Once again on Sanders and socialism
HILLARY CLINTON and BERNIE SANDERS: HISPANDERERS AND ADVOCATES FOR OBAMA'S OPEN BORDERS AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY!
Once again on Sanders and socialism
20 February 2016
At a town hall event Thursday night in Las Vegas, jointly hosted by the MSNBC cable channel and Telemundo, Democratic presidential candidate and self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders was asked by one of the moderators to explain what he meant by socialism.
Sanders has attracted broad support from working people and youth by basing his bid for the White House on denunciations of social inequality and the political domination and criminality of Wall Street. His claim to be a socialist, far from alienating many workers and youth, has attracted them to his campaign, an indication of the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment. According to one prominent poll released on Friday, he trails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nationally among Democratic voters by only 3 percentage points.
In reply to the question about socialism, Sanders said: “When I talk about democratic socialist, you know what I’m talking about? Social Security, one of the most popular and important programs in this country, developed by FDR to give dignity and security to seniors… When I talk about democratic socialist, I am talking about Medicare, a single payer care system for the elderly. And in my view, we should expand that concept to all people…
“When I talk about democratic socialist, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden…”
This response bears careful scrutiny. It makes clear that, despite his talk of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders is not an opponent of the capitalist system or the two-party political monopoly through which the American corporate-financial elite has ruled for more than 150 years.
There is nothing anti-capitalist in Sanders’ so-called “socialism.” Socialism is not a reform of capitalism, it is its opposite. It is based on the abolition of private ownership of the means of production—the major industries, transport, telecommunications, banking—and their transformation into public utilities under the democratic control of the working people. It replaces production for private profit based on the surplus value extracted through the exploitation of workers under the wage system with production for the benefit of society as a whole. It supersedes the anarchy of the market by organizing economic life on the basis of rational planning.
It overcomes the contradiction between globalized production and the nation-state political framework of capitalism by uniting workers internationally in the struggle for a world socialist federation. It is a revolutionary change that can be achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the working class and the establishment of a workers’ government.
Sanders opposes all of this. He contends, in the name of “socialism,” that the existing economic and political set-up can be reformed along the lines of the programs that were instituted in the 1930s (Social Security) and the 1960s (Medicare). Neither of these programs, while representing significant gains for working people, challenged the basic class interests of the American ruling elite. Precisely because the economic and political power of the ruling class was left intact, these programs have been under constant attack. They have been increasingly whittled down and are now targeted for extinction.
Where, moreover, did these programs come from? They were not the result of the beneficence of the American capitalist class. They were wrenched from the ruling elite in the course of bitter and bloody struggles of not only the American, but also the international working class. The most important factor behind the enactment of the social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s in America was the socialist revolution of 1917 that established in Russia the first workers’ state in world history.
That world-transforming event provided a mighty impulse to the struggles of workers in the US and around the world, and it inspired in the ruling classes of every capitalist country fear of something similar happening to them. The outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 discredited capitalism in the eyes of millions in the US and internationally and fueled a growth of class struggle that erupted in general strikes in three major American cities—Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis—in 1934.
This was the context in which Franklin D. Roosevelt, a resolute defender of the capitalist system and the interests of the American ruling class, felt compelled to implement a series of social reforms, including Social Security, whose basic purpose was to avert social revolution in the United States.
The next major social reforms, Medicare and Medicaid, the government health programs for the elderly and the poor, were enacted under conditions of rising social struggles and mounting political discontent. This was the period of the mass civil rights movement, which was, in essence, an extension of the class battles that gave rise to the industrial unions in the 1930s, and which was animated by an egalitarian ethos. It coincided with anti-colonial struggles that shook Asia and Africa. It was accompanied by urban rebellions that swept America’s cities, militant strikes of industrial workers and the first stirrings of the anti-war movement.
But even at the height of its global economic dominance and political influence, American capitalism was unable to overcome endemic poverty, unemployment and oppression. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson proclaimed his “War on Poverty,” but that quickly collapsed as American capitalism was overtaken by its international and internal contradictions. Since then, the Democratic Party and the ruling class as a whole have shifted ever more violently to the right, abandoning any policy of liberal reform.
The past 30 years have been dominated by a relentless ruling class offensive against the working class, which has been escalated, under the Obama administration, in the aftermath of the capitalist breakdown of 2008. Sanders often notes that in America today, the richest 20 individuals own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the population—more than 150 million people. Yet he embraces and praises the president who has overseen the greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in history.
As he said Thursday night, “Bottom line is, I happen to think that the president has done an extraordinarily good job. I have worked with him on issue after issue.”
