Category Archives: Immigration

Belarus Crisis Grows Worse, by Ted Galen Carpenter

Posted on November 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why should the U.S. worry about an immigration dispute between Belarus on the one hand and Poland and Lithuania on the other? Particularly when U.S. involvement might bring Russia into the fray. From Ted Galen Carpenter at theamericanconservative.com:

It is a dangerous folly for the United States to extend security guarantees to small nations that quarrel with their neighbors.

Mazur Travel/Shutterstock

The long-simmering feud between Belarus and several of its NATO neighbors (especially Poland and Lithuania) over the flow of refugees from the Middle East is escalating rapidly. On November 10, the European Union accused Belarus of mounting a “hybrid attack” by pushing migrants across the border into Poland. Poland and the Baltic republics have bolstered their security forces along their frontiers with Belarus to block the migrants trying to enter their countries. Thousands of hapless refugees are now stuck in makeshift camps in what amounts to a geographic no-man’s-land, and conditions there are becoming appalling.

It would be bad enough if the border crisis only involved humanitarian considerations, but the issue is taking on a military dimension. Britain has sent a small contingent of troops to Poland’s eastern frontier to show support for its NATO ally. On November 12, Russia and Belarus commenced joint snap paratrooper drills in Western Belarus, raising tensions another notch. More ominously, Moscow sent nuclear-capable bombers to patrol the skies over Belarus, emphasizing the Kremlin’s commitment to the security of that country and to Alexander Lukashenko’s government. Lukashenko has made his own contribution to the mounting tensions by threatening to cut off the transit of natural gas supplies from Russia to Poland and Germany—a step that would be quite worrisome on the eve of the winter season.

Both sides are engaging in dangerous and destructive posturing. There is little doubt that Belarus is exploiting the refugee flow to put pressure on its western neighbors. Minsk has provided financial incentives to encourage migrants to come to Belarus with promises that they will be able to gain asylum in the European Union’s eastern members and find new opportunities there. Reports also indicate that Belarusian authorities even supply the migrants with guides and maps to help them find the border, as well as wire cutters to deal with fences and other physical impediments there.

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Illegal Immigrants Would Get $10.5 Billion From Reconciliation Bill, by Steve Camarota

Posted on November 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

Let’s put a big welcome mat out for anyone who wants to enter the country illegally, funded by your tax dollars! from Steve Camarota at realclearpolitics.com;

Illegal Immigrants Would Get $10.5 Billion From Reconciliation Bill

AP Photo/Eric Gay

The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are U.S.-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration.

Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended.

In an analysis conducted in October, my colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimated that illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children would receive $8.2 billion from the new CTC. However, we had assumed that the new program, like the old ACTC, would require children claimed as dependents to have Social Security numbers (SSNs).  But reconciliation (page 1452, line 14) would permanently repeal this requirement.

Illegal immigrants are able to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. In the case of the old ACTC, they simply acquired an individual taxpayer identification number, which is not hard, and then claimed their payment. In practice, only illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children could receive payments under the old system, since as American citizens those U.S.-born children receive SSNs. The permanent elimination of the SSN requirement means that even illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country can receive the new expanded credit.

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Biden’s America: Illegal Aliens Worth More than U.S. Soldiers, by Chris Farrell

Posted on November 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you have any imagination at all you can think of all sorts of law-abiding American citizens more deserving of money from the government than illegal aliens. From Chris Farrell at gatestoneinstitute.org:

The Biden administration is considering payments of $450,000 to illegal aliens – per person – for “immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration” after illegal entering into the United States. Pictured: Migrants illegally enter the U.S. from Mexico on April 30, 2021 in Roma, Texas.(Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

The Biden administration is considering payments of $450,000 to illegal aliens – per person – for “immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration” after illegal entering into the United States. The payments would be part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of illegal alien families. The total settlement amount is reported to be at least $1 billion of federal taxpayer funds.

On November 4, 2021, President Joe Biden told reporters that payments to families separated at the Mexico border are, “Not gonna’ happen.” When pressed further concerning the likelihood such payments would actually encourage more migrants to try to cross into the United States, Biden said, “If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah. But it’s not true.”

Within 24 hours, the White House reversed itself completely and claimed that Biden was “perfectly comfortable” making the settlement payments.

