Following Up: More Illegal Immigrant Coddling from the Mainstream Media

Tags

crime, deportation, ICE, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Mica Rosenberg, Open Borders, Reade Levinson, Reuters, Trump, zero tolerance

Last year, I wrote some posts on how some Mainstream Media journalists and other closet Open Borders backers have taken to minimizing the seriousness of crimes like drunk driving when the perpetrators are illegal immigrants facing deportation. Unfortunately, if a recent Reuters “Special Report” is any indication, a new wave of such pieces could be on the way due to the uproar over the Trump administration’s treatment of Central Americans streaming toward the U.S. border with children in hopes of entering America through grants of asylum.

The main ostensible criticism of the President’s initial “zero tolerance” approach to this latest migrants’ surge is that it indiscriminately applied the practice of “family separation” long used by American law enforcement when dealing with domestic criminal suspects apprehended with minors to foreigners whose only transgression appeared to be attempting to cross the border under false pretenses. But supporters of more lenient immigration policies have also been accusing the administration of treating the illegal immigrants already residing in the United States in unduly harsh ways by seeking to deport unauthorized aliens who have broken no other laws – or at least no other serious laws.

It’s that supposed qualification that’s the problem; as I showed, in one instance, the Washington Post‘s coverage of recent deportation data demonstrated that its reporters and editors don’t consider drunk driving a serious crime. In May, the D.C. metro area was treated to another (non-media) example of such illegal immigrant coddling: An area non-profit that provides legal aid for detained immigrants facing deportation proceedings actually rejected taxpayer funding for such activities offered by a local county government because it would have been prevented from using these resources where the accusations entailed fraud, distribution of heroin, second- and third-degree burglary and obstruction of justice….” Apparently these didn’t make this organization’s “serious crimes” list, either – or that, originally, of Maryland’s Montgomery County.

On June 20, Reuters reporters Mica Rosenberg and Reade Levinson – and their editors – clearly attempted to show in a lengthy piece just how common such alleged abuses of illegals has become. In their words, although the President has claimed that “his strengthened immigration-law enforcement” efforts have targeted violent criminal aliens,

“as his administration has expanded its dragnet under a series of executive orders, ICE has locked up thousands of people…with little or no criminal history, with deep roots in their communities, who present little flight risk.

“In earlier years, ICE [the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency] would have released many of these people on bond soon after their arrest, allowing them to live with their families while awaiting legal proceedings that can take years. Now, ICE is denying bond for many of those people and pushing to keep them in detention for the duration of their cases….”

And as is often the case in journalism, Reuters sought to personalize its story by describing the actual experience of one illegal immigrant whose life in the United States has been disrupted by the new policies.

According to the authors, El Salvador native Morena Vasquez had entered the United States illegally as a teenager, and had lived in Georgia for 23 years before a traffic stop “turned into a nightmarish entanglement in the toughened-up immigration policies of U.S. President Donald Trump – an experience that tore apart the life she had spent more than two decades building for herself and her family.”

Near the beginning of their article, Rosenberg and Levinson described Vasquez in terms that were plainly intended to generate sympathy. She had held “two jobs – teaching Spanish at a preschool, as well as the office-cleaning gig.” She has six children – ages four to 17. “[A]ll of them [are] U.S. citizens, [and] had to relocate in the middle of the school year to live near their ailing grandfather in another town, far from the detention center.”

Yet over the next year, “Vasquez languished in the crowded detention center. She repeatedly asked an immigration judge for bond so she could await her day in court back with her family. And repeatedly, bond was denied as ICE argued that she was a flight risk. Even after a judge ruled that she had the right to stay legally and permanently in the United States, she was kept locked up for five more months as ICE fought the decision.”

It was only much deeper into the story, that the reader learns that when she was arrested last year, Vasquez’ “record showed two convictions in 2014 for driving without a license and other traffic violations. It also showed that in 2004, Vasquez was sentenced to probation for contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a child she was babysitting wandered too close to a highway.”

In addition, “Police records show that because Vasquez had failed to appear in court for one of her traffic tickets, ICE in 2015 had issued a ‘detainer’ for her arrest – a notice to local authorities of her illegal presence in the United States. Cooperating police departments automatically turn over to federal authorities any immigrants with outstanding detainers who are picked up in their jurisdictions.” Indeed, it was precisely because she skipped that court appearance, ICE and a local judge denied her bond request in the belief she was a flight risk.

Now let’s be clear: Vasquez is obviously no hardened criminal. But on top of living in the country illegally, she hasn’t been a model “citizen,” either. And if after a clearly lengthy (and surely expensive) probe aimed at showcasing the supposed injustices of the new Trump policies, Reuters decided to use her as their poster-person, readers are entitled both to ask “Is this the best you got?” — and to wonder how many other allegedly needless victims of the Trump policy shift are in fact eminently deserving of deportation?

Im-Politic: Trump Derangement Syndrome Breaking Out on the Supreme Court?

Tags

Balkan wars, Bosnia, citizenship, deportation, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Citizenship Services, John Roberts, Muslims, naturalization, refugees, Reuters, Serbs, Srebrenica, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court, Trump

Question: When is serving in a military unit that’s committed horrendous war crimes the legal equivalent of getting a speeding ticket? Or absentmindedly bringing a key-chain pen knife into a government office building? Or maybe even jaywalking? Answer: When the U.S. Supreme Court nowadays is evaluating an immigration case.

