Tag Archives: immigration

International news

‘Merit-based’ immigration policy? Define ‘merit’

What is seemingly lost in all the furor over the “zero tolerance” debate and the fate of children taken from their parents at the southern border is a key element of Donald Trump’s proposed immigration policy.

The president said it again just this week. He wants a “merit-based” immigration policy that allows for a greater degree of selectivity. If you have something to contribute to the United States … you’re in. If you’re, um, not so meritorious, well, call us when you deserve to be admitted.

Trump wants to restrict legal immigration while eliminating illegal immigration. I am with him on the effort to make all immigrants enter this country legally, with proper documentation.

It’s the caveat he is seeking to attach to legal immigrants that bothers me in the extreme.

I am the grandson of immigrants. All four of my grandparents came to this country at the turn of the 20th century. They weren’t highly educated. They didn’t bring special talents or skill — although my maternal grandfather was fluent or conversant in about seven languages, owing to his years of service as a merchant seaman.

I am unclear whether any of them would have made the cut under Donald Trump’s plan to institute a merit-based immigration policy.

Here’s another thing to consider: Two of my grandparents came from Greece, two came from Turkey. I am wondering here and now whether Trump considers Turkey — a predominantly Muslim nation — to be a “sh**hole country” along the lines of El Salvador, Haiti or anywhere in Africa.

This nation — with the exception of Native Americans — is made up of people who all were immigrants. Most of our ancestors came here voluntarily; others of them were forced to come here — as slaves!

To suggest that we set the bar higher than many immigrants can clear is to deny our nation’s history and its tradition of being a land that opens its doors — along with its arms and heart — to the rest of the world.

International news, national news, State news

Is the president creating a crisis where none exists?

I keep getting this feeling in my gut that Donald J. Trump’s insistence that we have an immigration “crisis” is a figment of the president’s imagination.

Or worse, it is a ploy he is using to curry favor with Americans who have this fear about immigrants of all stripes, legal or otherwise.

Trump keeps harping on the flood of immigrants pouring through our “open border” to do harm to Americans. He is managing to cast all immigrants in the same ultra-negative light: They’re murderers, rapists, drug dealers, sex traffickers, kidnappers.

Here’s the nasty part of it: Trump appears to be succeeding in this hideous effort.

The media are covering this “zero tolerance” story with zeal and aggressiveness. The children who have been separated from their parents and sent to something called “tender age” internment camps have broken our hearts. Former first ladies have issued statements condemning the practice.

I keep asking myself: Why? Why are we reacting with such hysteria over this story?

I heard a statistic the other day about how border crossings are down. Yet to listen to the president tell it, the nation’s southern border is awash in people pouring northward into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

I don’t spend a lot of time along the Texas border with Mexico, although I recently did travel to Laredo. My wife and I spent a few nights at a Texas state park along the Rio Grande River. We also spent some time on the road traveling southeast along the river.

What did we see during those few days along the border? We saw Texans going about their daily lives. We looked at families playing at parks. We saw people shopping. They were enjoying meals. They were walking their pets along city streets.

We saw life continuing at a normal pace.

We did not see a community in crisis. We didn’t see a region gripped by a flood of illegal immigrants/criminals.

This was two years ago. Has it changed dramatically since then?

I think not.

I also believe the president of the United States — who launched his first political campaign in 2015 with a pledge to curb immigration along our southern border — has created a crisis where none exists.

Sickening.

International news

Only Congress can fix it? How did POTUS do it?

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen made it clear: Only Congress can fix the situation regarding the policy that enabled Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to separate children from their parents at the border.

The president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, said the same thing.

So did the White House press office.

What, then, happened today? The president signed an executive order doing the very thing he and his aides could be done only by congressional fiat.

Was the president lying? Did he tell the nation’s DHS secretary to lie? Did the secretary lie on her own, all by herself?

national news

Trump ends family separation … now what?

Donald J. Trump today heeded the din of dissent across the nation over a policy that separated young children from their parents at the nation’s southern border.

The president’s executive order ends the policy in a 180-degree reversal. Families won’t be separated. Children won’t be delivered to camps to await some disposition of their fate while the government decides what to do about their parents’ illegal entry into the United States.

I am glad to see the president react in this manner. His rhetoric today, though, continues to sound defiant. He lays blame for this situation on his predecessors in the Oval Office.

