By John Binder
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/04/16/immigration-pause-four-decades-foreign-worker-inflow/
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
Jeff Sessions Doesn’t
Have Trump’s Support, But His Immigration Moratorium Should
Whether
or not former Attorney General Jeff Sessions wins back his old Senate seat,
President Donald Trump and Congress must seriously consider his proposal to
halt immigration until unemployment returns to pre-Coronavirus levels.
While most politicians are arguing over how to reopen the
economy, only Sessions is addressing the impact legal immigration has on jobs.
On Thursday, he announced a
plan to establish a “moratorium on employment-based immigration.”
The moratorium would last until the unemployment rate fell to
3.5 percent, where it was before the coronavirus crisis hit the US.
The run-off Republican primary race for US Senate in Alabama
was supposed to be over last month. Former Alabama University football coach
Tommy Tuberville, boasting an endorsement from Trump himself, led Sessions by
double digits in a poll weeks
before the initially scheduled election date of March 31.
Now that the election is reset for July 14, due to COVID-19
precautions, new life is breathed into the race. In addition to the Chinese
virus, two more pandemics will be top issues: job loss and legal
immigration.
Over 22 million Americans lost their jobs in the last month,
“nearly wiping out all the job gains since the Great Recession,” CNBC reported
Thursday.
Support
for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the
American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one. Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA and Students for Trump, recently reversed his position of “stapling green cards to diplomas” of foreign nationals. He now calls for a “total and complete moratorium on all visas.”
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one. Charlie Kirk, the leader of Turning Point USA and Students for Trump, recently reversed his position of “stapling green cards to diplomas” of foreign nationals. He now calls for a “total and complete moratorium on all visas.”
A recent Ipsos poll found
79 percent of Americans support a temporary pause on all immigration.
Currently, over 1 million legal immigrants are added to the country every year.
BLOG: THEY REALLY HAVE NO IDEA HOW MANY BORDER
JUMPERS IN UP IN OUR JOBS.
Sessions’ opponent, however, recently lamented that
400,000 workers in India were unable to “be Americans.” In a muddled
explanation, Tuberville blamed illegal immigrants for taking the places of
these Indians, while also supporting a program to bring illegals “out of the
shadows.”
Where Trump stands on immigration should be clear.
Unfortunately, Sessions lost the president’s support after failing as his
attorney general, abdicating his role in the Russiagate investigation. Trump is
endorsing Tuberville for personal reasons, not policy.
Despite being hawkish on immigration for 20 years in the
Senate, and despite being the first sitting US senator to endorse Trump in
February 2016, Sessions is now struggling to convince Alabamians that he’s the
Trumpist candidate.
“We don’t need to be bringing in immigrants now, in any kind
of numbers, that are going to take jobs from Americans,” Sessions told the
Alabama Federation of Republican Women on Wednesday night, Yellow Hammer News reported.
Whether it’s Tuberville or Sessions running against incumbent
Democrat Senator Doug Jones in November remains to be seen, but the American
people should not have to wait that long for substantive immigration policy in
this crucial moment.
Congress reopens in May. One of the first legislative acts
should be to pass a moratorium like the one Sessions is proposing. The
corporate donor class wouldn’t be pleased, but the country would love it.
In its latest weekly immigration poll,
Rasmussen Reports found the American people consistently support a national
e-Verify system and reject claims by businesses that say they can’t find
Americans to fill jobs. Raise the pay, even if it means higher prices, because
it’s keeping Americans working, 60 percent said.
Needless to say, Trump won the White House because of
sentiments like those. Right now could not be a better time for him to pressure
Congress to reform immigration policy.
A moratorium is a great place to start. A comprehensive bill
that permanently ends chain migration and birthright citizenship in exchange
for a points-based merit system, while restricting asylum protection to the
internationally recognized definition, and which tracks non-immigrant visitors
via biometric entry/exit systems should be debated on the House and Senate
floors.
Natural
supporters in the Senate for these policies include Republican Senators Tom
Cotton of Arkansas, David Perdue of Georgia, and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who
support the RAISE Act, which cuts legal immigration.
