In other words, “they” are dangerous enough that we need to kill them where they cannot hurt us, but not so dangerous that we need to stop them coming to hurt us.
Only ideological (or power-driven) politicians could maintain that kind of contradictory nonsense without painful cognitive dissonance.
The first responsibility and primary justification of government is the security of its own citizens – to whom it is accountable. And the first line of the security of a nation is its borders, which must be controlled to prevent the entry of those who wish to do harm. That is a moral good. In contrast, hurting innocents who are nowhere near one’s borders is a moral evil.
Making a real assessment of the risk associated with largely or partially unmonitored immigration – and in particular, making a proper distinction between genuine refugees (from messes that we helped to create) and economic migrants to whom our moral responsibility is clearly different – is not intolerant, prejudiced, or racist. It is reasonable, sensible, and just.
Here’s a thought experiment that doesn’t take much imagination at all.
If you were an ISIS fighter and you wanted to attack the West – and there were thousands of folks who looked like you pouring through the borders of that part of the world you wanted to be in, unseen and undocumented, why would you not enter among them? You’d frankly be stupid not to.
And since I write for an American audience, if you were an ISIS fighter, how would you get in to the US to launch an attack? Of course you’d walk over the Mexican border because you can.
Mark Steyn insightfully observed that
“… multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon”.
He might have overstated there, but if we add one word, he is painfully accurate: pathological multiculturalism is a unicultural phenomenon.
So what makes multiculturism pathological? I’ll offer a very precise definition: pathological multiculturalism is the over-accommodation by one culture of others by denigrating or hiding its own values, its own history, its own identity, and its own self-celebration.
Why is it that we in the West are so bad at overtly celebrating our history, our values, and our culture. We don’t even teach any of these in our schools in any serious way in the developed West. I hate to give a cliché as an answer, but it just fits so well – especially in Europe. Our white Liberal guilt has gotten the better of us. Because we did bad things in our history, we don’t celebrate the good things we did. Because we have oppressed people, we don’t point to the thousand-year long march of history that has freed millions. Because cultural minorities in our countries find it harder to get mainstream exposure (inevitable by virtue of their numbers), we stay quiet about our own culture, lest we cause offence.
Live and Let Live is – as it has always been and forever will be – the right motto for our times. But the West, in a kind of vicious cycle of fear, has (at least since 2001) been doing the opposite: “Kill and Let Be Killed”.
For those who prefer concrete political concepts to four-word idioms, the problem and its solution can be framed it in terms of self-determination – a concept right there in Article 1 of Chapter 1 of the United Nations charter.
Self-determination demands that we respect the sovereignty of other self-identified communities, nations and cultures. But it’s the very same self-determination that leaves us with the responsibility of respecting and protecting our own from those who would infiltrate to disrupt our own communities, nations and cultures.
In short, the fundamental question for the West at this time in history seems to be: must our open societies tolerate the intolerance that seeks to destroy our tolerance?
The answer is No – because that is what self-determination means.
When we understand that, we might be able to make two existential changes: the first will be to stop hurting others where they live – which requires us to recognize and end our self-righteousness and arrogance. The second will be to start protecting ourselves where we live– which requires us to recognize our cultural guilt and be able to talk about Western values as something worth proactively, even preemptively, protecting and asserting – but not exporting.
If we in the West must feel so guilty, let’s feel guilty about the children we’ve killed in Muslim lands – rather than about protecting ourselves from “Muslims” – and others – who would kill us in our own.
CALIFORNIA, October 12, 2015– On Saturday, California Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed Assembly Bill 1461, the Motor Voter Act, into law. The bill makes it to where all who have registered for a driver’s license are automatically registered to vote. In January of this year, a California law went into effect that allows illegal immigrants to have a California driver’s license, which is why critics of the new Motor Voter Act have suggested it is a calculated way to allow illegal immigrants an opportunity to vote in elections.
“This bill is terrible. It makes an already bad situation much, much worse,” True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht said in a statement.
Engelbrecht said that California’s registration databases “lack the necessary safeguards to keep non-citizens off the voter rolls.”