So, the question remains: What happens now?

Republicans in Congress joined their Democratic colleagues in calling for an end to this inhumane policy. I am heartened to hear the bipartisan outrage, just as I am heartened to witness Trump backing down from his previous statements.

I am left to wonder, too, why he would say today that he “didn’t like the sight” of families being separated. When did that “sight” upset him? Did it just happen? Or was he upset all along? If it’s the latter, then why continue to implement such a policy?

Well, he acted today as he should have done before this crisis erupted. Now it’s time to find a comprehensive solution to the nation’s immigration policy.

Get busy, Mr. President and members of Congress.

International news, local news, media news, national news, religious news

No doubt about it: U.S. is ‘secular nation’

An interesting argument has surfaced over the discussion about the use of Scripture to justify the separating of children from their parents as they enter the United States illegally.

It comes from the newspaper where I used to work, the Amarillo (Texas) Globe-News.

Here’s the editorial with the title, “The Spiritual Double Standard.” 

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently cited Romans 13 to justify the policy of yanking kids from their parents along our southern border and housing them separately. It also seems to suggest that the United States might not be a “secular nation.”

Actually, the United States most certainly is a secular nation. Of that there can be no serious debate.

The founders intended to craft a governing document that is free of religious requirements. Their ancestors came to this world fleeing religious persecution. Right? Yes!

The editorial seems also to suggest that critics of the AG are targeting Christians. Hmm. I don’t believe that’s the case. The founders didn’t even mention Christianity in crafting the U.S. Constitution. The Amarillo Globe-News opined: This is becoming a common tactic of many of those who support open borders – attempting to shame Christians by pointing out how federal immigration laws are not in line with Christian teachings about how to treat your neighbors, immigrants, etc.

The secular nature of our government is not aimed at Christians. It excludes any religious litmus test for government. Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus … you name it.

The G-N also suggests that secularists shouldn’t use Scripture to debunk the AG’s citing of the New Testament to justify the policy.

Fine, except that if the attorney general is going to bring it up first, then it is totally fair for critics to use the Bible to rebut what they believe is his misdirected justification.

The G-N notes, “As the saying goes, you can’t have it both ways.”

Actually, in this instance, I believe you can.

International news

Late-night wisdom on child-parent separation

Stephen Colbert is a comedian with a political point of view he delivers nightly from the Ed Sullivan Theater stage in New York City.

He was spot on in a diatribe against Donald J. Trump’s immigration policy that instructs border security agents to wrest children from their parents who enter this country illegally.

Perhaps the most poignant point that Colbert made is that the United States is the only country on Earth that has invoked such a heartless policy.

Yet the president contends that it’s a “Democrat bill” that congressional Democrats need to fix. One problem. There is no law on the books. This policy came from an executive branch instruction.

Listen to Colbert’s take on it. Yes, he’s a comic. He’s also a well-educated man who happens to be a husband and father who feels deeply about this issue.

national news

This is a seriously ICE-y policy

There’s heartlessness and then there is a new policy announced by the Trump administration.

Unauthorized immigrants seeking entry into the United States will be arrested and prosecuted, according to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Fine. I get that.

But their small children will be taken from them on the spot by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. They will be separated from their parents — from their mother and father — and sent … somewhere.

Sessions said, “… we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”

Infants? Toddlers? Adolescents? Doesn’t matter. They’re going to snatched from their parents under the new ICE policy.

Critics of this policy are calling it “torture” as defined by the United Nations. According to a Washington Post essay by Jaana Juvonen and Jennifer Silvers: Under federal law, which adopts the United Nations definition, torture is: “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as … punishing him or her for an act he or she or a third person … has committed or is suspected of having committed.” And though in theory any action inflicting such suffering is banned, that is what is inflicted by separating parents and children in border detention.

Read the entire essay here.

Is this how Donald Trump defines the “love” he once said he wanted to use in determining the fate of the so-called Dreamers, the U.S. residents brought here when they were children by their undocumented immigrant parents?

I can answer that one: It lacks any pretense of love when it comes to the treatment of the children of those who are trying to enter the United States. Asylum seekers? Refugees? Forget it, man! They’re going to be rounded up and sent to places where their children cannot join them.

Shameful.