This situation raises, again, the question of whether Biden has any idea what administration officials around him are doing. It appears that officials who actually run the government are making decisions and acting on major public policy issues without telling the president. As a result, the President appeared before the national media, and denied the facts. One day later, a White House press spokesperson engages in damage control and spin, pretending Biden’s complete ignorance of the matter was really about the amounts of the proposed settlements, with gratuitous swipes at Trump administration policies.

Media reports say that approximately 940 claims have been filed so far by families that were separated. On October 3, 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a federal lawsuit in Tucson, Arizona alleging the U.S. government violated immigrants’ rights and deeply traumatized children who were taken from their parents after crossing the border illegally. U.S. government officials reportedly are not certain how many more will come forward or try and take advantage of the potential settlement, not to mention the incentivizing impact of being rewarded with nearly half a million dollars for breaking the law and entering the U.S. illegally. The New York Times estimates that roughly 5,500 children were separated from their parents as a result of the policies.

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Biden’s Border, by Chris Farrell

Posted on November 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

There is no border anymore. A more correct characterization would be “the sieve and welcome mat.” From Chris Farrell at gatestoneinstitute.org:

Fiscal year-end figures provided this month by the Department of Homeland Security show that 2021 was the record year for all-time high apprehensions on the southern border. Federal agents apprehended 1,659,206 illegal immigrants at the southwest border in 2021, breaking the previous high of 1,643,679 in 2000. Pictured: U.S. Border Patrol agents watch as illegal immigrants cross the Rio Grande river from Mexico into Del Rio, Texas on September 23, 2021. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

One does not see reporting in the American news media nowadays about the “Biden Caravans,” thousands of immigrants making their way north to the border region of the United States. News media reports on the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are also few and far between. The deficit in reporting and public attention does not, however, mean that the border crisis has abated. In fact, the crisis has deepened on all fronts: it is a humanitarian disaster compounded by rampant criminality and grave national security threats.

The “mother of all caravans” (also known as the “march for liberty, dignity and peace“) is on the way from the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, which borders Guatemala, to the United States. By the time you read this, they may already have arrived. More than 4,000 illegal immigrants are estimated to be in the caravan. Spanish-language reporting (that includes video) on the caravan claims that the group consists mainly of Haitians and Central Americans. Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, is quoted in a Mexican news story as saying that the government will act with prudence and caution in accordance with human rights laws, although he adds that migrants are being fooled because they will not be allowed to enter the United States.

Fiscal year-end figures provided this month by the Department of Homeland Security show that 2021 was the record year for all-time high apprehensions on the southern border. Federal agents apprehended 1,659,206 illegal immigrants at the southwest border in 2021, breaking the previous high of 1,643,679 in 2000. Illegal “got-aways” – migrants who crossed the border without turning themselves in for processing — is estimated by law enforcement at an additional 250,000 for the year. “On average, noted one report, 1,600 migrants escape capture each day.”

The Department of Homeland Security defines “apprehension” as: “The arrest of a removable alien by the Department of Homeland Security. Each apprehension of the same alien in a fiscal year is counted separately.” Under the Biden administration, the vast majority of apprehended illegal aliens are processed for identification purposes and then released into the interior of the United States on the condition that the alien promises to appear at an immigration hearing sometime in the future. The date and location of the hearing is not set at the time of release. Border communities have struggled to keep up with the number of released aliens, as have transportation service providers such as bus companies and small regional airports.

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The Backsliding of America, by Dr. Igor Shepherd

Posted on October 26, 2021 | Leave a comment

A Russian immigrant to the US fears the country he loved is becoming like the country he left. From Dr. Igor Shepherd at lewrockwell.com:

Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve
your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall
repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it.
John Adams-1756

I left the lifeless credos of Russia and moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1993, a few years after the Iron Curtain collapsed. The “perestroika” in the new Russian Federation did little to change the lives of average Russian citizens who were scraping by to feed their families. Mother Russia still felt cold and lifeless, and the people ambled to-and-fro with the same anxieties and suspicions. I was still an active reserve officer for the Strategic Rocket Force when I married my wife, June, an American flight attendant, and moved to the USA. It did not take long for me to notice that there were a lot of churches in and around Seattle. I could not help but consider that maybe the reason America was so awesome was because of their faith in God.

The change for me was enormous. I could not speak fluent English and I was experiencing a way of life that was both astounding and daunting at the same time. Seattle itself was an intoxication to my senses. The fishy smells of the Puget Sound, the vibrant ferry trips to flowery islands, and the quiet hum of luxury cars speeding down the smooth freeways was an unexplainable pleasure. Unlike the citizens in Russia, I noticed people laughed and showed a lot of emotion in public.

