Disillusionment

 

The worst of the worst, really?

I was gone for a couple of weeks, and when I got back the whole place had gone nuts. The president seemed bent on conquering Greenland, apparently because he thinks the island is as big as it looks in the traditional Mercator projection and he just had to have it, and had in fact persuaded the Venezuelan Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado to give him her prize, or at least the gold medal that represents it (the prize itself also includes a variable monetary award of around 10 million Swedish kronor or one million US dollars, which the recipient normally uses to benefit the cause for which it was awarded, and which Machado didn't surrender to Trump, as far as I can learn, though I'm sure he'd have cheerfully accepted the money if it was offered, and the reputational enhancement that comes of having been judged worthy of the prize by the Norwegian committee, a glory that can no more be transferred than that of Trump's unearned Super Bowl rings and Purple Hearts, as the Committee made clear). 

Then there was the paramilitary occupation of Minnesota by 2000 irregular troops, 3000 after January, which seemed a good deal more serious than all that tomfoolery, more Miller than Trump if you know what I mean, with ICE and CBP terrorizing the Twin Cities with their arbitrary seizures of people, especially Somali and Latino, in "Operation Metro Surge" since Trump condemned Somalia as "garbage", not so different from what we'd already seen in California, Illinois, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C., in particular the ethnic profiling leading to arrests and detention of US citizens and permanent residents and otherwise protected people and kidnaping of children, parking them in the hideous prison camps rising around the country, not to mention all the simple people occupying what may be considered an "illegal" position on US territory (I'll get to that later) doing nothing but working, often in what we call "essential" occupations, educating themselves, and caring for their kids—the exceptional discipline of the general population rising to help protect their neighbors evade the invaders—and the out-of-control response of the latter, who seem to have decided they're at war and so far murdered two.

Things are now apparently getting a little bit better. Seven hundred of the Guards have been removed from the site. Citizens and other officially protected individuals are still getting wrongfully arrested for immigration violations, but are now able to file a habeas claim to get out, though not very quickly: it's going to take you a long time to get your day in court as the entire federal justice system in Minnesota collapses:

the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office has been crippled by mass resignations, including some of its most senior career attorneys. That has left the remaining DOJ attorneys in Minnesota inundated with more cases than they can keep up with. But I’m not sure that does justice to what’s been happening. It’s quite a bit worse than that.

The quality of lawyering has eroded to such a point that government lawyers have been unable to keep up with the court orders demanding that detainees be released. As a result, detainees have lingered in confinement even after courts have ordered their release....

You've probably heard of Julie Le, a DHS lawyer seconded to the U.S. Attorney's Office who was called in to explain why ICE was failing to comply with court orders and more or less broke down in front of the judge:

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.”

***

Birthright Citizenship Redux

Wong Kim Ark, from a 1904 US immigration document, via Wikimedia Commons. 

Revised and expanded from the post of January 26, with what I think is a somewhat new argument up in front, inspired immediately by an irritating Bluesky post. 

Maybe the birthright citizenship order will ultimately be held unconstitutional, but I find it highly embarrassing for a judge to say something so unequivocally at a preliminary stage without the slightest acknowledgement that there is an entire literature that disagrees. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/2R4OE9lT8a

— Ilan Wurman (@ilan_wurman) January 23, 2025

The "entire literature" (which seems to consist of a single book by Peter Shuck and Rogers Smith, Citizenship without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Polity, Yale University Press, 1985, and its brief recap in the American Enterprise Institute's magazine National Affairs, summer 2018, presumably published in the hope of attracting attention from President Trump and his factotum Stephen Miller), is fatally flawed by its failure to recognize the significance of an obvious fact: there were no "illegal aliens" in the United States at the time the 14th Amendment passed Congress in 1866 and was ratified two years later, only millions of immigrants who might or might not choose to be naturalized (white immigrants, that is, under the terms of the Naturalization Acts of 1798 and 1802).

