Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc.

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?

America Gone Mad

It's Victor David Hanson, at the American Mind, "The American Descent into Madness: America went from the freest country in the world in December 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?":

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Citizenship as Mere Residency

Two million people are anticipated to cross the southern border, en masse and illegally, over a 12-month period. If that absurdity were to continue, we would be adding the equivalent of a major U.S. city every year. The new arrivals have three things in common: Their first act was to break U.S. law by entering the country. Their second was to break the law by residing here illegally. And their third will be to find false identification or other illegal means to continue breaking the law. One does not arrive as a guest in a foreign country and immediately violate the laws of his host—unless one holds those laws in contempt.

Arrivals now cross a border that had been virtually closed to illegal immigration by January 2021. In the cynical and immoral logic of illegal immigration (that cares little for the concerns either of would-be legal immigrants or U.S. citizens), arrivals will be dependent upon the state and thus become constituents of progressives who engineered their arrival.

Yet the issue is not illegal immigration per se. If protests were to continue in Cuba, and 1 million Cubans boated to Miami, the Biden Administration would stop the influx, in terror that so many anti-Communists might tip Florida red forever.

How strange that the U.S. government is considering going door-to-door to bully the unvaccinated, even as it ignores the daily influx of thousands from Mexico and Latin America, without worrying whether they are carrying or vaccinated for COVID-19. Meanwhile, the progressive media shrilly warns that the new Delta Variant of the virus is exploding south of the border. Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.

Crime as Construct

Crime is another current absurdity. There exists a mini-industry of internet videos depicting young people, disproportionately African American males, stealing luxury goods from Nieman-Marcus in San Francisco, clearing a shelf from a Walgreens with impunity, or assaulting Asian Americans. These iconic moments may be unrepresentative of reality, but given the mass transfers and retirements of police, and the frightening statistics of large increases in violent crime in certain cities, the popular conception is now entrenched that it is dangerous to walk in our major metropolises, either by day or at night. Chicago has turned into Tombstone or Dodge City in the popular imagination.

Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.

So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.

The Campus Con 

The universities over the past 40 years were intolerant, hard Left, and increasingly anti-constitutional. But they also fostered a golden-goose confidence scheme that administrators dared not injure, given the precious eggs of federally guaranteed student loans that ensured zero academic accountability and sent tuition costs into the stratosphere. There was an unquestioned supposition that a degree of any sort, of any major, was the ticket to American success. In cynical fashion, we shrugged that most prestigious institutions were little more than cattle branders that stamped graduates with imprints that gave them unearned privilege for life.

Yet universities now have both hands around their golden goose’s neck and are determined to strangle it. The public is becoming repulsed at the woke McCarthyite culture on campus, and will be more turned off when campuses open in the fall in 2019-style. At the Ivy League or major state university campuses, admissions are no longer based on proportional representation in the context of affirmative action, but are defined increasingly by a reparatory character.

Grades, test scores, and “activities” of the white and Asian male college applicants are growing less relevant. Only “privileged” white males with sports skills, connections, or families who give lots of money are exempt from the new racial reparation quotas. The new woke admission policy ironically is targeting the liberal suburban professional family, the Left’s constituency, whose lives are so fixated on whether children graduate from Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, or like campuses.

Given the radical change in incoming student profiles, the faculty increasingly will have to choose between accusations of racism, or grading regardless of actual performance, given thousands of new enrollees do not meet the entrance standards of just two or three years ago. Remember that since wokeism was always a top-down elite industry, minority progressives still will fight it out with white leftists in intramural scraps over titles, salaries, and managerial posts.

The public has had enough. For the first time, people will ask why are we subsidizing student loans, why are multibillion-dollar endowments not taxed, and why do we think a B.A. in sociology or psychology or gender studies is an “investment” that prepares anyone for anything? ...

A great piece. 

Keep reading.

 

Customs and Border Patrol Records Highest Level of Illegal Immigrant Deaths in 20 Years

At Pajamas Media, "Illegal Immigrant Deaths Soar During Heat Wave":

Illegal immigrants frequently traverse through desert and ranchland to avoid detection by CBP. The Rio Grande Valley sector in southern Texas and Arizona’s Tucson sector account for most of the summer deaths, which generally spike in tandem with illegal crossing numbers. Over the past 20 years, the highest number of deaths recorded by CBP was 492, in fiscal year 2005, and the lowest was 251 deaths in 2015.