When I experienced my first encounter at a fast-food drive-thru I was hooked. My patient wife put up with my need to eat fast food every day for months. But it was my first visit inside the grocery store, standing in front of a long aisle full of all kinds of amazing breads, that the realization of communism versus God hit me. In Russia we had only two choices for bread—dark or white—nothing soft and fancy like the breads before me. As I stood there in that aisle, frozen, gawking, June looked over and caught my angry expression. She asked if I were okay. I did not know how to tell her that I felt cheated and deceived by my country of birth.

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Posted in Collapse, Culture, Governments, History, Immigration, Law, Morality, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, Society

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Biden Admin Has Released Over 16,000 COVID-Positive Migrants Into US: Whistleblower, by Tyler Durden

Posted on October 20, 2021 | 1 comment

Yet the Biden administration is forcing private and public employers to fire the unvaccinated. The hypocrisy is monumental. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

A whistleblower within the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) claims that the Biden administration has released more than 16,000 Covid-positive migrants into the United States after they were not required to take the jab, according to Breitbart News‘ Randy Clark – a retired 32-year veteran of the US Border Patrol.

According to the report, the released migrants ranged in age from infants to the elderly – nearly 1,300 of whom were under the age of ten.

The nearly 12,000 Covid-positive migrants were aged between 18 and 40 – with more than 11,800 of them male. Over 6,000 were between 20 and 29-years-old.

According to the source, the releases occurred in multiple cities across the United States between January 2021 and early October.

The totals do not include the thousands of untested migrants released directly by the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol testing of migrants has been limited to unaccompanied migrant children later turned over to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

As reported by Breitbart Texas, the Border Patrol relied on non-government organizations to test migrants after their release from detention. Many of those migrants were later released to self-quarantine at hotels within border cities. -Breitbart

According to Breitbart’s source, covid-status did not factor into the decision to release.

“With the pace of referrals from the Border Patrol, we tested, made the migrants aware, and released them to avoid increasing the detained population,” they said, adding “None of the migrants received the COVID-19 vaccine, either voluntary or forced.”

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Governments, Immigration, Medicine, Politics

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Yeah, we “expect you”. That’s why we have a Plan B, by Simon Black

Posted on October 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

We expect the worse from the current political alignment of immoral clowns. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

Last Monday during ‘Indigenous Peoples Day’, formerly known as Columbus Day, the statue of Andrew Jackson in Washington DC’s Lafayette Park was vandalized by activists with a warning message for everyone:

“Expect Us”

This is fascinating to me, considering that Lafayette Park is situated directly north of the White House, which is currently occupied by the ‘wokest’, most culturally progressive administration in history.

The federal government has stood on the sidelines cheering cancel culture, the de-gendering of our vocabulary, and ‘mostly peaceful’ protests. They’ve taken every opportunity to bend the knee and subordinate itself to the whims of the Twitter mob.

And yet apparently all of that is still not enough. So activists left this warning message, right in the White House’s backyard: Expect Us.

This is supposed to be intimidating. They want us to fear them as some menacing threat. But that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Yes, we expect you. You’ve made it quite clear that we should expect you.

We expect that your entire position will remain hilariously paradoxical– like how you believe Dr. Seuss is racist, but you tolerate the Chinese Communist Party’s ethnic violence.

And because your position is so comically absurd, we expect that you will continue to engage in attention-seeking criminal temper tantrums, including vandalism, arson, data theft, grand larceny, and assault.

We expect you will be protected by the media, which ignores your violent criminality and sings the praises of your moral righteousness.

We expect that, since your ideas cannot hold up to logic or rational debate, you will continue to demand suppression and censorship of any intellectual dissent.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Culture, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, Immigration, Law, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

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The Left Got What It Wanted—So Now What? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on October 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

What is happening now is all the left has ever wanted—chaos and destruction, and the reign of pure, totalitarian incompetence. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:

There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well.

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

Then

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal Obama Administration lawyer outlining all the ways to remove an elected president as soon as possible—including consideration of a military coup.

The FBI and the entrenched bureaucrats at the Justice Department continued their prior failed efforts during the campaign to seed the lies of the fabricated Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. A 22-month-long and $40 million hoax ended with the special counsel himself, a doddering Robert Mueller, swearing under oath that he essentially knew nothing about the dossier or Fusion GPS—the twin catalysts that had prompted his very own investigation.

