Vatican City has one of the strictest immigration laws in the whole world. I seem to recall the Bergoglio-Prevost tag team — now known as BergoLEO — going on and on about unconditional “Welcome the Stranger.” Suicidal leftist folly on stilts.
I am all for welcoming the stranger, but only under certain conditions. Immigration must be to the benefit of the host country. The depredatory Dems refuse to countenance that simple truth. Interesting to speculate why.
Our great founders understood that immigrants bring their culture with them, and that some cultures are toxic to our own. They understood that there can be no comity without commonality, that immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, and that unity, not diversity, is the source of our strength.
As Alexander Hamilton warned, America’s survival depends on “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character.”
“To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country … would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.”
Thomas Jefferson likewise warned that immigrants “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth,” and that, as a result, they “will infuse into [our legislation] their spirit, warp and bias its direction.” Jefferson recognized that a careless approach to immigration would eventually reshape America away from her founding character.
If Americans want America to survive, they must reclaim the moral clarity of the Founders and say, without apology, that not every idea deserves a seat at the table and not every person who wants to be in America deserves to be here.
Is a home invader an asylum seeker? Only in very rare cases. So why are people who immigrate illegally called asylum seekers? A few are but most are not. What we have here, once again, is the characteristic 'progressive' abuse of language. You should have learned by now that no word or phrase is safe around a leftist. Conservatives are not against asylum; they are against the abuse of asylum.
At the same time that so-called progressives abuse 'asylum,' they also abuse 'xenophobic' when they apply this term to those of us who stand for the rule of law. You are one dumb conservative if you acquiesce in the Left's abuse of language.
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a 'liberal.'
He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate.
The demented Dems are defeatists in several different ways. A pox be upon them and the fools who support them. Here is Facebook post of mine from 21 July 2022, with addenda.
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Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S." See here and here for the full text.
That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise. But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:
Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.
I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard. He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ." Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license. The driver doesn't have one. That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status. Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.
S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law. Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.) When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so. If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.
According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason. That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians. I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes. The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws. The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'
Joseph A. e-mails:
I greatly admire Victor Reppert for a number of reasons – I think the Argument from Reason is pretty amazing and effective when formulated and defended well, and Victor remains one of the most soft-spoken and polite bloggers around.
Agreed.
But a number of thoughts occurred to me when reading his and your post.
Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials – he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately.
A certain distrust of law enforcement is reasonable. Skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism and has been from the founding. But we need to make a simple distinction between a law and its enforcement. A just law can be unjustly applied or enforced, and if it is, that is no argument against the law. If the police cannot be trusted to enforce the 1070 law without abuses, then they cannot be trusted to enforce any law without abuses. Someone who thinks otherwise is probably assuming, falsely, that most cops are anti-Hispanic racists. What a scurrilous assumption!
At this point one must vigorously protest the standard leftist ploy of 'playing the race card,' i.e., the tactic of injecting race into every conceivable issue. The issue before us is illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with race. Those who oppose illegal immigration are opposed to the illegality of the immigrants, not to their race. The illegals happen to be mainly Hispanic, and among the Hispanics, mainly Mexican. But those are contingent facts. If they were mainly Persians, the objection would be the same. Again, the opposition is to the illegality of the illegals, not to their race.
Suppose Canadians, who are mostly Caucasians, were routinely violating our northern border in great numbers. Suppose a northern state were to enact a 1070-like law. What would leftists say then to avoid facing the issue, which is illegal immigration? They couldn't cry 'racism.' Would they scream 'xenophobia'? However the lefties emote, they would be missing the point.
But Victor also typically argues very much in favor of giving government far more authority and responsibility than it now has (see his views on health care, etc.) I just find it odd that he's very worried, deeply worried, about the actions of individual police officers operating at a local level – suggesting that they pose a problem/threat we're not going to be able to adequately address – but not nearly as worried about endowing federal bureaucrats with vastly more far-reaching powers.
That is just inconsistency on Reppert's part. As I said, skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism. The skepticism is shared by libertarians and paleo-liberals.
Also, you mention the 'argument' that the bill disproportionately targets Hispanics. Of course, you rightly dismissed it, but I notice Victor does suggest that securing our borders is a major interest. The riddle I have is, how does one secure the Mexican border without 'targeting Hispanics' in the process?