“To avoid death or injury from severe dehydration, a person walking across the landscape in the heat of summer must consume no less than two gallons of water per day,” CBP stated on July 1. “The average person cannot carry sufficient water to avoid life-threatening dehydration over the course of several days in the brush.” Some people crossing the Rio Grande drown...

Read the whole thing.

Wow! Tucker's Complete Opening Segment from Last Night's 'Tucker Carlson Tonight'! (VIDEO)

Well, I shouldn't be surprised. 

Fox News has been promoting Tucker as if he's the new reigning king of the American mass media, which, well, he most definitely is (at least in television news programming, as previously noted here). 

So, while I am surprised to see Fox News indeed upload his entire opening segment to YouTube, it's pretty logical, after all, considering that Tucker's doing the real news reporting --- including traveling the Central America to interview Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele --- that the idiot lying leftist "mainstream" networks refuse to touch (for all the regular reasons), for doing so would just totally f*ck up their stupid ideological lies and memes with all things related to illegal immigration, Trump's very laudable (yet also flawed and imperfect) policies on border security, and the Biden regime's epically dishonest and incompetent handling of the crisis (which these White Hose ghouls constantly refuse to identify as such). 

I'm not watching any news this morning, as I'm trying to get caught up on grading, but I did want to post some content here to the blog, as blogging's going to be light for a couple of days, as I travel out of town with my wife and young son to visit relatives in Fresno/Clovis. I should have an update on that perhaps later today, or early tomorrow morning, and I'll post some Amazon links for reader shopping opportunities, and of whose reader purchases are greatly appreciated.

Watch and enjoy:

Thousands of Unaccompanied Minors Are Crossing Over to the U.S., as the Biden Administration Continues to Hide From the Media's Questions (VIDEO)

I wanted to post this one earlier, but I'm glad I waited until after I found the Tucker segment posted earlier, "Spectacular Tucker Carlson Episode 'On Assignment' in El Salvador! (VIDEO)."

At one point at the video below, CBS News correspondent Mireya Villarreal is near tears, as she watches a young boy start off down the highway into the U.S., with no one "accompanying" him, so who knows what fate awaited that child, because the "bad hombres" prey on children not just south of the border, but inside the U.S. as well?

And I've got Fox News on right now as I'm working on this, and they've already had three segments blasting Jen Psaki and other administration officials for their lies and deceit, and it's not just Fox's Peter Doocy doing the grilling. 

No doubt I'll be keeping up with this story, because it's one of the most volatile for Biden, as he's just not up to the task on this issue, or any other, dealing with actually helping Americans rather than foreign "migrants," many of whom have in fact been designated as "terrorists," especially the untold number of "MS-13" gang-bangers and murderers Biden's now letting into the country, to kill, maim, and rape U.S. citizens, who're being literally f*cked by the ghouls now in charge in D.C. 

Spectacular Tucker Carlson Episode 'On Assignment' in El Salvador! (VIDEO)

Shoot, I'm surprised Fox News actually posted this whole segment, because as I've mentioned before, they're kinda stingy on posting Turker's stuff to YouTube. But this one is phenomenal, and I'm glad they did!

(Maybe they're just really "pumping up" some of the new content that will be part of the new "Fox Nation" package of specials, of which Tucker's new programming will be the highlight.)

Anyway, he keeps getting better, that's for sure, and as always, I can't stop laughing when I'm watching his segments. 

Here:

Biden's Border Crisis (VIDEO)

Bill Hemmer and Dana Perino report, for Fox News:

And must-see television: Stephen Miller's appearance on Tucker's last night: WATCH: "Tucker Carlson &  Stephen Miller Blast the Biden Administration for America's Border Crisis."

At Least 13 Dead as SUV Crammed With 25 Illegal Aliens T-Boned by Peterbilt Big-Rig Near Mexican Border (VIDEO)

Well, Tucker had former Trump adviser Stephen Miller on last night, and Miller explained that human traffickers cut the seats out of vehicles, like this Ford SUV, to be able to cram 25 migrants inside, most likely stacked one on top of another, like ready-made corpes.