In recent days, pro-Clinton economists such as Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have attacked Sanders’ reform proposals, including free tuition at public colleges and universal government-provided health care, as wildly impractical and unrealizable. This is an attack on Sanders from the right, based on the standard lie that “there is no money” for social programs. However, Krugman and the others are correct in one critical regard. Sanders, no less than his pro-Clinton critics, accepts and defends the existing economic system. Proceeding from that starting point, his reform proposals are indeed utopian.
Outside of a mass struggle that directly challenges the bases of capitalist rule no genuinely progressive changes can be achieved.
As for Sanders’ supposedly “socialist” models—Denmark and Sweden—both have for the past two decades been busy dismantling the welfare states established after World War II and imposing ever harsher austerity measures on the working class. Their turn to social and political reaction is exemplified by their savage attacks on refugees. Sweden last month announced it would expel some 80,000 people fleeing the imperialist wars in the Middle East, and Denmark announced plans to seize the assets of asylum seekers.
Sanders does not represent the growing opposition of the working class to inequality, war and repression. He does not articulate the growth of anti-capitalist sentiment among the masses. He represents a response by the ruling class to these developments. His central political function is to prevent the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class by channeling social discontent back behind the Democratic Party.
Barry Grey
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/maybe_we_milleanials_should_rethink_socialism.html
February 18, 2016
Maybe we millennials should rethink socialism
By Thomas Wheatley
If you ever find yourself driving through southeast Kansas, there is a small town tucked away off U.S. Route 169 that you might like. Its appearance and culture is one of quiet tradition, boasting no flashy distinctiveness. While it has a library, a safari museum, a few parks, and a cement factory, the town of Chanute, in all its aura of classic Americana, is pretty much your average Kansas small town. Like any small town, Chanute is home to a variety of rich life stories. One of those stories is about a man I knew named Pat.
Other than a handful of classes at the local community college, Pat’s formal schooling stopped after high school. He earned his first job at the age of fourteen sweeping floors at Caldwell Floor Covering, a modest carpet store located on West Cherry Street. As time progressed, he learned how to lay carpet, ceramic, hardwood, laminate, and vinyl. After a brief period in the National Guard, Pat returned to Caldwell, where his burgeoning reputation of trust and reliability earned him the responsibility of managing the store’s books. Fifty-six years later, he would retire from Caldwell as the owner.
Outside work, he and his wife, Billie Maxine, a nurse, raised a family. In 1972, the couple and their three sons (and later, a daughter) moved into a tiny two-bedroom house on a ten-acre hog farm. The scene was hardly picturesque: incessant grazing had stripped the pasture of vegetation, and the house was in a severe state of disrepair, complete with its own mice and roach infestation.
But to Pat and Billie, this despondent parcel of land was an opportunity. Embracing a work ethic forged in their own upbringing, they repaired the house, dug a pond, and planted grass. To make ends meet, they cultivated a large vegetable garden and raised chickens, cattle, and swine for the family's consumption. Although progress was slow, it was steady; as the years passed, Pat and Billie claimed their piece of the American Dream and built a happy life for their children.
In December 2015, the Washington Post reported that forty-eight percent of my generation (millennials) believe that the American Dream is dead. It is not a crazy belief – given the effects of wage stagnation, student debt, and a shrinking middle class, it is unsurprising the traditional benchmarks of adulthood, like getting married and buying a home, appear so far out of reach for millennials. It seems whenever our ostensibly bleak economic prospects are coupled with our teetering ability to gain the much-needed approval of older generations, we cannot help but view our futures so dubiously. Perhaps this is why millennials are the most medicated, depressed, and anxious generation in recent history.
So what should we millennials do about it?
On the one hand, we could brand ourselves "democratic socialists," blame our parents, scorn corporations, and deride capitalism. We could wallow in our apparent inability to thrive absent taxpayer-backed college, health care, minimum wages, and "safe zones." We could avoid building resilience, cling fervently to the questionable precept of intersectionality, and hand off to our children a gargantuan expansion of the national debt and federal bureaucracy.
Then again, we could acknowledge that economic mobility is no worse than it was fifty years ago and that no generation in history was as ideally situated to realize the American Dream as we are. We could take a page out of Pat’s and Billie’s book, rethink what opportunity means, and perhaps find the personal satisfaction we crave by building something from nothing, rather than chasing down the increasingly hollow credentials of "achievement" that seem to define our generation.
Indeed, we could live up to our reputation of "everybody gets a trophy," or we could find our own hog farm, roll up our sleeves, and discover a prize truly reflective of what we have earned.
I hope we make the right call.
Thomas Wheatley is a law student at George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia. Email him at twheatl2@gmu.edu.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/02/maybe_we_milleanials_should_rethink_socialism.html#ixzz40ZWhYD00
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AMERICA: NO DAMNED LEGAL NEED APPLY!!!
cnsnews.com
BLS: Total Unemployed, Marginally Attached & Part-Time, Unemployment Rate is 9.9%
By Michael W. Chapman | February 17, 2016 | 11:26 AM EST
(AP photo.)