I think I already explained that. It is not the race of the illegals that we who uphold the rule of law object to, but their illegality. So I deny your suggestion that there would be a targeting of Hispanics qua Hispanics. But because most of the illegals happen to be Hispanic, that fact is relevant in a decision to investigate a person's immigration status.
Suppose a cop pulls over a vehicle with a malfunctioning tail light. He asks the driver for his license. If a valid license is presented, no problem, even if the driver is Hispanic and speaks only broken English. The worst that happens is the cop writes a citation for the tail light. The same thing would happen as would happen were Reppert to be pulled over in similar circumstances. Will Reppert protest that he is being forced by a jackbooted thug to 'show his papers'? But that's the law, and the law is reasonable. You may not drive without a valid license.
Liberal hysteria about S. B. 1070 is just that. So far I haven't seen any rational grounds for opposition. It is clear why most liberals and leftists oppose it. They want as many illegals as possible in order to swell the ranks of the Democrat Party. I don't know what Reppert's motivation is. But it is without a doubt the motivation of most liberals/leftists. Please note that inquiring into people's motivations is entirely legitimate once you have demolished their arguments.
NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) — Inside an armored vehicle, an Army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.
The man lowers himself toward U.S. soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a U.S. Border Patrol SUV races toward the wall — warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.
If you hate DJT, my advice is to not live by likes and dislikes, loves and hates: that's the narcissistic Facebook way of life. Stop emoting and start thinking. Trump did what no one else either wanted to do, or had the civil courage to do: secure the border. Give the man credit, you petty, hate-America PsOS.
The abuse of a thing is no argument against its proper use. For example, the occasional abuse of State power by its agents is entirely consistent with the State's moral legitimacy.
You say you don't like the roundup of illegal aliens and their incarceration in detention centers such as the one in the heart of the Florida Everglades prior to their deportation? I don't like the roundup either, and it is to be expected that abuses will occur when a small minority of ICE officials overstep their legitimate authority. But the rule of law must be upheld.
It is also perfectly plain that the roundup would not be necessary had the previous (mal)administration enforced the borders and upheld the rule of law. So the Dems should look in the mirror and own the mess that they have created.
Nancy Pelosi spoke truly when she said that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. What she said is true; too bad she didn't meant it.
Abusus non tollit usum.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration will restrict immigrants in the country illegally from enrolling in Head Start, a federally funded preschool program, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday. The move is part of a broad effort to limit access to federal benefits for immigrants who lack legal status.
Translation: Illegal aliens will no longer be allowed access to taxpayer dollars to which they have no right.
Dems will scream in protest and start doing what they reliably do, namely, lie. They will claim that the Administration is eliminating the Head Start program just as they are supposedly eliminating Medicaid.
I would begin to have some respect for our political enemies if they stopped lying and simply stated their adamant opposition to the USA as she was founded to be, and owned up to the fact that their goal is the "fundamental transformation" (Barack Hussein Obama) of the USA so as to bring it in line with what they think a nation ought to be. But they will not come clean. That is why I label them 'stealth ideologues.'
You may have noticed that our relations with some people improve when we no longer have contact with them. Now while we can and must round up and deport illegal aliens, our classically liberal principles make it very difficult to force out of our midst those of our political adversaries who count as out-and-out political enemies. And of course we must do our level best to avoid hot civil war while preparing to engage in it should it prove unavoidable. May we be spared from the hell of that unavoidability!
Might the solution be voluntary segregation? I make the case at Substack.
Note the qualifier 'voluntary.' And please don't play the know-nothing who confuses segregation with racial segregation. I am talking about the voluntary political segregation of the sane and the reasonable from the rest.
If you are a sane and reasonable American citizen, and you love your country with an ordinate love, then I bid you a happy Fourth of July. If and only if.
It is according to the author of a TNR article. I don't disagree. After all, the bad hombres are being held against their will in one place prior to their deportation. The conclusion to draw, of course, is that some concentration camps are morally justified. This one is also legally justified. President Trump is merely upholding the rule of law, unlike the Dems who love to mouth that phrase, but don't mean what they say. "No one is above the law," Nancy Pelosi and her followers intoned again and again. Did she and they mean that? No. They meant: no one is above the law except our guys and gals.