Most media reports aren't including that kind of detail in their reporting, and of course, most media reports, again, have avoided mentioning the Biden administration's reversal of the Trump administration's tough border policies as one of the main reasons for this utter disaster. 

It's a waste of precious human life, and frankly, Democrats do not care.

At the Los Angeles Times, "At least 13 killed in crash of SUV carrying more than 2 dozen near U.S.-Mexico border":

A collision between a big rig and an SUV carrying more than two dozen people near the U.S.-Mexico border Tuesday morning killed at least 13 and injured several others, authorities said.

About 6 a.m., the 2011 Peterbilt tractor-trailer was traveling north on Route 115 near El Centro when, for reasons that remained unclear, a Ford Expedition entered an intersection directly in front of the truck, according to a California Highway Patrol report. The truck plowed into the left side of the SUV.

The burgundy 1997 Ford, designed to hold no more than eight people, was carrying 25, said Arturo Platero, a spokesman for the CHP’s El Centro office. All but the driver’s and front passenger’s seats had been removed from the SUV.

Twelve people died at the scene, including the Expedition’s driver, whom the authorities identified only as a 28-year-old resident of Mexicali, Mexico. A 13th person died after being transferred to El Centro Regional Medical Center, Platero said. The truck driver, a 68-year-old resident of El Centro, suffered serious injuries and was taken to a hospital in Palm Springs, according to the CHP report.

An almost equal number of men and women were killed in the crash, said Omar Watson, chief of the CHP’s Border Division.

El Centro Regional Medical Center authorities reported earlier Tuesday that the SUV was carrying 28 people and 14 died at the scene, but CHP officials revised those numbers.

The SUV’s occupants, who ranged in age from 15 to 53, were all either injured or killed, Watson said. Authorities were still working Tuesday afternoon to identify all of the deceased victims and notify their families, he said. At least 10 of the dead were Mexican nationals, according to Roberto Velasco Álvarez, who heads the North America Department for the Mexican Foreign Ministry.

Four people were airlifted by helicopter to the Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs. Two others hurt in the crash were in intensive care, including one in critical condition, said Todd Burke, a spokesman for the hospital.

Three people were transported to Pioneers Memorial Healthcare District in Brawley, about 20 miles away. One was treated for injuries that were not life-threatening, according to Karina Lopez, a hospital spokeswoman. The other two — a woman and teenage boy — were then airlifted to Scripps Mercy Hospital San Diego.

Six others are being treated at El Centro Regional, Platero said.

Watson described the crash scene as “chaotic.” Officers found people who had been ejected onto the pavement and others wandering around the site, he said. Some had been ejected, some were pulled from the wreckage, and some “walking wounded” got out on their own, he said. First responders had to cut the sole passenger seat out of the vehicle to reach some of the wounded.

Later in the afternoon, someone placed small, colorful crosses around the crash site. Inscriptions scrawled on two of them read “Justicia migrantes” and “No mas muerte.”

“It’s a very sad situation,” Watson said. “That vehicle is not meant for that many people. It’s unfortunate that number of people were put into that vehicle because there’s not enough safety restraints to safely keep those people within the vehicle.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said special agents from Homeland Security Investigations responded to the scene of the crash and had opened a human smuggling investigation.

Dr. Shavonne Borchardt at El Centro Regional Medical Center said injuries ranged from fractures to life-threatening head and chest injuries. The hospital is transferring patients to other treatment centers as soon as they are stable, she said.

“Our staff has done a tremendous job getting everything ready for these patients and being able to handle them and get them transferred out to the appropriate places as soon as possible, or if we can take care of them here, they’re being well taken care of as well,” Borchardt said...

 

The 'Honorable' Merrick Garland Goes Mum at Confirmation Hearing (VIDEO)

Ed Driscoll has a fabulous roundup, at Instapundit, "MERRICK GARLAND WATCH."

At watch, at Fox News:

Rise in Migrant Children Tests Biden Border Strategy

Actually, China Joe doesn't have a "border strategy." He has an anti-Trump strategy, by which he seeks to literally undo any and every policy the former president implemented or pursued, and damned be the consequences.

On the migrant issue, Biden's now taking things even further than Barack Obama. Democrats in general do not want any borders --- or any border controls --- because everyone knows that the Dems can't win without "undocumented" voters, and don't even get me going about criminal aliens who commit heinous crimes, only to be released under the new administration's policies. 

