For three days now, the MSM has been screaming bloody murder about an alleged (and denied) vulgarity spoken by President Trump in a closed-door meeting about immigration reform and DACA. We have covered this media meltdown extensively in pieces you can link to here and here. But now, let’s have a look into what the REAL news about DACA is, and we might even understand why the MSM is having such a meltdown.
On January 12th, the American radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh noted during his program that although there was not any detail about this known yet, the apparent issue was that President Trump was outraged over the Democrats trying to hand him a total nothing-burger deal about immigration. We have to remember that one of President Trump’s wishes is to get the United States to adopt a “merit based” immigration position, where the US screens people who want to come to live in the USA in regards to what they can and will contribute to the well-being of this nation.
This is not a strange or barbarous position to take on immigration. Canada does it. Australia does it, Germany, Hong Kong, Denmark, New Zealand and other nations in the world probably do it as well. In fact, the United States itself ran with such a system up until the year 1952. Such a vetting process may go far in reducing the chance that elements who get in to a given nation will then attack it and its people.
What was proposed by the Congressional representatives that started this?
From a January 11 piece run on Vox.com, this was the basic outline of the proposal. Please note that it is a framework, and not extremely specific (though it may appear so on first reading:)
Allowing young unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children to get legal status — and eventually citizenship:The deal would allow hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children, and meet other requirements (which aren’t yet clear), to apply for provisional legal status in the US. After a certain number of years, they’d be eligible to apply for green cards — and after another three or five years, like other green card holders, they would be able to apply for US citizenship.
Legalization wouldn’t just be open to the 690,000 immigrants who were protected under the DACA program when Trump started winding it down in September; it would also include immigrants who qualified for DACA and never applied (or whose protections expired without renewal), or who meet the requirements set forward in the bill, as well as immigrants under 15 who weren’t able to apply for DACA. And unlike DACA, it would be permanent.
Preventing “chain migration” by preventing parents of DREAMers from becoming US citizens: In order to make it impossible for people legalized under this bill to sponsor their parents for citizenship, the bill would make parents of DREAMers ineligible to get green cards, making it impossible for them to naturalize. It would instead provide them with a form of legal status that could be renewed every three years.
By putting the restriction on parents of DREAMers, rather than directly restricting DREAMers’ ability to sponsor relatives after becoming citizens, the bill could avoid a constitutional pitfall. But it could end up locking out immigrant parents who have both a DREAMer and a native-born US citizen in the family — who would currently be eligible for green cards when their citizen children turned 21.
Eliminating the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the 50,000 visas currently used for it: As first reported by Politico’s Seung Min Kim, the proposed DACA deal would kill two birds with one stone. It would eliminate the visa lottery. But instead of just allowing 50,000 fewer immigrants into the US legally each year, it would reallocate those visas. Some of them would go to immigrants from underrepresented countries, just on some non-lottery basis; other visas would go to immigrants whose Temporary Protected Status is about to expire due to the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to end the program. (Right now, people with TPS can’t get green cards; under this deal, they could.)
A few billion dollars for the border: NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reported that the deal as presented to Trump would have included $1.6 billion for physical barriers (which Caldwell called a fence but the White House would probably call a wall), surveillance tech, and agent training — and another $1.2 billion for “other priorities” on border security. Those numbers are roughly in line with what the White House asked for for a single year on the border in its 2017 supplemental funding requests.
But these sound like good proposals. Why is President Trump so angry about them?
If we take each of these points at face value it is easy to see why President Trump would strenuously object to them.
The first proposal shows zero movement towards merit-based vetting. In fact is at the very least, DACA repeated and with possibly more liberality as there are “unknown” criteria used. The fact that it extends DACA provisions to people who have never applied for citizenship since the order was made in 2014, more than three years ago. In other words, people who did not care enough about getting legal to even file are getting a chance they ought not have.
The second proposal does indeed prevent parents of “Dreamers” from receiving US citizenship, but it does provide them with a renewable permit to stay in the US, presumably with no change. This comes down to a formality-based amnesty. No one gets deported from breaking the law in this scenario.