Fired FBI Director James Comey—a lion on Twitter, and a lamb when under oath—on over 240 occasions testified to the Congress that he either did not know or could not remember, when asked details about the collusion fraud that the philosopher G-man had helped perpetuate.

No one worried about the weaponization of government. So, we went right from the nefarious legacy of John Brennan (who lied under oath to Congress twice), James Clapper (who lied under oath to Congress once), James Comey (who leaked confidential presidential memos), Andrew McCabe (who gave false testimony to federal investigators), Lisa Page (who was fired from the special counsel’s legal team for various unprofessional conduct), Peter Strzok (about whom there is not enough space to detail his transgressions), and the now convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith onto the next round of impeachments.

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Featured Story Biden’s Illegal Migrants Should ‘Pay Their Way’ Into America, Unloading Cargo Ships Stuck Off California Coast, by Robert Bridges

Posted on October 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

Here’s a novel solution to two crises in one. From Robert Bridges at strategic-culture.com:

The travesty of justice must end if the United States has any hope of remaining a free and democratic sovereign state, Robert Bridge writes.

In September, the full madness of Joe Biden’s open border season became painfully visible as some 12,000 illegal Haitians were filmed huddled under the Del Rio International Bridge seeking shelter. So shocking were the images, which could have passed for one of Dante’s nine circles of hell, that the FAA banned news media from flying drones over the humanitarian wasteland.

Ironically, at the very same time these illegal migrants were getting ushered into the U.S. mainland with nowhere to go, international cargo ships were being restricted from delivering their shipments at U.S. harbors. Many of the vessels are still adrift at sea today, idling off the coast of California and beyond. So bad is the backlog, in fact, that Vice President Kamala Harris broke the news to Christians that Santa would have some trouble fulfilling orders on time this Christmas.

“The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might now be might be the time to start buying them, because the delay may be many, many months,” she said at a conference in predominantly Buddhist Singapore, of all places.

In any case, instead of calling out the real Grinch behind the global gridlock, which was the Democrat’s draconian kill-switch response to the Covid pandemic, Harris blamed climate change for spawning “stronger typhoons” and a “sea level rise” that has purportedly wreaked havoc on “port infrastructure.” Does anyone recall the Weather Channel reporting on cargo ships going missing at sea lately, or was Harris just offering a tantalizing hint that climate change lockdowns are the next big event on the horizon?

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A Global Fiat Currency: “One Ring to Rule Them All”, by Thorsten Polleit

Posted on October 10, 2021 | 3 comments

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One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

We’re fighting Sauron. From Thorsten Polleit at mises.org:

1.

Human history can be viewed from many angles. One of them is to see it as a struggle for power and domination, as a struggle for freedom and against oppression, as a struggle of good against evil.

That is how Karl Marx (1818–83) saw it, and Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) judged similarly. Mises wrote:

The history of the West, from the age of the Greek Polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders.1

But unlike Marx, Mises recognized that human history does not follow predetermined laws of societal development but ultimately depends on ideas that drive human action.

From Mises’s point of view, human history can be understood as a battle of good ideas against bad ideas.

Ideas are good if the actions they recommend bring results that are beneficial for everyone and lead the actors to their desired goals;

At the same time, good ideas are ethically justifiable, they apply to everyone, anytime and anywhere, and ensure that people who act upon them can survive.

On the other hand, bad ideas lead to actions that do not benefit everyone, that do not cause all actors to achieve their goals and/or are unethical.

Good ideas are, for example, people accepting “mine and yours”; or entering into exchange relationships with one another voluntarily. Bad ideas are coercion, deception, embezzlement, theft.

Evil ideas are very bad ideas, ideas through which whoever puts them into practice is consciously harming others. Evil ideas are, for example, physical attacks, murder, tyranny.

2.

With Lord of the Rings, J. J. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) wrote a literary monument about the epic battle between good and evil. His fantasy novel, published in 1954, was a worldwide success, not least because of the movie trilogy, released from 2001 to 2003.

What is Lord of the Rings about? In the First Age, the deeply evil Sauron—the demon, the hideous horror, the necromancer—had rings of power made by the elven forges.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

But Sauron secretly forges an additional ring into which he pours all his darkness and cruelty, and this one ring, the master ring, rules all the other rings.

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Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Culture, Currencies, Debt, Economics, Economy, Education, Government, Governments, Immigration, Literature, Movies, Politics, Propaganda, Religion, Technology, Tyranny

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