Tag Archives: immigration

national news

Immigration: way up in polling!

Here’s a news flash that ought to get immigrants’ heart pumping: a Gallup poll says 79% of Americans view immigration and immigrants favorably, compared to 64% a year ago.

Who knew?

I am the direct descendant of immigrants who came to this country in the early 20th century because they, along with millions of others, saw the United States as a place where dreams come true. Theirs did.

And yet, some folks in the Donald Trump administration believe immigrants are sullying the national culture. What the hell?

They aren’t just targeting undocumented immigrants. They want to slam the door in the faces of all foreign nationals who choose to become U.S. citizens. I shake my head in shame and wonderment … and ponder what my Mom’s parents would think of that.

I want to single out briefly my maternal grandmother. She was Yiayia to her 12 grandchildren. Hell, her children — Mom and her two brothers — even referred to her that way. She was as patriotic an American as you would find anywhere. She loved Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. I am prepared to argue that Yiayia was the greatest American I’ve ever known … or ever will know.

She did not sully the character of this nation. She enhanced it! She enriched it! Yiayia and others who choose to live in the world’s most indispensable nation make it even greater than it was before they arrived here.

When I see poll results that tell me that Americans now view immigrants positively, I am heartened by a belief that most of us are rejecting the palaver being offered by Trump and his MAGA cult followers. America’s greatness can be seen every day in the faces of those who chose to seek a better life in the land that offered it to them.

national news

Give these residents a break!

I am overwhelmed by the desire to speak out on behalf of a group of U.S. residents who are getting the short shrift in the current kerfuffle over immigration.

They number in the hundreds of thousands. Maybe even the millions.

They are individuals who came into this country in the custody of parents who sneaked in illegally. Many of them were babies, infants who needed mama’s milk to sustain them. They grew into pre-teens, then teenagers, then young adults and finally into full-grown adult human beings able to — and willing and capable — to contribute to the only society they know.

They are de facto Americans.

Texas is home to many of these individuals. They pay their taxes. They excel academically. A good number of these de facto Americans finish at or near the top of their academic classes. They make good livings, raising their families.

According to many Americans, though, they’re criminals. Why? Because they remained in this country illegally. Donald Trump wants to round them up and deport them. But … to where? The country of their birth. Never mind that these U.S. residents know nothing of their birth nation.

These folks are called Dreamers. They are living their dream by making a life in a country far removed from the deprivation they would suffer at home. They deserve to be treated humanely by the powers that be, not cast off as rubble the way Trump and his MAGA goons want to do.

I see the likes of Trump hit man Steven Miller yammer about deporting criminals and I want to puke. Many of these individuals who draw the ire of Miller and his ilk are seeking a chance to make it right. They want to forge a clear path to either permanent U.S. residency or citizenship. Whether they obtain a green card or a U.S. passport doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me.

I just want my government, which I pay for with my tax money, to show some heart and humanity to individuals many of whom have given more to the country of their choice than many of us have given to the country of our birth.

State news

Ex-governors relegated to obscurity

Texans elected two men to be their governor and they served, in retrospect, with considerable presence and gravitas.

George W. Bush and Rick Perry served back to back in the early 2000s. Bush got elected president in 2000 as Texas governor, then resigned to enter the White House. Perry, the lieutenant governor, succeeded Bush and served longer than any man in state history.

Let me be clear about one thing. I didn’t vote for either man. Looking back, though, I find them both to be men of considerable stature. What earned them this belated praise from little ol’ me? They both are right on immigration. They both have argued for reforming the nation’s immigration system. They have favored treating foreign-born Texas residents who entered the country as children as Texans. Perry and Bush both argued to allow those residents to enter Texas public universities as in-state students, thus, reducing their costs.

Both men espoused views on immigration that reflected their experiences governing a big, important border state. Perry ran for president in 2016 and was pilloried by the MAGA morons for actually speaking out in favor of the DACA program: Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals. This is an executive order from President Obama that granted amnesty from deportation for those who came here as children of undocumented immigrants, were raised in the United States and became de facto Americans who got educated, landed good jobs and paid taxes.

Perry did become energy secretary in Trump’s first go-round in the White House … and has said or done virtually nothing of significance ever since!

No one should doubt these men’s Republican credentials. Now, they’re considered RINOs — Republicans in name only — for reasons that baffle me.

legal news

Legal scholars got this one right

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A federal judge in Washington state has become the latest Man in the Moment by issuing a temporary halt to Donald Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship for anyone born in the United States of America.