(CNSNews.com) -- Although the national unemployment rate in January was 4.9%, a broader measure used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), called U-6, which includes total unemployed, persons marginally attached to the labor force, and those working part-time for economic reasons, shows that the unemployment rate was 9.9% in January 2016.
That 9.9% unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, was the same in December and November 2015, and up slightly from October, when it was 9.8%.
In January 2015, a year ago, the U-6 unemployment rate was 11.3%.
Prior to October 2015, the last time the U-6 unemployment rate was in the 9.8-9.9% range was in May and June 2008, seven months before Barack Obama was inaugurated president.
Source: Gallup and Bureau of Labor Statistics.
When Obama entered office in January 2009, the U-6 unemployment rate was 14.2%. It's peak was in late 2009, early 2010, when it hit 17.1% unemployment for several months.
The Gallup polling company calls the U-6 number the "Real Unemployment" rate in America. As it states, "Widely reported unemployment metrics in the U.S. do not accurately represent the reality of joblessness in America."
"For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does not count a person who desires work as unemployed if he or she is not working and has stopped looking for work over the past four weeks," says Gallup. "Similarly, the BLS does not count someone as unemployed if he or she is, for instance, an out-of-work engineer, construction worker or retail manager who performs a minimum of one hour of work a week and receives at least $20 in compensation."
The Unaccompanied Children Crisis: Does the Administration Have a Plan to Stop the Border Surge and Adequately Monitor the Children?
10:00 a.m., Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Dirksen Senate Office Building 226
Washington, DC, 20003
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/the-unaccompanied-children-crisis-does-the-administration-have-a-plan-to-stop-the-border-surge-and-adequately-monitor-the-children
Would President Rubio Push Amnesty?
By Mark Krikorian
The Corner at National Review Online,
February 8, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430960/would-president-rubio-push-amnesty?target=author&tid=982
Kevin writes that it’s a mystery to him “that conservatives are so miserable at the moment, when they are presented with such a desirable choice” between Cruz and Rubio. Let me explain.
There’s no doubt that both “are self-conscious conservatives in the sense that they are products of the conservative movement,” as Kevin says, “in a way that no president has been since Ronald Reagan.” I’ll even concede that Rubio got into bed with Schumer because he was auditioning for the job of Republican We Can Do Business With, a deal-maker who can get things done, and a deal on immigration seemed like a good place to start.
But there are two factors that might help resolve Kevin’s mystery. First, as I argue on the homepage today, immigration is not just another issue. It impacts every aspect of policy, and is irreversible. Angela Merkel’s conservative bona fides are irrelevant next to the damage she has done to her country. If Rubio were to change his tune on immigration after winning the election (as he’s done after winning every previous election), nothing else he did would matter.
And the chances of that happening are greater than Kevin thinks. He writes that, “our hypothetical President Rubio is never going to sign that amnesty bill because Congress isn’t ever going to send it to him.” He could be right – If Rubio wins, I certainly hope that’s the way it would play out. But the House has different leadership than in 2013. While John Boehner was basically in favor of a Gang of Eight-style policy of amnesty for illegals and massive expansion of legal immigration, he wasn’t an ideologically committed supporter of unlimited immigration like Paul Ryan. Remember, in 2013-2014, Ryan worked with Luis Gutierrez to pass a version of the Senate bill, just as Rubio had worked with Schumer. With Ryan as Speaker and Rubio in the White House, the odds that they’d try again are greater than we should be comfortable with, especially when the anti-borders interests would take a Rubio victory as proof that you can push amnesty and increased immigration and live to tell about it.
This notion that Marco Rubio doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true.
Rubio: Sneakier Than Your Average Bear
By Mark Krikorian
The Corner at National Review Online, February 6, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/430897/rubios-immigration-lies?target=author&tid=982
Eagle Forum has published a memo detailing Marco Rubio’s lies to conservatives in his effort to get Chuck Schumer’s immigration bill passed. “Lies” is a strong word, but it’s the only word that fits. This wasn’t the natural trimming of politicians, like Rubio’s justification of sugar subsidies in the service of his financial patrons the Fanjul brothers. From Cicero to Reagan, all successful politicians engage in misdirection or exploit ambiguity (including all the other current Republican hopefuls). In this case, though, Rubio led a Clintonian campaign of calculated falsehoods designed to sell Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill to conservatives.
Those falsehoods are too numerous to list in a blog post – read the whole paper. But some examples regarding just one part of the bill: As Rubio himself was forced to admit eventually, Schumer’s bill granted work permits and Social Security numbers to illegals up front, and promised the enforcement targets would be met in future years – just like the failed 1986 amnesty. And yet, here’s what he told conservative media:
To Limbaugh: “if there is not language in this bill that guarantees that nothing else will happen unless these enforcement mechanisms are in place, I won’t support it.”