The third proposal again starts with the right words “eliminating the visa lottery”, but then offers it in a different way with “reallocate the 50,000 visas in some other way, to ‘underrepresented countries'” – well, so what are we saying? Is it a lottery or a random giveaway? – in other words, there is NO difference here. The move to merit based naturalization cannot involve free giveaways of American visas. Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who would come here to take advantage the opportunity to do so and game the government who gave these out, but if we asked the question of “do you want to go to America to succeed, to build a good life and support your new land” in the process, most of these people would rather stay home. This is still a freebie and utterly unchanged in the nature of the policy.
Finally for the fourth proposal, “a few billion dollars for the border.” While this would seem to be what President Trump wants, so he can complete the wall / fence along the Mexican border, the combined weight of the first three proposals makes the wall’s existence all but pointless. It is an expensive equivalent perhaps, of telling a grown man that he may go ahead and play with his blocks as long as everyone else gets what they want.
The net loser in this is the United States. Her sovereignty is not supported in any possible way by these proposals.
And in that context, it would seem that even if Mr Trump did use a vulgarity, it was probably absolutely correct in context with what he was presented. The Congressional salesmen and women tried to treat the President, an extremely astute businessman, like a chump, and he wasn’t having it and he let them know it. Since it was a closed-door meeting, it would seem that it would have not been unseemly for plenty MORE expletive language to occur. By the President’s own admission, there was indeed tough language.
CNN tries to stir up opposition to Trump by broadcasting illegal immigration protests… from Mexico!
Media and Trump opponents spin and spin…
The media has tried to portray this as racism and prejudice. But it really is not. It is a nothing-burger proposal that met a very blunt end, hopefully, and Trump’s call probably aggravated some bleeding hearts. That is what this is. When it comes down to it, probably 90% of adult Americans use this alleged language and far worse. CNN made sure the whole world knew that they say things like this! As happened with Judge Roy Moore, the media has attempted a “moral” play, but hopefully the American people are wise to this nonsense and will reject it for the hypocrisy that it is. However, for those who dislike everything Trump, they will, and have, eagerly eaten the junk food the press has offered them these last three days. And, in classic fashion, attention has been deflected from the immigration issue itself.
So, let’s take this a little farther.
What are the actual issues at hand?.
The liberal hold on American domestic policy has been very strong over the last several decades, most significantly so in the time of Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, with Obama in the clear lead in terms of liberalized policies that all “family based” immigration, which leads to the phenomenon of “chain migration,” where once a family sets up some foothold in the US in which to live and work, the other relatives come too, to try to find the same experience. This sometimes has a very bad side effect, in that it allows criminal elements in just because “they’re family” and sometimes those criminals commit crimes in their new home, like this one. The story goes that after this point in the early 1950’s, the government authorities began to shift the policy on immigration toward “family” based ideology, which came to mean that if one member of a family emigrated to the USA the rest could more easily come, too. However, this became “rigged” as a tool by the political party that supported it, because it could be used to manipulate the group of incoming immigrants to support that party which supported their own family migration into the country. In recent years this has been held to be a Democrat mechanism for securing their own power whilst not really helping the American nation as a whole. Further breakdowns in American society and governance, for very interesting and subtle reasons, have led to an immigration policy that appears to be largely powerless to stop waves of illegal immigration, because people who get deported manage to get back in the country and live here while easily avoiding of the authorities. This has led to sad stories such as this one, and there are far worse ones as well.
The State of Arizona fully supports California’s sanctuary state status.
What the United States has now appears to be a situation of near anarchy with regards to immigration. California declared itself a “sanctuary state” and there are many US “sanctuary cities” where federal immigration law enforcement is disregarded. There are many good people caught up in this because it has been drilled into the minds and hearts of many Americans that we must never turn away anyone who wants to come to this country, because to do so is not compassionate, or it is racist, or cruel in some other way; it’s not fair, after all, our ancestors or ourselves came in… and so on.
As the reader can see, this is truly an emotionally-charged political debate. Sometimes it invites the desire to talk about issues that seem parallel, but are not (as printed in Russia Today here), but if we look at the situation without all the stormy emotions, it comes down to one or two real issues.
