Immigration

You don’t have to be obsessed with racial calculations to consider the possibility that the next presidential election in the United States could be fought between two American-born women with roots in India: Nikki Haley in the red corner and Kamala Harris in the blue, the Republican Sikh and the Democratic Tamil Brahmin (on the side of the sainted mother who raised her), duking it out for leadership of what’s left of the Free World. The probability of this happening dwindles by the day, of course, as Vice President Harris makes it ever clearer that she’s too lightweight for the White House, and that nominating her for president would be electoral suicide for the Democrats. (Besides, hubris may drive Joe Biden to run again.) As for Ms.

"The cruelty is the point" is a phrase created by The Atlantic's Adam Serwer in an October 2018 essay (it was later expanded into a book). It describes the supposed rejoicing that occurred over Donald Trump's cruel policies, such as the no-tolerance family separations of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers at the Mexican border. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit in 2019, seeking damages for the toll the separations took on migrant families. Other attorneys stepped in to file similar claims on behalf of their clients. In late October 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration was in talks to settle the lawsuits with a whopping figure of $450,000 as a possible high point.

For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018 has been the political gift that’s kept on giving ever since. In 2020, the conspicuously inhumane protocol provided a rallying cry for candidates in the primaries and later for Biden as nominee. True, the policy did have a rationale beyond sheer sadism. American law restricts the number of days border agents may detain the underaged and likewise constrains children’s deportation.

Despite the constant barrage of people telling us they are best suited for the job, politics ain’t bean-bag. There is no surefire way to become competent at governing. A politician may have decades of experience or a Harvard degree or millions of Twitter followers or the backing of the mainstream media — and they could still prove to be an utter disaster when given the reins. Look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, home to some of the 'best and brightest’ political minds in the country, or so David Ignatius tells us. What does America have to show for having this elite braintrust in the White House? For one, gas prices, inflation and illegal immigration are all sky-high. Plus we have a supply chain crisis on both coasts.

No one has done more to undermine the Biden administration’s vaccination strategy than Joe Biden. From his confusion over when to wear a mask and when not to wear a mask, to the lack of press conferences, on through the Delta variant, we arrive at Biden’s biggest optics crisis yet: 15,000 migrants flooding the southern border under a Del Rio, Texas, bridge in temperatures reaching 100 degrees. Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confirmed last week that his department's border officials did not test the some 12,000 to 15,000 migrants for COVID. He did say that some had fallen ill, but would not elaborate further.

The Congressional Black Caucus did not respond when asked on Friday whether they agree with Rep. Maxine Waters’s comment that the treatment of Haitian migrants by Border Patrol agents is 'worse than what we witnessed in slavery'. 'What we witnessed takes us back hundreds of years. What we witnessed was worse than what we witnessed in slavery,' Waters said during a news conference outside the Capitol on Wednesday. 'Cowboys — with their reins, again — whipping black people, Haitians, into the water where they're scrambling and falling down when all they're trying to do is escape from violence in their country.

The Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, delivered another major blow to President Joe Biden's domestic agenda this week, ruling that Democrats may not include a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants in their $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The parliamentarian's decision was based on the 'Byrd rule', proposed by Sen. Robert Byrd and adopted by the Senate in the 1980s, which limits what can be passed under the reconciliation process. Under the Byrd rule, laws must be 'more than incidental' in their impact on spending or the budget in order to be included in a reconciliation package.

The Spectator is a magazine for conservatives written by liberals. From that tension comes an editorial persuasion — there is no line — that can seem winsome, beguiling, even perverse. Optimistic but never idealist, sceptical of the big but not the new, The Spectator combines a radical’s grasp of the possible with a reactionary’s sense of the inevitable. It is instinctually Whiggish but plagued by spasms of Toryism, looking forward through the rear-view mirror of life. If National Review is in the business of standing athwart history yelling ‘stop’, the The Spectator has more often been found sprinting ahead of history yelling ‘hurry up’.

Eight months in and I am perilously close to employing one of the worst political clichés in existence — Joe Biden’s honeymoon is over. You’re not imagining things — the Biden presidency is in a state of free-fall. This is not a joke. It’s not an overreaction. It’s not about Biden’s opponents pouncing or seizing. Biden’s presidency has a very real chance of completely foundering within its first year. After a promising start where he inherited a vaccination process that was already in progress, albeit briefly, under Trump, his vaccine strategy has stalled to the point of him now demanding mandates on private businesses, a step he assured the electorate he would not take.

All eyes are on the flyover state of Ohio as the fight for the future of Trumpism unfolds. In January, Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced he was bowing out of politics for good. His vacancy has set up a rare primary between two candidates offering two different versions of Donald Trump's amorphous ideology. One believes the former president's rhetoric should assimilate with bygone Tea Party-era politics and contemporary culture war talking points. The other is running on the populist rollercoaster that slung Trump into the White House. Rust Belt boy wonder Josh Mandel, who served in the statehouse and was state treasurer for almost a decade, touts a pro-Trump campaign 'to protect the Judeo-Christian bedrock of America.

The sun is beating down again, the waves are less choppy in the English Channel and the small boats full of irregular migrants are pouring across once more. At least 1,000 men, women and children were reportedly spotted landing on the south coast yesterday. If these numbers are correct, it would have shattered the previous daily record of 828, recorded on 21 August. But Home Office sources were today briefing that was an over-estimate and the likely official number will be about 740, merely the second highest daily total ever. The graphs plotting the staggering acceleration of this traffic make grim reading indeed – this is one curve that has never been flattened.

The rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban has potentially dire consequences for Afghan women and children. The Islamist group was able to commandeer sophisticated US weaponry and other military equipment during our poorly-planned troop withdrawal. And so Americans have been primed to cheer the arrival of planes carrying thousands of Afghan refugees, who we are told would otherwise be executed by the Taliban, into the United States. But what are the long-term consequences of rapid refugee resettlement? Could this present a risk to national security? How will this effect Americans economically or culturally?

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700. Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested 'positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you 'died from’, or at least with COVID. There are exceptions, of course.

Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake of Britain’s offer of settlement status to resident EU citizens exposes even this upright organisation’s immigration statistics as, well, worse than damned lies.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.