Think I’m kidding? Then check out this Reuters account of a hearing held by the high court that dealt with an immigrant from Bosnia who was deported and stripped of her citizenship last October. The reason? She had lied on her application to enter the country as a refugee. Now, Divna Maslenjak is seeking to restore the status quo ante. And according to the Reuters piece, several Justices are concerned that in defending the U.S. government’s previous decision (made, mind you, under the Obama administration), President Trump’s Justice Department is laying the groundwork for revoking citizenship for false statements that had no significant influence on the original refugee decision.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with that. Everyone, for example, forgets things or gets details confused. These lapses are particularly understandable in the chaotic conditions with which most refugees struggle. Nor could any reasonable person quibble with Chief Justice John Roberts concern that the Trump administration position (even though it’s drawn straight from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ naturalization form) could enable the government to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans for lying or for omitting information about minor legal infractions that even the most scrupulously law-abiding folks everywhere are hard-pressed to avoid completely.

As Roberts noted, “in the past he has exceeded the speed limit while driving. If immigrants failed to disclose that on a citizenship application form asking them to list any instances of breaking the law, they could later lose their citizenship, the conservative chief justice said. ‘Now you say that if I answer that question ‘no,’ 20 years after I was naturalized as a citizen, you can knock on my door and say, ‘Guess what, you’re not an American citizen after all?'”

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who is viewed as considerably more liberal than Roberts, agreed, “noting he had once walked into a government building with a pocketknife on his key chain in violation of the law.”

Added Breyer: “It’s, to me, rather surprising that the government of the United States thinks that Congress is interpreting this statute and wanted it interpreted in a way that would throw Into doubt the citizenship of vast percentages of all naturalized citizens.”

Fair enough. But the lie in question did not concern a speeding ticket or an innocent failure to check the contents of one’s pockets. Nor did it concern an intrinsically legal but possibly questionable act that had no important bearing on Maslenjak’s application for refugee status. In fact, it concerned a subject central to her request: Despite telling the government that, as ethnic Serbs, she and her family feared ethnic persecution by Bosnia’s Muslims, she never mentioned that, as the Reuters article reports, her husband (who had received refugee status when she did) served “in a Bosnian Serb Army brigade that participated in the notorious 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica.” And P.S.: He lied about the matter as well.

Now it’s possible that the husband was completely uninvolved in this, or any other, atrocity (another subject about which the naturalization form inquires). It’s also possible that, whether he was complicit or not, that’s what Divna, his wife, believed. Or he simply could have lied to her. If he was innocent, he might have been afraid that the relevant American authorities simply would not have believed him. Certainly, no one could blame inhabitants of countries ruled by oppressive and/or corrupt governments for not trusting U.S. officials right off the bat.

But apparently, neither spouse has offered any such excuses. Nor did any of the Justices apparently mention them. Both the Maslenjaks and Roberts and Breyer (and possibly some of their colleagues) seem to be focused on technicalities – and perhaps the former and their lawyers are counting on the Trump administration’s “anti-immigrant” reputation and the resulting backlash to help sway the Court.

The Justices’ final decision isn’t due until late June. It could be a great test of whether they, like so much of the rest of the country, have succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Im-Politic: A Preview of Trump-ism without Trump?

Tags

2016 election, amnesty, attrition, Contract for the American Voter, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, entitlements, establishment, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration magnet, independents, Jobs, NAFTA, Obamacare, Peggy Noonan, politics, Populism, Republicans, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wall Street Journal

Throughout this circus of a presidential campaign, I’ve emphasized the importance of distinguishing between Donald Trump’s myriad personal failings and the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign positions – which I remain convinced can form the basis of an urgently needed, sensible, and therefore, enduring new American populism. This week, substantial support for this proposition has come from Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and, more surprisingly, from Trump himself.

In an October 20 essay, Noonan – long one of the most effective critics of the corporate-funded Republican establishment that Trump thoroughly trounced during the primaries – described the pillars of “Trump-ism without Trump” with her usual wit and grace. Among the highlights:

>He “would have spoken at great and compelling length of how the huge, complicated trade agreements created the past quarter-century can be improved upon with an eye to helping the American worker”:

>He “would have argued that controlling entitlement spending is a necessary thing but not, in fact, this moment’s priority. People have been battered since the crash, in many ways, and nothing feels stable now”:

>And he “would have known of America’s hidden fractures, and would have insisted that a healthy moderate-populist movement cannot begin as or devolve into a nationalist, identity-politics movement.”

The only matter on which I believe Noonan is seriously off-base is immigration. I certainly agree with her that Trump should have “explained his immigration proposals with a kind of loving logic—we must secure our borders for a host of serious reasons, and here they are. But we are grateful for our legal immigrants….” The problem is with her apparent belief that “In time, after we’ve fully secured our borders and the air of emergency is gone, we will turn to regularizing the situation of everyone here….”

As I’ve written, this popular (with both wings of the establishment) version of amnesty inevitably will supercharge America’s “immigration magnet.” The perceived likelihood of eventual legalization can only bring millions more impoverished third world-ers to the nation’s various doorsteps. It’s inconceivable that even a President Trump would take the measures needed – which would surely involve some use of force – to keep these masses, and especially the women and children, at bay.

The far better, indeed only realistic, approach is one that Trump himself has unfortunately barely mentioned: a stout refusal to legalize in any form accompanied by a strategy of attrition – i.e., encouraging illegals to leave both by boosting efforts to keep them out of the workplace, and by denying them (and their anchor children) public benefits.