I agree with U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan. He called Trump’s order “blatantly unconstititutional.”

But hold on! He’s getting plenty of push back from conservative legal experts who are backing Trump’s decision.

One of them is Hans Von Spakovsky, who works for the Heritage Foundation. He said: “The 14th Amendment has two key clauses in it. One, you have to be born in the United States, but you also have to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. All those who push birthright citizenship just point to that first phrase and ignore the second,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of research on this. I’ve looked at the original passage of the 14th Amendment and what that phrase meant subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. According to the original sponsors of the 14th Amendment in Congress was that you owed your political allegiance to the United States and not a foreign government.” 

I just want to take note, however, of one key ommission in the amendment. It makes no mention of allegiance to a foreign power. It just lays it out there in plain English: If you’re born or are naturalized in this country, you are a U.S. citizen.

Conservatives ought to stand on historical precedent. This proposal to end birthright citizenship is a notion intended to attack the intentions of illegal residents, which has nsothing to do with the children they bring into this world.

International news

Biden restores compassion to immigration

Joe Biden has been vilified unfairly by his critics for what they contend is the president’s so-called “open border policy” on immigration.

The president is seeking, as of today, to strengthen our borders while seeking also to treat immigrants with compassion. He issued an executive order that aims to give undocumented spouses of immigrants a greater pathway to US citizenship.

The Texas Tribune reports: “President Biden has consistently used his executive powers to create additional legal pathways for immigrants, and today’s joyous announcement will help keep many of these mixed-status American families together,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar said in a statement. Escobar is a national co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign and introduced legislation, the American Families United Act, that would offer similar protections for undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens.

What is in his plan? Biden wants to make it easier for so-called Dreamers to qualify for work authorization; undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens will have to have lived in the United States for10 years to qualify for the authorization; those who qualify can apply for a three-year work permit.

None of this smacks of an “open border” policy to my eyes.

One of the major beneficiaries of this policy are those who came here as children when their parents entered the country illegally. The United States is the only country they have known. However, many Republicans — such as Donald Trump — want to deport them immediately. The don’t give a damn about keeping families together, or allowing them to continue to prosper in the only country they have known.

Biden announces protections for undocumented spouses of citizens | The Texas Tribune

I refer here to Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival, an executive order issued by President Obama that aims to grant a form of amnesty to those US residents who came here as children. Obama left office in January 2017 and Trump threatened to deport them all. Then Trump got defeated in 2020 and Biden seeks to restore compassion to our immigration policy.

DACA recipients and their spouses deserve to be treated with kindness, not with blind anger.

crime news, national news

Yes, he was an ‘illegal’ immigrant

Lest you think I am a Joe Biden lackey, I have to acknowledge that the president was wrong to apologize to the killer of a woman whose case has become a rallying cry for the MAGA movement.

Laiken Riley died at the hands of a man who was in this country illegally. President Biden referred to him as an “illegal” immigrant, then apologized to him for his use of the term “illegal.” Biden said he should have called him an “undocumented” immigrant.

Talk about splitting hairs!

The dude was in this country illegally. He reportedly broke U.S. immigration law by coming here, then committed a horrific crime. Riley was killed while jogging on the University of Georgia campus. Police arrested a man from Venezuela, Jose Ibarra, who came to this country — dare I say it — illegally.

The president’s apology now has lifted the issue of immigration to the top shelf of campaign issues heading into the 2024 presidential campaign.

Damn, I wish Biden would take greater care on issues such as this. He blurted out a description that, on its face, is accurate. He did not need to apologize for speaking the truth about an individual charged with a horrible crime.

political news

Ain’t a ‘dog whistle’ now!

Political pundits refer all the time to pols using “dog whistle” language, terms that only their fanatic followers understand.

Donald Trump, though, has tossed the immigration dog whistle into the crapper. He’s saying out loud what he thinks about immigrants and, by cracky, his followers are buying it, too.

He said this past weekend that “immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country.” He didn’t distinguish between legal and undocumented immigrants. He appeared to lump ’em all together.

The irony of Trump’s patently racist epithet is too rich to overlook.

Dude is married to an immigrant. They produced a son, who now becomes a second-generation American. Did Melania “poison” our national blood when she moved here from Slovenia? And is the Trumps’ son, Barron, poisoning the blood by, um, being born?

Of course not. I need to mention, too, that Trump’s late first wife, Ivana, also was an immigrant and they produced three kids. You know their names, as they have been in the news of late.

Still, the hideous blathering from the ex-POTUS does reveal a dark, sinister and evil side of an individual who seeks to become president yet again.

I take particular offense to these remarks because I am the grandson of immigrants. All four of my grandparents came to the U.S.A. from Greece and Turkey. I want to stipulate something here: Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country, but my mother’s parents were ethnic Christian Greeks. Still, as I recall it, Trump referred to Muslim nations as, um, “sh**hole countries.”

OK, I’ll just say this out loud: Donald Trump is an unvarnished dumbfu**!

One of my grandfathers, the one from Turkey, enlisted in the U.S. Army at the end of World War I. Both of Mom’s brothers served in the military, as did Dad, his two brothers and one of his sisters. So, did I, along with several of my cousins. Oh, and Trump? He came up with a tale of bone spurs that kept him out of uniform during the Vietnam War.

Did my immigrant grandparents “poison” the nation’s blood when they arrived here in the early 20th century. No! They enriched it.

I hope you understand a little better just why I detest Donald Trump.

He — not the immigrants he vilifies — is the poison we must avoid.

International news

Gipper called for ‘open border’

I came across an astonishing social media video today of Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States and the one-time godfather of American conservatism.

His topic was immigration. President Reagan spoke of the need to buttress U.S.-Mexico relations by maintaining what he called a “two-way open border.” He said the United States should allow Mexicans into our country “legally,” where they would work and “pay taxes” and then return to their homes in Mexico.

He feared that the nations were headed toward a state of hostility. Reagan believed the best way to ensure tranquil relations would be to keep the border between the U.S. and Mexico wide open, enabling citizens of both nations to travel freely — back and forth — across an “open border.”

He also spoke of the dangers of building walls to keep residents of Mexico out of this country.

Hmm. Wow!

The late president’s remarks only heighten the divide that exists between the Republican Party of his era and today’s GOP. The party activists today will have nothing to do with the immigration ideology espoused by Ronald Reagan.

Go … figure.

national news

Why end this amendment?

Some things defy explanation, definition or any semblance of reason. Ladies and gents, I present to you the idiot governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, a Republican candidate for president of the United States.

DeSantis said recently he intends to move to remove a portion of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the clause that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States of America.

Specifically, he is taking aim at the children of immigrants.

Holy crap-ola, man!

I don’t get this bat-crap crazy dude. He is the grandson of immigrants. He was granted citizenship the moment he entered this world. That’s good enough. His parents were U.S. citizens the moment they were born.

I guess DeSantis’s real target is the undocumented immigrant who sneaked into the country illegally. Therefore, according to DeSantis, it’s OK to punish those people by denying their children a constitutional right that has been part of the Constitution since 1868.

This is short-sighted, gratuitously punitive and petulant in the extreme.

I, too, am the grandson of immigrants. That means my father was the son of immigrants, too. He was a U.S. citizen when this country was attacked by Japanese military forces on Dec. 7, 1941. He enlisted that very day in the Navy because he wanted to get into the fight to save the world from tyranny.

Dad never would have imagined we would be facing a new form of tyranny here at home in the form of a goofy governor seeking to deny liberty to those who were born in this great land.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

State news

Where’s the migrant surge?

Hey … what happened to that surge of migrants everyone thought would pour into the country when a Trump-era restriction lifted?

It didn’t occur! That’s according to the Biden administration and local police and government officials who expected far greater numbers of immigrants than arrived.

Well, I won’t seek to examine why that occurred. I merely will welcome the initial response and hope it stays relatively quiet on our southern border.

Federal official: no “major influx” of migrants at border as Title 42 ended | The Texas Tribune

Title 42 lifted this week. It was imposed during the Trump administration while the nation was fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. The government sought to keep infected migrants from entering the country and, of course, infecting others once they crossed the border.

The pandemic has been declared effectively over. The Biden administration is seeking to comport with today’s reality.

I agree that it is not a good situation along the border. We still have too many people seeking illegal entry. I shall stipulate once more, however, that the border is “not open.” We’re still rounding up illegal entrants daily and seeking to process them as humanely as possible.

But … that surge? It didn’t occur. I’ll take that as a victory of sorts.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com