Tag Archives: immigration

economic news, national news

Federal workers ‘favor’ the shutdown? Hardly!

Donald Trump says many members of the federal work force “favor” the government shutdown that has put many of them out of work and has taken money from their pocketbooks.

Yep, that’s what the president said.

The president’s assertion, quite naturally, has been rebuked by union leaders, who say Trump’s statement is, shall we say, way off the mark.

Think of it. You work for a federal agency that is deemed “non-essential.” Members of Congress and the White House cannot agree on spending priorities. The government runs out of money approved by Congress during its most recent continuing resolution.

So the government shutters itself. Your agency is one of them that goes dark. You’re furloughed without pay.

And you favor shutting down the government? Sure thing, and the sun will rise in the west tomorrow morning.

Trump is trying to insert The Wall into this discussion. Well, whether employees favor construction of The Wall along our southern border is beside the point. They might actually support the president on that one.

It doesn’t mean they want the government to shut down and they want to deny their families an income upon which they demand for things such as, oh, keeping a roof over their head and putting food on their table.

International news

The Wall becomes a symbol, nothing more

Let’s just call it “The Wall,” with capital letters. It has become a sort of comic book characterization.

Donald Trump wants to build The Wall because he promised to do while campaigning for the presidency. He says The Wall will stop illegal immigrants from “pouring” into the country bringing crime, disease, evil intent.

His foes — and you may count me as one of millions of ’em — say The Wall is pointless, it is unnecessary, it is un-American. We consider The Wall to be a symbol of a mindless, feckless, pointless campaign pledge. It went over well with the base of supporters who bought the candidate’s assertion about the scourge that was pouring over our borders.

The reality is that the government is shut down partially because Trump and congressional Democrats (and a few sensible Republicans) are quibbling over how much money to spend. Trump wants to spend $5.7 billion; Democrats are countering with an offer of less money, about $1.3 billion.

Oh, and then there’s this: Trump also promised that Mexico would pay for The Wall. Mexico won’t do it. Trump cannot make them pay for it.

The United States has plenty of options that do not require construction of The Wall. It has drones. Electronic surveillance. We can deploy more Border Patrol agents. We have all manner of resources available to stem whatever illegal immigration is occurring. We also have immigration laws that we can enforce; we can put additional teeth into those laws.

Donald Trump has dug in behind The Wall. He wants it built. He has shuttered the government because he has inflamed a problem, scared the daylights out of millions of Americans.

It’s only a symbolic gesture intended to make him look good to those who still are swilling the snake oil he’s peddling.

The government is shut down as a result.

This is not how you make America great again.

International news

Let’s not slam the door shut

Tucker Carlson’s intemperate blast at immigrants brings to mind an argument I have heard from others who share the Fox News talking head’s view.

Carlson had the bad form to say on the air the other day that immigrants make the country “dirtier” and “more divided.” Advertisers have been pulling out from Fox News sponsorships as a result of Carlson’s intemperate remarks.

However, he seems to speak on behalf of an alarming number of Americans who want the country to stiffen the standards for entry to all immigrants who seek to come to the Land of Opportunity.

I have sought to argue that it is patently un-American to slam the door shut on those who want in. The Statue of Liberty still invites the rest of the world to send us the dispossessed, those who “yearn to breathe free.” Yes, the president wants to build a wall along our southern border to stem what he describes as an illegal immigration “crisis.” I am not yet convinced that the “crisis” that Donald Trump alleges is any more severe now than it has ever been.

Then we hear from the likes of Tucker Carlson, who has a cable TV forum to spout the nonsense seemingly about all immigration.

I stand proudly as the grandson of Greek immigrants. Not a single one of them made this country “dirtier,” nor did they seek to “divide” themselves from the rest of the society they sought to join. They all became U.S. citizens. My maternal grandfather did so by enlisting in the U.S. Army in his quest to get into the fight in the waning days of World War I. His wife, my Yiayia, became a fervent U.S. patriot who idolized Presidents Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

To be sure, my grandparents weren’t the only immigrants who found a better life. They weren’t alone in their quest for opportunity. They were among millions of others from throughout the world who sought and found their proverbial end-of-rainbow treasure.

Do these xenophobes actually seek to deny other immigrants the opportunity to become Americans by choice? How can they say the things they say, make arguments that Tucker Carlson echoed the other day, that immigrants make dirty the nation that traditionally has kept the light on for those seeking entry?

I will not tolerate that kind of bigotry. Nor should anyone else.

Immigrants built this nation. They continue to improve on what our forebears erected.

They are dirty? They divide the nation? Ridiculous.

national news

Democracy at its messiest best

The great British statesman Winston Churchill had it right when he described representative democracy as an inefficient, clumsy and messy form government, but better than any other form that had devised.

