Friday, June 1, 2018

THE INVASION CONTINUES! - DHS SAW 315% INCREASE IN ILLEGALS USING CHILDREN TO GAIN ENTRY to US..... LOS ANGELES COUNTY HANDS OUT $1 BILLION IN WELFARE TO ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS

DEATH OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE-CLASS AND THE STAGGERING COST OF MEXICO’S WELFARE STATE AND CRIME TIDAL WAVE ON AMERICAN BACKS.


DHS: CBP Saw 315% Increase in Illegals Using Children to Gain Entry to US





By Melanie Arter | May 30, 2018 | 4:58 PM EDT


(Screenshot)
(CNSNews.com) - An official with the Department of Homeland Security told reporters Tuesday that in the first five months of fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection saw a 315 percent increase in illegals using children to gain entry to the U.S. as family units compared to the prior fiscal year.

“In the first five months of fiscal year ‘18, CBP saw a 315 percent increase in individuals using children to pose as family units to gain entry into the country compared to fiscal year ’17. Smugglers and drug traffickers know the loopholes well, and they know that if they reach our borders, they will be released into our country and evade the consequences of their criminal action,” Jonathan Hoffman, assistant secretary of DHS, said.

Fiscal year 2018 began on Oct. 1, 2017 and ends on Sept. 30, 2018. That means that from Oct. 2017 to February 2018, there were 315 percent more illegals than last fiscal year using children to try to gain entry to the U.S. as family units.

“The bottom line is that if you break the law, there will be consequences,” Hoffman said. DHS is no longer “exempting classes of individuals from enforcement.”

“If members of Congress do not like the laws they pass, they need to change them. They should not ask DHS to look the other way. They should not ask DHS to abdicate our oath to enforce the law,” he said.

The United States also experienced a dramatic increase in the number of asylum claims during the Obama administration, Hoffman said.

“We had an increase in asylum claims by 1700 percent from 2008 to 2016. We have seen the backlog explode to over 300,000 cases for asylum,” he said.

Of the unaccompanied children (UACs) placed with the Department of Health and Human Services, “only five of those children were actually removed from the country,” Hoffman said. He said the majority of removal orders DHS sees are for those who don’t show up for immigration hearings.

“Ninety percent of the removal orders that we see and we actually institute are based solely on a failure to show up for the hearing themselves. This is a crisis. We’re seeing the numbers increase, and we are taking steps to address those, and one of the things we’re doing is we’re prosecuting every person who enters the country illegally,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman addressed false reports that the Trump administration was keeping illegal minors in metal cages, advanced by Democrats who tweeted photos of children housed during the Obama administration. President Donald Trump also addressed the issue on Tuesday.

"Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires. Dems must agree to Wall and new Border Protection for good of country...Bipartisan Bill!" Trump tweetedTuesday.

“DHS takes seriously its responsibility to protect alien children from human smuggling, trafficking, and other criminal action. While ensuring that our immigration laws are enforced, DHS has continued the previous administration’s policy and will separate alien minor children from an adult for his or her protection or in cases where the adult or custodian has been referred for criminal prosecution. This is a policy that has not changed from the prior administration,” Hoffman said.

“And while the previous administration did little to screen those seeking to sponsor unaccompanied alien children, DHS and HHS are in the final stages of implementing a new agreement on robust information-sharing so that such potential sponsors are thoroughly and systemically screen for the protection of the children,” he added.

Hoffman said the administration’s job “is made more difficult by Congress’s continued failure to address debilitating loopholes in our immigration laws.”

“As a result of some of these loopholes, we continue to see too many cases of children being used by smugglers, traffickers and transnational criminal organizations in an attempt to circumvent our laws and gain entry to the United States,” he said.

Hoffman complained that the U.S. immigration system “is clearly being gamed by those who are aware of the loopholes and shortcomings.”

“Specifically, the four loopholes that many of you are aware: the Flores settlement agreement, the TVPRA, the Zavydas ruling, and asylum, the asylum provision, as well as the fact that there does not exist bars in our law to prevent us, to deem people inadmissible based on gang affiliation or from foreign countries,” he said.