To Hannity: “I don’t think any of that [amnesty] begins until we certify that the border security progress has been real. That a workplace enforcement mechanism is in place. That we are tracking visitors to our country, especially when they exit.”
Bill O’Reilly said: “Senator Rubio told me on the phone today that it would be at least 13 years, 13, before people in the country illegally right now could gain full legal working status and even longer to achieve citizenship.”
Rubio also lied about the size of the bill’s unprecedented increase in legal immigration, he lied about the scope of waivers, he lied about welfare eligibility, he lied to law enforcement about amnesty for gang members.
Disagreement over policy is one thing; Jeb’s immigration views, for instance, are not shared by most of the people whose votes he’s seeking, but he’s honorably forthright about what he believes. Rubio, on the other hand, tried to trick his own partisans. I had actually forgotten the scope of his dishonesty in pushing Schumer’s bill; Eagle Forum has done a service by collecting it all in one place. And Rubio has never apologized for it. Maybe someone will bring it up at tonight’s debate.
Immigration Is a Deal-Breaker — No to Rubio 2016
By Mark Krikorian
National Review Online, February 8, 2016
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430926/marco-rubio-immigration-wrong-2016?target=author&tid=982
Immigration isn’t just another issue. Despite his “does not compute” glitch Saturday night (which will likely dog him for the rest of his career, like Rick Perry’s “oops” and Dan Quayle’s “you’re no Jack Kennedy” moment), Marco Rubio is still a live contender for the nomination. So it remains important to explain why I think his immigration record disqualifies him from being the 2016 nominee.
Many conservatives who admire Rubio’s genuine political talent agree that his shilling for Chuck Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill was bad. But they offer two reasons that this should not be an impediment to his being the Republican presidential nominee. First, they say, Rubio has learned his lesson and, second, he’s quite solid on many other issues. Both parts of this defense warrant examination: Has Rubio truly changed his spots on immigration? And is immigration simply one issue among many, so that Rubio’s deviation there is outweighed by his fidelity on others?
As to the first question: There’s every reason to suspect Rubio is merely an election-year immigration hawk. A devastating 14-page indictment of Rubio’s immigration record, prepared by Eagle Forum (html and pdf), lays out his duplicity in painful detail. Early in his career, anti-borders groups were delighted with Rubio’s conduct in the Florida legislature; the head of one of them, NALEO, said, “He, as speaker, kept many of those [immigration-control bills] from coming up to a vote. We were very proud of his work as speaker of the House.”
Then, when Rubio ran for the Senate, he turned into a hawk. As CNN’s greatest-hits clip at last month’s debate showed, Rubio said the following, among other things, during his 2010 campaign: “Earned path to citizenship is basically code for amnesty, it’s what they call it. . . . It is unfair to people who have legally entered this country to create an alternative pathway for individuals who entered illegally and knowingly did so.” This hawkishness on immigration was an important reason for his upset victory over Charlie Crist.
“Once he got elected, he betrayed us all,” according to Phyllis Schlafly, Rubio’s first major outside endorser in the Senate primary. Rubio chose to become the chief salesman and public face of Chuck Schumer’s Gang of Eight bill and, as the Eagle Forum indictment shows, his mendacity went well beyond embracing the amnesty he’d so recently denounced: It included a calculated effort to dupe conservatives about what was really in the bill. It was so bad that the head of the ICE agents’ association said that “he directly misled law-enforcement officers” at a meeting right before the bill was introduced in the Senate.
Then, when the voters rebelled at Senate passage of his monstrous bill and the House refused to pass it, Rubio denounced his own bill, saying the public doesn’t trust Washington to follow through on its enforcement promises. (Of course, this was apparent to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, not just in 2013 but even in 2007, when Bush’s amnesty push failed.)
To sum up: Rubio was anti-enforcement in the Florida legislature, then an enforcement hawk at election time in 2010, then Schumer’s cabana boy in 2013, then a hawk again at election time. Anyone can flip once — people really do change their minds, or even see political writing on the wall and embrace a new position. But flipping and flopping in time with the election cycle should be cause for skepticism, to say the least.
And Rubio hasn’t even really renounced Schumer’s bill. He still supports all the parts of it, but thinks they should be passed separately rather than in a comprehensive package. And he is still an enthusiastic supporter of the most important piece of the Schumer-Rubio legislation — its doubling of legal immigration, from 1 million a year to 2 million, which, combined with the amnesty, would have resulted in the issuance of 30 million green cards in the first decade after passage.