But it’s almost like Trump was listening. Two days later, he came out with a “Contract for the American Voter” that echoed much of Noonan’s column. He promised that in his first hundred days in office, he would announce his “intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal,” along with withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Both measures should draw strong support from Democrats and independents. In addition, Trump would designate China a currency manipulator, and order an inventory of predatory foreign trade practices.

On immigration, he omitted any reference to blanket deportation of all illegals and instead focused on starting to remove “the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back”; to de-fund Sanctuary Cities; and to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.” Especially in the political climate that would result from a Trump victory, would most Democrats on Capitol Hill fall on their swords to prevent any of this?

And what did Trump vow re entitlement reforms? The phrase doesn’t appear at all in the Contract, although the list of legislative proposals does include the repeal of Obamacare and replacement with a system (described only generally, to be sure) that could well appeal to most Republicans and many independents, and that in combination with other measures mentioned could bend the national healthcare cost curve down further.

Couple these ideas with Trump’s support for a big infrastructure build-out and repair program; his broadly non-interventionist foreign policy stance combined with a big (job-creating) defense buildup; new government ethics reforms that seek to halt the corrupting revolving door between government and private sector; and any kind of serious middle class tax relief, and it looks to me like a (mandate-sized) winning formula – for a politician who can pass the interlocking personality, character, and temperament tests.

Can such leaders emerge from the current political system, as I recently asked? Are American politicians who rise up through this system simply too beholden to special interests, or too thoroughly imbued with the “If you want to get along go along” ethos to favor rocking any big boats? I still can’t say I know the answer. But I’m as confident as ever that unless and until this kind of candidate emerges, American politics is going to remain one very angry space.

Im-Politic: More Anti-Trump Media Bias – Including One Example That’s Homophobic

Tags

amnesty, Bloomberg.com, deportation, Donald Trump, Gang of 8, Hillary Clinton, homophobia, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, immigration reform, Jobs, John McCain, John Micklethwait, Labor Force Participation Rate, labor markets, LGBT, living standards, Mainstream Media, Mark Zandi, Max Ehrenfreund, media, media bias, part-time, productivity, The Washington Post, Vladimir Putin, wages

I sure hope all you RealityChek readers have had a great Labor Day weekend. Unless it was a complete disaster, it had to be better than the last few days’ performance just registered by the Mainstream Media.

On Sunday, I reported on a truly contemptible smear of white working-class Americans delivered by Time magazine uber-pundit Joe Klein. But published this weekend along with this display of mass character assassination was a swipe at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump that can only be reasonably interpreted as homophobia, and an example of outright ignorance of the basic economic concept of productivity, and of recent U.S. labor market trends. For good measure, this second piece left out information on its main source that strongly suggests major political bias.

The homophobia was delivered courtesy of no less than John Micklethwait, the current Editor-in-chief at Bloomberg.com who previously held this post at The Economist. Think I’m exaggerating? See for yourself. In the course of an otherwise informative interview with Vladimir Putin, Micklethwait pressed the Russian president in this way for his views of Trump and his Democratic counterpart, Hillary Clinton:

“[Y]ou are really telling me that if you have a choice between a woman, who you think may have been trying to get rid of you, and a man, who seems to have this great sort of affection for you, almost sort of bordering on the homoerotic, you are really going to go for, you are not going to make a decision between those two, because one of them would seem to be a lot more favorable towards you?”

I had to go over this passage several times before convincing myself that I’d actually read it correctly. Even giving Micklethwait’s language the most charitable interpretation it deserves – that the journalist meant it simply as a joke – what exactly distinguishes it from the kind of sniggering locker-room-level humor that’s now recognized as demeaning and hurtful? Therefore, is it remotely plausible to doubt that Micklethwait himself believes that such emotions are fundamentally shameful, and that his attribution of such feelings toward Trump reveal a positively vicious bias against the maverick politician?

Here’s hoping that gay activist organizations come down hard on Micklethwait’s bigotry – and insist that his resignation is needed to guarantee the integrity of Bloomberg’s coverage of both American politics and LGBT issues.

The second major media stumble came in a Saturday Washington Post Wonkblog item spotlighting a claim that Trump’s immigration policies “could put Americans out of work.”

That’s of course an entirely valid and important possibility to report on, but author Max Ehrenfreund (and his editors) failed to fulfill a fundamental journalistic obligation by omitting from his article the unmistakable anti-Trump bias of Mark Zandi, the economist who came up with this finding. Yes, the piece mentioned that Zandi is a former aide to Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. But what it didn’t tell you is that McCain was a charter member of the “Gang of 8” – the bipartisan group of Senators that several years ago launched a powerful push for an amnesty-focused immigration reform bill. Nor did Ehrenfreund mention that Zandi has also contributed to Clinton’s presidential campaign – which has been pushing immigration reform proposals even more indulgent than the Gang’s.

As for the Zandi-Ehrenfreund case that Trump’s immigration policies would backfire powerfully on the U.S. economy, it could not have been more ignorant or incoherent economically. As Ehrenfreund explained it, “deporting [millions of] undocumented immigrants would increase costs for employers, because they would have to compete for the workers remaining in the United States, causing wages to rise.”

Full stop: Amnesty supporters have maintained for years that most illegals are simply filling “jobs that Americans won’t do.” Now they’re saying that if a the supply of American labor shrank due to deportation, increasing wages would summon forth replacements who are either native-born or legally residing in the country? Do tell! Ehrenfreund and Zandi might also have mentioned that robust wage increases have been one of the most conspicuously absent developments during the weak current U.S. recovery since it technically began some seven years ago.