And when those immigrants had children, as they often did, no reason to question their citizenship or "naturalize" them; as affirmed in an 1844 New York state case, Lynch v. Clarke, in which a state judge held that a woman born in New York City, of alien parents temporarily sojourning there, was a U.S. citizen. They were "natural" already; for the children of immigrants, birthright citizenship was the universal norm (local governments could order the deportation of obnoxious individual immigrants, but there wasn't a national policy). Miller's scenario is completely irrelevant to the realities of the time when the 14th Amendment was written.

The hard cases before 1866-68 were not immigrants, but people whose parents were born within the borders of the US: citizens of the Indigenous nations, and the freed descendants of enslaved Africans.

Annotated Edition

Mark Wilson/Getty Images, via Vox.

Annotated edition of the NBC interview with the president-elect. Nearly all of his response to the first question, "What do you plan to accomplish in your first 100 days?"

Well, we’re going to do something with the border, very strong, very powerful. 

But you won't tell us what?

That’ll be our first signal — first signal to America that we’re not playing games. 

Oh, sending a signal. Something with the border, and it's going to be a signal. To America.

We have people coming in by the millions, as you know, and a lot of people shouldn’t be here. Most of them shouldn’t be here.

It has not been anything like millions at the border since December 2023, and especially since Biden's executive order of last June.

And how do you know who should and shouldn't be here?  

But we have jails being emptied into our country. We have mental institutions from all over the world being emptied into our country. 

Nobody, including your own campaign staff, has ever been able to point to any evidence that there is any truth to this story—

Vance in Defense of the Lie

Drawing by Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press, 7/17/24.

Anne Applebaum, of all people, created or appropriated a meme, and a good one:

This was the moment that mattered. Trump's political movement relies on total impunity for liars, and mostly gets it. The lies bind them together, cement their feeling of power. pic.twitter.com/McbdBNwUyq

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) October 2, 2024

This is another instance of the same shocking openness as when Vance claimed that he was justified in telling lies (on the imaginary pet-eating in Springfield, Ohio) in order to get attention—

The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana...

—and in this case turning it around on the moderator, making her the offender, and taking advantage of the moment to tell a more difficult-to-expose lie without fear of correction, as you see from the transcript:

Margaret. The rules were that you guys weren't going to fact check, and since you're fact checking me, I think it's important to say what's actually going on. So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand. That is not a person coming in, applying for a green card and waiting for ten years.

The CBP1 app, introduced in October 2020, was originally meant for truckers crossing from Mexico into US to schedule cargo inspections, so they could just show up at the border at their appointment time instead of lining up and waiting for hours and days clogging the road. In January 2023, DHS added some new functionality, so that it could also be used by individuals applying for asylum (from all over the place, but chiefly at that time the "Northern Triangle" of Central America) or Temporary Protected Status (at the moment for Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans) to schedule interviews from the Mexican side of the border instead of having to wait in line for hours and days and months or, in the pattern that had become a serious problem since 2014 or so, crossing the border at an uncontrolled spot and chasing down a border patrol agent to interview them; and that May, the app was made the only way to get a first asylum interview at the Mexican border.

So the app, far from being a "Kamala Harris open border wand", is a piece of cell phone tech for applying the law as it has stood since the 1990 Immigration Act was signed by George H.W. Bush (in which Temporary Protected Status was instituted—the asylum provisions date back well before that), and meant to get rid of the much decried chaos at the border, or rather keep it on the Mexican side. In fact it adds a good deal of harshness to the system (for which it has been rightly called out by organizations like ACLU), as waiting in Mexico is difficult and dangerous, and it can take a really long time. But in terms of what it was intended to do, it's worked exceedingly well, with migration at the border at its lowest level since fall 2020 (when the Covid pandemic had largely shut it down).

And Vance's picture of a Kamala conspiracy to wave people in (presumably to vote illegally and beget "anchor babies" that will dilute America's blood) is as grotesquely false as the cat-eating canard. 