POTUS is legally justified in building a concentration camp in the middle of the Everglades for the housing of illegal aliens prior to their lawful deportation. What was legally unjustified was the Biden-Mayorkas invitation of an invasion of illegal aliens into our country. Those 'gentlemen' were in dereliction of duty and should both have been impeached and removed from office, at the very least.
Some say, quite reasonably, that they should both now be in prison.
If you think my use of 'invasion' two paragraphs supra is an exaggeration, consider that in December 2024, during the Biden-Harris (mal)administration, there were 301, 981 Southwest Land Border Encounters according to official U. S. statistics. For the same year there were over two million total such encounters. Under Trump, border encounters have dropped dramatically. In June of this year there were zero. Again, these are official stats.
If you are against detention centers, then you must also be against prisons. Is your name Zohran Mamdani?
The Environmental Argument. Although there are 'green' conservatives, concern for the natural environment, and its preservation and protection from industrial exploitation, is more a liberal than a conservative issue. (By the way, I'm a 'green' conservative.) So liberals ought to be concerned about the environmental degradation caused by hordes of illegals crossing the border. It is not just that they degrade the lands they physically cross, it is that people whose main concern is economic survival are not likely to be concerned about environmental protection. They are unlikely to become Sierra Club members or to make contributions to the Nature Conservancy. Love of nature comes more easily to middle class white collar workers for whom nature is a scene of recreation than for those who must wrest a livelihood from it by hard toil.
Robert Kuttner, in a piece entitled Supreme Contempt for the Constitution, writes,
The Supreme Court issued a shocking ruling today, making it easier for President Donald Trump to overturn birthright citizenship. The way the Court did it was in keeping with its disingenuous strategy of using technicalities that allow it to duck the underlying question.
The substance of Friday’s 6-3 decision, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, involved a challenge to Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. His order violated the 14th Amendment, which clearly holds that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, regardless of the circumstances.
This Kuttner is obviously a leftist ideologue. 14A does not "clearly hold" what Kuttner says it "clearly holds." Section 1 begins:
14A. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The meaning of the amendment depends on how the clause I have set in italics is interpreted. Such interpretation is the office of SCOTUS the function of which is neither legislative nor executive. Its function is judicial. Here is how Stephen Miller and others read 14A.:
Let's talk about birthright citizenship. After the Civil War, Congress and America came together to ensure freedom for the children of slaves, not the children of illegal aliens . . . .
If you go to the UN today, the United Nations, [which is located in New York City] you have diplomats from all over the world. None of their babies become automatic American citizens. Why?
Because they're [the diplomats are] subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign country. Their allegiance is to a foreign country. Their citizenship is to a foreign country.
Illegal aliens are no different, in fact, worse, because illegal aliens are expressly forbidden from even being on our soil. Their allegiance is to a foreign land. They're under the jurisdiction of a foreign nation.
Their children are not U.S. citizens, and the Supreme Court has now cleared the way for us to restore the actual meaning of the United States Constitution and the idea that this special privilege does not belong to illegal aliens and their children.
The interpretation of 14A depends on who the referents are of the phrase, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Miller quite naturally takes the referents to be the parents of the illegal aliens. Thus Miller et al. take 14A to be expressing the more explicit:
14A*. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and WHOSE PARENTS are subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
On this reading birthright citizenship is ruled out. The actual formulation in the Constitution, however, is 14A. The trouble is that the actual formulation allows the following reading:
14A**. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, whether or not their parents are subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
14A** is ruled out by the points Miller makes, one of them being that the children of foreign diplomats born to these diplomats while they are in the USA do not automatically become U.S. citizens.
I have made two main points. The first is that Kuttner is either bullshitting or lying when he claims that the meaning of 14A in its actual formulation in the Constitution is transparently clear. No, it NOT clear.
Second, and more importantly, the most plausible reading, is 14A* above, and NOT Kuttner's perverse hate-America leftist reading.
Democrats upset over deportations ought to look in the mirror. Prior to Biden-Harris they did little to secure the nation's borders, and by supporting Biden-Harris they embraced the destructive open-border policy of that administration. That nations need enforceable and enforced borders not merely to flourish, but to continue to exist, is well-nigh self-evident. Those in a nation who blind themselves to this self-evidence are reasonably viewed as wanting the destruction of the nation they are in.
