Im-Politic: Trump Should Go All-in on Sanctuary Jurisdiction Shaming

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asylum seekers, border security, election 2020, illegal aliens, Im-Politic, Immigration, migrants, Open Borders, Sanctuary Cities, Trump

Anyone doubting the political and moral genius of President Trump’s so-called threat to transport the migrants flooding the U.S. border to sanctuary jurisdictions throughout the country simply lacks a grip on politics and crucial aspects of morals. At the same time, the President has been missing a potentially crucial opportunity to gain the upper hand (both politically and morally) for good on intertwined immigration and border security issues via the sanctuary jurisdiction angle.

The expressed outrage of many sanctuary jurisdiction leaders at Mr. Trump’s proposal to drop the migrants off within their bounds could not be a more classic case of failing to put one’s money where one’s mouth is. Suddenly, cities and counties and states that have been harping for years at how welcoming the United States historically has been and should be, and advertising how welcoming and therefore signaling how virtuous their welcoming policies have been, seem to have decided that their hospitality and generosity are limited after all.

Further, as numerous immigration-realist commentators have noted, after just as many years of portraying sanctuary policies as not only the height of morality but the height of self-interest – because of all the contributions illegal aliens make to their economies and their cultures – the sanctuary leaders and their fellow Open Borders backers in Congress and the Mainstream Media are now singing a different tune. They’re condemning as especially shameful partisanship measures that could greatly increase these populations.

In fact, the Open Borders types’ reactions to this latest Trump position are simply the latest example of one of their defining characteristics. As I’ve been writing, they’ve long been pushing immigration policies that shower them with outsized benefits and display no interest whatever in paying a proportionate share of the costs.

And this observation brings us to where the President needs to administer a genuine coup de grace. Predictably, some of the debate over his statements to date have revolved around supposed legal and policy issues. According to the above-linked Washington Post article, even Mr. Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security argued that his sanctuary jurisdictions plan would violate the law. But in both political and moral terms, such considerations should be completely beside the point – and deserve to be pilloried as either clueless or cynical distractions.

For if the sanctuary and Open Borders enthusiasts are so convinced of the righteousness of their cause, they not only shouldn’t allow such considerations to keep the President from putting this policy into effect – much less retreat behind them. They should be volunteering to get the ball rolling, offering all the resources at their command – and should have been out in front since the unprecedented scale and makeup of recent migrant flows first become clear.  President Trump, for his part, should have been shaming them into action all the while – and shouldn’t wait a minute longer to start turning these tables on them. 

Moreover, even in sanctuary jurisdictions whose leaders are – verbally, anyway – putting their (taxpayers’) money where their mouths are, an intensified Trump strategy will speak volumes about the loonie-ness of indiscriminately indulgent immigration policies.  Efforts to cope with constant streams of low-skilled, poorly educated newcomers should make for an equally constant stream of head-shaking media reports.  Jurisdictions with large numbers of homeless Americans (like those all along the West Coast) would be in for especially, but justifiably, humiliating coverage.

From time to time, the President has depicted Open Borders and sanctuary positions as boons for the nation’s elites at the expense of middle- and lower-income Americans. The uproar over his new sanctuary proposal is a golden opportunity to turn this insight into one of mos consistent themes – and into a thumpingly winning campaign issue in 2020.

Im-Politic: From Virtue-Signaling to Real Compassion on Immigration

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asylum seekers, celebrities, DACA, family separation, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Mainstream Media, Sanctuary Cities, Trump, virtue-signalling

As should have been clear from the start, President Trump’s decision to halt the practice of family separation for supposed asylum-seekers who try to enter the United States outside of designated ports of entry will by no means end this phase of the immigration policy wars.

After all, this reversal has come via executive order, and the administration’s new policy – which would prevent family separation by detaining both children who have sought illegal entry into the country along with the adults that have accompanied them until their asylum claims are approved – appears to clash with a 2015 Federal court decision appearing to mandate quick release of both the children and the adults, whether asylum claims have been vetted or not.

In addition, avowed immigration rights advocates have made unmistakably clear their dissatisfaction with the new administration stance – strongly indicating in the process that their main concern has never been family separation, but the practice of detaining any of these family members until their asylum claims can be examined.

In other words, these advocates want a “catch and release” policy to be applied to these newcomers as well – even though many and possibly illegal border crossers never comply with orders to return to immigration courts once their cases are up for judgment. So court challenges are inevitable, as is pressure on politicians to loosen such border control practices further, as the outcry over the previous administration policy appears to be widespread (though its depth remains unclear, as suggested by these Gallup results).