Democrats are lawless and intentionally oblivious to the concerns of everyday Americans, as my posts here recently have pointed out.

At WSJ, "Administration seeks to avoid new crisis as child shelters near capacity":

WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is looking for ways to stave off a fresh humanitarian crisis at the southern border as the number of unaccompanied children arriving to seek asylum is beginning to rise again, this time amid a global pandemic, according to government officials and others familiar with the conversations.

Children have been crossing the border illegally in increasing numbers for the past few months after a lull, when the start of the pandemic and lockdowns across Latin America last spring briefly brought border crossings to historic lows. In January, 5,707 children arrived at the border alone, up from 4,855 the month before.

The numbers are smaller than in 2018 and 2019, when waves of children and families overwhelmed border-patrol stations and migrant shelters.

But this time, government capacity is limited: The child-shelter network run by the Department of Health and Human Services to house migrant children has reduced its capacity by 40%, and as of Friday, shelters were 93% full.

“They’ve seen very large growth in a very short period of time,” said Mark Greenberg, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, who oversaw the shelter network during the Obama administration. “The closer you get to 100% capacity, the harder the system is to manage.”

On Monday, the government plans to reopen an emergency shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas—a converted encampment that once hosted oil-field workers—to house 700 additional children. That facility, which opened in 2019 to manage the surge of children, and other emergency shelters had come under criticism from Democrats, in part because they didn’t follow standards governing care at permanent government shelters.

Unaccompanied children enjoy unique protections under immigration law that forbid the government from quickly deporting them. They are required to be sent to HHS shelters, where the government cares for them until they can find a suitable sponsor, typically a family member or family friend living in the U.S.

The risk, when HHS shelters get full, is that children get backed up in border-patrol stations, where they are housed in stark cells—with just a bench and a toilet—that are designed to hold single adults for a few hours rather than children for days.

As of Friday, more than 700 children were in Border Patrol custody, up from 150 on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the numbers.

“A jail cell is no place for a child, even for the shortest possible duration,” said Andrew Meehan, who served as the spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the border patrol’s parent agency, during the 2019 crisis.

The increase has several likely causes, U.S. and international officials say. Sagging economies and gang violence in Central America, exacerbated by the pandemic and a pair of hurricanes last year that hit the region, have continued to push migrants to flee.

“If we were not in the middle of a pandemic, we wouldn’t be facing the situation that we are in right now,” said an HHS official.

Human smugglers working in the region have also been telling would-be migrants to attempt the journey now, saying the new administration would prove more lenient than its predecessor...

Oh, yes, those "human smugglers" who China Joe and his far-left minions care about not one whit. And who is most hurt? Children, of course, because as any human trafficker knows, the Democrats are soft on border control, and traffickers can literally "make a killing" with their human prey.

This should make any person, and decent and thoughtful person, angry as hell.

Still more.

 

Democrats 'Going Bold' on Immigration Reform?

Well, the idiot Dems are no doubt "bold" in thinking that abolishing our nation's borders is good public policy. But of course, just about everything "China Joe" has done thus far, along with his weak "majority" cohorts in Congress, has been to hammer any and all "MAGA" supporters of former President Trump. From defunding the "wall" at the southern border, to canceling the Keystone pipeline up in South Dakota, it's like the dumb Dems are just oblivious to the real concerns of American citizens in the heartland. 

Of course, we'll see how it all turns out, when the 2022 midterms roll around, but you can bet good money that a LARGE number of uber-progressive Democrat legislators will be sweating out VERY tight campaigns to keep their seats.

That'll be fun to watch. The Senate is literally tied, and only with the help of V.P Harris can Dems get anything passed in that chamber; and in the House, Speaker Pelosi looks like she's flipped her wig, with all her wild rants and distractions about "white supremacist domestic terrorists." And, never forget, Trump, sure, was impeached twice, but never found guilty of all the hateful left's bogus attacks, dating back literally to the days after the 2016 election (Hillary won the popular vote! Russia! Ukraine! Bwawhahah!). 

So, we'll see. We'll see.