Whereas most Republican senators support big business
interests in maintaining a large labor pool that lowers wages, there may be a
few who would move further right under current circumstances.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky once proposed a
“trade-off” where no new legal immigrants would be accepted “while we’re
assimilating the ones who are here.”
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas told Numbers USA that
legal immigration should be scaled down to traditional levels of 250,000 per
year when he was a candidate in 2012.
With three months of campaigning left to go, Sessions reported a
campaign account balance of over $749,000, and Tuberville reportedly has
campaign cash totaling nearly $459,000. Of course, much more money will be
spent on the race by outside political action committees, especially under an
economic lockdown confining many voters to TV and computer screens.
Much of that money could be wisely spent communicating a
message that reflects the decades-long plea of Americans to put America
first.
Tuberville may have the most recent photos smiling alongside
Trump, but so far, Sessions is bringing the substance. Come 2021, whoever the
next Alabama senator is, they should be voting on an immigration moratorium
bill if one has not already passed.
What Makes a “Healthy” Economy?
The
coronavirus pandemic shows that we don’t have one.
April 16, 2020
Last
week, Janet Yellin, former chair of the Federal Reserve, gave an upbeat assessment of the pre-pandemic U.S. economy. “Very fortunately
we started with an economy that was healthy before this hit,” she told the PBS
NewsHour. “The banks were in good shape, the financial system was sound,
Americans at least overall on average had relatively low debt burdens.”
But
how “healthy” was that economy, really? How healthy is an economy whose workers
have so little savings that they can’t make the rent after missing just a
couple of paychecks? How healthy is an economy whose small businesses have so
little cushion that they face almost instant obliteration when their cash flow
is disrupted? How healthy is an economy where hourly employees performing many
essential services earn so little that they have to go to work sick to keep
their jobs? And how healthy is an economy whose housing costs force millions
to cram into overcrowded homes in polluted slums replete with high stress,
malnutrition, asthma, diabetes, heart problems, and other chronic disease?
“There’s
nothing fundamentally wrong with our economy,” said Fed chairman Jerome Powell
in March. It was “resilient,” he said in February. Yellin concurred, citing the
old good news in her hope that the “economy will recover much more speedily
than it did from any past downturn.”
Recover
for whom? The experts look at conventional measurements, which painted a
picture of prosperity before COVID-19. The unemployment rate last September hit
a fifty-year low, at 3.5 percent, and the rate for people without a high school
diploma dropped to a new low of 4.8 percent. The GDP had been growing within
the range considered ideal—two to three percent—and Powell reported a rising
willingness of employers to hire low-skilled workers and train them.
But
alongside the bright figures on unemployment and job creation, consider a
competing set of numbers from before the pandemic: The
poverty-level wages for those who harvest our vegetables, cut our Christmas
trees, wash our cars, cook and serve our food in restaurants, deliver groceries
to our doors, clean our offices, and even drive our ambulances. The 14.3
million households (11.1 percent)
uncertain that they could afford enough food, and the 5.6 million families (4.3
percent) where at least one person has had to cut back on eating during the
year. The 14.3 percent of black children with asthma, double the rate in
the population overall. The 20 percent of children living in crowded homes shared with
other families or three generations of their own, and the 50 percent of urban
children who have lived in those conditions by age nine.
A
pernicious dynamic of financial stress is the unexpected link between housing
costs and malnutrition. For many low-wage families without access to such
government subsidies as Section 8 vouchers or affordable housing, rent can soak
up 40 to 60 percent of income, which can leave too little for other
necessities. You have to pay the rent. You have to pay the electricity, phone,
and fuel bills. If you need a car to get to work, which the vast majority of
employees do, you have to make the car payments. Those are not optional. The
category that can be squeezed is for food, and that’s what many poor families
have to do.
A
result is childhood
malnutrition. It sometimes manifests
itself in obesity resulting from cheap, bad food, which in turn can promote
diabetes. It compromises the immune system. Even more seriously, deprivation of
nutrients such as iron during key periods of brain development, both before and
after birth, can lead to lifelong cognitive impairment. Studies show that
children who suffered iron deficiency as infants, even if they’re fed properly
later, still suffer as adolescents, scoring lower in math, written expression,
and selective recall. Their teachers see them displaying “more anxiety or
depression, social problems, and attention problems,” according to a National
Academy of Sciences report.