Just as strange was the claim that “Already, the labor force has been shrinking as older workers retire, and the unemployment rate is under 5 percent, which suggests relatively few workers are looking for jobs.” Don’t Ehrenfreund and Zandi know that much of this shrinkage has taken place among working age women and especially men? Or that the number of Americans working part-time involuntarily still remains above pre-recession levels? In other words, there’s an enormous population in the United States that would bid for better-paying jobs.

Perhaps strangest of all is the Zandi-Ehrenfreund contention that “To compensate, businesses would have to increase prices. Some firms would lose customers and could be forced out of business. ‘Asking these folks to leave is going to put a hole in the economy that’s going to cost jobs,’ Zandi said. ‘It’s going to cost the jobs of American citizens.'”

That is, Zandi and Ehrenfreund have either omitted or ruled out the possibility that many companies will eventually respond instead by either automating and/or by otherwise improving their efficiency in ways that boost their productivity – thereby laying the ground for sustainable prosperity and living standard increases going forward. These two pessimists might believe that this venerable maxim of economics no longer holds, and that “this time it will be different.” But maybe they could do readers the courtesy of explaining why?

This Washington Post article’s descent into fakeonomics hardly stops here. But the above reasoning should be enough to establish its silliness – and to prompt the question if comparably doofy pro-Trump studies would ever see the light of day in the paper.

I closed my last post by asking why recent polls show Americans’ confidence in the media has stayed even in the low double-digits on a percentage scale. These Bloomberg and Washington Post pieces don’t merit even single-digit approval.

Im-Politic: How Trump Can Clean Up His (Needless) Immigration Mess

Tags

2016 election, amnesty, anchor children, border security, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, public assistance, Sanctuary Cities

Donald Trump has been getting it from all sides because of his recent, contradictory statements on immigration policy, and whatever the motives, the criticisms of the Republican presidential candidate are richly deserved for one fundamental reason: You don’t need to be an Open Borders fan or a total deportation hardliner to recognize that, with just over two months left till Election Day, Trump should at least have the main details of his approach down cold. It’s painfully clear that he doesn’t.

Even worse, if you’re a Trump supporter, the core precepts of a sensible and politically appealing alternative to current immigration policy – and to the even more permissive version being pushed by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton – are anything but rocket science. And this description even applies to policies for dealing with the nation’s current illegal immigrant population, the dimension of immigration reform widely thought to present policymakers with their most difficult, even agonizing, choices, and that’s given Trump the greatest difficulty over the last week.

Trump has announced that he’ll be giving a speech on immigration this Wednesday, and if he has any hope of clarifying his views in a way likely to win more votes than it loses, here’s what he’ll have to do.

To start, Trump needs to remember that the kind of mass deportation he’s referred to in TV interviews was not part of the immigration blueprint he released a year ago – and for very good reasons. Surely at one point he and his team recognized the logistical nightmare, budget-busting costs, and public relations disaster this idea entailed.

Then the candidate needs to remember that he and his team recognized that the nation is by no means therefore stuck with the various versions of soft or quasi-amnesties with which he’s flirted in recent days. For that immigration blueprint made a compelling, though only partial and implicit, case for addressing the great majority of the illegal population that has been otherwise law-abiding through attrition. That is, rather than trying actively to kick millions of men, women, and children out of he country, Washington would concentrate on steadily reducing this population by turning off or weakening the two big magnets collectively responsible for their presence.

The first of course concerns jobs, and the Trump blueprint identifies most of the answer – mandating nation-wide use by employers of the E-verify system, a computerized means of identifying job applicants residing in America without proper authorization. As I’ve reported, where it has been used, E-verify boasts an outstanding record of success. And its effectiveness could be supercharged by requiring that businesses pay truly painful penalties for violations.

The second big magnet encompasses various kinds of public assistance currently being extended to illegal immigrants, but the Trump blueprint covered only some of the bases. Yes, de-funding sanctuary cities would help bring to an end the extra layer of legal protection perversely provided throughout the country even for criminal aliens. But the statement should have also expressly prohibited any state from providing driver’s licenses and public college tuition benefits for illegals.

Even these measures would leave intact two big illegal immigrant drains on the public purse – their families’ use of hospital emergency rooms and public schools, and their eligibility for and use of transfer payments and entitlement programs like Obamacare (especially by “anchor children,” who are born in the United States and thus automatically enjoy full citizenship rights). The Trump blueprint glosses over the former issue and would handle the latter by ending birthright citizenship.

In principle, I support preventing illegals from trying to strengthen their legal status in America by creating these human faits accompli. But I also foresee a huge constitutional fight that would take years at best to resolve. As a result, it makes the most sense to rely mainly on turning off the jobs magnet in order to persuade illegals to leave the United States. Clearly, many would remain, counting on their ability to receive public assistance via the anchor children route. But using an E-Verify-type system to crack down on welfare use gained through falsified documents would pare illegals’ numbers further. And the new barriers to finding American jobs would help prevent future surges in their ranks – especially if the U.S. economy’s growth picked up enough to boost employment opportunities greatly.

Obviously, this attrition strategy wouldn’t placate either extreme on the spectrum of immigration policy views. But along with the serious border enforcement Trump has consistently promised, it would achieve the crucial aims of bringing the illegals population down to much more economically manageable levels, and keeping it there. And attrition would do so in the “fair” and “humane” way that Trump understands a critical mass of American voters – rightly – are seeking.  