Under the Flores Settlement Agreement, DHS can only detain unaccompanied minors for 20 days before turning them over to the Department of Health and Human Services, which places them in foster care or shelters until they can find a sponsor, according to DHS.

In 2017, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the Flores settlement agreement. The court affirmed a district court’s order granting a motion by the plaintiff, Jenny Lisette Flores, to enforce a 1997 settlement, which set a nationwide policy for the detention, release, and treatment of minors detained in the custody of Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). It also required that unaccompanied minors be given a bond hearing.

The Zadyvas ruling, decided on July 28, 2001 by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, held that an illegal alien, who has been ordered removed from the country and is not able to be repatriated, should not be detained beyond a reasonable time beyond the 90-day removal period.

TVPRA stands for Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Passed in 2008, TVPRA strengthened federal trafficking laws, adding provisions that govern the rights of unaccompanied children who enter the U.S. It was reauthorized in 2013.

TVPRA stipulates that UACs who are not from Mexico or Canada are exempt from prompt return to their home country. The administration wants to amend TVPRA so that the time period to file asylum claims for UACs are limited to one year, which is consistent with other asylum applicants, and so that these cases are only heard in immigration court.




It Pays to be Illegal in California

 By JENNIFER G. HICKEY  May 10, 2018 
It certainly is a good time to be an illegal alien in California. Democratic State Sen. Ricardo Lara last week pitched a bill to permit illegal immigrants to serve on all state and local boards and commissions. This week, lawmakers unveiled a $1 billion health care plan that would include spending $250 million to extend health care coverage to all illegal alien adults.
“Currently, undocumented adults are explicitly and unjustly locked out of healthcare due to their immigration status. In a matter of weeks, California legislators will have a decisive opportunity to reverse that cruel and counterproductive fact,” Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula said in Monday’s Sacramento Bee.
His legislation, Assembly Bill 2965, would give as many as 114,000 uninsured illegal aliens access to Medi-Cal programs. A companion bill has been sponsored by State Sen. Richard Lara.
But that could just be a drop in the bucket. The Democrats’ plan covers more than 100,000 illegal aliens with annual incomes bless than $25,000, however an estimated 1.3 million might be eligible based on their earnings.
In addition, it is estimated that 20 percent of those living in California illegally are uninsured – the $250 million covers just 11 percent.
So, will politicians soon be asking California taxpayers once again to dip into their pockets to pay for the remaining 9 percent?
Before they ask for more, Democrats have to win the approval of Gov. Jerry Brown, who cautioned against spending away the state’s surplus when he introduced his $190 billion budget proposal in January.
Given Brown’s openness to expanding Medi-Cal expansions in recent years, not to mention his proclivity for blindly supporting any measure benefitting lawbreaking immigrants, the latest fiscal irresponsibility may win approval.

And if he takes a pass, the two Democrats most likely to succeed Brown – Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa – favor excessive social spending and are actively courting illegal immigrant support.

Adios, Sanctuary La Raza Welfare State of California  
A fifth-generation Californian laments his state’s ongoing economic collapse.
By Steve Baldwin
American Spectator, October 19, 2017
What’s clear is that the producers are leaving the state and the takers are coming in. Many of the takers are illegal aliens, now estimated to number over 2.6 million. 
The Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that California spends $22 billion on government services for illegal aliens, including welfare, education, Medicaid, and criminal justice system costs. 
                                                                                                                
BLOG: MANY DISPUTE CALIFORNIA’S EXPENDITURES FOR THE LA RAZA WELFARE STATE IN MEXIFORNIA JUST AS THEY DISPUTE THE NUMBER OF ILLEGALS. APPROXIMATELY HALF THE POPULATION OF CA IS NOW MEXICAN AND BREEDING ANCHOR BABIES FOR WELFARE LIKE BUNNIES. THE $22 BILLION IS STATE EXPENDITURE ONLY. COUNTIES PAY OUT MORE WITH LOS ANGELES COUNTY LEADING AT OVER A BILLION DOLLARS PAID OUT YEARLY TO MEXICO’S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS. NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY THE NUMBER OF COUNTIES IN CA AND YOU START TO GET AN IDEA OF THE STAGGERING WELFARE STATE MEXICO AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAVE ERECTED SANS ANY LEGALS VOTES. ADD TO THIS THE FREE ENTERPRISE HOSPITAL AND CLINIC COST FOR LA RAZA’S “FREE” MEDICAL WHICH IS ESTIMATED TO BE ABOUT $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR.