Eleven states and the District of Columbia currently allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. However, the licenses appear different than those issued to citizen drivers. In California, licenses issued to illegal immigrants carry the words “Federal Limits Apply” and “not valid for official federal purposes” according to DriveCA.org, which would theoretically prevent them from being used to vote in federal elections.
In California, however, True the Vote spokesman Logan Churchwell said that state officials “specifically chose not to make non-citizen license holders searchable in their DMV database,” and called the newly signed bill “unprecedented.”
“The New Motor Voter Act will make our democracy stronger by removing a key barrier to voting for millions of California citizens,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement. “Citizens should not be required to opt in to their fundamental right to vote. We do not have to opt in to other rights, such as free speech or due process.”
By Thomas A. Hawk (IVN) – When Donald Trump talks about illegal immigration, ending birthright citizenship, and uses the term “anchor babies,” it gets a lot of attention from the media and from the Democratic Party, who like the portray the GOP front-runner as racist for his comments. Yet, it was not long ago when some leading Democrats shared the same views about illegal immigrants.
In fact, in 1993, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reidstood on the Senate floor and bemoaned the fact that the United States was offering social services to children of illegal immigrants because they are granted birthright citizenship.
“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right? Guess again. If you break our laws by entering this country without permission and give birth to a child, we reward that child with U.S. citizenship, and guarantee full access to all public and social services this society provides — and that’s a lot of services.” – U.S. Sen. Harry Reid
What would today’s Democratic Party say about Harry Reid then?
Controversy erupted last week when 2016 Republican presidential candidate and retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson suggested that, as president, he would use drone strikes to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
Commenting on what steps he would take in an effort to stop the travel of undocumented immigrants across America’s southern border during a visit with Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu in Florence, AZ, Carson told KPHO-TV reporter Dennis Welch, “You look at some of these caves that are out there — one drone strike, boom, and they’re gone. And they’re easy to find.”
In the above-embedded clip from Sunday’s episode of CNN’s State of the Union, Ben Carson went into greater detail and told CNN senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta that he would order drone strikes, not to kill people, but to target caves that he claims smugglers utilize to hide undocumented immigrants along the border.
Appearing frustrated at the media’s suggestion that his drone strike plan might be used to target people such as members of drug cartels, Carson clarified, “That’s a total lie. What I said is it’s possible that a drone could be used to destroy the caves that are utilized to hide people. Those need to be gotten rid of.” Carson claimed that “scouts and the people who are facilitating illegal activity” utilize a network of caves on the border to hide immigrants in preparation for entry into the United States and that his strikes on those caves would be timed to avoid targeting people.
“Read my lips,” said Carson, “Listen very carefully to what I’m saying. I said there are caves that they utilize. Those caves can be eliminated. There are a number of possibilities, that could be one of them. I’m not talking about killing people. No people with drones.”
Carson also called for broader use of the military and the National Guard to secure the U.S.-Mexico border.
The latest U.S. intelligence estimates say that more than 100 Americans have joined the jihad in Syria to fight alongside Sunni terrorists there.
Americans ISIS members still have their passports and can still return to the United States. They can even cross the southern border with ease, and they can even fly into any international airport by gaming the failed U.S. immigration system.
According to reports, some ISIS members claim to be in major US cities already. After alleged Islamic terrorists threatened Chicago and Washington D.C., on Twitter, the government is begging local police to remain vigilant.
How real is the threat? According to Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe, the threat is very real.
He told a local Fox affiliate: “We’re in the most dangerous position we’ve ever been in as a nation.”
“They’re crazy out there and they’re rapidly developing a method of blowing up a major U.S. city and people just can’t believe that’s happening,” he added.
But both political parties and President Obama have done nothing to fix the visa waiver program and immigration process regarding national security concerns.
Former INS agent Mike Cutler explained just how easy it would be for ISIS to come to the US by exploiting our failed immigration system in an interview with Benswann.com’s Joshua Cook.
As the debate on illegal immigrants grows with every child and person who crosses the border, the president and his administration are considering giving the millions of immigrants temporary legal status.
Before President Obama’s June 30 announcement to use his executive powers to move forward with immigration reform, the president blamed House Republicans and their unwillingness to stand up to the Tea Party when it comes to immigration reform, according to the Hill.