At LAT, "Democrats unveil broad immigration reform bill with citizenship path for 11 million":

WASHINGTON — President Biden made official on Thursday his aggressive opening salvo in a decades-long effort to reform a broken U.S. immigration system, which ground to a near-halt under his predecessor.

Democratic lawmakers introduced the legislation that Biden officials touted on his first day in the White House — an ambitious bill that would offer a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status.

With Democrats having a tenuous hold on both chambers of Congress, progressives have pushed the Biden administration to go “big, bold and inclusive” on immigration reform, as Rep. Linda T. Sanchez (D-Whittier) and Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the bill’s chief sponsors, put it in a statement Wednesday.

Republicans, for their part, began to decry the bill before it was announced, a potential sign that Biden’s proposal may join the congressional graveyard of efforts before it under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“I look forward to working with leaders in the House and Senate to address the wrongdoings of the past administration and restore justice, humanity and order to our immigration system,” Biden said in a statement Thursday. “These are not Democratic or Republican priorities — but American ones.”

But administration officials said that “this is not a bipartisan bill,” and they signaled Wednesday that they view it more as an opening bid and don’t necessarily expect it to pass with the needed Republican support in its current form.

“It is his vision of what it takes to fix the system,” one White House official said in a call with reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity without providing a reason, “and it’s also a chance to kind of reset and restart conversations on immigration reform after the last four years.”

At a news conference Thursday introducing the bill, Menendez, the highest-ranking Latino in Congress, said he knows the path forward will demand negotiations, but he refused to make concessions from the start, calling it “the righteous thing” to do...

And you know, it's not "11 million undocumented migrants" in this country. Only Democrats push that lie, but that's who they are, and that's what they do.

Awful ghouls, all around. 

 

A Last Look at a Remarkable Presidency

At Issues & Insights, "Trump’s Top-10 Triumphs":

President Donald Trump became an ex-president on Wednesday, as Joe Biden was inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. We wish him nothing but the best. But before we let Trump go, we thought we’d review some of his biggest accomplishments while in office. We call them “triumphs,” because they were all big achievements executed against great odds.

More than any other president of recent memory, Trump fought hard for average working Americans. And contrary to the epithets thrown at him by his far-left detractors in the Democratic Party, his policies helped low-income and minority Americans most of all.

We believe – we hope – that Trump’s post-presidential career and reputation will resemble President Ronald Reagan’s. For those old enough to remember, Reagan also was called every vile name in the book, from “senile” to “fascist” and everything between. Yet, today, in retrospect, his presidency shines as a beacon in our nation’s history.

Given the at-times unhinged nature of the criticism directed at Trump’s presidency by the left and Republican “never-Trumpers,” Trump’s performance in just four years was nothing short of remarkable. He promulgated dozens, if not hundreds, of successful policies that other presidents talked about, but never secured.

He reached so many we can’t highlight all of them. But here are 10 that we believe stand out — and that future presidents (are you listening, Joe Biden?) would be foolish to reverse or overturn:

1. Slashed taxes on individuals and businesses. As an earlier administration said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” As much as anything, Trump’s growth-boosting $1.9 trillion in tax cuts and doubling of the child tax credit led to the bottom-up growth of our economy, as unemployment rates plunged for African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Hispanics and women, and poverty rates plummeted to an all-time low in 2019, before COVID-19 struck. The bottom 20% of incomes posted a 16%-plus rise, the largest ever for those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.Yes, Wall Street and Silicon Valley moguls made out well as stocks boomed. But so did average Americans, especially the middle class. More than half of all Americans now own stock, a fact that’s lost on those who curse the stock market and “tax cuts for the rich.” By the way, the top income earners were the only group to pay more to Uncle Sam under the Trump tax cuts. And income inequality under Trump fell, after rising during Obama’s eight years in office.