Not only has Rubio not recanted his support for doubling immigration, he’s actually sponsored a bill in this Congress to triple H-1B admissions of foreign workers (the I-Squared Act — which Michelle Malkin has cheekily labeled Rubio’s second-worst immigration bill). What’s more, personnel is policy, and Rubio’s inner circle — pollster Whit Ayres, for instance, and Cesar Conda, his chief of staff during the Schumer romance and likely White House chief of staff — are confirmed opponents of immigration limits. The idea that the open-borders corporate culture of the Rubio operation would be trumped by some enforcement promises made on the campaign trail is a fantasy.
But even supposing all this is true, Rubio is sound on many other issues — his answer on the abortion issue Saturday night, for instance, was very strong and, while he’s a little too interventionist for my taste, he’s firmly in the GOP mainstream and probably more knowledgeable on foreign policy than his rivals. Since no candidate is perfect, isn’t focusing so intently on immigration an unrealistic demand for purity? After all, Rubio’s opportunistic embrace of sugar subsidies, at the behest of a major donor, is the kind of soiled compromise we often accept.
But immigration isn’t just another issue, like farm subsidies or taxes or even battling radical Islam. Immigration is a meta issue, one that affects almost every arena of national life — from politics to education to jobs to security to health care to national cohesion. If we set taxes too high, we can lower them later. If we let the Navy get too small, we build more ships. But if we get immigration wrong, we can’t undo it: People are not widgets, and we can’t ask for a do-over after adding 30 million green cards in a decade.
What’s more, the deep gulf in views over immigration between elites and the public, between globalists and patriots, has given immigration a symbolic importance as a marker of legitimacy. As Ramesh Ponnuru has written, “A hard line on immigration, however it is defined, is now part of the conservative creed.”
In effect, Rubio is an Angela Merkel Republican — genuinely conservative on most every issue, except the one that counts above all others.
For this reason alone, he should be denied the nomination. If he were to succeed in getting it, the donor class and its politicians would take away the lesson that they can betray the voters all they want on this potentially nation-breaking issue, and simply talk their way out of it. Voltaire wrote, in Candide, that “it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others.” Rubio’s betrayal doesn’t warrant the gallows, but he must be denied this prize, “in order to encourage the others.”
This doesn’t mean he’s finished in politics. He’s a young man with immense political gifts and has plenty of time before 2020 or 2024 to atone in Congress for his transgressions and earn back the people’s trust. If he were to run for governor of Florida, for instance, he could amass a record of fidelity to immigration law by, say, passing mandatory E-Verify for his state. Even before then, during the remainder of his Senate term, he could work with Jeff Sessions to introduce legislation to end chain migration and abolish the Visa Lottery — or, at the very least, withdraw his sponsorship of the anti–American-worker I-Squared H-1B bill.
If Marco Rubio can convincingly turn away from his Merkelian past, he can have a bright future, perhaps even become the 46th or 47th president of the United States. But to nominate him in 2016 would be a profound mistake.
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4.
Where Does United States v. Texas Stand after Scalia's Death?
By Jon Feere
CIS Immigration Blog, February 14, 2016
. . .
If United States v. Texas results a 4-4 split decision, it means that the lower court holding stands and President Obama's unilateral amnesty remains enjoined. Critical to this analysis, any opinion issued by the Supreme Court would not be precedent-setting. (It would also likely be quite short. For example, in a 4-4 case from 2010, the Court simply wrote: "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided Court.")
What is unique in this situation is that the lower court's holding is in the injunction phase – a full trial on the merits of DAPA and the states' interests has not been held. This means that if the Supreme Court were to split evenly, a hearing on the merits of the case is still likely to be held at some point in the future by the lower court. At some point after that, it is possible that the case would get appealed back up to the Supreme Court. This would presumably happen after a new justice has been appointed and after a new president has been elected.
What's interesting about this is that if the Obama administration hadn't pressured the Court to take up the case, it could have slipped to the next term and perhaps the immigration case would not be on everyone's radar to the extent that it is now, making it easier for the president to persuade Congress to allow him to appoint a new justice later this year. It would be much more preferable from the administration's perspective to appoint a new justice before the immigration case is decided.
. . .
http://www.cis.org/feere/where-does-united-states-v-texas-stand-after-scalias-death
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5.
Criminal Alien Assistance Funds: Wanting Your Cake and Eating It Too
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
. . .
But one can understand congressional interest in creating favor with politically savvy and powerful law enforcement officials throughout the country, such as county sheriffs and major city police chiefs, by establishing an atmosphere of good will and cooperation between law enforcement agencies nationwide and federal immigration agents charged with finding and removing alien criminals.