And since even ultimately the President has shown that he’ll allow apparent public opinion to override his restrictionist immigration instincts, it’s reasonable to expect the U.S. illegal immigrant population to resume rising, and to surge strongly if Mr. Trump loses a reelection bid in 2020. And don’t forget: Washington could well turn on another powerful magnet for more immigration, especially from the very low-income countries of the Western Hemisphere – broad amnesty for the DACA population, residents of the United States who were brought to the country as children by illegal immigrant parents.

It looks, therefore, all too likely that a new outburst of virtue-signaling fomented by the Open Borders lobby will generate major new costs for the American economy, including both the native-born population, recent legal immigrants, and even recent illegals. Principally, downward wage pressures will increase on workers from these groups with less than exceptional educations or skill levels. And taxpayers at all income levels will need to pay for the government-provided services these newcomers will need.

These services, moreover, aren’t simply confined to various forms of welfare (since a large majority of these arrivals themselves will be poorly schooled and largely unskilled). The population increases they fuel will need new schools, public transit, and fire and law enforcement capabilities, just to name a few. (For a shocking example of the price of failing to provide these new services, check out this recent Washington Post piece on a middle school located right near where I live in a Maryland suburb of D.C. that’s becoming dominated by MS-13 recruiting and recruits in part because of a ballooning student body attributable to the surge of unaccompanied Central American minors in 2014.)

At the same time, those Americans who reap most of the benefits from supercharged immigration flows will represent a much smaller group. As I showed in this 2014 Fortune column, it will be dominated by families high up the income ladder, who disproportionately use the cut-rate landscapers, housekeepers, and nannies who account for so many illegal immigrant workers; and from businesses and entire industries (like construction, hotels, and restaurants) which profit so handsomely from the continuing flood of cheap labor.

As I also wrote in that column, these inequities are far from inevitable, and reducing them is hardly rocket science. How? Through policies that result in the main beneficiaries of illegal immigration paying the lion’s share of the costs. Four years ago, I suggested a new tax on the super-rich, and on industries that heavily employ illegals. That’s still entirely appropriate. But other possibilities abound, too.

For example, how about channeling these newcomers to sanctuary states, and cities and other localities? Or to states that voted for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016? Or to the Congressional districts represented by the loudest critics of the family separation and other elements of the President’s immigration policy? (Yes, there’s lots of overlap here.)

Moreover, let’s not forget the celebrity world. Via social media campaigns, maybe the Samantha Bees and the Robert de Niros and the Kathy Griffins could be pressed to provide some financing for this new – or newly legalized – population. (And here, it’s vitally important to specify that big contributions to advocacy groups focused on indiscriminately helping newcomers work the system, and thereby encouraging greater numbers, a la the Clooneys this week, doesn’t cut it.) Considering its sometimes reckless, often hysterical, and usually one-sided coverage of this complicated issue, the Mainstream Media should be targeted for similar “shaming.”

It’s all about applying to immigration controversies a fundamental principle of fairness – user pays – and adding to it the idea of “cheerleader pays” And even if this proposal falls flat on its face, it will at least achieve a crucial goal: helping Americans distinguish between the virtue signalers and the genuinely compassionate.

Im-Politic: Sadly Poetic Justice for California Open Borders Enthusiasts

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ACA, Affordable Care Act, border security, California, Disney, H1B, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Norman Matloff, Obamacare, Open Borders, San Francisco, Sanctuary Cities, tech workers, University of California

As I’ve mentioned previously, computer scientist Norman Matloff is a great source of information and analysis on immigration issues – and especially on the visa system that lets businesses replace high paid domestic tech workers with low-paid foreigners. Late last week, the University of California-Davis professor once again showed his chops. Thanks to him, I learned about a stunning instance of poetic justice for a leading national center of Open Borders policies and enthusiasm.

Surely everyone knows by now that, as a municipality, San Francisco is proud to be one of America’s most ardent cheerleaders and enablers of dangerously permissive immigration policies. Its sanctuary city status directly resulted in the murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant criminal that it released from custody rather than comply with an extradition request from the federal government. And of course the entire Bay Area’s zeitgeist is strongly influenced by the Silicon Valley tech companies whose profits depend heavily on continually driving down labor costs by hiring relatively young and extremely cheap immigrant programmers and the like and getting rid of older, more expensive native-born employees.

In addition, these descriptions also apply to the entire state of California – which has been charged with moving ever closer to become a full-fledged sanctuary jurisdiction.

So although it’s always unfortunate when someone loses a job, some smirking is surely understandable in response to the news – summarized in this September 8 post by Matloff – that the University of California’s San Francisco branch is pink-slipping 80 of its tech workers and some of the vacant positions will be filled with H1Bs supplied by an Indian outsourcing company. Worse, at least some of the cashiered employees at this public university believe they will need to train their imported replacements – as with a widely publicized case involving the Disney Corporation two years ago.