2. Forged peace in the Mideast. The big media have tried to pretend that Trump’s unorthodox but astoundingly successful peace deals don’t exist. But it’s no accident that Trump has already been nominated — twice — for the Nobel Peace Prize. He deserves it. This year, thanks almost entirely to Trump’s efforts under the “Abraham Accords,” Israel has normalized diplomatic ties with four Arab League members: Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan and Morocco. Jordan and Egypt already have ties. Terrorist sponsor Iran, meanwhile, has never been more isolated and on the defensive than it is now, thanks to Trump’s pulling out of President Barack Obama’s phony “nuclear deal” with Tehran’s mullahs. And while the terrorist group ISIS still exists, it has effectively been neutered, a shell of its former self, pushed out of nearly all its strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

3. Created Operation Warp Speed. The Chinese virus hit the U.S. hard. It’s now clear that China’s communist regime downplayed the deadly virus outbreak early, leading to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus that official data show has killed 400,000 Americans. Trump was ridiculed and berated for daring to think he could push the creation of a new, effective vaccine within the remaining months of his term. Yet, as Bloomberg noted on Wednesday, “Vaccinations in the U.S. began Dec. 14 with health care workers, and so far 16.3 million shots have been given, according to a state-by-state tally … In the last week, an average of 806,716 doses per day were administered.” The vaccine critics were dead wrong, and Trump’s push may well end up saving hundreds of thousands of lives in coming years.

4. Deregulated the nation’s economy. It’s not sexy. But Trump promised to cut two regulations for every new one proposed. He beat even that estimate, cutting eight regulations for every one added. If you think that doesn’t matter, consider this: Regulations currently cost the economy nearly $2 trillion a year, or about $14,000 a year for every U.S. household. Trump’s rule-cutting saved the average American household an average of $3,100 a year.

5. Got rid of Obamacare’s “individual mandate”. By far the most odious element of Obama’s first step toward socialized medicine was its requirement that all Americans must buy health insurance. For the first time ever, the U.S. government forced its citizens to purchase something, whether they wanted it or not. This part of the 2010 bill was clearly unconstitutional, as a federal appeals court ruled late last year. Americans are, for now, safe from being forced to buy insurance policies they don’t want. At least, that is, until the new Democratic administration begins its push for Medicare for All, or some other nationalized health care scheme.

6. Restored Supreme Court balance. By naming three new justices, Trump assured Americans that the court’s days of rulings based on politics and ideology, not the Constitution, are over. At least for the foreseeable future. Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, are all strong constitutionalists who have sterling reputations for fairness and non-political legal decision making. “A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers,” Barrett said during her nomination hearings in the Senate, a fitting description for all Trump’s choices. That includes the more than 230 judges he appointed to the federal bench.

7. Forced NATO to reform. Trump pushed NATO members to live up to their commitments to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense, part of a 2014 deal that came after years of NATO countries shirking their duty to pull their own weight in the military alliance. In Trump’s first year in office, just four of the 30 NATO members met the 2% floor. Today, 10 do, and more will increase spending by $400 billion by 2024. By demanding NATO to keep its promises, Trump likely saved the West’s main military alliance.

8. Encouraged U.S. energy independence. By encouraging fracking and approving the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump set off an energy boom. And he did something that no one thought possible just four years ago: He made the U.S. energy independent for the first time in 70 years, meaning we would no longer be held hostage to unstable petro-powers and the vagaries of foreign energy supplies. Fracking enabled the U.S. to boost its output of natural gas, with many major utilities now using the cheap, clean source of energy instead of coal and other major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. The result: the U.S. is one of the only major countries whose CO2 emissions are plunging, with output now at the lowest levels since 1985.

9. Reformed immigration and built the border wall. Despite being called a “racist” and “fascist” and “anti-immigrant,” Trump has now built more than 450 miles of wall to restore control of our nation’s borders against illegal entrants into the U.S., including gang members, smugglers and drug dealers. As journalist Deroy Murdock recently noted, “federal apprehensions and encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border have plunged from 977,509 in fiscal year 2019 to 458,088 in fiscal year 2020 — down 53.1%.” A blow to Mexico? Not according to a recent Reuters headline: “Mexico’s Lopez Obrador says Trump helped Mexico.“

10. Withdrew from the Paris Climate Deal. The U.S. is the only major country actually living up to the Paris Climate Accords’ steep cuts in CO2 emissions. But the deal is still a bad one, since it commits the U.S. and other major industrial nations to shrink their economies over the long run to meet arbitrary CO2 limits in the future. Meanwhile, fast-growing countries such as China and India have few binding requirements on their emissions. The result: Those two countries, with more than a third of the world’s population, continue to spew CO2. This year China’s coal use surged above 2015 levels, “undercutting climate pledges,” according to a news report out this week. Biden’s plan to rejoin the Paris deal will only bolster China and hamstring the U.S. going forward. It’s a climate-based “America last” policy...