The problem is that recalcitrant state legislatures and city and county councils have erected barriers to such cooperation. Likewise, many sheriffs and police chiefs have adopted rules that render the jobs of federal agents much more difficult by refusing to honor immigration detainers and declining to notify agents of arrests or the release dates of aliens. This "sanctuary city" movement (which includes counties and states along with cities), having gone unchecked by the administration, has experienced mushroom-like growth — especially since the administration itself has unilaterally created policy barriers by narrowly defining when agents may even file such detainers. Not to mention the litigiousness of open-borders groups that have sued state and local law enforcement organizations for honoring the detainers (suits which, as often as not, the federal government has run from, leaving their enforcement "partners" to fend for themselves).
Still, there is something unconscionable about holding out one hand for federal money and using the other to stiff-arm federal immigration agents trying to do their job. Such is the case with California, which even as it receives tens of millions of dollars in SCAAP money, has enacted into law the "Trust Act", a statute prohibiting both state and local California agencies from fully cooperating with immigration agents or honoring detainers. This has on more than one occasion led to unnecessary deaths (see here, here, and here). Yet, amusingly, a California spokesman is quoted as lamenting the potential loss of money because of the serious impact it will have on his state, and talking about the number of alien inmates with detainers filed against them. One wonders how many would, in the end, actually be honored, and how many were rejected out of hand in the first place.
. . .
http://www.cis.org/cadman/criminal-alien-assistance-funds-wanting-your-cake-and-eating-it-too
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6.
"We Might as Well Abolish Our Immigration Laws"
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
I mentioned two ways in which this ultimate dismantling might come about. One involved stacking the deck of key appointments, such as enlarging the bench of immigration judges with individuals who share the president's open borders outlook. That has been happening in earnest, and as one can see from a cursory glance at the official website of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, it includes not just rank-and-file judges, but also a slew of six new assistant chief immigration judges who will ride herd over the others. Can anyone doubt their philosophical proclivities?
The other way involves continuing to mandate executive actions that crush even the semblance of immigration law enforcement. This most recent directive to the Border Patrol certainly meets that test. And it is not the only one. The administration has also directed that aerial surveillance of our borders be cut in half. This is incredible at a time when ISIS terrorists have threatened to infiltrate the United States by any means necessary. One suspects that they care little about that fight, though, since they have shown no will for it to date, and since it will become the inheritance of the next president. It takes little imagination to gauge that the reasons for the cut are twofold: First, to permit the flooding of our borders with citizens from our southern neighbors in a way that they believe, or at least hope, will force the issue of a future broad-based amnesty. Second, and more prosaically, to minimize the possibility that there will be a leak of aerial surveillance videos that reveal exactly how damaging the new rules of engagement for Patrol Agents are by showing footage of large numbers of aliens crossing the border with impunity and indifference to the possibility of apprehension.
. . .
http://www.cis.org/cadman/we-might-well-abolish-our-immigration-laws
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7.
DHS OIG Issues a "No Recommendation" Audit Report — Or Does it?
By Dan Cadman
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
As one can easily see, the left column, highlighted in blue, says, "What We Recommend: We made one recommendation to CBP to develop and implement a process to determine program costs for the SOG."
The text immediately to the right of the blue says, "We made no recommendation regarding the lack of formal performance measures in the SOG program [but that] CBP concurred with our recommendation. The recommendation is resolved and open."
Guess they couldn't decide whether saying "stay the course" was really a recommendation, but were reluctant to issue a report with no recommendations at all. So, hey, why not the best of both worlds?
. . .
http://www.cis.org/cadman/dhs-oig-issues-no-recommendation-audit-report-or-does-it
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8.
A Look at the New Center for Migration Studies Illegal Population Estimates
By Steven A. Camarota
CIS Immigration Blog, February 8, 2016
. . .
One of the biggest problems with the CMS report is the way the findings are presented. The headline and the accompanying article emphasize a "continued" decline in the illegal population. But this conclusion is not supported by data they present. The illegal estimates from CMS are based on the public-use file of the American Community Survey, and like any survey it has a margin of error. Although CMS does not provide it, for a population of 10.9 million illegal immigrants drawn from the public-use file of the ACS, the margin of error must be a little over 100,000. We can estimate the margin of error for the illegal population by using the total foreign-born Mexican population in the 2014 ACS as a proxy population. In 2014 the ACS showed 11.7 million Mexican immigrants, with a margin of error of ±110,000. If we simply use the same procedure for calculating the margin of error for an illegal population of 10.9 million, the margin of error would be ±106,000 for 2014. This assumes a 90 percent confidence level. If we assume a 95 percent confidence level the margin of error is +/- 127,000. The illegal population is very similar in characteristics to the overall Mexican immigrant population so the confidence interval would have to be nearly identical.
. . .
http://www.cis.org/camarota/center-migration-studies-report-falls-short
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9.
The House Presents a Sprightly Hearing on EB-5
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
The full House Judiciary Committee produced a lively and often stimulating hearing on the immigrant investor (EB-5) program yesterday.