One issue is the concept of national sovereignty – that assumed right of any nation or state to define its own boundaries, and to make and enforce its own policies within those established boundaries. The second issue is security – the execution of policies needed to keep said nation or state safe from intrusion, invasion or otherwise subversion. Both of these concepts are the true center of the debate.
But the emotional center is the matter titled “fairness and compassion.” The alleged vulgarity by the president certainly would be seen as a terrible affront to the idea of being compassionate. But it has gone much farther. For decades now, the running narrative about immigrants coming into the United States was the repetition of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free / the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”, from Emma Lazarus’ historically important sonnet. This is truly a noble sentiment. Further, though, the incredible luxury of American life has also been turned into a tool used to provoke a sense of guilt – and a sense that America does not have the right to enforce its own sovereignty over its borders because we have it so good that we owe the rest of the world something. We also get such heart-rending photos as this one:
Mexican-American mother and child, as caught on camera.
While no one who is sensible wants to be cruel, the notion that by enforcing the law we are being cruel is is a classic liberal trope, and it is based purely in emotionalism and not in logic. It leads to very misleading comments like this one, taken from the New York Times’ recent piece on this matter (emphasis mine):
And lawmakers are already facing a difficult fight over the politically volatile subject of immigration, with the fates of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants hanging in the balance. Adding to the uncertain picture for those immigrants, the Trump administration resumed accepting renewals for the program over the weekend, under orders from a federal judge who is hearing a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the program.
The emphasized line is a lie. It would be accurately presented if it said, “with the fates of hundreds of thousands of illegal alien immigrants hanging in the balance…” Because these are not people that are going through the naturalization process. They are people that have not done this, and may not be doing it now. However, if they were in process of becoming citizens, or at least legal visiting workers, then this does not apply to them. This is a prime example of misleading writing pulling heartstrings of people who are not being intellectually honest about this topic.
Now, there IS a place where these ideas must necessarily meet, and that meeting place is precisely what President Trump has been working towards achieving. The televised meeting with the Congressional representatives showed this in an enormously successful way. However, the next meeting featured the liberal elements giving Trump a proposal for how to deal with immigration and Trump was outraged because the offered idea was no kind of a solution at all. Apparently it was a free-for all for simply continuing things as they were before, which has been the problem in the first place. Now, President Trump took fire for three days with reporters blasting him for the alleged vulgarity, only for him to make a statement simply saying he never said anything of the sort in the meeting. But he also said this:
DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2018
Continuing food for thought
As this piece draws to a close, the reader is invited to compare three ideas regarding immigration.
For most of us, when we think about allowing immigrants or refugees into our nation, we feel compassion and pity for the people who are fleeing some really bad place (any words come to mind?) and to come to our land which is a really lovely, prosperous nation. It sounds great and right, we say; they should be able to come.
Then we start investigating where we will put them. It still remains a kind and pleasant thought when we hear or read about the same refugees being located in Texas, or California, or New York, or Arkansas, or Wyoming. It’s a great idea especially in the minds of people who do not live in these places.
Then we get to cities. With a few exceptions, perhaps, this is where the resistance truly begins. The idea of creating government housing in Chicago for a new set of 10,000 Syrian refugees is something that will not appeal to Chicago residents, for example. And this disapproval will happen at street level even in Sanctuary Cities.
Although this is an improbable situation, it still begs thought: Now, what about hosting these refugees in your own home. After all, they need help, and we said we should be compassionate. So, how can we show it?
Most of us do not want our lives interfered with by the influx of total strangers who may or may not be responsible for themselves, who may or may not be law-abiding people, who may or may not be safe for our wives and children to be around…
It is not to say that all immigrants are bad. It IS to say that immigration should be conducted in such a way as to protect the nation they are immigrating to. That means vetting, interviews and that great question: “What will you do for your new nation to make it worth the while for us to adopt you?”
While this question may be repugnant to a liberal, I would ask that same liberal how many illegal aliens they support in their own home. Probably not too many.
The saying is “liberals have great ideas about how to spend someone else’s money.” This seems to be true here.
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