Senator, the question was, will you separate parents from their children, even if their kids are U.S. citizens? You have 1 minute.

JDV: Margaret, my point is that we already have massive child separations thanks to Kamala Harris' open border. And I didn't accuse Kamala Harris of inviting drug mules, I said that she enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country, and we know that they use children as drug mules, and it is a disgrace and it has to stop. Look, I think what Tim said just doesn't pass the smell test. For three years, Kamala Harris went out bragging that she was going to undo Donald Trump's border policy. She did exactly that. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. And now, now that she's running for President, or a few months before, she says that somehow she got religion and cared a lot about a piece of legislation. The only thing that she did when she became the Vice President, when she became the appointed border czar, was to undo 94 Donald Trump executive actions that opened the border.

Harris wasn't the "appointed border czar"; she was asked in early 2021 to work on combating the "root causes" of the wave of asylum seekers coming through Mexico from the three countries of the Northern Triangle (Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala) by improving cooperation with the four countries on US immigration law and by encouraging investment to relieve the economic stresses of living in Central America, and it may have had some effect—by 2023 just 16% of all CPB encounters were with people from Golden Triangle countries, compared to 52% in 2021 (replaced by Venezuelans and Haitians, who were not part of Harris's mandate).

It's true that some family separations took place up through 2022, of parents accused of gang affiliations, or through the stupid Trump-instituted Title 42 program, but nothing like the systematic destruction of families pushed through by Stephen Miller in his truly czar-like, sadistic and violent, reign.

Fentanyl is not smuggled into the US by undocumented aliens, but by US citizens driving cars at the official crossings. Do the cartels use children as mules? Sure, if they're Americans and can drive:

But Look, Clearly

 

Screen capture via Fox 5 San Diego. Rep. Greene looking a little like Spike Lee at a Knicks game, if the Knicks wore red, except Spike knows the difference between a basketball game and a joint session of Congress.

I'm just not ready to stop talking about the SOTU, because there are still more ways in which it was totally unique that I haven't gotten to, in the laundry list body of the speech as well, like when he warned the attendant justices of the Supreme Court that overturning Roe v. Wade had been a serious political mistake, throwing their own words in their faces:

Look, in its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court majority wrote the following, and with all due respect, justices, “Women are not without electoral, electoral power” — excuse me — “electoral or political power.” You’re about to realize just how much you got right about that.

Clearly, clearly, those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the power of women. But they found out when reproductive freedom was on the ballot. We won in 2022 and 2023, and we will win again in 2024.

If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you, I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.

Some nominal supporters of abortion rights were stomping on this because Roe v. Wade wasn't, in fact, all that radical, allowing states to set whatever restrictions they wanted on terminating pregnancy after 24 weeks, but those critics might not be aware of what "codifying Roe" has come to mean since Dobbs. It's not your grandfather's Roe, as evidenced by the formula advanced by Abigail Spanberger (D-VA, not known as a wild-eyed leftist):

The Spanberger-backed legislation would create a statutory right for providers to provide and patients to receive an abortion — without facing medically unnecessary restrictions. The bill would also block the government from requiring providers to provide inaccurate information to patients, remove the ability to require that patients make medically unnecessary in-person visits before receiving an abortion, and restrict the government from forcing patients to disclose their reasons for seeking an abortion before receiving care. 

Proponents are now rejecting the ahistorical idea that fetuses have rights that compete with those of the pregnant person, regardless of Justice Alito's bogus arguments. The new version is an unqualified right for the person with the womb.

He's also taken heat for referring to the man who has been charged with murdering a University of Georgia nursing student last month as "an illegal" in the speech, during his back-and-forth with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, although the way he used the word suggested he wan't entirely familiar with it (I think he picked it up from whatever Greene howled at him, but I'm not finding a report of her exact words):

Lincoln [recte Laken] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal, that’s right. But how many thousands of people are being killed by legals?