We’re witnessing it in its messiest form right now.

Congress and the president are locking horns over spending for a wall along our southern border. Donald Trump wants money to pay for the wall, although he initially promised he would make Mexico pay for it. That won’t happen.

Failure to pay for the wall would result in a partial shutdown of the government at midnight Friday. Merry Christmas, to thousands of federal employees who will not be paid for the time they are being forced to take away from work.

I am just one of those Americans who doesn’t quite understand why we reach this precipice every few months. Why in the world must we subject ourselves to this kind of melodrama? Why do Congress and the White House fail continually to provide long-term budgets that allow them to avoid this kind of brinksmanship?

The president has his constituency. Each member of Congress — 435 House members and 100 senators — answers to his or her own constituencies. They fight. They wrangle. They haggle. They argue. They threaten each other. They toss insults. And all the while the government that is supposed to serve all Americans is being kicked around like some kind of cow chip.

We don’t need to build a wall to secure our southern border. The president doesn’t seem to get that. He wants the wall because he made some idiotic campaign promise. Congressional Democrats want to secure the border through other means.

At last report, the White House indicates that Trump is backing away from the wall. The impasse remains.

Churchill was right about representative democracy. So help me, though, it doesn’t need to be this messy.

International news

Who’s next, those who fled the Holocaust?

Donald J. Trump is expanding his campaign to rid the nation of political refugees, or so it appears.

The president now reportedly is taking aim at those who fled Vietnam during the war that tore that country apart. The Vietnam War! The one that ended in 1975 when the communists rolled into Saigon and took control of the country. They renamed the South Vietnamese capital city after Ho Chi Minh and set up a repressive government that rounded up those who cooperated with the United States and sent them to what they called “re-education camps,” which was a euphemism for “concentration camps.”

Now, more than four decades later, the president wants to round up many of those who came to this country and send them back to Vietnam. What in name of human decency has possessed this guy, the president?

According to The Atlantic: This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.

Trump believes many of those immigrants have taken up lives of crime, corruption and assorted mayhem, that they pose a hazard to Americans.

Here’s what the White House needs to consider: Vietnam is still a hardline communist country. Many of those refugees who fled their homeland did so to avoid persecution by the government, which looked harshly on those who aided U.S. forces and diplomats during “the American war.” Returning them to Vietnam well might subject them to imprisonment — or worse.

Yes, we now have full diplomatic relations with our former battlefield enemy. Do we really want to imperil that relationship over a demagogic campaign promise to crack down on immigration, to “put America first”?

Don’t go there, Mr. President.

media news, national news

Yes, we damn sure are a ‘nation of immigrants’

The quote under the picture is attributed to the fellow in the picture, right-wing lawyer and radio talk show host Mark Levin, who is engaging in some of the worst hyperbole I have seen in this debate over immigration, illegal immigration and immigration reform.

For starters, we damn sure are a nation of immigrants. I don’t know the first thing about Levin’s background, but given that he appears to be an white guy, my strong hunch is that his familial forebears came from somewhere other than the backwoods of wherever he was born.

Europe, maybe? Yeah, probably?

I am the proud grandson of immigrants to came to this country in the early 20th century. I have a deep pride in my Greek heritage. I make no apologies for it.

And yet . . .  I consider myself to be an American patriot. I have gone to war for my country. So, to suggest that to be an American citizen is somehow mutually exclusive from living in a nation of immigrants is the most disgusting demagoguery imaginable.

One more point. I do not believe anyone is treating those who “cross the border illegally as the most virtuous human being on the face of the earth.”

Again, hyperbole in the extreme.

But as it is with these radio talkers, their “fan(atic)s” take their word as some sort of gospel. They glom onto their message, pass it on, giving them a life of their own.

I’ll concede that I do not listen to Mark Levin; I don’t listen to talk radio of any political stripe. It’s just that when these messages show up on social media platforms and get otherwise good folks all riled up, I am compelled to speak my own mind.

Levin is entitled to his opinion. Just remember: Opinions are like a certain body orifice . . . everybody has one.

International news

Stunt is coming to an end on the border

Thousands of active-duty American troops deployed to our southern border. They strung some razor wire, walked around with rifles on their shoulders. They waited for the “caravan” to arrive.

The migrants fleeing repression in Latin America are still en route, supposedly. But the troops are getting ready now to go back to where they are based.

What was the point of sending them to the border? It’s clear to a lot of us that the troops were part of “stunt” orchestrated by the commander in chief, Donald J. Trump.

The size of the “border security force” outnumbered the forces deployed each in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So they’re now getting ready to leave. The “caravan” might get here. It might not arrive. The “horde” comprises families: mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers and children. These are the folks who pose the existential threat to our national security? Please!