Im-Politic: How Polls Skew Their Results on Immigration and Amnesty

Tags

amnesty, attrition, Central America, chattering class, Cheap Labor Lobby, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, legalization, magnet effect, Mainstream Media, Open Borders, path to citizenship, polls, The Washington Post

The Washington Post editorial board seems pretty confident that if U.S. immigration policy faithfully reflected the views of the majority of the American people, it would come down decisively for the first option in the “bottom line question – should illegal immigrants stay or go.” Too bad the Post writers either didn’t read the collection of polls they cited, or decided to cherry pick the results. For these same surveys show how crimped the debate permitted by them and their Mainstream Media and chattering class colleagues has been. Moreover, many of their findings point to immigration policy perceptions and priorities that are much more Trump-ian than the Post and other amnesty supporters would like.

The Post is correct in noting that most respondents in most polls asking the question support either (a) granting illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, provided that certain conditions are met (like paying fines and back taxes, and learning English); or (b) awarding them legal status short of citizenship (also usually with conditions). But it’s stunning to see how completely polling organizations have ignored two major anti-amnesty considerations in the choices they present.

In particular, of the 70 surveys in the set used as evidence by the Post, none indicates to Americans that amnesty, active deportation efforts, or simply continuing the illegal immigration status quo are far from the only options available to policymakers. In fact, not a single one of these polls mentions attrition as a strategy for dealing with the illegals problem.

It’s true that such an approach would leave many illegals resident in the United States. But measures like denying these immigrants most government benefits – including driver’s licenses and access to the financial system – and enforcing existing laws against hiring them (which is overwhelmingly backed by Americans) – would undoubtedly reduce their numbers significantly. The more sluggish the U.S. economy and its creation of all manner of jobs remains, moreover, the more effective attrition would be. And this policy would arguably be much cheaper than at least one condition typically attached to amnesty-like proposals – conducting “background checks” on all illegals who apply. Just to remind, their total numbers are pegged at about 11 million.

Equally important, only one of the 70 surveys in this compilation even mentioned to respondents a major anti-amnesty argument: the likelihood that such lenient American policies would create a powerful magnet effect and lure many more immigrants into the country. This survey was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute in late-July, 2014, and focused on the surge of Central American child migrants that began trying to cross U.S. borders in spring and summer of that year.

One of the first questions the Institute asked was whether Washington “should offer shelter and support [to the children] while beginning a process to determine whether they should be deported or allowed to stay in the U.S. [or whether America] should deport them immediately back to their home countries.” “Shelter and support” while investigating their circumstances beat “deport them immediately” by a wide 70 percent to 26 percent margin. But then, quite a few questions later, respondents were asked whether they agree that “The U.S. should NOT allow children coming from Central America to stay because it will encourage others to ignore our laws and increase illegal immigration.” Fifty-nine percent “completely” or “mostly” agreed; only 39 percent “completely” or “mostly” disagreed – a big turnaround.

It’s also worth noting that children are understandably an immigrant group that’s bound to elicit considerable sympathy. Imagine how the public might respond when told by pollsters that citizenship or legalization offers could greatly boost inflows of all kinds of immigrants.

Also supporting the notion that mentioning the magnet effect would dramatically change poll answers on amnesty-like policies: This group of 70 polls consistently shows that large majorities of Americans favor reducing legal immigration or keeping the annual numbers where they are, rather than increasing it. So it seems logical that the U.S. public would reject citizenship or legalization policies if it learned they may well greatly increase the country’s overall foreign-born population. (At the same time, these polls make just as clear that most Americans believe that immigration’s benefits to the country – in terms of diversifying it and adding talent – outweigh costs such as lost jobs or greater welfare payments or diluted traditional values.)

No wonder, then, that Open Borders types in the Mainstream Media and in politics are so upset at Trump and others who favor more restrictive immigration policies. And no wonder they work so hard at sliming them as racists, nativists, and know-nothings. If Americans ever found out their real options on immigration policy, the demand for approaches that prioritize the interests of most of the native-born population first – rather than those of the Cheap Labor Lobby, Democratic Party wannabe ballot-stuffers, elitist liberal guilt-mongers, and self-righteous one-world-ers – could become irresistible.

Im-Politic: On Immigration and Trade, Signs of a New, Improved Trump

Tags

2016 elections, Bret Baier, deportation, Donald Trump, Fox News, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, offshoring lobby, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership

Because it’s still early in this presidential campaign at least in some respects (though not in the crucial “money primary”), it’s legitimate to take heart from new evidence that Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is making progress toward sharpening – and expanding the appeal – of some of his main messages.

Of course, since Trump is the front-runner at this point, offering him advice can understandably seem presumptuous. (I.e., what are my poll ratings?) Nonetheless, since however thoroughly he’s thrashed most expectations, Trump still only enjoys plurality support among a huge Republican field, and still suffers from high negative ratings.  Therefore, he’s still a long way from the GOP race’s commanding heights, much less from victory in the general election.

That’s why I’ve been convinced for months that he needs to tweak some of his rhetoric in ways that preserve his outsider, cut-through-the-you-know-what, can-do image, but that also reach out to new audiences. It’s also why I’ve been convinced that these modifications would be pieces of cake. And in an interview with Fox News last night, Trump took some major steps in that direction.