Liberals claim they more than make that up with taxes paid, but that’s simply not true. It’s not even close. FAIR estimates illegal aliens in California contribute only $1.21 billion in tax revenue, which means they cost California $20.6 billion, or at least $1,800 per household.

Nonetheless, open border advocates, such as Facebook Chairman Mark Zuckerberg, claim illegal aliens are a net benefit to California with little evidence to support such an assertion. As the Center for Immigration Studies has documented, the vast majority of illegals are poor, uneducated, and with few skills. How does accepting millions of illegal aliens and then granting them access to dozens of welfare programs benefit California’s economy? If illegal aliens were contributing to the economy in any meaningful way, California, with its 2.6 million illegal aliens, would be booming.
Furthermore, the complexion of illegal aliens has changed with far more on welfare and committing crimes than those who entered the country in the 1980s. 
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens. Granted, those statistics are old, but if you talk to any California law enforcement officer, they will tell you it’s much worse today. The problem is that the Brown administration will not release any statewide data on illegal alien crimes. That would be insensitive. And now that California has declared itself a “sanctuary state,” there is little doubt this sends a message south of the border that will further escalate illegal immigration into the state.
"If the racist "Sensenbrenner Legislation" passes the US Senate, there is no doubt that a massive civil disobedience movement will emerge. Eventually labor union power can merge with the immigrant civil rights and "Immigrant Sanctuary" movements to enable us to either form a new political party or to do heavy duty reforming of the existing Democratic Party. The next and final steps would follow and that is to elect our own governors of all the states within Aztlan." 
Indeed, California goes out of its way to attract illegal aliens. The state has even created government programs that cater exclusively to illegal aliens. For example, the State Department of Motor Vehicles has offices that only process driver licenses for illegal aliens. With over a million illegal aliens now driving in California, the state felt compelled to help them avoid the long lines the rest of us must endure at the DMV. 
And just recently, the state-funded University of California system announced it will spend $27 million on financial aid for illegal aliens. They’ve even taken out radio spots on stations all along the border, just to make sure other potential illegal border crossers hear about this program. I can’t afford college education for all my four sons, but my taxes will pay for illegals to get a college education.



If Immigration Creates Wealth, Why Is California America's Poverty Capital?




California used to be home to America's largest and most affluent middle class.  Today, it is America's poverty capital.  What went wrong?  In a word: immigration.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Official Poverty Measure, California's poverty rate hovers around 15 percent.  But this figure is misleading: the Census Bureau measures poverty relative to a uniform national standard, which doesn't account for differences in living costs between states – the cost of taxes, housing, and health care are higher in California than in Oklahoma, for example.  Accounting for these differences reveals that California's real poverty rate is 20.6 percent – the highest in America, and nearly twice the national average of 12.7 percent.

Likewise, income inequality in California is the second-highest in America, behind only New York.  In fact, if California were an independent country, it would be the 17th most unequal country on Earth, nestled comfortably between Honduras and Guatemala.  Mexico is slightly more egalitarian.  California is far more unequal than the "social democracies" it emulates: Canada is the 111th most unequal nation, while Norway is far down the list at number 153 (out of 176 countries).  In terms of income inequality, California has more in common with banana republics than other "social democracies."

More Government, More Poverty
High taxes, excessive regulations, and a lavish welfare state – these are the standard explanations for California's poverty epidemic.  They have some merit.  For example, California has both the highest personal income tax rate and the highest sales tax in America, according to Politifact.