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TApparently the government has had, for 25 years, the power to raise the minimum investment, but never used it, even as inflation climbed.
Colucci said that the administration was thinking about it.
Several people said that the half-million/one-million differential was supposed to channel funds into depressed rural and urban areas, but that EB-5 promoters had through gerrymandering managed to distort the program into its current shape. Then in one of those moments we sometimes see in these hearings, witness Calderon pointed out something that had been forgotten for decades.
She said that "in footnote six of my paper there is a reference to a third level of investment in the 1990 act, and it calls for a minimum stake of $3 million" for an investment in a really prosperous area. She was arguing for a sliding scale of investment to help depressed areas.
At about this point, witness Gordon said, in response to a question about how to break the strangle-hold of affluent urban areas, that a new and vigorous use of differential rewards (with higher ones for investments in poor areas) could change the current patterns, but only if the government made that a priority.
Calderon had another interesting observation. There are something like 63,000 visas backlogged in the program because there are more applications on hand than can be filled within the annual ceiling of 10,000. The backlog has been worsened due to the fact that there usually are about 2.5 visas per investment, and also by the heavy use (87 percent) of the program by Chinese nationals. The Chinese usage has bumped into another provision of the law setting overall migration ceilings on aliens from individual nations.
Calderon's suggestion was: Why not give priority to those in line who were planning to invest more than the usual half-million dollars. She called it a visa reserve.
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http://www.cis.org/north/house-presents-sprightly-hearing-eb-5
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10.
Strategic Objective Is Questionable, but Tactics Are Attractive
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 11, 2016
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Yesterday's Immigration Daily featured a brief article by "Dino Palangic et. al." to which is attached an Excel spreadsheet that enables immigration attorneys use eye-catching graphics to support their petitions for either nonimmigrant treaty investors (E-2) or immigrant investors (EB-5).
Mr. Palangic runs a paralegal services firm that assists immigration lawyers as they seek to aid their alien clients – which shows, among other things, the complexity and the size of the migrant-advocacy industry.
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http://www.cis.org/north/strategic-objective-questionable-tactics-are-attractive
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11.
What Money Can and Can't Buy in Our Immigration System
By David North
CIS Immigration Blog, February 10, 2016
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E visas are nonimmigrant ones and do not, in and of themselves, lead to a green card.
As an aside, my caller said that one of the reasons why there are so many small Korean retail establishments is that a migrant with $100,000 to $200,000 can buy a retail establishment and thus qualify for an E-2 visa. This is another way to buy your way into the country, but not permanently.
The Treaty Trader (E-1) and Treaty Investor (E-2) programs are worrisome because they are handled totally by the State Department, which has no on-the-ground oversight and enforcement mechanism. Further, there are no statutory minimums for the size of the investments.
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http://www.cis.org/north/what-money-can-cant-buy-our-immigration-system
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12.
Most of the Gains from Immigration Go to Immigrants Themselves – Not to Natives
By Jason Richwine
CIS Immigration Blog, February 10, 2016
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured a reasonably balanced look at the economic effects of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigrants. The state has enjoyed a 40 percent decline in its illegal population since it mandated E-Verify and empowered local police to check immigration status during traffic stops. (Because Arizona's decline is larger than in surrounding states, we may plausibly attribute it to the new policies.) The Journal points out that fewer illegal immigrants has meant less overall economic output for Arizona, but also higher wages in some sectors and less of a financial strain on schools and hospitals.
Sorting through these different effects can be tricky, and it tripped up even Kevin Drum, a sharp-minded liberal blogger for Mother Jones. Reacting to the Journal piece, Drum noted that Arizona's annual GDP is $6 billion lower because of the new policies, whereas schools and hospitals are saving only $410 million. "Arizona is paying a high price for cracking down on illegal immigration," Drum concluded.
But Drum seems to assume that the benefits of a higher GDP accrue to Arizonans. As CIS's Steven Camarota pointed out in congressional testimony, gains in GDP and gains to the native-born are very different things. Most GDP gains from immigration are captured by the immigrants themselves.
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http://www.cis.org/cis/most-gains-immigration-go-immigrants-themselves-%E2%80%93-not-natives
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13.
The Ideological Divide on Immigration: Prevention vs. Protection
By Jerry Kammer
CIS Immigration Blog, February 7, 2016
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South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy, the immigration subcommittee chairman, charged the Obama administration with failure to manage the crisis. He pointed to reports that migrants had told Border Patrol agents they came north because they had heard that if they made it across the border they would be allowed to stay in the country.
"In other words, no adequate steps have been taken to halt the surge or discourage aliens from attempting to enter the United States," Gowdy said. "We must at some point send a clear message to potential unlawful immigrants" that they will not be allowed to stay in the United States.