The first came in response to a by-now-formulaic question by Fox anchor Bret Baier about Trump’s position on deporting America’s current illegal immigrant population. “The economics of deporting 11 million immigrants,” Baier observed, “it just doesn’t seem to add up for a lot of people.”

But Trump gave a decidedly non-formulaic answer. He didn’t simply repeat standard, evasive abstractions like “They have to go…we either have a country, or we don’t have a country.” He didn’t double down by insisting that the key to success was “really good management.” And he didn’t try to soften the blow by promising “If we bring them out and they’re wonderful people, which I’m sure they will be, we’ll bring them back in an expedited fashion.”

Instead, Trump made a point referred to in his immigration plan, and that I’ve argued he should have been making all along, but one that he hadn’t directly connected to his deportation goal: “A lot of them — you’re going to make it so tough — look, you’re going to make it so tough that they’re going to leave. Many of them are going to leave. We’re going to make it so tough many of them are going to leave.”

In other words, for the first time during a media interview, and for the first time plainly in the context of deportation, Trump suggested that much of his policy towards illegals would center on what might be called a policy of attrition – removing all of the employment and government benefits incentives that both attract illegal immigrants and make it easy and appealing for them to stay despite all the legal uncertainties they face. Actually, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made much the same proposal, but characteristically called it “self-deportation,” a term that all but invited ridicule.

There’s no panacea for America’s illegal immigrant problem, but the best evidence available indicates that when jobs in illegals-heavy sectors of the economy dried up during the housing bust and ensuing recession, the illegal population began shrinking. Enforcing current laws against hiring illegals, denying them protections like sanctuary city status and conveniences like driver’s licenses, and cracking down on their welfare use seems likely to achieve even more dramatic results.

The second example of a New, Improved version of Trump-ism came in his answer to Baier’s question about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The candidate’s standard trade policy rhetoric slams “stupid,” and “incompetent” American negotiators for agreements that have slowed U.S. growth, and destroyed jobs and wages for the nation’s workers, as well as diabolically clever foreign governments. Trump made these same points in response to Baier, but also suggested (albeit fuzzily) that the results be blamed on “the lobbyists. It’s done by the special interests for certain companies that want it.”

I’ve recommended that Trump focus on corporate offshoring interests’ support for wrong-headed trade policy both because they dominate trade policymaking in Washington by dint of their campaign contributions, and because fingering domestic fat cats enables Trump to strike a populist and even nationalist stance without courting charges of xenophobia. And these Fox comments show that he’s getting this message – from somewhere.

Obviously Trump continues to alienate potential backers with childish personal insults of his political rivals and of allegedly biased media figures. In the process, he casts doubt on his temperament and fitness for office. He could argue that he’s also maintained his lead and thrown other candidates off stride. But if he really wants to drive the establishment crazy, he’ll drop the schoolyard stuff in favor of making his populist case with ever greater – and therefore more devastating – precision.

Im-Politic: Both Trump and Media Critics Need to Get Real on Immigration

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2016 elections, amnesty, attrition, Bill O'Reilly, deportation, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Latin America, legalization, Mainstream Media, path to citizenship

Among the biggest news emerging from this presidential campaign is that Donald Trump is not a model of verbal precision or restraint. Because loose lips can be dangerous in a president, whose words can move markets, shake governments, and even trigger war (and “sink ships”), it’s entirely proper for the media to cover the flood of factual blunders, hyperbole, illogic, canards, and half-baked ideas the Republican hopeful generates.

But an even bigger insight about the Trump phenomenon is being almost entirely missed so far: In an important way, journalists’ coverage of Trump’s statements has been just as juvenile, downright silly, and obtuse as this rhetoric himself. And nowhere is this problem worse than in coverage of the two issues on which Trump has most forcefully opposed the establishment consensus that too many Mainstream Media journalists either actively support or implicitly accept: immigration and trade. The former has of course generated the biggest headlines, so let’s confine our discussion today to that subject. And to keep this relatively short, let’s focus on “mass deportation.”

As I’ve noted, Trump is largely responsible for the uproar over this option. Although deportation was never mentioned in his immigration plan, he did endorse the idea, and surely out of stubbornness, has refused to back down. The media – including Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly – have proceeded to rake Trump over the coals, characterizing his position as everything from delusional to racist, xenophobic, and fascistic.

There’s no doubt that mass deportation is wildly impractical, for reasons ranging from economic to humanitarian. And that’s why nothing even remotely like it will happen, even under a Trump administration. Indeed, that’s likely why such deportation was absent from his plan (though I have no evidence to support this claim). But it’s not necessary even to insist that journalists concentrate on the plan – which is full of proposals strongly endorsed by many immigration specialists in academe, and even strong bipartisan majorities in Congress (e.g., expanding the E-Verify program) – to recognize the immense bigger picture the Big Media is missing.

Thoughtless as their content is, Trump’s deportation remarks were necessary push-back against strong bipartisan insistence that America has no choice but to accept that the roughly 11 million illegals estimated to be living here. Thus, both Democrats and Republicans in their parties’ mainstreams have worked overtime to insure that what immigration debate is permitted is limited to whether illegals will be granted a path to citizenship or not.

But however reasonable these views seem, they overlook (or cleverly define out of existence?) a huge likely downside: Any form of legalization will become a powerful magnet for still more illegal immigration, no matter how circumscribed legal status is, how strict the conditions for securing it, or how well the border is secured. Disagreeing amounts to accepting two related propositions that make mass deportation look like the essence of realism:

>That populations in Latin America in particular will react by thinking, “The U.S. government has just decided that if we can get into the United States, we’ll be allowed to stay forever. Therefore, we’ll just keep living here in [Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. – including, more recently, collapsing Venezuela?].”