What are "legals"? Sounds like he means legal immigrants, who are of course the least likely people in the United States to commit a violent crime, or any crime at all. The most likely are those who are citizens by birth, with the undocumented being somewhere between. (The best-confirmed example is homicide convictions: 2.8 per 100,000 US-born residents, 2.4 per 100,000 undocumented foreign residents, and 1.1 per 100,000 for the documented foreign-born.) Given that there are maybe 13 million undocumented  migrants and 30 million documented ones vs. about 285 million US-born, that certainly adds up to thousands of killings by the last group for each one by the first.

José Antonio Ibarra, the alleged murderer, is a Venezuelan asylum seeker, and thus not exactly "illegal" anyway. He and his then wife and her child crossed the border at an unlawful spot near El Paso in September 2022 and surrendered to CBP, which paroled them, and then somebody, presumably Governor Greg Abbott, had them bused to New York, where they were given court dates, and where he found work delivering meals and maybe got busted in Queens for endangering the welfare of a child, riding his moped with the wife's kid on his back, with no helmet (but NYPD has no record of the arrest). He eventually left New York to join his brother, who was living with a fake green card in Athens, Georgia, and found work there, but made his immigration court appearance in New York in December, and then apparently did this horrible thing, killing Laken Riley with a blunt instrument and dragging her body into the woods, though the wife continues to doubt he was the one who did it:

“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives. He wasn’t aggressive, none of that,” she said. “We had problems as a couple but our problems weren’t physical. We wouldn’t punch but we’d raise our voices."

Completely lost in the discussion is the thing Biden actually said to Greene after that, his important comment on the case, improvised away from the written text, which a lot of listeners may not have understood, though the congressmembers definitely should have:

To her parents, I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself. I understand.

But look, if we change the dynamic at the border — people pay these smugglers 8,000 bucks to get across the border because they know if they get by, if they get by and let into the country, it’s six to eight years before they have a hearing. And it’s worth the taking a chance for the $8,000.

But if it’s only six weeks, the idea is it’s highly unlikely that people will pay that money and come all that way knowing that they’ll be able to be kicked out quickly.

Most asylum applicants are going to lose their cases, even in New York, where immigration judges tend to be a lot friendlier than in Texas, and in many or most of those instances they probably don't really deserve to win, at least in terms of the law as it's written. But the law as written also demands that the cases be heard. 

Biden is saying that the incredible bottleneck that has existed for some time in the system, while Congress fails to pass a comprehensive reform, actually encourages people without credible fears to come to Mexico and cross into the waiting arms of a CBP agent, because they know that, while they will eventually lose and get deported, they'll have six or eight years to make and save some money before that happens, enough perhaps to turn into landlords when they get home. If José Antonio Ibarra's asylum case had been heard in El Paso a few weeks after his arrival, in October 2022, Abbott wouldn't have had an opportunity to bus him to New York, and Ibarra wouldn't have had an opportunity to commit any crimes there or in Athens. More than that, as Biden suggests, if he knew he'd be sent back to Venezuela that soon, he'd likely never have left.

That's a major part of the reason Biden's proposals for "fixing the border" always depend so much on beefing up the resources of the system, the CBP agents and immigration judges, along with trying to get people to apply for asylum without coming to the US, from consulates in their home countries, or from the Mexico side of border using the phone app. And (the legally and morally questionable aspect) making it easier for CPB to deport them straight away. It's because our immigration system is broken, as they say, and when they say it's broken they don't mean it's evil, though its consequences often are evil, hurting innocent people for no good reason; they mean it doesn't work any more—it's in need of major repairs that Congress has been putting off for many years, mostly because Republican members are afraid their voters won't like it.

Though there are Republicans, often in Great Plains states like Oklahoma that have been bleeding population for a century, who realize that we need more immigration, not less, which is why James Lankford worked so hard on the bill currently languishing in the House because Trump ordered Mikey Johnson not to put it on the floor.