In response to Gowdy's call for tough-minded resolve, Michigan Democrat John Conyers called for big-hearted compassion. Said Conyers: "People need to live free from an endless cycle of violence and persecution. ... We must address the root causes of the hemisphere crisis. ... We have a moral as well as a legal obligation to provide asylum seekers the opportunity to apply for humanitarian protection."
Thirty years ago Democrats and Republicans managed to bridge the much narrower ideological divide of that era. Congress passed and President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, calling it a solution to illegal immigration. IRCA was built on a hard-won compromise that promised to combine protection in the form of amnesty with prevention in the form of worksite enforcement.
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http://www.cis.org/kammer/ideological-divide-prevention-vs-protection
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14.
Attention Syrian Refugees: U.S. Is Looking into Your Facebook Accounts
By Nayla Rush
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
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Based on the following excerpts from the witness statements, here's the deal. The U.S. government is going to hire more people, spend more money, deploy more resources to vet more and more immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees (unaccompanied minors from Central America have just been added to the list of people we "need" to bring in). And this, despite the fact that the system is already backlogged, staff is overwhelmed, and the budget is tight. As usual, it is the American citizen and the legal immigrant who will pick up the tab in order to keep up with this administration's overseas humanitarian enthusiasms.
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http://www.cis.org/rush/attention-syrian-refugees-us-looking-your-facebook-accounts
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15.
Democrats Get Immigration Wrong, Again
By Kausha Luna
CIS Immigration Blog, February 12, 2016
Last night, the Democratic debate in Milwaukee became the latest example of the ill-informed immigration narrative propagated in the United States and the lack of interest in enforcement of immigration law.
During the debate Sen. Bernie Sanders went after Hillary Clinton's vague support for deporting some Central Americans, claiming she was willing to deport "people who were fleeing drug violence and cartel violence," making an explicit reference to Honduras. Yet, violence is not the principal reason Honduran are choosing to migrate.
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http://www.cis.org/luna/democrats-get-immigration-issue-wrong-again
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16.
Survey Shows Main Cause of Honduran Emigration Is Economics, Not Violence
By Kausha Luna
CIS Immigration Blog, February 9, 2016
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Regarding migration, the survey confirmed the economic crisis in Honduras as the main cause for migration. Of the respondents that had a family member who had migrated in the last four years, 77.6 percent did so due to lack of employment and a search for better opportunities. Meanwhile, 16.9 percent migrated due to violence and insecurity. In comparison, the 2014 ERIC-SJ survey showed that 82.5 percent migrated for the former causes and 11 percent migrated for the latter. So while violence and insecurity have grown in importance among causes for migration, they continue to lag far behind economic factors as the primary cause.
Homicide rates in Honduras have been decreasing since 2012.
However, the Obama administration's narrative insists that Central Americans are fleeing violence and as such should be welcomed into the United States with open arms as "refugees." This narrative ignores the economy as the primary push factor for migration, as well as the pull of incentives created by the Obama administration in its refusal to enforce immigration laws.
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17.
The Next Administration's Immigration Crisis
By Michael Cutler
FrontPagMag.com, February 8, 2016
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While the politicians downplay the actual number of likely illegal aliens they also never mention that if legalized, millions of illegal aliens would have the right to immediately bring in their spouses and minor children. Think of how many millions of additional aliens would suddenly be admitted into the United States with lawful status- flooding our educational and healthcare systems.
We should be concerned about the growing national debt. However, when was the last time you heard anyone on any of the news programs talk about the fact that each year more than $200 billion is wired out of the U.S. by foreign workers- both legally and illegally working in the United States?
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/261725/next-administrations-immigration-crisis-michael-cutler
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18.
How to Fix Illegal Immigration in Five Steps Without Building a Wall
But we should build some walls too
By Kevin D. Williamson
National Review Online, February 9, 2016
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No, not the question of immigration — illegal immigration. There’s a temptation to bundle those together, because we have problems with our legal immigration regime, too, but the more tightly we tie them together, the more closely we bind ourselves to “solutions” that aren’t. With illegal immigration, we won’t get 100 percent of the way there with five reforms, but we might get 92 percent of the way there.
One: Enact a law that does one thing: prohibit people who have entered the United States illegally from applying for citizenship — even if their current status is legal. If you ever have entered the United States illegally, you don’t ever become a citizen.
Two: Enact a law that does one thing: prohibit people who have entered the United States illegally from applying for a work permit — even if their current status is legal. If you ever have entered the United Sates illegally, you don’t ever get a work permit.
That’s your firewall against amnesty. Vote against those laws, and you’re voting for amnesty; vote to repeal them down the line, you’re voting for amnesty. This creates good political incentives in Washington and removes bad incentives among those who come here illegally expecting that their status eventually will be made legal.
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