Not only are California's taxes high, but successive "progressive" governments have swamped the state in a sea of red tape.  Onerous regulations cripple small businesses and retard economic growth.  Kerry Jackson, a fellow with the Pacific Research Institute, gives a few specific examples of how excessive government regulation hurts California's poor.  He writes in a recent op-ed for the Los Angeles Times:
Extensive environmental regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions make energy more expensive, also hurting the poor.  By some estimates, California energy costs are as much as 50% higher than the national average.  Jonathan A. Lesser of Continental Economics ... found that "in 2012, nearly 1 million California households faced ... energy expenditures exceeding 10% of household income."
Some government regulation is necessary and desirable, but most of California's is not.  There is virtue in governing with a "light touch."
Finally, California's welfare state is, perhaps paradoxically, a source of poverty in the state.  The Orange Country Register reports that California's social safety net is comparable in scale to those found in Europe:
In California a mother with two children under the age of 5 who participates in these major welfare programs – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), housing assistance, home energy assistance, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children – would receive a benefits package worth $30,828 per year.
... [Similar] benefits in Europe ranged from $38,588 per year in Denmark to just $1,112 in Romania.  The California benefits package is higher than in well-known welfare states as France ($17,324), Germany ($23,257) and even Sweden ($22,111).
Although welfare states ideally help the poor, reality is messy.  There are three main problems with the welfare state.  First, it incentivizes poverty by rewardingthe poor with government handouts that are often far more valuable than a job.  This can be ameliorated to some degree by imposing work requirements on welfare recipients, but in practice, such requirements are rarely imposed.  Second, welfare states are expensive.  This means higher taxes and therefore slower economic growth and fewer job opportunities for everyone – including the poor.
Finally, welfare states are magnets for the poor.  Whether through domestic migration or foreign immigration, poor people flock to places with generous welfare states.  This is logical from the immigrant's perspective, but it makes little sense from the taxpayer's.  This fact is why socialism and open borders arefundamentally incompatible.

Why Big Government?
Since 1960, California's population exploded from 15.9 to 39 million people.  The growth was almost entirely due to immigration – many people came from other states, but the majority came from abroad.  The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that 10 million immigrants currently reside in California.  This works out to 26 percent of the state's population.

BLOG: COME TO MEXIFORNIA! HALF OF LOS ANGELES 15 MILLION ARE ILLEGALS!
This figure includes 2.4 million illegal aliens, although a recent study from Yale University suggests that the true number of aliens is at least double that.  Modifying the initial figure implies that nearly one in three Californians is an immigrant.  This is not to disparage California's immigrant population, but it is madness to deny that such a large influx of people has changed California's society and economy.

Importantly, immigrants vote Democrat by a ratio higher than 2:1, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies.  In California, immigration has increased the pool of likely Democrat voters by nearly 5 million people, compared to just 2.4 million additional likely Republican voters.  Not only does this almost guarantee Democratic victories, but it also shifts California's political midpoint to the left.  This means that to remain competitive in elections, the Republicans must abandon or soften many conservative positions so as to cater to the center.
California became a Democratic stronghold not because Californians became socialists, but because millions of socialists moved there.  Immigration turned California blue, and immigration is ultimately to blame for California's high poverty level.

REALITIES OF A STATE IN MELTDOWN:


THE INVISIBLE CALIFORNIA

De facto apartheid world in the Golden State.


https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270265/invisible-california-bruce-thornton


Reprinted from Hoover.org.
In 1973, as I was going through customs in New York, the customs agent rifling my bag looked at my passport and said, with a Bronx sneer, “Bruce Thornton, huh. Must be one of them Hollywood names.”
Hearing that astonishing statement, I realized for the first time that California is as much an idea as a place. There were few regions in America more distant from Hollywood than the rural, mostly poor, multiethnic San Joaquin Valley where my family lived and ranched. Yet to this New Yorker, the Valley was invisible.