So
when federal and state governments are stingy with housing subsidies, as they
always are, they are effectively, perhaps unwittingly, damaging children’s
brain development and life opportunities.
The
booming economy since the Great Recession
of
2008, amplified by Republican tax cuts that
gave
corporations huge benefits, has begun to
raise hourly
wages, but not significantly.
If
median hourly wages in
certain jobs are put next to the official poverty line—currently $25,750 a year
for a family of four—it’s clear why so many people are in desperate trouble so
soon after the economy’s lockdown. Most poor families have only one wage
earner, so assuming a full-time, 40-hour week, that person would have to be
paid $12.38 an hour just to reach the poverty line. As of May 2019, according
to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median hourly wage for ambulance drivers
and assistants was just $12.45; for workers in retail sails, $11.37 to $12.14;
for building cleaners, $12.68; for parking attendants, $12.11; and for
fast-food and restaurant cooks and servers (some of whom also get tips), $11.00
to $12.45.
The
lesson is to look beyond the unemployment rate and number of new jobs and
examine how well those jobs pay. The “healthy” economy did little to narrow the
wealth gap. The most recent Federal Reserve figures, from before the pandemic, showed the top 10 percent of
households with a median net worth of $2,387,500 and the bottom 10 percent with
minus $962—that is, they owed more than they owned.
Adding
assets and subtracting liabilities as of the fourth quarter of 2019, the
wealthiest 10 percent had 70 percent ($78.5 trillion) of the country’s total
household net worth, and the bottom 50 percent had just 1.5 percent ($1.7
trillion). The top had miniscule debt, and the bottom half had miniscule
financial assets alongside huge mortgage and consumer debt.
So,
Janet Yellin was only partially right when she said that Americans had low debt
burdens. Consumer debt reached a record high in 2019 of more than $14
trillion, according to Experian, the credit agency. But it was lower as
a portion of income. And defaults and late payments were low enough to drive
the average FICO score—a person’s credit rating—to a high of 703, up from 689
in 2010 at the end of the Great Recession. (A perfect score is 850.) Given the
high credit card and other debt among the unwealthy, however, delinquency rates
can now be expected to soar, pushing credit ratings down.
In
that prospering economy, then, the glass was either half full or half empty,
depending on whether you were looking from the top or from the bottom. There
was no need to exaggerate the hardships at the bottom, as some Democratic
candidates did with one misstated statistic.
BLOG:
INTERESTINGLY HARRIS, WARREN AND SANDERS ALL WANT AMNESTY SO 40 MILLION
ILLEGALS CAN BRING UP THE REST OF MEXICO. NOW DO THE MATH ON JOBS, HOUSING AND
THE HOMELESS CRISIS
Senators
Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all said last year that 40 percent of Americans could not
come up with the money to pay a $400 emergency expense. In fact, the contrary
was the case, according to the Federal Reserve’s annual survey, “Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households.”
Asked
to check all the ways they could pay for a $400 emergency, only 12 percent said
they could not pay right now, 45 percent checked “with the money currently in
my checking/savings account or with cash,” and 33 percent said they’d use a
credit card and pay it off entirely at the next statement. To a follow-up
question, 85 percent said that making the unexpected payment would not prevent
their paying other bills.
On
the other hand, 25 percent told the Federal Reserve that they were just getting
by or finding it difficult to get by. That number is troubling enough, one
bound to spike as stay-at-home orders continue. The economy was not “healthy”
for those folks in the first place, and will not be so for many more.
Improvements
will come not from the stalemate of left and right, or from their manipulating
statistics, but from a new ideology of practical realism that honors the
complex facts, without distortion. The free-market system is the one we have,
and it can work for virtually everyone if everyone in government and business
works for everyone. Too idealistic? Naïve? Probably.
Support for an immigration moratorium is rising among conservative leaders and the American people as a whole.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
Conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter have long favored one.
In
Immigration Debate, Trump Says We Don’t Have Enough American Workers to Fill
Skilled Labor Jobs
President Donald Trump told Fox News TV host Laura Ingraham on
Friday his 2021 plans to welcome more foreign graduates will not flood the
labor market for U.S. college graduates.