Still more.

 

Latinos Now the Majority at the University of California

This seems, umm, anticlimactic.

And Michelle Malkin's got the rejoinder:

They're allowed to celebrate this, but if I talk about it, I'm a racist conspiracy theorist...

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 16, 2020

Mobility of Newcomers to America: Poor Immigrants Rise?

Lost in the debate about "build the wall," and so forth, is the basic fact that a majority of Americans embraces immigration as a "net plus" to society and our future. Frankly, the debate today is not about legal or illegal immigration or the appropriate levels of newcomers to our country. The debate now, on the left in particularly, is whether to have any meaningful control of our national sovereignty at all. Leftists literally want open borders, as Andrew Sullivan pointed out over the summer.

Putting that to the side, it's fascinating that newcomers to the country, regardless of the country of origin, succeed economically at a rate consistent to patterns of immigration going back over a century. This should be a confirmation of our pride as a "land of opportunity." People come here to seek a better life, to escape political and religious tyranny, and to have a better material life for themselves and for their families.

But, are the sending their best lately? I'm skeptical.

At the New York Times, "Children of Poor Immigrants Rise, Regardless of Where They Come From":

Data on millions of father-son pairs going back to the 1880 census shows the kids of poor immigrants have consistently had higher upward mobility than kids of native-born parents: https://t.co/fg00VD9tm2

— Emily Badger (@emilymbadger) October 28, 2019

Immigration to the United States has consistently offered a route to escape poverty — if not for poor immigrants themselves, then for their sons.

New research linking millions of fathers and sons dating to the 1880s shows that children of poor immigrants in America have had greater success climbing the economic ladder than children of similarly poor fathers born in the United States. That pattern has been remarkably stable for more than a century, even as immigration laws have shifted and as the countries most likely to send immigrants to the United States have changed.

The adult children of poor Mexican and Dominican immigrants in the country legally today achieve about the same relative economic success as children of poor immigrants from Finland or Scotland did a century ago. All of them, in their respective eras, have fared better than the children of poor native-born Americans. If the American dream is to give the next generation a better life, it appears that poor immigrants have more reliably achieved that dream than native-born Americans have.

The findings, published in a working paper by a team of economic historians at Princeton, Stanford and the University of California, Davis, challenge several arguments central to the debate over immigration in America today. The Trump administration has moved to reorient the country’s legal immigration toward wealthier immigrants and away from poorer ones, arguing that the nation can’t afford to welcome families who will burden public programs like Medicaid. This research suggests that immigrants who arrive in poverty often escape it, if not in the first generation then the second.

“The short-term perspective on immigrant assimilation that politicians tend to take might underestimate the long-run success of immigrants,” said Ran Abramitzky, a professor at Stanford and one of the paper’s authors, along with Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome and Santiago Pérez. “By the second generation, they are doing quite well.” Keep reading.

President Trump and other proponents of tighter immigration have also suggested that today’s immigrants, predominantly from Latin America and Asia, are less likely to assimilate into the economy than earlier immigrant waves from Europe. This data suggests that is not true. It also shows that Norwegians, whom President Trump has held up as model immigrants, were in fact among the least successful after they arrived.

More.

And then don't forget to read Michelle Malkin's book, Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?

Thirty-Nine "Chinese Nationals' Dead in Truck Container-Trailer in Grays, Essex (VIDEO)

Terrible, terrible awful story.

At the Telegraph U.K., "Detectives focus in on Irish gang after 39 migrants froze to death in lorry."

Growing Numbers of Immigrants Getting Naturalized So They Can Vote

For Democrats, this is what it's all about. Flood the country with immigrant, who vote for the far-left Dems at a rate of about 5-1.

At LAT, "As Trump seeks reelection, immigrant voters stand in his path":

New: As Trump seeks reelection, a growing army of immigrant voters stands in his path.

Naturalized citizens cast more than 8% of the ballots in 2018 — double their share since 1996 — helping put Texas, Georgia and Arizona closer in reach for Democrats. https://t.co/EREYnajTjj

— Matt Pearce bargained a fair contract 🦅 (@mattdpearce) October 23, 2019

HOUSTON —  This is where a nation changes: a public school auditorium that moonlights as a veritable citizenship factory.