>That when Latin populations begin coming north, Washington will decide to leave them stranded in the Mexican desert.

That’s why it’s time for journalists to start doing some thinking to try to figure out what Trump is really saying – and why it’s resonating so strongly even beyond Republican ranks. Roughly translated, it’s “Legalization looks like a disaster. As a result, it would be off the table in my administration. And something else is urgently needed.” And indeed, not so surprisingly, Trump’s plan points unmistakably to the alternative: an “attrition” strategy that aims at denying illegals both jobs and government benefits.

Clearly, this might leave a large illegals population still in the country. But eliminating most payoffs for unauthorized border crossing is likely to both prompt some outflows (much evidence indicates that the U.S. recession convinced many illegals to pick up stakes and return home) and, at least as important, deter inflows. Trump himself of course could help clarify matters enormously by shifting his own emphasis. But some minimal smarts by the media wouldn’t hurt, either.

Fortunately, some evidence of genuine thought is starting to emerge in its ranks. Is it delusional to hope that we might get at least a tad more?

Im-Politic: The New York Times Loses It on Trump and Immigration

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2016 elections, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, H1B, ICE, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jobs, Republicans, September 11, tech workers, The New York Times, visa overstays, visas, wages

The New York Times‘ recent editorial trashing of Donald Trump’s immigration proposals was so over the top and intellectually dishonest that you’d think the paper’s editorial board members and owners’ main worry was losing access to the super-cheap illegal nannies and gardeners that support their one percent-er lifestyles. Certainly nothing else about Trump’s policies can possibly justify the vehemence with which The Times attacked him.

Predictably, the editorial focused on Trump’s position on deporting America’s huge illegal immigrant population, and the related issue of birthright citizenship. Trump does deserve some criticism on this score. As I’ve argued, aside from criminal aliens, he should be focusing not on active deportation but on a policy of attrition – discouraging illegals from remaining in the country by denying them both employment opportunities and government benefits. And although I agree with Trump (and many others) that the anchor babies problem is unacceptable, it does seem that Constitutional issues will prevent any solution for many years.

But as I’ve also pointed out, mass deportation wasn’t even a part of Trump’s plan, although he did endorse the idea in a media interview. Completely indefensible, by contrast, is the paper’s charge that every plank of Trump immigration platform is “despicable,” “cruel,” “racist,” and “xenophobic.” If anything’s despicable, its much of The Times’ own tendentious analysis.

Take the editorial’s treatment of Trump’s call to make mandatory the E-Verify system that was developed to enable employers to check the legal status of job-seekers. It’s currently a crime for businesses to hire applicants residing illegally in the country, but many illegals find work anyway largely because the documents needed to prove legal status are so easy for forge, and because so many businesses simply don’t care and believe that the government really doesn’t, either.

E-Verify is a federally created “internet-based system that compares information from an employee’s Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records to confirm employment eligibility.” The good news is that it’s free to use, it produces results quickly, and its accuracy rates are not only astronomically high, but improving, according to independent auditors of this program. Moreover, E-Verify enjoys overwhelming bipartisan Congressional support. The only significant problem associated with it is that in most of the country, its use is voluntary.

So here’s how The Times characterizes Trump’s view that every U.S. employer should be brought into E-Verify to ensure that a law that’s on the books, and that the paper apparently does not oppose, is effectively enforced: It would “impose a national job-verification system so that everyone, citizens too, would need federal permission to work.”

Only somewhat less inane is The Times‘ description of Trump’s plan to “triple the number of [immigration enforcement] officers”: It would “flood the country with immigration agents….” What the paper doesn’t tell readers is that this “flood” would amount to 10,000 new employees for the Enforcement and Removal Operations branch of the Homeland Security Department’s bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Talk about crying wolf.

Also falling into The Times‘ category of “despicable” Trump proposals:

>ending the phony “catch-and-release” practice applied to illegals crossing the border and detaining them until they are sent home;

>establishing criminal penalties for legal visitors to the United States who overstay any of the wide variety of visas offered by Washington (a group that has included at least two of the September 11 hijackers);

>stepping up ICE’s cooperation with local law enforcement authorities to increase the chances that illegals belonging to criminal gangs will be deported;

>and addressing employer violations and other abuses of the H-1B visa system for workers supposedly possessing special skills in technology or other areas, practices which needlessly cost American workers both jobs and wages;

The Times of course wasn’t content to savage Trump. It castigated other GOP presidential hopefuls who haven’t repudiated all of his proposals for “racing to the bottom” on immigration. But if the paper’s editorial writers are looking for demagogues on immigration, they should try a mirror instead.

Im-Politic: Why Trump Has Just Nailed it on Immigration

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birth citizenship, Chuck Todd, CNN, deportation, Donald Trump, E-Verify, executive amnesty, executive order, Gallup, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Meet the Press, Mitt Romney, NBC News, Obama, Open Borders, polls, The Wall Street Journal

If you harbored any doubts that America’s immigration policy debate has become completely devoid of common sense, and that both the nation’s politicians, pollsters, and media seem determined to outdo each other to keep befogging the real issues and options, look no further than how all of the above treat the issue of deporting immigrants already in the United States illegally. It all adds up to a huge and unnecessary tragedy for American public policy. For a series of realistic deportation-related ideas advocated by immigration restrictionists for many years has always offered the nation by far the most efficient, least costly – and, yes, most humane – solution to the illegals problem.