BLOG: FEINSTEIN & BOXER THREE TIMES ATTEMPTED TO INSERT IN VARIOUS BILLS AN AMNESTY FOR FARM WORKERS TO REPAY THEIR BIG AG BIG DONORS.
ONE-THIRD OF ALL FARM WORKERS END UP ON WELFARE AS SOON AS THE ANCHOR BABIES START COMING
Coastal Californians are sometimes just as blind to the world on the other side of the Coast Range, even though its farms, orchards, vineyards, dairies, and ranches comprise more than half the state’s $46 billion agriculture industry, which grows over 400 commodities, including over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts.
Granted, Silicon Valley is an economic colossus compared to the ag industry, but agriculture’s importance can’t be measured just in dollars and cents. Tech, movies, and every other industry tends to forget that their lives and businesses, indeed civilization itself, all rest on the shoulders of those who produce the food. You can live without your iPhone or your Mac or the latest Marvel Studios blockbuster. But you can’t live without the food grown by the one out of a 100 people who work to feed the other 99.
A Politically Invisible Valley
Living in the most conservative counties in the 
deepest-blue state, Valley residents constantly see 
their concerns, beliefs, and needs seldom taken 
into account at the state or federal level.
Registered Democrats in California outnumber registered Republicans by over 19%, and the State Legislature seats about twice as many Democrats as Republicans (California’s one of only eight states nationwide with a trifecta of a Democratic and two Democratic controlled legislative bodies).
California’s Congressional delegation is even more unbalanced: in the House of Representatives, currently there are fourteen Republicans compared to thirty-nine House Democrats (at least half of those GOP districts are in danger of turning blue this fall); half the Republicans represent Central Valley districts, none bordering the Pacific Ocean. The last elected Republican US Senator left office in 1991. The last Republican governor was the politically light-pink action-movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose second term ended in 2011.
This progressive dominance of the state has led to policies and priorities that has damaged its agricultural economy and seriously degraded the quality of life in the Valley.
Despite a long drought that has diminished the run-off of snow from the Sierra Nevada, projects for dams and reservoirs are on hold, seriously impacting the ag industry that relies on the snowmelt for most of its water. Worse yet, since 2008, a period including the height of the drought, 1.4 trillion gallons of water have been dumped into the Pacific Ocean to protect the endangered Delta Smelt, a two-inch bait-fish. Thousands of agricultural jobs have been lost and farmland left uncultivated, all to satisfy the sensibilities of affluent urban environmentalists. And even after a few years of abundant rain, Valley farmers this year are receiving just 20% of their South-of-the-Delta water allocation.
Or take California’s high-speed rail project, currently moribund and $10 billion over budget just for construction of the easiest section, through the flat center of the Valley. Meanwhile, State Highway 99, which bisects the Valley from north to south for 500 miles, is pot-holed, inefficient, and crammed with 18-wheel semis. It is the bloodiest highway in the country, in dire need of widening and repair. Yet to gratify our Democratic governor’s
high-tech green obsession, billions of dollars are 
being squandered to create an unnecessary link 
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. That’s $10 billion that could have been spent building more reservoirs instead of dumping water into the ocean because there’s no place to store it.
The common thread of these two examples of 
mismanagement and waste is the romantic 
environmentalism of the well-heeled coastal left. 
They serially support government projects and 
regulations that impact the poor and the aged, who
are left to bear their costs.
The same idealized nature-love has led to regulations and taxes on energy that have made California home of the third-worst energy poverty in the country. In sweltering San Joaquin Valley counties like Madera and Tulare, energy poverty rates are 15% compared to 3–4% in cool, deep-blue coastal enclaves. Impoverished Kings County averages over $500 a month in electric bills, while tony Marin Country, with an average income twice that of Kings County, averages $200. Again, it’s the poor, aged, and working class who bear the brunt of these costs, especially in the Valley where temperatures regularly reach triple digits in the summer; unlike the coast, where the clement climate makes expensive air-conditioning unnecessary.
Deteriorating Quality of Life
It’s no wonder then that Fresno, in the heart of the 
Valley, is the second most impoverished city in the
poorest region of a state that has the highest 
poverty levels in the country and one of the 
highest rates of income inequality. Over one-fifth 
of its residents live below the poverty line, and it 
The greatest impact on the Valley’s 
deteriorating quality of life, however, has been 
the influx of illegal aliens. Some are attracted by 