At the M.O. Campbell Educational Center, where murals honoring the arts and sciences adorn the walls, U.S. immigration officials routinely hold packed naturalization ceremonies. Immigrants approved for citizenship walk in, take the oath of allegiance, and walk out as Americans — and as a small army of new voters.

“It will never, ever be easier to register than it is this morning,” U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison, who presided over a ceremony last month, told the 2,155 immigrants from more than 100 countries who had just taken their citizenship oaths. “The record for registrations is 89% of those who are sworn in.... Let’s see if we can break that record today.”

Amish Soni, a 34-year-old radiologist from India holding a small American flag, was one of the 85% who registered to vote that morning, aided by a volunteer from the League of Women Voters. He “definitely” plans to vote in 2020, partly because he thinks the healthcare system should be fixed, but also: “I’m not a big fan of Donald Trump.” And he’s far from the only one.

At ceremonies like these across the country, hundreds of thousands of immigrants are expected to receive their U.S. citizenship and become eligible to vote before November 2020, gently reshaping — and threatening — the electoral path that President Trump must thread to win reelection.

Over the last two decades, naturalized immigrants have grown into a force at the ballot box, with the United States recently swearing in more than 700,000 foreign-born U.S. citizens each year.

Naturalized citizens — who share the full legal rights of natural-born citizens, except for the ability to become president — cast more than 8% of the ballots in the 2018 midterm elections, almost double their share in the 1996 presidential contest, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

Surveys show that many of the new citizens are liberal-leaning, which is one of several demographic trends helping put some historically red states such as Texas, Arizona and Georgia closer to Democrats’ reach.

The gains in immigrants’ electoral strength have been gradual. But Trump’s anti-immigration policies may be accelerating the trend by spurring even more people to naturalize and to vote, worrying some moderate Republican experts.

“It’s not ‘bad-ish’ news. It’s extremely bad,” said Mike Madrid, a Sacramento-based GOP consultant who studies Latino voters. He thinks the party’s use of anti-immigrant rhetoric to mobilize non-college-educated white voters will come at a steep electoral price. “This is a five-alarm fire.”

Keep reading.

U.S.-Mexico Border Barrier Proves Walls Work

The U.S. Border Patrol beefed up San Diego's border enforcement in the early 1990s, to rousing success. But now, as evidenced by this L.A. Times piece, you'd think it was all a failure. The story laments the "humanitarian" impact of actually reducing the flood of illegal aliens. (San Diego locals were stoked though, having gotten their neighborhoods back and not living in constant fear of crime and violence on their streets.)

Bottom line: Walls work and leftists don't like it.

Operation Gatekeeper at 25: Look back at the turning point that transformed the border https://t.co/ezRgFVsHby

— L.A. Times: L.A. Now (@LANow) September 30, 2019

Michelle Malkin National Book Tour

She's coming to the O.C. on October 15th, at Angelo and Vinci's Italian Restaurant in Fullerton (not technically "Los Angeles").

Her new book's at Amazon, Michelle Malkin, Open Borders Inc.: Who's Funding America's Destruction?

Email me if you'd like to have a meet up before her book signing.

The #AbolishICE mob is threatening our immigration enforcement agents & endangering us all. I'm taking #StandWithICE straight to sanctuary hellholes. Need patriots to join me. More to come==> https://t.co/aThvSvw6dG #openbordersinc #malkintour pic.twitter.com/MrO04IvcYI

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) August 28, 2019

Citizenship and American Identity

We can't take in everybody.

At City Journal, "If We Extend American Citizenship to Everyone in the World, Can We Still Be a Country?":

Citizenship and American Identity: If we extend the designation to everyone in the world, how can we still be a country? https://t.co/uAYlbsWsEe pic.twitter.com/Gs3kyMiyu3

— City Journal (@CityJournal) August 2, 2019

And ICYMI, Andrew Sullivan's must read on Democrat immigration proposals, "Democrats Offering a Great Deal to People Who Aren't Americans."

Supreme Courts Clears Pentagon Border Wall Funding (VIDEO)

At LAT, "Supreme Court rules for Trump in border wall funding dispute."