I could wish Biden wouldn't work so hard insisting that Lankford's bill is "conservative"

In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen. Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill, huh? That conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned, that’s amazing.

but I understand why he does it: to highlight the perversity of the Republicans rejecting it, after wailing all year about the situation at the border, out of nothing but Trump's fear of giving Biden a W.

But it would be better to highlight the way these "bipartisan" feats of legislation always require Democrats to make all the sacrifices—while Republicans demand to be bribed, as they have been in all these matters involving immigration and foreign policy this year, to do the things they claim to want. It would be better to handle this the way he handled the abortion rights issue, asking voters to send him a better Congress so he can do a better job.

Somewhat edited version at the Substack.

Immigration and Caesarism

Jessie Fuentes stands during an August 7 vigil organized by residents of Eagle Pass to protest Gov. Greg Abbot’s policies and to remember migrants who died crossing the Rio Grande. Fuentes is the owner of a kayak business in Eagle Pass, which he started after he retired in order to offer tours of the river. According to Manuel Ortiz, Fuentes is a deeply spiritual man and a lover of nature. He sees Abbot’s barriers as a violation of life, both of the people and of the natural world. “What the government is doing here is killing the river… They are destroying our community.” (Photo by Manuel Ortiz, via Ethnic Media Services)

 

I was enjoying this rightwinger response to the Senate's immigration bill, from Carl Goldman of the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce, at the Santa Clarita News—

Fact #1: The proposed bill will legalize up to 5,000 adults to cross the border DAILY. Children are unlimited. That’s over 1.8 million per year, plus kids. Under the legislation the border never closes.

Fact #2: All future legal disputes will be taken away from the states and controlled by the US Federal DC District Court. This court is perhaps our most lenient court in the land. It would prohibit any Governor and any state Attorney General from effectively challenging any Federal immigration policy, such as the current “open border” crisis that saw 8.5 unvetted illegal immigrants enter the country under the Biden administration, an amount greater than the current population in 36 states.

Fact #3: The bill calls for 3,275 new border personnel. This sounds like a good thing, assisting the already overloaded border patrol. Read the fine print. These new employees won’t stop the flow. Their roll will be to speed up the processing.

Fact #4: Once this law is put into place, it will be extremely difficult to pass a new law tightening policies. It would tie the hand of future administrations from implementing a closure or partial closure of the border.

Fact #5: The Republican led House of Representatives passed HR 2 last May. It created a much more effective set of tighter immigration policies. To date, it has remained untouched for over nine months on US Senator House Majority leader, Chuck Schumer’s desk [except, as reader Foghorn Leghorn points out, when Ted Cruz added the text of HR2 as an amendment and the vote failed, 32-58].

These five facts alone should be enough to convince any rational individual questioning our current open border policy to run as far away from the Senate bill as possible. How any Republican or Democrat Senator could support this is creating insurmountable challenges for our country. Perhaps they skipped over a few of the 400 pages.

—when I started realizing he was right, in a way. 

For the Record: Texas Trolls

Via National Women's History Museum.

Gish Galloped from Eleanor Roosevelt to Pudding Fingers DeSantis

That was a Democrat President that denied the Jews asylum. Many of the people at the border are being let in without court dates and the ones that are given dates are for the year 2030.

— Bluecaribe (@Bluecaribe2) May 21, 2023

I'm more concerned about Republicans in Congress today who are responsible for failure to pass comprehensive immigration legislation, especially Marco Rubio, who backed off it in one of the most cynical moves I've ever seen.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) May 21, 2023

The Other Big Lie

 

This thing I saw on Twitter Thursday afternoon

is in the first place an egregious deception, because that photo of a caravan from Honduras marching through Arriaga in Chiapas state (credited to AFP/Getty) is from October 2018, in the middle of the Trump Administration, and has no connection to anything that is happening now, and my first thought on seeing it was that posting it is some kind of Republican dirty trick. Were they spreading the story of open borders in the hope of encouraging more migrants to come, with the purpose of making the Biden administration look bad? Working to create a genuine crisis for a political profit?