In his Rose Garden announcement last month, President Obama said, “I take executive action only when we have a serious problem, a serious issue, and Congress chooses to do nothing…And in this situation, the failure of House Republicans to pass a darn bill is bad for our security, it’s bad for our economy, and it’s bad for our future.”
Even before this, the president said he had no authority or power to change the immigration laws in the U.S.
Now, according to TIME, pro-reform activists say the president will be seeking to give millions of illegal immigrants “temporary relief from deportation,” which would protect them and allow them to work in the U.S. These claims come almost a month after these activists met with the president, where he disclosed his plan was to act before November.
Until then, the president and his administration are looking into how far they can legally and politically go to protect the millions of immigrants from deportation, according to Politico.
In a similar move, President Obama and his administration want to begin screenings to grant child immigrants from Honduras refugee status, according to CBS News. The administration hopes this will slow the influx of youths into the country illegally, while allowing the children to escape gang violence throughout the Central American country.
This plan is similar to the plan proposed by senators John McCain and Jeff Flake. According to New York Magazine, this plan would increase the number of refugee applications already available to countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, but the time for deportation would be lessened.
Screening for refugees is not a new plan of action for the U.S. government though. In the 1990’s, the U.S. began screening children in Haiti to give them refugee status, while immigrants from El Salvador were granted temporary protective status starting in 2001.
According to the NY Times, critics of this plan are claiming the administration would only increase the flow of immigrants to the U.S. as the legal definition of refugee would be changed.
As of now, the recognized definition of a refugee in the U.S. is a person or group of people who are fleeing their country on the basis of fears of persecution based on race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in a given social group.
The militia group known as the Minutemen Project, has set plans to recruit and send 3,500 volunteers to the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in what the group is calling “Operation Normandy.”
Co-founder Jim Gilchrist released a letter on the group’s website, saying, “Operation Normandy will provide a vital defense against the waves of illegal aliens flooding over the border in search of welfare benefits, jobs and school places that rightfully belong to American citizens.”
Gilchrist helped to establish the Minutemen Project in 2005 on the basis of curbing illegal immigration from Mexico to the U.S. The group held training sessions and sending volunteers to the border in the past.
Operation Normandy plans on establishing points of observation along the border between the cities of San Diego, CA, and Brownsville, TX come May of next year. These points of observation will be on the lookout for any immigrants trying to cross the border illegally along the 2,000 mile strip of border.
A recent commentary from Gilchrist calls the surge of immigrant children a “human shield tactic” to allow more and more immigrants to cross the border and “anchor” themselves into their communities. It is this “human shield tactic” which has made Gilchrist say he wants the group to focus their efforts on fortifying the border.
Concerns have been raised though about the militia volunteers growing potentially violent with immigrants, but Gilchrist promised he does not plan for physical force to be used along the border. “You do not put a hand on anyone, you do not talk to anyone, you do not confront anyone,” Gilchrist told KPHO-TV. “You report to Border Patrol.”
It will take an estimated 10 months to recruit and train all the volunteers, so Operation Normandy is scheduled to begin on May 1, 2015.
Republicans in the House have been holding discussions recently on a bill which would give President Obama about half of the $3.7 billion the President requested to deal with the tens of thousands of immigrants who are illegally crossing into Texas, and other border states, in droves.
The problem has been the large numbers of immigrant children who have been finding their way across the border and how the government decides to handle the children. Currently, many of the 57,000 immigrant children who have made their way into America since October are being housed in government facilities.
Part of the funds would provide the child immigrants with proper housing while the government processed the thousands of children who are, according to Quartz, escaping the violence of their home countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R), told KVUE in Austin, “The humane answer is to stop the pattern of lawlessness, of amnesty, of refusing to secure our border that is causing so many children to be subject to such horrific abuse.”
President Obama made his way to Texas last Wednesday to assess the situation first-hand and to meet with Gov. Rick Perry in Dallas. The meeting between the two saw the border issue discussed, and the president asked for Gov. Perry’s help in getting the appropriate funds to help fix the problem. They also discussed solutions to which the president said he agreed with many of the recommendations Gov. Perry laid out.