“I have so many companies
coming into this country, you’re not going to have to worry about
it,” Trump said in the interview, adding, “It is always going to be a
shortage … We have so many companies coming in, from Japan … [and] China now is
going to start building a lot of things.”
Trump and Ingraham did not
find common ground, likely because they were talking about different parts of
the immigration problem. Also, neither mentioned Ivanka Trump’s campaign to
prod companies to train their own American employees for high-tech jobs.
Ingraham
began the
exchange by
noting American graduates’ salaries have been suppressed by the flood of
foreign graduates:
We don’t have a tight labor
market. If we had a tight labor market, we would be seeing real increases in
wages. I hear that your team is planning on advocating more foreign workers
coming in for some of these high-tech companies.
Ingraham rejected business
claims of shortages: “We’re seeing a plateauing of wages … There’s a
never-ending appetite on the part of corporate America to bring in as much
cheap labor as possible to drive down wages.”
“I’m
not talking about cheap — I’m talking about brainpower,” Trump responded. “They want to hire smart
people. And those people are thrown out of the country — we can’t do that,” he
said, referring to foreign graduates of U.S. colleges.
Trump seems to want to help
companies import a relatively small number of very clever people, such as Ivy
League valedictorians. In contrast, Ingraham is trying to block companies’
effort to cut payrolls by replacing well-paid American professionals with cheap
foreign graduates who have just enough skills to get the job done, regardless
of quality.
“We
have to allow smart people to stay in our country — if you graduate number one
in your class at Harvard, [if] you graduate from the Wharton School of Finance,”
Trump said. “If we tell smart people to get the hell out, that’s not America
first.”
“Yes, that’s a small
percentage of what [ccompanies] want,” said Ingraham.
” No, it’s not. It’s a lot,”
said Trump.
But business has hired very
few valedictorians among the pool of roughly 1.5 million visa workers who now
hold jobs sought by American graduates.
In fact, the government does
not require U.S companies to hire Americans first, and it does not screen out
unskilled foreign workers. The government does not cap foreign hires and does
not enforce the loopholed rules which supposedly require foreign workers to be
skilled and to be paid market-level wages. Nor does the government even try to
curb the large scale nepotism that allows foreign born managers in the United
States to import huge numbers of foreign workers who will kick back some of
their salaries to their bosses.
For example, the “Optional
Practical Training” program was expanded by President G. Bush and President
Barack Obama to provide employers with an extra stream of foreign graduates.
Foreigners get these OPT work permits by simply enrolling in U.S. colleges,
ranging from the elite Stanford University down to the so-called
“visa-mill” colleges where many students can speak little English and may do
very little study.
DHS posts videos of Indian migrants buying
fake documents from ICE's Farmington U. sting operation.
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
The #OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if #S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh
Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT'
Traffickers
In 2017, for
example, federal data shows Northeastern University provided
OPT work permits to 4,359 foreign graduates– or far more than the number of
valedictorians. Harvard sold access to the OPT work permits to 1,875
foreigners, and Columbia University sold access to 5.59o work permits.
But even more work permits were sold to foreign students by many
little known colleges. For example, in 2017, Northwestern Polytechnic
University sold access to 6,060 work permits, Silicon Valley University sold
3,127 work permits, and the Illinois Institute of Technology sold 2,678.
Nationwide, universities earned roughly $30 billion a year from
this labor-trafficking business, so they have little incentive to exclude
low-quality migrants.
New 2018 data provided to Breitbart News by the Department of
Homeland Security shows that universities provided 215,000 OPT work permits in
2018. This total consisted of 145,586 one-year OPT work permits and 69,650
three-year OPT-STEM work permits in 2018.
In 2017, the matching “Curricular Practical Training” program
provided one-year work permits to roughly 100,000 foreign students at U.S.
colleges — including colleges that require little or no attendance.
DHS officials have recently changed how they count the OPT and
CPT work permits, so the estimated workforce now ranges from 400,000 to roughly
300,000. The older 2017 methodology was used to produce this DHS chart:
Many of these
OPT graduates are hired by prestigious
U.S. firms, — and by foreign managers in those elite firms — so demoting
skilled U.S. graduates in lower-tier jobs, in lower-tier cities, at lower-tier
wages.