It’s also been an expensive stunt, costing billions of dollars we cannot afford to spend. Meanwhile, the fires are burning out of control in California and Donald Trump is yammering about “forest management practices” being the culprit for the tragedy that has ravaged the state.

I am astonished.

national news

America, we have a home-grown problem

1 Comment

I won’t take credit for thinking of this. This thought showed up on a social media platform I see regularly.

The shooter who gunned down 12 victims overnight in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is a home-grown, corn-fed domestic terrorist. He walked into a country/western night club and opened fire with a pistol.

A wall across our southern border wouldn’t have kept him out of the country; nor would a travel ban imposed on those coming here from Muslim countries; the shooter wasn’t an Islamic State goon; he didn’t trudge north into this country as part of a “caravan” comprising murders/rapists/sex traffickers.

He was an American citizen. A former Marine. He purchased his murderous weapon legally.

We need to look inward, folks. We are facing threats from within arguably more dire than from outside our borders.

International news, national news, political news, State news

Remember: Immigrants built this great nation

The Donald Trump Republican lies keep piling up.

Here is one of them: Immigrants are pouring into our country intent on harming innocent, defenseless Americans; they will steal our children and sell them into sex slavery; they will rape our women; they will peddle deadly drugs. We have to stop them now by sending thousands of heavily armed “patriotic” American fighting men and women to our southern borders.

What’s more, the lie continues, Republican opponents — Democrats, if you please — favor “open borders,” they believe we have “too much border security” and want to grant illegal immigrants “the right to vote.”

The lying is prevalent in border states, such as Texas, where a U.S. Senate campaign — Democrat Beto O’Rourke vs. Republican Ted Cruz — is heading into the home stretch.

Donald Trump is fomenting those lies with his reckless, feckless rhetoric on the stump. He whips his crowds into a frenzy with the blathering about how Democrats favor lawlessness and Republicans favor “safety and security.”

Look, this nation owes its greatness to immigrants. My sisters and I are the grandchildren of immigrants. Two of our grandparents came here from Turkey, which the president might define as a “sh**hole” country, given that it is a predominantly Muslim nation; the other two came from southern Greece. Yes, they got here legally, but they shared the same dream as others who are sneaking in illegally: They wanted to build a better life than the one they had back in the “old country.”

The same thing can be said of those who are fleeing oppression in Latin America. Yet the president seeks to lump them into a single category of “violent criminals.”

As for Democrats wanting to grant illegal immigrants the immediate “right to vote,” I am waiting to hear or read a single comment from any politician in this election cycle say such a thing. Beto O’Rourke hasn’t said it, nor has any other so-called squishy liberal/progressive politician.

What I hear them say is that they want to grant temporary reprieves from deportation for those who are here illegally; they want to ensure, through thorough background checks, that they want in for the right reasons, and they want to enable them to gain permanent resident status or — yes! — citizenship.

Once they become citizens, then they can vote! Not before! That’s what I am hearing.

I know the lying will continue, so my plea isn’t for the liars to cease. It is for the rest of us to stop swilling the poison.

military news, national news

Army assessment dampens Trump view of ‘caravan’

I’m sure you remember that when he was campaigning for president in 2016, Donald Trump declared he knows “more about ISIS than the generals, believe me.”

It has turned out that he doesn’t. Nor does he know more about that so-called “caravan” of tough guys, criminals and “Middle Easterners” heading toward our southern border than the generals.

Trump has tried to inject fear and panic among Americans in advance of next Tuesday’s midterm election. He has called that “caravan” an invasion force intent on breaching our southern border. So he’s dispatched as many as 15,000 troops to the border to take charge of matters, to secure it against the invading hordes.

The U.S. Army, though, assesses it a bit differently. It said the refugees fleeing northward remain a good distance away and projects that only a small percentage of the “caravan” will reach our border. The Army assessment presumes that there will be about five U.S. troops for every refugee who manages to make it to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Washington Post says it cannot verify the Army assessment independently, but reports that military officials the newspaper contacted are vouching for its veracity.

Trump peddles fear like few other modern-day politicians. I’ll concede that he’s pretty good at it. He has that base of supporters who continue to believe the lies that fly out of the president’s mouth. That’s all that matters to him. He talks to them only. The rest of us? Forget about it!

As the Post reports: Seizing on immigration as his main campaign theme ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, Trump has depicted the caravans — at least four have formed, though they remain hundreds of miles away — as a grave danger to U.S. national security, claiming they are composed of “unknown Middle Easterners,” hardened criminals and “very tough fighters.” He also insists the number of migrants heading north is much larger than estimates put forward by U.S. and Mexican government officials.

The military assessment does not support any of those claims.

And we are to believe the opinion of a man — the president — who admits he doesn’t read briefing papers or doesn’t feel the need to absorb national security briefings?

I don’t think so.