As made clear in this comprehensive account, the university’s decision could well spread throughout its numerous branches and potentially affect thousands of tech workers. And as Matloff explains, these government tech workers

“are highly sophisticated, aggressive people who know how to pull strings. It becomes especially important in light of UC’s generous defined-benefit pension plan. If someone has worked, say 10 years, at UCSF and had planned to work 25, they are having enormous future pension sums snatched away from them. So it’s real money” they’ll be losing.

A final point worth considering. According to the executive in charge of information technology services at the University of California-San Francisco:

“the campus is facing ‘difficult circumstances’ because of declining reimbursement and the impact of the Affordable Healthcare Act, which has increased the volume of patients but limits reimbursement to around 55 cents on the dollar….”

California, of course, is a major Democratic Party stronghold, in part because its (immigrant happy) public employee unions are so enormous and so powerful. I wonder how many more state university workers will be replaced by immigrants – and how long it will take the broader state government to adopt these practices – before the Golden State’s politics begin to change.

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

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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.  

Following Up: Immigration Cheerleaders Keep Belittling the Illegal Alien Crime Issue

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crime, Donald Trump, Following Up, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, Immigration, Kevin Drum, Migration Policy Institute, Mother Jones, Sanctuary Cities, Washington Post

Here I was all set to spend the morning finishing up a post that drills down on the new U.S. trade figures when I found myself caught up in a heated Twitter debate on the threats posed by illegal alien criminality. In this exchange, the “other side” repeated yet again a fundamental mistake of those who dismiss such talk as racism and xenophobia. Specifically, it used statistics that, as I’ve noted, some insightful immigration policy critics have explained are largely beside the point. But since I also committed a minor journalistic sin, it’s worth discussing these issues in detail.

It all began last night when I was reading over a new Washington Post editorial (predictably) slamming Donald Trump’s new immigration plan as a disaster. In the process, the Post argued that Trump’s deportation views (which as I reported were not contained in the plan itself but expressed in an interview televised on Sunday) made no sense because of the Republican presidential candidate’s promise to “bring them back rapidly, the good ones.” The editorial decried the illogic allegedly demonstrated by Trump by claiming that the vast majority of America’s current illegal population is law-abiding and otherwise upstanding. Therefore, deporting them only to let them promptly return would represent a huge and hugely economically disruptive waste of time and resources.

The Post has the logic right, as I see it. But what’s much stranger was the evidence it cited that “about 87 percent” of U.S. illegals “have no serious criminal record.” It’s strange – to say the least – because one of the paper’s main editorial writers on the subject, Charles Lane, has rejected the idea that illegal immigrant crime is “a real issue” (though he has acknowledged that the sanctuary city movement has gone too far). Yet now the paper seems to have implicitly admitted that Washington’s failures on this front have allowed into the country 1.3 million individuals who are arguably big threats to public safety (based on its estimate of an illegals population of 10 million).

The Post editorialists, in other words, were ignoring an indictment of current (and more lenient future) immigration policies that’s (understandably) been resonating with great shares of the American electorate: The federal government has paid too little attention to ensuring that these policies make the country’s existing population more secure, not less.

But this is where my mistake came in: I relied on the Post‘s description of the above data, rather than reading the report in which it first appeared. As a result, doing the subtraction, I tweeted that 13 percent of America’s illegal immigrants have serious criminal records. Mother Jones reporter Kevin Drum correctly pointed out that the study itself – put out by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) – did not peg the share of U.S. illegals with serious criminal records at 13 percent, and he was right. That figure covered the number of illegals the Institute judged would be considered “enforcement priorities” under the Obama administration’s latest guidelines.

According to MPI, this category also includes arguably less dangerous folks – namely, 60,000 illegals who have violated judicial removal orders issued since the start of 2014, and 640,000 members of this population who have entered the country illegally since then. Rounding out this enforcement priority group are the crooks – 690,000 resident illegal aliens who “have previously been convicted of a felony of serious misdemeanor.”

So I definitely should have been more thorough, and if I was, I would have seen that the illegal alien criminal population was 690,000, not the 1.3 million cited by the Post, and that the criminal proportion of the total illegals population was 6.3 percent, not 13 percent. (Actually, MPI’s math adds up to 1.39 million illegals in the enforcement priority group.). But even if MPI is correct (and it should be noted that it’s been a strong advocate of more lenient immigration policies), that means that America’s border control and deportation policies have enabled 750,000 individuals with serious criminal records or who have defied court orders to stay in the country.