plentiful agriculture and construction work, and 
others by California’s generous welfare transfers
— California is home to one in three of the 
country’s welfare recipients— all facilitated by 
California’s status as a “sanctuary state” that 
regularly releases felons rather than cooperate 
with Immigration and Customs Enforcement 
(ICE). As a result, one-quarter of the country’s 
illegal alien population lives in California, many 
from underdeveloped regions of Mexico and Latin
America that have different social and cultural 
mores and attitudes to the law and civic 
responsibility.
The consequences of these feckless policies are 
found throughout the state. But they are 
especially noticeable in rural California. There 
high levels of crime and daily disorder—from 
murders, assaults, and drug trafficking, to 
driving without insurance, DUIs, hit-and-runs, 
and ignoring building and sanitation codes—
have degraded or, in some cases, destroyed the 
once-orderly farming towns that used to be 
populated by earlier immigrants, including 
many legal immigrants from Mexico, who over 
a few generations of sometimes rocky 
coexistence assimilated to American culture 
and society.
Marginalized Cultural Minorities
More broadly, the dominant cultures and mores of the dot.com north and the Hollywood south are inimical to those of the Valley. Whether it is gun-ownership, hunting, church-going, or military service, many people in the San Joaquin Valley of all races are quickly becoming cultural minorities marginalized by the increasingly radical positions on issues such as abortion, guns, and religion.
Despite the liberal assumption that all Hispanics favor progressive policies, many Latino immigrants and their children find more in common with Valley farmers and natives with whom they live and work than they do with distant urban elites.
Indeed, as a vocal conservative professor in the local university (Fresno State), I have survived mainly because my students, now more than half Latino and Mexican immigrants or children of immigrants, are traditional and practical in a way that makes them impatient with the patronizing victim-politics of more affluent professors. They have more experience with physical labor, they are more religious and, like me, they are often the first in their families to graduate from college. As I did with the rural Mexican Americans I grew up with, I usually have more in common with my students than I do with many of my colleagues.
And this is the great irony of the invisibility of the “other” California: the blue-coast policies that suit the prejudices and sensibilities of the affluent have damaged the prospects of the “others of color” they claim they want to help. Over-
represented on the poverty and welfare rolls, many
migrants both legal and illegal have seen water 
policies that destroy agricultural jobs, building 
restrictions that drive up the cost of housing, 
energy policies that increase their cost of living, “sanctuary city” policies that put back on the 
streets thugs and criminals who prey mainly on 
their ethnic fellows, and economic policies that 
favor the redistribution rather than the creation of wealth and jobs.
Meanwhile, the coastal liberals who tout a cosmetic diversity live in a de facto apartheid world, surrounded by those of similar income, taste, and politics. Many look down on the people whom they view as racists and xenophobes at worst, and intellectually challenged rubes at best. This disdain has been evident in the way the media regularly sneer that House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes is a “former dairy-farmer” from Tulare County, an origin that makes “the match between his backstory and his prominence” seem “wholly incongruous,” per Roll Call's David Hawkings.
Finally, those of us who grew up and live in the rural Valley did so among a genuine diversity, one that reflected the more complex identities beyond the crude categories of “white” or “black” or “Hispanic.”
Italians, Basques, Portuguese, Armenians, Swedes, Mexicans, Filipinos, Southern blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Volga Germans, Scotch-Irish Dust Bowl migrants—all migrated to the Valley to work the fields and better their lives. Their children and grandchildren went to the same schools, danced together and drank together, helped round up each other’s animals when they got loose, were best friends or deadly enemies, dated and intermarried, got drafted into the Army or joined the Marines—all of them Americans who managed to honor their diverse heritages and faiths, but still be a community. Their most important distinctions were not so much between races and ethnicities, though those of course often collided, but between the respectable people––those who obeyed the law, went to church, and raised their kids right––­ and those we all called “no damned good.” Skin-color or accents couldn’t sort one from the other.  
What most of us learned from living in real diversity in the Valley is that being an American means taking people one at a time.
That world still exists, but it is slowly fading away—in part because of the policies and politics of those to our west, who can see nothing on the other side of the Coast Range.