The other major visa-worker program is the H-1B program. This
program keeps roughly 750,000 foreign workers in U.S. college-graduate jobs.
These foreign workers will often accept very low wages for these jobs — and
will underbid American graduates — partly because they are hoping their
employers will sponsor them for the hugely valuable prize of a green card.
Federal agencies have never released a full count of the
resident H-1B workforce, but federal data shows that a huge percentage are not
valedictorians and that many come from no-name universities in India.
The federal
data for
2017, for example, shows that 39 percent of the H-1Bs sought
by New York employers were rated as “entry-level” workers, similar to
U.S. graduates. Another 26 percent were rated as just “qualified,” and only 6
percent were rated “competent.” These cheap workers have pushed hundreds of
thousands of American
professionals out of jobs.
This is the visa worker program which is used by companies to
replace many Americans graduates. In 2016, for example, Disney outsourced
Americans’ jobs to an Indian company that imported low-wage H-1B workers to do
the Americans’ jobs. The American graduates were forced to train the Indians,
torpedoing the claims of a shortage of skilled U.S. workers.
Ingraham reminded Trump of the Disney H-1B scandal. “You ran on
people training their foreign replacements, that you ran against that. It’s
humiliating for an American worker who works for a company for 30 years … to
train your replacement,” Ingraham said.
“No, no, that’s different, I would never do that,” said Trump.
“Why shouldn’t we have American graduates of colleges and
universities taking those jobs? Ingraham said.
“We do,” answered Trump. “But
we don’t have enough of them … and we have to be competitive with the rest of
the world too.”
But Trump’s deputies have done little to shrink the H-1B
program. In fact, his deputies are defending the OPT program in court.
Officials have also blocked a DHS plan to end the “H4 EAD” program that Obama
created to persuade temporary H-1B workers to stay in U.S. jobs. The result is that
many Americans are still being forced to train their workers, for example, at
an AT&T finance office in North Carolina.
Yes, this is Walmart. See http://bit.ly/2ZoVQJB https://twitter.com/S1S1B1/status/1109459333023174656 …
Walmart Outsources Accounting, Office Jobs to Indian H-1Bs
Polls show the public strongly prefers rules which require
companies to hire Americans before importing more workers.
A Rasmussen survey shows likely voters by
2:1 want Congress to make companies hire & train US grads & workers
instead of importing more foreign workers.
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
The survey also shows this $/class-based view co-exists w/ much sympathy for illegal migrants. #S386http://bit.ly/2ZA6WIE
Rasmussen Shows 2:1 Opposition to Cheap Labor Legal Immigration
Some of
Trump’s supporters say his comments are demoralizing. “I gotta say just put
myself through one hell of a three year period,” said one Twitter user, titled
“Presto.” “Going to school for IT,
working a fulltime meat cutting job all cause of the hope Donald Trump gave me.
This clip kinda hurt a bit. This hurt me worse than any hit piece. Give me a
spot in the middle class.”
But Trump’s
focus on a relatively few valedictorians is a much lesser threat to Americans
than the bipartisan push by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, to pass his pending
S.386 bill.
The bill would offer foreign OPT and H-1B workers a fast-track
to a new status, dubbed “Early Adjustment,” once they can persuade — or
pay — their employers to sponsor them for green cards. There is no limit on the
number of OPT, CPT, or H-1Bs that can be awarded each year, nor any limit on
the number of foreign graduates who can be sponsored for green cards by their
employers. The lack of limits ensures that Lee’s bill would allow an unlimited
flood of foreign college-graduates into the jobs needed by “Presto” and other
Americans to get into or to stay in the middle-class.
Notably, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, has dismissed
employers’ demands for more workers and insists they step up their training
programs.