International news

Happy Trails, Part 89

I don’t like doing this, but this post is going to mix a bit of current politics and public policy with another musing about retirement.

You see, I’ve mentioned already that my wife and I intend to visit North America while hauling our RV behind our (now repaired) pickup truck.

What I’ve neglected to say is that North America includes another set of countries. They are south of the United States, starting with Mexico and going into Central America.

We are a bit concerned about traveling into Mexico. It has nothing to do with the people there, or the country. We’ve both ventured across the border. The last time we crossed the border was in 1974, when we drove from San Diego into Tijuana and then to Ensenada. We took a cruise with our sons from Galveston to Cozumel in 2011, but that doesn’t actually count as a “border crossing.”

What is troubling to me is the rhetoric coming from Washington since the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the United States. He campaigned on a pledge to build a wall across our southern border; he vowed to make Mexico pay for it. He accused Mexico of “sending criminals” into the United States, as if suggesting that the Mexican government is responsible for some so-called deluge of illegal immigration.

He has continued to sound sharply critical of those who live in Latin America.

My fear is the potential fomenting of anti-American bias in that part of the world, which could put tourists — such as, oh, yours truly — at risk of harm by those who might notice the Texas license plates on our RV and our truck.

Do you get my drift? Of course you do!

I ventured to Mexico City in 1997 on a four-day journalism-related trip. I love that city. I want to show my wife the Aztec pyramids I got to climb. I want to take her to the spectacularly colorful Folklorico Ballet that I watched. I want to treat her to tacos the way they are prepared in Mexico.

At this moment, though, I am fearful of hauling our RV there to see those sights.

If only we could cease this in-your-face rhetoric that I suspect is not being lost on those wonderful continental neighbors.

military news

FYI, Mr. President … you need Congress to OK this one

Psst. Here’s a little secret that Donald J. Trump didn’t mention when he said he wanted to deploy American military personnel along our border with Mexico.

The president cannot act alone. He needs Congress to approve it.

Trump has declared that because our immigration laws are “so weak,” he needs to send soldiers to the border to be on the lookout for illegal immigrants sneaking into the United States of America.

Trump wants to military to patrol the border while he commences and completes construction of his “big, beautiful wall” that is going to stop the flood of bloodthirsty criminals flowing across our border. Isn’t that what he says is occurring?

So, he’s thinking out loud yet again. With no thought whatsoever. Did he say he would ask Congress to approve his request? Oh, no! He simply declared his intention to deploy American military personnel to do whatever it is they intend to do on American soil.

This is the kind of thing that requires another branch of government to sign off.

In 1957, President Eisenhower sent troops to Little Rock, Ark., to stand by while local school officials sought to integrate Central High School. Ike asked Congress for permission to do it; Congress agreed, so the president issued the order.

There remains a sequence of events that must occur before a president does something so dramatic — and drastic — as Trump has pitched.

He is merely demonstrating a show of muscle. He isn’t giving a moment of thought or deliberation to add context to what he is proposing.

That’s just Trump.

Hey, he’s “telling like it is,” right?

International news

Idiocy takes new turn: pay for wall with military money

Donald J. Trump’s penchant for idiotic policy pronouncements is utterly boundless.

It’s bad enough that the president wants to build a “big, beautiful wall” along our southern border. The notion of building a wall is as un-American an idea as any Trump has pitched.

Now comes this apparent trial balloon. He is talking openly about paying for the wall using funds dedicated for the Department of Defense. Sure thing, Mr. President. Let’s take money away from equipping our troops to pay for a wall that won’t do a damn thing to stem what Trump says is a “flood” of illegal immigrants bringing drugs, murder and mayhem into the United States.

Oh, and there’s that other thing hanging over the discussion: the president’s pledge to “make Mexico pay” for the wall. That, um, hasn’t gone according to plan. The Mexican government has dug in deeply. It won’t pay for the wall, says Mexico’s president, Enrique Pena Nieto. He and Trump remain miles apart on that particular issue.

The idea that the wall somehow is a matter of “national security,” which in Trump’s mind would justify taking funneling money from the Pentagon to building that wall only confirms what many of us have thought all along.

The commander in chief has so little regard for the military that he would rob it of resources to shore up a promise he made for purely political gain.

And to think the president keeps yammering about his “love” of the men and women who defend our nation.

Idiotic.