Therefore, the questions posed to the Institute and to Drum by that apparent reality are the same that Post editors and other supporters of illegals-friendly immigration policies need to answer: Is that kind of increased threat to public safety remotely acceptable? And are restrictionist immigration policy critics wrong to shine the spotlight on it?

Judging by MPI’s support, in the same study, for the evasive (at best) claim that illegals’ rates of criminality are “low,” it seems clear that the Institute, anyway, has decided to fuel obfuscation. As long as this practice continues to be widespread among champions of more indulgent immigration policies, they can expect ever push-back from a public justifiably outraged about illegal immigrant crimes.

Im-Politic: Political Dividers and Double Standards

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Al Qaeda, Chattanooga shooting, Donald Trump, Ferguson, illegal immigrants, Im-Politic, Immigration, ISIS, Kathryn Steinle, Michael Brown, Obama, police killings, radical Islam, radical Islam denialism, San Francisco, Sanctuary Cities, terrorism, Trayvon Martin

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has caught lots of flak for inflammatory and polarizing political statements, and some of it is deserved. At the very least, even a less-than-master rhetoretician could have made the same points in less offensive, more precise, and equally hard-hitting, attention-getting ways. Now I’m waiting for the same self-appointed guardians of inclusiveness and political civility who have slammed Trump to go after President Obama for two gratuitous contributions he’s recently made to America’s national divisions.

The first has been his failure to reach out personally, or to authorize any communications from his aides, to the family of Kathryn Steinle. She was the innocent woman gunned down in San Francisco July 1 by an illegal alien criminal who was released by law enforcement in that Sanctuary City even though he had been deported five times previously, and even though the Department of Homeland Security wanted him held in order to deport him again.

Mr. Obama has made such gestures to the families of other killings, especially if they have been the victims of controversial uses of violence by police or, in the case of Trayvon Martin, a vigilante. He spoke out and even sent representatives to the funeral of Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown, even though the officials at fault were not federal employees.

But when it came to the victim of an illegal immigrant whose presence on the streets stemmed from clear failures of federal deportation, border enforcement, and related policies, the Chief Executive said and did nothing. Nor have words of comfort have been offered by the administration for other families whose loved ones have been killed in similar circumstances. If Mr. Obama truly wanted to be a president of “all the people,” why would he distribute his sympathies so unevenly when it comes to policy-related wrongful deaths? And why have nearly all advocates both on the Left and the Right of fewer immigration curbs – and even more or less Open Borders – so far allowed their legitimate policy preferences to override their sense of simple decency?

The president’s second divisive decision was his failure to order federal flags to be flown at half mast to honor the Marines slain by the Arab-American gunman in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Yesterday, five days later, and after considerable criticism, he deemed their deaths worthy enough. His delay understandably fed fears that he’s insufficiently alert to the threat now clearly posed to the American homeland by Islamic-related terrorism.

The flag-lowering delay also fed somewhat less understandable, but by no means completely unjustified, charges that the president’s emotions don’t kick in especially hard when these actions can, and often have, been cited, particularly on the Left, in narratives emphasizing the historic suffering of non-Western peoples at the hands of Europeans and Americans (including those who have settled in an ancient Middle East homeland). Indeed, Mr. Obama engaged in something like this rationalization when he practically handed ISIS and its ilk talking points by comparing their current atrocities with past horrors encouraged by Christianity.

To be fair, in remarks yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mr. Obama specifically mentioned the possibility of Al Qaeda and ISIS responsibility. But he remains unwilling to acknowledge that these attacks and countless others like them reveal a major problem with the mainstream of contemporary Islam, not just a few lunatic fringes. Especially interesting in this vein: The Washington Post has reported that the killer’s father has been accused in a court of law of the type of misogynistic behavior (in this case, wife-beating) unmistakably sanctioned by the Koran – and all too widespread throughout the Muslim world.

Similarly troubling about the president’s views – his description of the Marines’ killings as “tragic” and “senseless.” Obviously, they’re tragic for the victims. But the rest of us, including the Commander in Chief, should treat them as outrages. And far from being senseless, they just as obviously were directed at a highly particular type of target.

In this case, many of the conservatives who have upbraided Trump for various potshots have condemned President Obama’s coddling of the “Islamic” part of Islamic terrorism. But for the most part, the president’s morally dubious and – more important – tactically destructive attitudes have been either ignored on the Left or applauded.

So here’s hoping that calls for greater civility and inclusiveness in the public square continue and are heeded. But here’s also hoping that selective expressions of outrage that conceal political agendas are increasingly recognized as the hypocrisy they represent.