Immigration

Remember when Donald Trump crowded illegal immigrants into cages? What a brute! But what could you expect from a man who was, when you came down to it, indistinguishable from that diminutive Austrian house painter with the funny mustache and a fondness for leather? The problem was, it was the anointed one, Barack Obama Himself, who built the cages and crammed them full of illegal immigrants. (Really they were large areas secured with chain-link fences, but “cages” sounds scarier.) And those dismal photographs depicting the huddled masses? The media splashed them everywhere as yet more evidence of Trump’s perfidy. But, wouldn’t you know it, the photographs too were from the Obama era. Even the Snopes Fact Manipulator, no friend to Trump, had to acknowledge that.

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any writer in his or her prime today whose ideas enjoy the currency that Buchanan’s now do. From trade and foreign policy to immigration and the “culture war” — a term that Buchanan introduced into popular politics — views that once set Buchanan apart from his fellow conservatives are now redefining the right. Buchanan was not the only conservative skeptic of free trade or foreign interventionism in the 1990s, but he was the only one that most newspaper-reading or cable news-watching voters knew about. At the zenith of American power and economic globalization, Buchanan defined the opposition to the spirit of the age.

The biggest open secret in Texas politics is now public knowledge. For months, it's been known that Ted Cruz will run for re-election to the Senate in 2024, skipping the presidential contest. It's a smart move by Cruz for a number of reasons, and will likely benefit the potential candidacy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who would have had to compete with Cruz in the conservative lane for the GOP nomination. Those who come in second in presidential primaries, as Cruz did in 2016, tend to run again. The fact that Cruz is passing on the opportunity leaves a major opening for others. Since 1976, every competitive presidential primary on the Republican side has had one thing in common: at least one candidate has hailed from Texas.

During a recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, comedian Louis C.K. stated a position that many on the left believe but are unwilling to admit: America should open its borders to the world. “My feeling is they should open the border,” he explained. “Just let everybody pour in… Then there will be all these problems, well, there should be. It shouldn’t be so great here. It is a weird thing to sequester a certain group of people and keep upping their lifespan and their lifestyle.” As someone who's spent most of his journalistic career railing against mass immigration, my initial reaction was one of scorn.

John Nance Garner, a Texan who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years, famously quipped that the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Garner wasn’t necessarily wrong. But the groundbreaking election of Kamala Harris was supposed to transform the office. After all, she was the first woman, the first black person, and the first South Asian VP. Little else mattered. She was a badass, and if you didn’t acknowledge her intersectional excellence, you were a sexist, racist goon. Even many on the right thought Harris might play an outsized role as VP, given President Biden’s cognitive frailty. As we’re now halfway through Harris’s first term in office, it’s a good time to take stock of all that's gone wrong.

Numbers can be boring. So let's look at Mr. Jimenez from Ecuador and Mr. Singh from India, alongside some numbers, to keep it interesting. Both want to come to the US, one for illegal work, one to take his family to New York on a vacation. Mr. Jimenez will enter across the Southern Border near El Paso. In 2022 there were 330,037 legal immigrants to the US, or "new potential lawful permanent residents" (LPRs) entering the country. Meanwhile, more than 2.75 million "migrant encounters" occurred along the southwest border since Joe Biden took office. In the Rio Grande Valley sector alone, roughly 10,000 encounters with illegal immigrants occur every week.

President Joe Biden doesn’t answer many questions without his handler-approved list of reporters. So when he does occasionally go rogue, you can rest assured his answers are coming from the heart. Last week, when Fox News reporter Peter Doocy — or as Joe likes to call him, the “one-horse pony” — asked the president why he didn’t plan on visiting the border during his trip to Arizona, Joe had a rare moment of honesty. “There are more important things going on,” he shouted on the White House South Lawn. Arizonans — and the rest of America — might disagree. A Gallup poll earlier this year showed that 41 percent of Americans worry “a great deal” about illegal immigration.

The news that Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel is planning on conducting an "autopsy" of the 2022 election brought horrible political flashbacks to a decade ago. That was when the post-2012 election autopsy of Mitt Romney's failure gave the GOP all the wrong lessons about what was making them lose. You might remember that 2012 autopsy. It was the one that prescribed moving left on immigration policy as essential to appealing to Hispanic voters. As a now-infamous three sentences put it: We are not a policy committee, but among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond, we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.

In front of the whole world, Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threw the Border Patrol agents he oversees — and our country's reputation — under the bus. Now, two leading border chiefs are ushering the DHS secretary toward the exit. Mark Morgan, head of the US Border Patrol under Barack Obama, has dubbed Mayorkas "the most dangerous man in the Biden administration" and is calling for his impeachment. Morgan also slammed the DHS head for choosing "to withhold the truth." Former ICE director Tom Homan is equally blunt: "He should resign.

It's always easier to break something than to build it. Joe Biden broke the immigration control system that he'd inherited from Donald Trump and that had been built up over several administrations of both parties. Rebuilding it after Biden's vandalism will take time. Even if Republicans win the majority in both houses of Congress in November, it will take a change in administration before any real reconstruction can begin. With more than 2 million "encounters" with illegal border-crossers over the past year, more than any year in history, restoring order may seem like an insuperable task. But as we saw right after Trump's election and during the first months of his presidency, a simple expression of will can have a huge influence on prospective illegal aliens and their smugglers.

Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come to the border, the border is coming to them. On Thursday, two buses of illegal immigrants unloaded in front of Harris’s vice presidential residence. Others have arrived in downtown New York, Chicago, and D.C., to the fury of local mayors and governors. A small planeload caused an uproar on Martha’s Vineyard when it landed on that self-proclaimed sanctuary island. More busloads are sure to come, probably in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and perhaps a beach community in Delaware. The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving.

I’ve never been blessed enough to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, but if you’re an illegal alien who’s always dreamed of biking with the Obamas, you might be in luck. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has just sent two planeloads of migrants to the New England paradise. You’d think the residents of Martha’s Vineyard would be thrilled at the opportunity to increase the diversity of the approximately 80 percent white island. Oddly, there have been reports of elderly women in straw hats and kaftans packing up their “no human is illegal” signs and marking their doors with the blood of slaughtered lambs.

It was sad to see the glee with which pro-choice advocates welcomed the news that the ten-year-old Ohio rape victim was real. Surprisingly she lacks a nom de guerre yet, something like Victim Zero, Baby Doe or Child Jane. She went from victim to martyr to symbol within a news cycle or two. The story just received new life as Indiana, where the abortion was performed, has since voted to ban most abortions. We know now an illegal alien who should never have been in the United States (his status is never to be talked about again of course as it's outside the narrative) twice raped the ten-year-old.

To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie. Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point?