Back in 1975, California Governor Jerry Brown was opposed to allowing Vietnamese refugees into California.
Immigration
What Happened Last Weekend ?
Last weekend, the Democrats in the Senate refused to vote for a Continuing Resolution to fund the US government.
Why ? Because they wanted a law to legalize the thousands of illegal aliens in a status called “DACA” or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals.
The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was an American immigration policy that allowed some individuals who entered the country as minors, and had either entered or remained in the country illegally, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit.
Thus these illegal aliens were given the right to remain and to work in this country. Why ?
The policy was established by executive action rather than legislation; however, participating individuals were sometimes referred to as Dreamers after the DREAM Act bill, a bipartisan bill first proposed in 2001 that was the first of a number of subsequent bills in the U.S. House and Senate attempting to provide a pathway to citizenship or other legal status for certain undocumented residents who immigrated illegally as children and subsequently completed some college or military service.[2]
This is mostly a myth.
Victor Davis Hanson explains some of the mythology.
College graduation and military service are often referenced as DACA talking points. In truth, some studies suggest that just one in 20 dreamers graduated from college. One in a 1,000 has served in the military. So far, about eight times more Dreamers have not graduated from high school than have graduated from college.
I examine military applicants and am unaware of any “Dreamers.”
Then again, are the DACA people just 700,000 ? Or are they millions ?
To be eligible, illegal immigrants must have entered the United States before their 16th birthday and prior to June 2007, be currently in school, a high school graduate or be honorably discharged from the military, be under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, and not have been convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three other misdemeanors, or otherwise pose a threat to national security. The program does not provide lawful status or a path to citizenship,[39] nor does it provide eligibility for federal welfare or student aid.
They are widely eligible for free college education or, at least, to be given resident status for tuition.
Many of these people entered as “Unaccompanied Minors. “
A significant number are teenaged gangsters like the MS 13 gangs in Maryland and Virginia.
Almost one-third of 214 U.S.-based MS-13 gang members arrested in an international sweep were invited into the United States by President Barack Obama’s “Unaccompanied Alien Children” policy.
The successful “Raging Bull’ sweep was announced by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Deputy Director Tom Homan in a joint press conference at ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
Shithole Countries
Anecdote of a recent conversation:
A: Where are you from?
B: A bad part of Kingston.
A: What part is that?
B: All of it.
Did Trump say “shithole”? It sounds like his typical bombast that enrages people who don’t like him. It also sets a trap for his political opponents by reframing the conversation. The questions whether we should favor immigrants from specific countries and with specific personal qualifications are back in play. Many voters think these questions are important despite the continuing efforts of establishment pols of both parties to stipulate them as beyond the pale. The attempt to conflate the characterizations of countries and of individuals is a rhetorical sleight of hand intended to dismiss doubts about mass-immigration by unskilled people from dysfunctional countries. Ann Althouse nailed this point. The doubts are reasonable — Wouldn’t the French and Germans have been better off heeding such concerns in the recent past? Shutting up people who express such thoughts may be more likely in the long run to lead to an immigration moratorium or other crude measures than to convince the doubters to acquiesce in the admission to the USA of more unvetted young Somali and Central American men.
What Trump was saying, as ordinary people will understand it, is obviously true: We should encourage immigration based on our country’s needs rather than on the needs of prospective immigrants; we should favor people who are likely to be highly productive; and we should attempt to screen out criminals, terrorists and people who are mainly interested in welfare-state subsidies.
There are many talented people in Haiti, but as a country Haiti is troubled and unproductive, which is why so many Haitians want to leave. Perhaps Mia Love is bound to criticize Trump based on Trump’s crudeness of expression and reported disrespectful words, but Trump is right. There were good reasons for Congresswoman Love’s family to leave Haiti for the USA. We are lucky to have them, but that’s not the same thing as saying that we should let in every Haitian who wants to come here. We should be more selective and we should reform our immigration bureaucracy to make things easier for the people we want.
We can expect additional inflammatory stories about Trump’s supposed racism and other character flaws while his negotiations with Congress on immigration continue.
I Am a Barbarian
Scott, James C. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Scott has hit another metaphorical grand slam with this one, a worthily disconcerting follow-on to his earlier work. I have previously read (in order of publication, rather than the order in which I encountered them) The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State, and Two Cheers for Anarchism, and found them congenial. Scott is particularly good at encouraging a non-elite viewpoint deeply skeptical of State power, and in Against the Grain he applies this to the earliest civilizations. Turns out they loom large in our imagination due to the a posteriori distribution of monumental ruins and written records—structures that were often built by slaves and records created almost entirely to facilitate heavy taxation and conscription. Outside of “civilization” were the “barbarians,” who turn out to have simply been those who evaded control by the North Koreas and Venezuelas of their time, rather than the untutored and truculent caricatures of the “civilized” histories.
By these criteria, the United States of America is predominately a barbarian nation. In the order given above:
It looks like the “hero” security guard in the Vegas shooting is illegal.
UPDATE: The hero guard has surfaced and will be on the Ellen Degeneres show.
He went for the money, which was sensible of him, but does anyone think he will be asked about his immigration status ?
The “hero” security guard in the Las Vegas shooting has not only disappeared, but had a false Social Security number.
I guess that’s why he bolted before the press conference.
He also may be the reason for the shifting stories about the shooting.
There are photos of him wearing a badge and others without it.
The security guard was supposed to be interviewed by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, but the host tweeted on Thursday: ‘He cancelled.’
Campos’ disappearance came just hours after MGM Resorts International, which owns the Mandalay Bay, disputed the official timeline of the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, rejecting any suggestion that hotel staff delayed calling 911 for six minutes after Paddock opened fire.
Maybe he did not have a gun because he could not pass a background check. Then there is the matter of the six minutes after he was shot and the massacre began.
The latest chronology raised a series of questions about whether officers were given information quickly enough to possibly have a chance to take out the gunman before he could carry out the bloodshed.
But according to resort officials, it was no more than 40 seconds between the time Campos used his walkie talkie to call for help and Paddock opening fire on the crowd from two windows in his suite.
Earlier in the investigation, police had said that Paddock shot through his door and wounded Campos after the guard distracted him from firing on the crowd out the windows.
Campos’ union president said the latest timeline does not dispute the assertion that the guard is ‘still a hero, saving his coworker, possibly stopping additional shots,’ reported Stephanie Wash.
Two timelines. Mysteries about the motive, whether there was a second shooter, who used his card key when he was gone ?