Another problem which has slowed down the process of what to do with the children is figuring out where they came from and where to send them back to.
Representative Kay Granger (R-TX) said Tuesday, according to Politico, “An average case of someone coming across the border illegally, going through the process that we have, will take between a year and a half or as long as five years… With 57,000 unaccompanied children, that’s just not acceptable.”
Half of the original funds requested would go towards the health agency, which at this time, is in charge of providing housing for the children.
More than half of the public who participated in a poll for the Hill approve of the funds while some 43 percent oppose the funds, or think the price tag is high.
President Obama’s Department Of Agriculture (USDA) continues to spend tax money to promote food stamps to illegal immigrants living in and entering the United States. The government agency has done this for over a decade despite the fact that federal law requires individuals entering the US to be financially independent.
Food stamps, or in USDA parlance, the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” came under controversy last year for being promoted to illegal immigrants. Documents obtained by Judicial Watch last year revealed that the USDA works with the Mexican government to promote participation by illegal immigrants.
As Judicial Watch reported, “The promotion of [SNAP] includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance. Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, ‘You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.’”
Despite these findings, the House’s new $1 trillion bill does not defund the USDA’s promotion of SNAP to illegal immigrants — it only “strongly” encourages the USDA to stop the program.
An unnamed GOP congressional aide told TheBlaze, “It’s simply appalling that our government is even doing this—recruiting people who have come to America into government dependence. There is an ongoing partnership with USDA and the government of Mexico to promote food stamp use by Mexican nationals in the U.S. What happens in the omnibus is they put out the summary document claiming they are prohibiting the program. But in reality, there is no language that does this. There is language in the nonbinding explanatory statement encouraging USDA to stop working with foreign governments to promote food stamp use by immigrants, but that is not legally binding.”
It is unknown how much promoting SNAP to illegal immigrants costs taxpayers.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers said, “There is concern about the use of valuable tax dollars to promote enrollment of SNAP through radio, television, and other advertisements as well as outreach activities with foreign governments to encourage the use of SNAP. USDA is strongly encouraged to cease these types o f government-sponsored recruitment activities.”
The new House bill, filed on Monday night, did not eliminate the program but it did include requirements meant to “weed out” waste, fraud, and abuse in SNAP. The bill is expected to be voted on in the Senate this Friday.
Your hard-earned tax dollars are going towards hotel rooms for illegal immigrants.
Yes, you read that correctly.
There has been a recent surge of Mexicans seeking asylum in the US. This increased demand has lead to federal agents purchasing hotel rooms for the illegal immigrants.
New documents, originally released by Fox News, reveal that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has been releasing illegal immigrants into cities around America and spending up to $99 per night for families to stay in hotels. Federal agents assert that this is necessary due to overcrowding in Mexican border processing centers. They say there is simply not enough room.
A border patrol source said, “People were sleeping on floors – they had nowhere to put them. This shouldn’t be happening.” He argued that the hotel rooms are absolutely necessary.
Here is how it works: federal agents put the illegal immigrants in a van, and bring them to a hotel, which they aim to keep unidentifiable. The immigrants are then escorted into their rooms by other agents.
Most are brought to hotels in Texas, Florida, or New York.
Obama has given the go-ahead on this practice from the top.
The illegal immigrants who fail to show up for their hearings are supposed to be removed by an immigration judge, but often end up staying in the US, unaccounted for.
Officials believe they know the reason for the increase of Mexicans attempting to cross the border. Those looking to enter the US have been taking advantage of a “loophole” of sorts — they have been told to use special “key words” while speaking to border officials, which has been the root cause of the increase.
For instance, about 200 individuals who tried to cross into San Diego last week told border officers they had “credible fear” of large Mexican drug cartels.
Many think this is an organized effort.
Peter Nunes, a former California US Attorney, said, “This clearly has to have been orchestrated by somebody. It’s beyond belief that dozens of thousands of people would simultaneously decide that they should go to the U.S. and make this claim.”
It is easy to think that it may even be the Mexican drug cartels themselves that are organizing this campaign. That way, they could get more of their operatives into the US.
What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below.