As the declaration of an end to the COVID emergency approached, and with it the Title 42 provisions allowing the border patrol to bar migrants more or less at random on the grounds that they might spread the virus, which they started using to bar asylum seekers under the Trump administration (as if they had more chance of bringing COVID to Texas than of catching it there themselves) and continued doing after courts blocked Biden from stopping the policy, and the policy was thus going to be blocked more or less automatically on Thursday, a remarkable chorus of doomsaying Republicans began to arise, like these from the Twitter account of @sentedcruz:

For the Record: Punk'D by Ron DeSantis

That George Wallace–era prank Texas governor Greg Abbot has been playing and Florida governor Ron DeSantis has attempted to emulate rreally isn't any funnier than it was in 1962

There are no new ideas https://t.co/nLmASZYQQK

— big dicta energy (@BigDictaEnergy) September 15, 2022

if you recognize how frightened and bewildered the people they're using must feel, but that obviously doesn't bother DeSantis

Jeez, Ron, you don't act as if you take it seriously. You act like you're running an episode of Punk'D https://t.co/NShd37exnw

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 15, 2022

But it's re-raising a bunch of issues that haven't gotten the attention they really deserve; just summarizing:

Literary Corner; Wokers of the World

 

My new Twitter handle, which I'll probably dump in a week or two, is from Senator John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), the tool with the Oxford doctorate, rubbery lips and finger-wave hair who pretends to be a folksy Walt Kelly character, looking like Porky Pine (above) and thinking like Senator Simple J. Malarkey (a sweaty caricature of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy), who's taken to ranting about "woke neosocialist cupcakes", and recently introduced the word "wokers", as in maybe "Wokers of the world, unite!" in this bizarre appearance with Sean Hannity:

Bow to the Wokers

by Senator John Neely Kennedy

I think they believe in open borders
That is very unfair — I mean, think about it.
We have Nigerian doctors and German engineers
who are following the law, they're waiting years
to be properly vetted, but yet President Biden
will allow any gangbanger who can cross the river
and jump the fence, he just says, 'Come on into America.'
It's also very dangerous. We don’t have the
slightest idea who's coming into our country.
But I don’t think the Biden Administration
will change because they prefer to bow
to the wokers and open borders as part
of the Woker Cupcake Bible. The wokers
honestly believe that venting people
at the border is racist. They honestly
believe that. And I know that sounds like —
that I am saying it, I am from Crazy
Town, but that is what they believe.

U.S. Humanitarian Relief for Ukrainians in the Wake of Russian Invasion

A Ukrainian woman reacts after arriving at the Medyka border crossing, in Poland, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022.  Since Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine, more than 200,000 people have been forced to flee the Country to bordering nations like Romania, Poland, Hungary, Moldova, and the Czech Republic — in what the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said will have “devastating humanitarian consequences” on civilians. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu) (Fair Use)

Most of the World has been horrified by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a sovereign nation that posed no threat whatsoever to the Russian Federation.  The U.N. estimates that two million refugees have already fled Ukraine.  While preliminary reports suggested that the total number of refugees could be as high as five million, I believe the number will be much, much higher as the fighting continues and Russian forces target civilians. U.S. sees 'very credible reports' of deliberate attacks on civilians in Ukraine.

The United States has helped organize a strong, united response to this Russian aggression. Still, it has only begun to consider what steps it will take to protect the countless citizens of Ukraine fleeing the violence or who have found themselves stranded overseas when the invasion started.

This post will discuss the most recent aid developments and the options that Ukrainians have, depending on where they are and what their current U.S. immigration "status" is.