Promotion of illegal immigration being the Democrats' greatest crime, Donald J. Trump's securing of the border is his greatest achievement so far, as is recognized by most of the populace. But the Biden-Harris mess will be with us for a long time to come. Deportation of illegal aliens must proceed if the rule of law is to be upheld. There will inevitably be mistakes and injustices. The law must be enforced, but the enforcers are finite and fallible, and a small minority of them are as bad as the criminals they are charged with protecting us against. This obvious point I am making will be resisted by those with an authoritarian personality structure, but leftists, who tend toward the opposite extreme, that of the rebellious protester who reflexively takes the side of criminals and underdogs, regardless of their criminality, ought readily to accept it.
There are bad cops. We all know this. You do not have to be a member of a minority to have experienced bad behavior from law enforcement agents. Give a man a gun, a badge, and a uniform and it may go to his head. It's not that power corrupts; the problem is that we are all more or less morally corrupt inherently so that any power we acquire is subject to misuse.
So I say to Democrats, you have brought about this situation by your support of perverse and deleterious policies. Blame yourself first for any excesses.
An important article. Mercifully brief. Double hat tip: Mark Levin, Tony Flood. Do your bit and propagate it.
The crucial phrase: "subject to the jurisdiction thereof."
Critics claim that anyone born in the United States is automatically a U.S. citizen, even if their parents are here illegally. But that ignores the text and legislative history of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children.
The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.
Elsewhere in the epistle, Francis implicitly condemns Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic, for misunderstanding the Church’s teaching on ordo amoris—the order of love. Vance, a convert who was catechized by two of the most intelligent Dominican priests in America (I introduced him personally to his first teacher), had defended the administration’s tough migration policy by referring to St. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching that the order of love requires us to love those closest to us first—not exclusively, but primarily, as God has given us the duty to care for them.
It turns out that JD Vance really is more Catholic than the pope. The Catechism teaches that the moral duty towards foreign refugees must be balanced by duties to the common good of the people within one’s own country. Yes, wealthy countries do have a moral responsibility to be generous in welcoming distressed foreigners, but they have the right to set limits on migration, and to refuse it when they judge that it harms the common good. The official Catholic teaching balances charity with common sense.
JD Vance understands that; Pope Francis does not. The pope, in his teaching, has sanctified open borders—even, as in Europe, when those ungated frontiers allow the migration into the Christian lands of Europe of millions of Muslims who at minimum do not share the ancestral faith of Europeans, and no small number of whom are militantly hostile to it. If Francis had lived in the time of Pius V, Europe would be Islamic today.
Over at the Stack.
It is. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats lied to us about this. Illegal immigrants are subject to criminal penalties. While improper entry is a crime, unlawful presence is not a crime. One can be unlawfully present in the U. S. without having entered improperly, and thus without having committed a crime.
Read it all. Very short.
I just heard a Democrat politician refer to the The Trump-Homan border crackdown as 'draconian' and 'xenophobic.' It is neither.
It is not cruel or severe. Although you may think that 'severe' is etymologically related to 'sever,' it is not. To witness a penology that includes beheading and limb amputation you will have to take a trip to the Middle East. Iran and Saudi Arabia are go-to locales for draconian punishments. If there are any draconian punishments in the USA at the present time, they are inflicted by leftists. J-6 trespassers and abortion protesters are good examples of inflictees.
As for 'xenophobic,' it it is the adjectival form of 'xenophobia.' Now a phobia is an irrational fear. But we who stand for the rule of law, have no irrational fear of foreigners or of things foreign. If we did, why would we freely travel abroad and indeed freely live for extended periods in foreign lands? ('Freely' as opposed to 'by military order.') I myself have lived two and a half years abroad: six months in Salzburg, Austria, a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and a year in Ankara, Turkey, and I have intensively studied the native languages, cultures, religions, and histories of these countries.
What's more, I entered legally, did not overstay my visa, obeyed the local laws, ate their food, observed their customs, and dressed appropriately. I did not, for example, walk around Turkey Arizona-style in short pants. I showed respect for Muslim ways. I entered legally in the way my ancestors entered the USA, legally. And like them, I studied the native languages and did my best to assimilate.
You can always count on a leftist to misuse language. Language abuse is as it were inscribed into their DNA. Show me a leftist and I'll show you a linguistic hijacker. The scumbaggery of our subversive political enemies has many sources, but the mother of them all, and the mother of all subversion, straight from the pit of hell and the Father of Lies, is the subversion of language.