ABOUT BRUCE THORNTON

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, a Research Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Classics and Humanities at the California State University. He is the author of nine books and numerous essays on classical culture and its influence on Western Civilization. His most recent book, Democracy's Dangers and Discontents (Hoover Institution Press), is now available for purchase.

ENFORCING IMMIGRATION LAWS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO FEEL GOOD

5:50 AM 05/29/2018Ira Mehlman | Media Director, FAIR
At a May 15 Senate Government Affairs Committee hearing, Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) grilled Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen about her department’s efforts to enforce immigration laws at the border and in the interior of the country. “I’m extremely concerned about the administration’s repeated attacks on some of the most vulnerable communities, and in particular, children and pregnant women as it relates to the world of DHS,” Harris said in her opening statement, strongly implying that actions by agencies within her department are cruelly separating families.
Secretary Nielsen deftly deflected Harris’s implications by noting that DHS is merely carrying out its responsibilities as mandated by laws enacted by Congress with the intent of protecting the public interest. “No, what we are doing is prosecuting parents who have broken the law, just as we do every day in the United States of America,” replied Nielsen to Harris’s assertion that DHS is maliciously separating children from their parents.
Nielsen might also have reminded Senator Harris that during her own long career as a prosecutor, as District Attorney of San Francisco and has Attorney General of California, she undoubtedly took actions that separated families or which resulted in significant hardships to innocent family members. Like every other law enforcement officer, there were surely times when Harris felt badly about what she had to do, but also understood that it was necessary to protect societal interests and that the ultimate responsibility rested with the people who broke the laws she was sworn to uphold.
Senator Harris’s line of questioning, like a significant amount of media coverage consists of emotional responses to DHS’s efforts to control our borders and enforce immigration laws in the interior of the country. These blatant appeals to emotion belabor the obvious: Law enforcement – particularly enforcement of civil laws – rarely feels good. But what Harris and others overlook is that what feels good can be harmful and what is necessary is often uncomfortable.
Most people who violate laws aren’t monsters. The vast majority of people who violate civil laws are otherwise decent people who make bad decisions, or cheat to achieve some significant gain for themselves at the expense of the general interests of society. That last category – identifiable human beings who commit acts that significantly benefit themselves and their families, while the harm is spread among many unidentifiable victims – is the hardest to address.
The societal impact of one individual violating our immigration laws, claiming a job in this country, putting his kids in our public schools, and using other services is negligible. Twelve million (or more) people violating our immigration laws has a profound impact on other workers, on schools and other vital public institutions, and on other societal interests. That is why society is obligated to take action against every immigration law violator who is identified, even if does not feel especially good doing so.
Immigration lawbreakers are human beings. As such, they have understandable aspirations and they have families — families that directly benefit from their decision to violate immigration laws, and that are directly harmed when the law is enforced. But empathy does not change the fact that their illegal actions harm others, and that those interests must be protected.
Throughout her testimony, Nielsen repeatedly made clear to Harris and other lawmakers that the steps her department is taking to enforce immigration laws are necessitated by Congress’s refusal to fix or enact laws that effectively entice people to violate our immigration laws. Gaping loopholes in our asylum and anti-trafficking laws permit that widespread fraud and encourage people to show up in the company of minors, are well known to Congress, and leave DHS with little choice but to take the steps Harris finds objectionable
Illegal and widespread state and local policies that promise illegal aliens sanctuary (most notably in Harris’s home state), and the lack of a mandated employment eligibility verification system further induce illegal immigration and compel DHS to step up enforcement in the interior of the country.
Harris and her congressional colleagues have the power to fix these problems in a way that deters people from breaking our laws and minimizes the hardship to innocent family members and the American public. Until they are prepared to take these steps, members of Congress should think carefully before pointing fingers at federal law enforcement agencies that are forced to clean up the mess Congress is ignoring.
Ira Mehlman is the media director at Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.