Literary Corner: Holy Fool

The holy fool Private Kozma Prutkov, creation of the 19th-century novelist and satirist Aleksei Tolstoy, in a drawing by M. Dormer (Nature, June 2000). Asked which was more important, the sun or the moon, he replied, "The moon, of course! It shines at night, when we need the light, while the sun only shines in the daytime!" (Probably stolen by the Russians from the Muslim folk hero Mullah Nasreddin.)

 

The Moon's Orbit Is Apparently Changing Some

by Louis Buller Gohmert, Jr.

Yeah, well, we can't
do anything substantive
about the climate change
right now,

when the moon's orbit
is apparently changing some,
the earth's orbit is changing some,
according to NASA.

But we can do something
about people that will continue
to die getting across
our border.

IMMIGRATION: "THE MACHINE STOPS" OR, DEALING WITH AN IMMIGRATION SYSTEM "DISMANTLED IN ITS ENTIRETY" PART 1

Book Cover Courtesy: brooklinebooksmoth

Reference to the famous 1909 short story by E.M. Forster is a good way to start this post.  The story describes a world in which humanity lives underground serviced by a single, all-knowing machine that limits human contact to Zoom-like screens, and takes care of all other human needs in its own way – that is until "the machine stops."  

You will recall in my introductory post that I referred to statements by the incoming Department of Homeland Security, (DHS) Alejandro Mayorka, that: 

To put it succinctly, the prior administration dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety.

For someone who has dealt professionally with the immigration system since 2002, I thought this statement was rhetorical to some degree, bitter as I was about Trump and the illegally appointed apparatchiks he put in place to sabotage the system.  I refer, among others, to Ken (the Cooch) Cucinelli, the former "Acting Director" of USCIS

If the Creek Do Rise, What Else Will? Protect Yourself!

 

Lindsay Graham, in his hypothetical, is fully armed, watching all his neighbors get killed by a gang. https://t.co/vlbEWUn0Gt

— A.R. (Ancient Router) Moxon (@JuliusGoat) March 28, 2021

Central, South Carolina (pop. ca. 5,385), home of Senator Lindsey Woolsey Graham, isn't in central South Carolina, but up in Pickens County in the state's far northwest, and not exactly in a hurricane zone, or prone to earthquakes or volcanoes

Pickens County, SC, via Wikipedia.

but that doesn't mean it's without its perils, as people learned last year in nearby Easley, and and all along the Calhoun Memorial Highway (Route 93) pretty much every year, when the spring rains come and the creeks rise.

For the Record: Twitter Wars

 

Bearers of Trophies and Bullion. From Andrea Mantegna, Triumphs of Caesar (1482-94, now Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace), via Wikipedia.

So much winning. Well, that's what I think.

Re Republican voting restrictions:

You compare them yourself, in order to make your case, so that's a completely ridiculous thing to say. And as you point out some proposals have similar motives (like 'the limit on Sunday voting... understandably considered an attack on the famous “souls to polls” events')

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Jim Crow measures also didn't seem overwhelming taken one at a time. What could be so bad about requiring a literacy test? It was the cumulative effect of all of them put together that made it work.

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) March 23, 2021

Re filibuster:

Immigration: The Wreck of No. 944

The Wreck of the C P & V Train – Scioto County Ohio

Well, the subject being Immigration, I speak metaphorically, in the dictionary sense.

From Dictionary.com

The "944" I refer to is Immigration Form I-944, Declaration of Self-Sufficiency, which received the following death notice on March 9, 2021, at the website for USCIS  (the so-called benefits bureau of the Dept. of Homeland Security, DHS):

On or after March 9, 2021, applicants and petitioners should not provide information required solely by the Public Charge Final Rule. That means that applicants for adjustment of status should not provide the Form I-944, Declaration of Self-Sufficiency, or any evidence or documentation required on that form with their Form I-485.  * * * * 

Rectification Central Adds a Voice: Welcome Redhand

After years of commenting (I've lost count of the number, but it precedes the big comment crash fairly early in the blog's history) I've finally decided to accept Yas's kind invitation to post on a regular basis. Before I do so, I figured I'd "out" myself by letting you know who I am and what I do and give you a sense of the kind of content I plan to offer here.