“I love
what’s happening because it’s forcing employers to get creative,”
Trump told Gary
Shapiro, the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association,
during a January 7 interview at its annual meeting in Las Vegas. She added:
When I hear employers [who] would come to me and they’d say, ‘We
need more skilled workers, we need more skilled workers,’ and then I’d read
about them laying off segments of their workforce because they were investing
in productivity, and not having spent the time — when they had known three
years prior they’d be making that investment and upgrading those systems — not
taking the time to take those workers and reskill and then retrain them into
their job vacancies, well, I have very little sympathy for that.
Her push seems to be working.
Many U.S. companies are upgrading their training programs, and
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently showcased a company that uses software to
identify and hire ordinary Americans — including truckers — who may have the
intellectual skills to succeed in the software business.
Ivanka tells CEOs to train Americans before
asking for more immigrants.
She stood up for unemployed, ex-cons, old ppl, blacks, disabled, & non-grads.
But she was diplomatic & pleasant, so many journos simply missed her decent & strong populist message. http://bit.ly/2T6BwbI
She stood up for unemployed, ex-cons, old ppl, blacks, disabled, & non-grads.
But she was diplomatic & pleasant, so many journos simply missed her decent & strong populist message. http://bit.ly/2T6BwbI
Ivanka Trump: Executives Must Train Americans Before
Immigrants
Before serving as President, Trump was an employer, and he has
repeatedly shown his sympathy for fellow employers who complain about supposed
labor shortages that would force them to compete for employees by offering
higher wages. But he was elected on a pro-American promise — and he has raised Americans’
wages by repeatedly rejecting business demands for more, and yet more, imported
workers.
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers
helps them force down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not
going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue
told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten
jobs, wages are going to go up.”
ANN COULTER EXPOSES TRUMP’S “WALL” HOAX
In fact, Trump is steadily moving in the precise opposite
direction of what he promised.
Illegal immigration is on track to hit the highest levels in
more than a decade, and Trump has willfully decided to keep amnesty advocates
Jared, Ivanka, Mick Mulvaney, Marc Short, and Mercedes Schlapp in the White
House. For all his talk about immigration, did he ever consider hiring people
who share his MAGA vision?
Video shows climbers surmounting border wall
Trump claimed 'impossible to climb'
A popular video clip shows two climbers
using a ladder and rope to successfully cross a border wall President Trump
claimed was "impossible to climb."
In a visit to the southern border in
September, Trump claimed that portions of newly built wall along the
U.S.-Mexico border near Tijuana were reinforced and even "championship
mountain climbers" were unable to cross them. A video posted by
photojournalist J. Omar Ornelas, however, shows two individuals using a ladder
and other tools to cross the border successfully.
The president also noted the recent throttle in immigration numbers and
credited the newly built wall. "People aren't even coming up," Trump
said. "You see the numbers are going way down, and we're not doing a catch
and release anymore."
The video of the climbers was widely
shared as critics of Trump's border wall policy championed the effort of the
migrant climbers to disprove the president's claim. Several hundred miles of
border wall are currently under construction at the southern border,
though no new fencing has been completed since Trump took office.
While the "impossible to
climb" claim was disproven, the Department of Homeland Security claims the
wall's efficacy cannot be understated. "When it comes to stopping drugs
and illegal aliens from crossing our borders, border walls have proven to be
extremely effective," a statement said. "Border security relies on a combination
of border infrastructure, technology, personnel and partnerships with law
enforcement at the state, local, tribal, and federal level. For example, when
we installed a border wall in the Yuma Sector, we have seen border
apprehensions decrease by 90 percent."
THE NEW YORK TIMES IS MEX OWNED AND SUBSTANTIALLY NOTHING BUT A
MOUTHPIECE FOR LA RAZA 'The Race'
Jared Kushner Fails Up, Again
Having solved the Middle East, the president’s son-in-law tackles the
border wall.
Opinion Columnist
Ivanka
Trump and Jared Kushner, who, reports say, has been given the job of overseeing
construction of a wall between Mexico and the United States.Credit...Anna
Moneymaker/The New York Times
Jared
Kushner just got a promotion. Another one. At
least I think we can call it that, and it’s a deliciously perfect assignment.
The pallid princeling is now responsible for speeding construction of the
border wall. In other words, a make-believe fixer will oversee a fairy-tale
fix.
Josh
Dawsey and Nick Miroff of The Washington Post broke the news, and when I read it, I realized that I
hadn’t heard much about Jared — or, for that matter, Ivanka — in a good long
while. They’re front and center when the administration is announcing some
ostensibly sensible initiative or claiming a pittance of progress. But when its
corruption is being exposed and the drizzle of subpoenas becomes a downpour,
they vanish, cuddling for warmth under the gilded umbrella of their
hallucinatory virtue.
We can
pretty much chart the weather of the administration by the relative visibility
of Donald Jr., so loud and hirsute, and Jared, so smooth-cheeked and mute.
Donald Jr. thrives when it’s nastiest, stomping gleefully through the muck.
Jared comes out only if his suit won’t get dirty or his hair wet.
During the impeachment inquiry, we’ve seen a lot
of Donald Jr. That’s partly because he has been hawking his new book, copies of
which the Republican National Committee spent nearly $100,000 on. But it’s also because he’s such
a ready, eager conduit for his father’s wrath, with a talent for exaggeration
and misdirection that’s clearly chromosomal.
Jared and Ivanka have been strategically scarce,
though Ivanka did flutter into view, in a fashion, when President Trump boasted two weeks ago that she had created 14
million jobs since the inauguration. “Fourteen million and going up!” he
clarified, lest anyone get the misimpression that she thought her work was
done. Never! On behalf of the American people, Ivanka is tireless. There’s no
rest for the weary, and there’s even less of it for those who live at the
crossroads of self-infatuation and delusion.
In an interview last month on Fox Business, Ivanka said
that she and Dad were “fighting every day for the American worker” and that she
was determined to “drive hard every single day to make an impact.”
“Your
time and service — our time here — is finite,” she mused, and while I’d love to
believe that she was prophesying her and her father’s imminent eviction from
the White House, I think she was referring, in her deeply spiritual way, to the span of a human life.
“It’s sand through an hourglass.” As Ivanka serves us, she never forgets the
sand.
Democrats believe that the Trump administration’s
void of ethics will sour American voters on the president. But those voters are
likelier to abandon him for the administration’s vacuum of competence — for his
nonsensical managerial style, captured in his magical thinking about Jared.
He tasked
Jared with reinventing the federal government. Unless constant rash firings,
unfilled jobs and shakedowns of foreign governments constitute reinvention,
this remains on Jared’s infinite to-do list. The president put Jared in
charge of brokering a durable peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Insert
punch line here. He followed Jared’s counsel that faith be placed in Saudi Arabia and its crown
prince, Mohammed bin Salman. We know how that worked out.
The
president somehow looked at that track record and decided that the dynamo he
should entrust with his central campaign
promise — a secure barrier between the United States and Mexico — was … Jared!
And so we have the trillionth gorgeous example of his investment in fiction.
Nearly
three years into Trump’s presidency, the border wall barely exists. Subtract
the upgrading of fencing and such that was already there and Trump has, by some recent estimates,
constructed
fewer than 25 miles of actually new barrier. The southwestern border is nearly
2,000 miles long.
But Jared
is on the case! According to The Post, he “convenes biweekly meetings in the
West Wing, where he questions an array of government officials about progress”
and “explains the president’s wishes.” Huh. Those wishes are hardly cryptic,
and how complicated can this questioning be? Already, The Post reported,
there’s grumbling that Jared is just an annoyance.
That
belittles his symbolic significance. Many journalists, including me, have tried
to settle on the perfect mascot for the Trump administration. There are choices
galore. The greedy, vainglorious Scott Pruitt, who did his best to decimate the
Environmental Protection Agency, fit the bill, but he’s long gone. Mike Pompeo embodies the Faustian arc of so many of the
president’s aides and allies, from principle-driven dismissal of Trump during
the 2016 campaign to reputation-torching submission when he dangled a ticket to
the big time.
But for
naked opportunism and situational scruples, Jared’s my guy. Remember how he and
Ivanka were going to contain the president’s ego, blunt his cruelty, whisper
sweet moderation in his ear? That was then. Now he’s devoting himself to an
exorbitant, unnecessary monument to Trump’s nativism and xenophobia.
There’s
an upside, though. With Jared in the saddle, this horse won’t go far.
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