The big news hook here of course comes from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s latest comments on the subject. To hear it from news organizations like The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, Trump has just come out in favor of rounding up this huge population – estimated at 11 million – and herding them back across the Rio Grande. Thus this morning’s Wall Street Journal headline, “Donald Trump Says He Would Deport Illegal Immigrants.” According to Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” who interviewed Trump for this morning’s program, the candidate’s objectives were considerably narrower – but still pretty ambitious: “[H]e plans to immediately rescind President Obama’s executive order that stopped the deportations of some younger undocumented immigrants who had entered the country as children.”

Yet even Todd lumped together several specific questions that desperately need to be unpacked. First, Trump acknowledged that “the executive order gets rescinded.” Revealingly, however, the new immigration policy plan that he’s just released, which has occasioned this latest round of coverage, didn’t even mention deportation, or even the president’s latest initiative. Trump has indeed mentioned deportation previously, but it appears that his priorities have changed. Why did Todd fail even to note this, either while talking with Trump or later in the program?

Just as important, a Trump rollback of the executive order by no means signals that he would start mass deportations on Day One of his presidency – or ever. Nor is there any reason to suppose that any of the other Republican presidential hopefuls who has opposed the Obama moves would unleash the legions of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau (ICE). But ending what critics have rightly called executive amnesty is an essential first step for any eventual illegals strategy that doesn’t (a) simply accept their mass presence and (b) in so doing, inevitably strengthen the policy magnet that’s bound to attract many more with its message of leniency. As Trump himself told Todd (who clearly was in no mood to listen), “We have to make a whole new set of standards.”

Two other critical deportation-related matters ignored by Todd and the Journal. First, even the president for years believed that the (longstanding) immigration policy status quo before his executive order was the law of the land. As such, it reflected a national political consensus on the subject. And as such, it’s curious that anyone who’s not an Open Borders ideologue would view a return to this status quo – after a brief departure – as front page news, or even especially noteworthy from a real-world perspective (as opposed to a political perspective).

Second, the president’s initial, much more cautious, view of his immigration authority could soon be re-validated by the courts. So restoring the deportation status quo ante could be not only a substantive nothing-burger, but a legal and constitutional necessity.

Not that Todd, The Wall Street Journal, or the Mainstream Media as a whole deserve all the blame for deportation’s prominence in the immigration debate. Opinion polls have repeatedly cited the round up as the only, or one of the only, alternatives to paths to legal residency or citizenship in dealing with the illegal population. Here are just two examples from CNN/ORC, and from Gallup. And as suggested above, politicians have contributed to the confusion. In addition to Trump himself, 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney called his illegals strategy “self-deportation.”

Here’s the rub, though. Romney actually got it pretty near right on the substance. As he explained (futilely, of course):

“The answer is self-deportation, which is people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we’re not going to round people up.”

The former governor continued: “The way that we have in this society is to say, look, people who have come here legally would, under my plan, be given a transition period and the opportunity during that transition period to work here, but when that transition period was over, they would no longer have the documentation to allow them to work in this country. At that point, they can decide whether to remain or whether to return home and to apply for legal residency in the United States, get in line with everybody else. And I know people think but that’s not fair to those that have come here illegally.”

Even better, Romney went on to address the need to turn off the jobs magnet:

“We’d have a card that indicates who’s here illegally. And if people are not able to have a card, and have through an E-Verify system determine that they are here illegally, then they’re going to find they can’t get work here. And if people don’t get work here, they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.” And later on in the campaign, Romney specified that illegals should be denied public benefits.

That is to say, Romney in his own often-fumbling way, hit on by far the best fundamental way to handle the illegals problem – eliminating the incentives attracting them and keeping them here in the first place. And Chuck Todd and The Wall Street Journal to the contrary, that’s exactly the emerging focus of Trump’s illegals strategy.

His immigration blueprint would make the E-Verify system mentioned by Romney mandatory nation-wide, in order to prevent businesses from hiring illegals with impunity. It strangely did not specify that government benefits would be denied to illegals. But that explicit proposal probably isn’t too far down the road, as the Trump plan has noted that “The costs for the United States [of supporting illegal immigrants] have been extraordinary: U.S. taxpayers have been asked to pick up hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, housing costs, education costs, welfare costs, etc. Indeed, the annual cost of free tax credits alone paid to illegal immigrants quadrupled to $4.2 billion in 2011.”

Trump’s most controversial proposal is ending “birthright citizenship” – the longstanding practice of awarding U.S. citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants who are born on U.S. territory – which he has described as “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” But ending federal aid for Sanctuary Cities and other measures to crack down harder on illegal alien criminals and even those who overstay visas – who comprise roughly 40 percent of the illegal population – are bound to attract much more support with voters on both sides of the aisle.

One other important and encouraging feature of Trump’s plan that I’m sure the Mainstream Media in particular will overlook: As I’ve recommended, it dramatically shifts the focus of blame for America’s immigration policy mess from foreign governments (which, to be sure, aren’t blameless) to the real culprit: the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby. Leading off the plan is the charge that When politicians talk about “immigration reform” they mean: amnesty, cheap labor and open borders. The Schumer-Rubio immigration bill was nothing more than a giveaway to the corporate patrons who run both parties. Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first – not wealthy globetrotting donors.”

And you thought the political establishment, and the political reporters who coddle them, couldn’t be more scared of Donald Trump?