Like Yas, I'm very much "A grizzled Boomer," perplexed and disturbed by the direction our Country has taken under Republican rule, and compelled to comment on it. I'm proud to say I was born in the Bronx in 1949, into a totally ethnic Irish immigrant family. (My Russian wife insisted I take a DNA test, and it showed a genetic strain traced literally 99.9% to Ireland: no surprise really given my grandparents' names on both sides of the family.)  I'm an O'Neill, which explains the handle "Redhand."  The angry centurion avatar I use is a hat tip to the time my family spent in Rome in the late Sixties where my Air Force pilot father was assigned after spending a year in Vietnam.

I spent three years in the Navy after college in the early Seventies, went to law school, and became a lawyer in 1977. I worked twenty years as in-house counsel for a defense contractor in New Jersey, ultimately becoming the General Counsel until I "left corporate life" in 2001 when it was clear that I was incompatible with the Company's new CEO.

Going back to my family's immigrant roots, I decided to reinvent myself as an immigration lawyer after 9/11, and haven't looked back since. I've practiced in Morristown, NJ for many years, and have no plans to retire.

As you might imagine, the Trump years were a nightmare. I think it's best summed up by incoming DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorka's press conference on March 1, 2021, when he stated:

"I think it is important to understand what we have inherited, because it defines the situation as it currently stands. Entire systems are not rebuilt in a day or in a few weeks. To put it succinctly, the prior administration dismantled our nation’s immigration system in its entirety." [My emphasis.]

Most of my content will be immigration-related; it remains a cutting-edge issue in American society and politics, but I'll also occasionally comment on cultural issues, both here and abroad.  I'll continue to comment, and look forward to further fascinating discussions at this remarkable place.

Thinking Bigger

 

Dumpling truck, via New York Street Food.

Cheered and even kind of pumped by a radio appearance from Matty Glesias (as I like to think of him—it's how it looks on his Twitter handle) promoting a book, One Billion Americans: The Case For Thinking Bigger, offering some pretty big thinking indeed: that if you really wanted to make America great again, you'd want to do it with a greater population, say tripling it to a billion by the year 2100, through a combination of policies: not just making immigration much easier rather than much harder as the Trump administration has done, but also making it much easier for existing Americans to raise kids, and generally working the infrastructure to support a bigger population, because

the United States is not “full.” Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had decades ago. And virtually all of our thriving cities easily have room to grow and accommodate more people.

Tweedict

Here we go again with the imperial Tweedict.

Two White House officials said an executive order is being drafted and that Trump could sign it as soon as Tuesday. The order, which was discussed among senior staff members Monday [sure, Jan], would suspend nearly all immigration under the rationale of preventing the spread of infection by foreigners arriving from abroad.

Oh, sure, but

Grift for the Mill

Haunted by the story of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is where the Justice Department's immigration policy is administered from, and thus the employer of the nation's 400 immigration judges, and sends all its employees a near-daily bloggy compilation of memos and news clippings and the like:

But on Monday, tucked between stories from The Washington Post and a public radio station, the briefing included a summary of and a link to a blog post from what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “Hate Group”: Vdare.com, a frequent platform for white nationalists espousing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Vdare post singles out immigration judges by name, uses their photos and refers to them with an anti-Semitic slur. 

Coming the same week, as Reis Thebault notes at the Washington Post, as Trump scolded American Jews for being "disloyal" when they vote for Democrats and singled out the fanatical Jew-hater Henry Ford for praise, and a growing recognition that the White House may have an anti-Semitism problem. As the president of the judges' union, Ashley Tabbador, explained in a letter to the EOIR director James McHenry, the post was creating a hostile work environment: