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A Second Caravan Is Now Forming

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The 7,000-strong migrant caravan that’s heading toward the United States from Central America is not the only one the Trump administration may soon have to deal with. A second migrant caravan has formed at the Honduran border, although it is currently much smaller, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Thousands of Honduran migrants gathered in a Guatemalan city near the border with Honduras Tuesday to prepare for a new caravan that would follow in the footsteps of a larger group currently marching to the U.S.-Mexico border, posing a fresh challenge to Guatemalan and Mexican authorities seeking to contain a surge in mass migration.

Church-run charities assisting migrants and activists say as many as 2,500 Hondurans who crossed into Guatemala in recent days have gathered in the city of Chiquimula, near the border with Honduras. But estimates of the size of the new group vary widely, from that number down to a few hundred, according to Francesca Fontanini, spokeswoman for the Americas region for the United Nations office on refugees.

The migrants say they plan to head to Ciudad Tecun Uman, the Guatemalan border town that was overwhelmed by a larger group of migrants who rushed into Mexico over the weekend. (WSJ)

(Read more from “A Second Caravan Is Now Forming” HERE)

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The Originalist Case Against Birthright Citizenship

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The American people are being told by the political class that there is nothing they can do to prevent future waves of illegal immigrants from coming here, unilaterally declaring political and legal jurisdiction, and securing citizenship for their children. We are told that there is no recourse through our elected representatives to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining a legal foothold in this country, all because of a footnote from the most radical anti-originalist justice of this century, William Brennan Jr.

If you are scratching your head wondering how our own Constitution can be used as a suicide pact against us by foreign countries, you are not missing anything. This irrational sentiment expressed by a number of conservative and liberal pundits alike, in fact, undermines the very fabric of the social contract, popular sovereignty, and the republican form of government established by the preamble of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Mandated birthright citizenship even for legal immigrants is a big stretch

Let’s put aside everything we believe as conservatives for a moment and take the activist ruling of Wong Kim Ark (169 U.S. 649 (1898)) as impregnable constitutional law. As such, the Fourteenth Amendment would compel Congress and the executive agencies to grant citizenship to all children of legal immigrants. Although we all agree as a matter of policy that it is a good idea to grant children born to legal permanent residents citizenship, by accepting the 1898 court decision as settled law, thereby enshrining birthright citizenship into our Constitution, we’d have to swallow the following ridiculous notions:

We’d be adopting one-directional stare decisis of an activist court that overturned two previous court decisions: the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases and Elk v. Wilkins (1884). In those cases, the Supreme Court made it clear that the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment was primarily to grant equal rights to freed black slaves and that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” required that the petitioner for citizenship be “completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.” These cases excluded children born to foreign diplomats and American Indians and were quite clear that the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment would not include all children of immigrants – most of whom would have been covered by less political jurisdiction than even those born on Indian reservations, which were partially under U.S. jurisdiction. (See more from Prof. John Eastman at NRO on defining jurisdiction.)

We’d be overturning the most logical meaning of the text of the citizenship clause, rendering the second phrase all but superfluous.

We’d be ignoring the intent of the drafters of this amendment, who clearly had no intention of mandating birthright citizenship for all immigrants (see more in the Eastman article). While originalists like to focus on text, in this case the text fits in exactly with the intent of the drafters, as demonstrated by the Senate floor debate.

We’d be adopting the Revolutionary-era feudal system of English Common Law rooted in the fact that men are subjects of the state by virtue of being born on the soil. This is antithetical to the consent-based notion of citizenship expressed by our Founders. Although many of our laws are built upon the English Common Law, this certainly was not one of them, and this segregation-era court was incorporating it into American law, ironically, at a time when England was abandoning feudalism. As Thomas Jefferson wrote precisely in a discussion on immigration in Notes on the State of Virginia (Query 8, 211), our Constitution is a composition of the “freest principles of the English constitution.”

By adopting jus soli as a constitutional mandate (not just policy) for automatic citizenship based on soil, and not jus sanguinis – right of blood – all children born to American citizens abroad would not automatically be citizens, as noted by then-Chief Justice Fuller in his dissent in Wong Kim Ark.
Fuller further noted in his masterful dissent that by mandating automatic citizenship for all children of immigrants – no matter the circumstances – the Fourteenth Amendment would have the power “to cut off the legislative power from dealing with the subject.” Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress plenary power over naturalizations. Fuller observes that “the right of a nation to expel or deport foreigners who have not been naturalized or taken any steps toward becoming citizens of a country is as absolute and unqualified as the right to prohibit and prevent their entrance into the country.”

Extrapolating birthright to illegals countermands the social contract and all semblance of sovereignty

Freeze frame at this point.

Accepting the notion of automatic birthright citizenship for legal immigrants as a constitutional mandate is hard enough to swallow. Yet the conservative pundits in the political class want to extrapolate this terrible decision to children of illegal immigrants. As if it wasn’t enough to accept the activist 1898 court case from the segregationist justices, proponents of anchor citizenship for illegal immigrants rely on footnote 10 in William Brennan’s Plylor v. Doe (1982) opinion – a decision that absurdly forced taxpayers to fund K-12 education for illegal immigrants.

In that footnote, which is nothing more than dicta (nonbinding comments not relevant to the case), Brennan quotes “one early commentator” noting that “given the historical emphasis on geographic territoriality, bounded only, if at all, by principles of sovereignty and allegiance, no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

There you have it, until the end of time. American citizens – through their elected representatives – have no recourse to prevent future illegal immigrants from obtaining citizenship against the will of the people, because of the nonbinding footnote of the most radical justice of the 20th century, which in itself relied on a decision reversing precedent and relying on the English feudal system.

In reality, there is a huge difference between the legal permanent resident who was the subject of the 1898 court case and the illegal immigrants of today, even if we were to fully accept the concept of birthright citizenship based on nothing more than geographical jurisdiction. The justices in Wong awarded the child citizenship because his Chinese immigrant parents were “domiciled” in America (legally, before the ban on Chinese immigration). As Prof. Eastman notes, “’Domicile’ is a legal term of art; it means ‘a person’s legal home,’ according to Black’s law dictionary, and is often used synonymously with citizenship.” Undoubtedly, those here in contravention to our laws, unlike Wong Kim Ark’s parents, cannot unilaterally declare domicile in our country.

And this all leads to a much more fundamental and vital discussion about sovereignty. There is simply no way our Constitution can prohibit our elected representatives from preventing illegal immigrants from driving their pregnant wives to the border, and, assuming the border patrol fails to catch the speeding vehicle in time, poof! That baby is a citizen.

First, as noted before, Article 1 Section 8 grants Congress plenary power over naturalization. Mandating automatic citizenship to babies born in the aforementioned case would completely strip the ability of Congress to exercise the most basic regulation over naturalization – keeping out those we affirmatively do not want in the country.

But more fundamentally, the notion that illegal immigrants can unilaterally declare citizenship for their kids against the will of people and the laws duly passed by the people’s representatives, and that those representatives would lack a single recourse to stop it even prospectively, violates the very essence of consent-based citizenship. The notion of consent-based citizenship serves as the bedrock of popular sovereignty, territorial sovereignty, and Republicanism – all built on the social contract. The preamble of the Declaration of Independence was built upon the principle that in order to protect natural rights, people are entitled to popular sovereignty – to form a government that derives its powers “from the consent of the governed.”

Professor Edward Erler has been the leading voice observing how birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants, and indeed the entire phenomenon of illegal immigration and their securing of rights and benefits, violates the social contract in the most foundational way. In his book “The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration,” Erler writes the following on citizenship and the social contract:

[T]he social contract requires reciprocal consent. Not only must the individual consent to be governed, but he must also be accepted by the community as a whole. If all persons born within the geographical limits of the United States are to be counted citizens – even those whose parents are in the United States illegally – then this would be tantamount to the conferral of citizenship without the consent of “the whole people.”

Drawing on the writings of our Founders, Erler notes that they clearly envisioned that “new members can be added only with the consent of those who already constitute civil society.” He cites Madison, who wrote that “in the case of naturalization a new member is added to the social compact, not only without a unanimous consent of the members, but by a majority of the governing body, deriving its powers from a majority of the individual parties to the social compact.”

Even Wong Kim Ark court would never mandate citizenship for illegal aliens

Clearly, even the authors of the Wong decision, unlike William Brennan, understood the basic concept of consent-based citizenship, at least as it relates to those who come here illegally. While some intellectuals contend that because there was no real concept of illegal immigration in those days, the decision would apply to all aliens, the writings of that very court prove otherwise.

In fact, by that point, pursuant to the immigration laws passed in 1882 and 1891, Congress had already denied admission to the following categories of aliens: “idiots,” the insane, paupers, and polygamists; persons liable to become a public charge; those convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral depravity; and sufferers “from a loathsome or dangerous” contagious disease. They also passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning all new immigration from China. The Immigration Act of 1891 created a new office, the commissioner of immigration, within the Treasury Department, vested with the power to inspect new immigrants and potentially deny them entry if they were deemed inadmissible under one of the criteria.

In Nishimura Ekiu v. United States (1892), a Japanese woman sued immigration officials for denying her entry becauase she would be a supposed public charge. She claimed that her due process was violated because she was not afforded the opportunity to present her case. And no, she was not even asserting the dubious modern substantive due process violation in pursuit of new fundamental rights; she was merely alleging a procedural due process violation. Yet Justice Gray – the author of the Wong decision – not only rejected her claim, he noted that the courts shouldn’t even have the jurisdiction to second-guess legislative and executive decisions on immigration. Here are the relevant quotes, with my emphasis added:

“It is an accepted maxim of international law that every sovereign nation has the power, as inherent in sovereignty, and essential to self-preservation, to forbid the entrance of foreigners within its dominions, or to admit them only in such cases and upon such conditions as it may see fit to prescribe. Vat. Law Nat. lib. 2, §§ 94, 100; 1 Phillim. Int. Law, (3d Ed.) c. 10, § 220. In the United States this power is vested in the national government, to which the constitution has committed the entire control of international relations, in peace as well as in war. It belongs to the political department of the government, and may be exercised either through treaties made by the president and senate, or through statutes enacted by congress, upon whom the constitution has conferred power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, including the entrance of ships, the importation of goods, and the bringing of persons into the ports of the United States; to establish a uniform rule of naturalization; to declare war, and to provide and maintain armies and navies; and to make all laws which may be necessary and proper for carrying into effect these powers and all other powers vested by the constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof. […]”

“It is not within the province of the judiciary to order that foreigners who have never been naturalized, nor acquired any domicile or residence within the United States, nor even been admitted into the country pursuant to law, shall be permitted to enter, in opposition to the constitutional and lawful measures of the legislative and executive branches of the national government. As to such persons, the decisions of executive or administrative officers, acting within powers expressly conferred by congress, are due process of law.”

Here we have the very activist author of the decision used as the foundation for the birthright argument clearly expressing the basic concept that Congress has the ability to control the nation’s sovereignty. It would require preposterous mental gymnastics to assume that, had this Japanese woman given birth at the port the day she was interviewed by the immigration officer, Justice Gray would have conferred citizenship on that baby – against the will of the people’s representatives.

Where is the voice of the people on immigration?

The reason the birthright discussion is so important is because it sheds so much light on the transmogrification of the judicial system on issues of popular sovereignty and the social contract. Not only do we have judges like Brennan bestowing citizenship and education rights on illegal immigrants from the high perches of the bench, they have invalidated almost every attempt by the states and federal government to keep out illegal immigrants. A California judge recently invalidated detention for all illegal immigrants with children, essentially mandating their irrevocable disappearance into the American population.

In addition to the courts, we have unelected bureaucrats and the U.N. transforming entire communities through refugee resettlements without the consent of the people. And although our current immigration system was formed by the Hart-Cellar Act (“Kennedy bill”) in 1965, the supporters of the bill lied to the American people and publicly ruled out the transformational outcome that indeed took place. For decades, illegal aliens have been counted in the Census and have now permanently distorted the representation the civil society needs to fight on behalf of its sovereignty.

What ever happened to the voice of the people?

Immigration transformation pursued outside the democratic process is even worse than having courts decide societal issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, in what Justice Scalia calls “societal transformation without representation.” The courts have now empowered themselves to unilaterally and immutably change civil society itself – without any recourse for those the Constitution vested with making such decisions. How far we have deviated from the Founders’ vision that even so-called conservatives support the idea of changing the civil society without the consent of its citizens.

Indeed, the issue of birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants is not just a tangential topic within immigration. It cuts to the very core of how illegal immigrants are able to force their will on the American citizenry and the broader issue of sovereignty. This runs much deeper than the Fourteenth Amendment. The question for policymakers has moved beyond whether we will survive as a nation as our Founders envisioned. We have already deviated extremely far from that vision. It’s a question of whether we are a nation at all. (For more from the author of “The Originalist Case Against Birthright Citizenship” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Caravan Migrants Refuse Mexico’s Offer for Schooling, Jobs and Much More

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Caravan migrants heading to the U.S. have refused Mexico’s offer to receive refugee status that would provide schooling, jobs, medical care and shelter. . .

The program gives refugee status to those who apply and provide migrants access to shelter, medical attention, schooling and temporary employment opportunities to Central American migrants in the Chiapas and Oaxaca states, according to The AP. . .

Those of working age would clean, repair and maintain infrastructure in the two southern Mexican states, according to the program. Migrants can also obtain Mexico’s version of a social security number called CURP (Clave Unica de Registro Publico). This will allow the migrants to have legal proof of identity, enter and leave shelters and open bank accounts.

The program came in response to the “unprecedented flow of people from Central American countries who have entered [into Mexico] the last few days,” according to the program’s press statement.

“The government of the Republic reiterates that the unrestricted commitment to the human rights or migrants does not mean an endorsement to irregular, massive and undocumented entry into Mexican territory, on the contrary it makes a new call to those who wish to enter Mexico, to avoid risks unnecessary and subject to the procedures that Mexican law establish,” a Ministry of the Interior press statement said. (Read more from “Caravan Migrants Refuse Mexico’s Offer for Schooling, Jobs and Much More” HERE)

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After This Tragedy, Illegal Caravan ‘Taking a Break’

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The caravan traveling from Central America to the United States on Sunday decided to take a “break” in Southern Mexico after reports of a child was abducted, NBC News reported. Those who were on the caravan wanted to keep moving forward until a vote was taken and it was decided that they would stop for the day.

Tensions have been growing intense between those traveling on the caravan. Some of the illegal immigrants have relied on hitchhiking to travel between towns instead of walking the entire way. Part of the problem: as soon as seats become available, abled-body men rush to those vehicles, leaving women and children to walk.

A local nun scolded the men for their actions. She also said her church arranged for five vehicles to transport only women and children to their next stop in Niltepec, about 33 miles away. . .

The Mexican government seems to be in limbo, trying to decide whether or not they should help the caravan’s travelers press on or stop them from heading towards the United States. On Saturday, the Mexican government stepped in to help caravan riders for the first time. Grupo Beta, Mexico’s immigrant protection agency, gave rides to those falling behind and passed out water, The Washington Post reported. . .

To try and force more caravan riders to apply for asylum, around a hundred federal police dressed in riot gear blocked a rural highway in southern Mexico. Police eventually let the caravan continue after Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission reminded them that the stretch of highway, which lacked shade, water and restrooms, was not safe for the illegal immigrants. (Read more from “After This Tragedy, Illegal Caravan ‘Taking a Break'” HERE)

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Rather Than Being an Asylum From Persecution, We Are Bringing the Persecution to the Asylum

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The lynchpin of our border crisis is not a lack of border enforcement, but a lack of legal enforcement. It all boils down to the invasion under the guise of asylum backed by lawfare. But is there really anything wrong with the way the asylum laws are written, or is there something wrong with the brains of our political class applying a law to the exact opposite situation it was intended to address? In the case of the Central American invasion since 2014, it’s a lot more of the latter.

To begin, both our laws governing refugee status for unaccompanied children and asylum are designed to protect victims of trafficking and persecution, not those engaging in trafficking to fleece America or those simply reuniting with other illegal family members with no evidence of persecution at home. Asylum was not designed for anyone living in an impoverished and/or violent country. That would make two billion or so people eligible for legal status. It was designed for individuals persecuted by their government. For example, a case like Charlie Gard’s parents in Great Britain, in my opinion, or groups of persecuted ethnic or religious minorities victimized by the majority in a one-way persecution, not a civil war.

Say what you want about Central America, but it’s one of the most homogenous places in the world. There are no persecuted ethnic and religious minorities, and none of them are coming to America because they are being persecuted by the government for, say, supporting free market health care or gun rights. In other words, it’s inconceivable that any of them are persecuted based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” as required by law.

Illegal immigration is all about incentives, not persecution

To the extent that there are push factors driving the migration, it’s all economics. Of course people will come if we incentivize them to come here through amnesty. Hundreds of millions of people would come if we opened our doors. But the ebb and flow of Central American migration does not respond to push factors, much less factors associated with violence (which, again, is not grounds for asylum); it responds to pull factors of our politics in America.

The media has lied to us from day one. To begin with, 80 percent of the children who have crossed over the border since 2014 are not with parents but are unaccompanied. Only 20 percent come with parents. Either way, almost all of them have been resettled with family members who have successfully evaded the Border Patrol over the years and have settled in the country illegally. Why did this begin in 2014? Because of DACA and the understanding that they will get amnesty, just like it is resurging this year because of catch-and-release policies. The El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) drafted a memo in 2014 asserting that 95 percent of the border-crossers interviewed cited the promise of amnesty as the primary factor behind their migration, not violence back home.

Violence is down, migration is up!

The twisted irony is that violence in Central America actually dropped by 30 percent over the exact same time of the border surge, which shows that this is all a fraud being perpetrated on America’s dime. Oh, and 73 percent of the migrants in fiscal year 2017 were male, the most violent demographic of any civilization, which doesn’t exactly reflect a reality of fleeing from violence. If the primary factor were violence, then why in the world would we not see more women in this percentage? Sounds similar to what’s going on in Europe, huh?

If you break down the murder rate trends by individual country, you see an inverse relationship between violence and migration. As noted earlier this week, by far, Guatemala is dominating the illegal migration, with Honduras increasing but more modestly, and El Salvador decreasing. Guess what? El Salvador has three times the murder rate of Guatemala and is still 46 percent higher than Honduras. Thus, the country with the lowest murder rate has the highest migration rate and vice versa. According to Phoenix ICE officials, 85 percent of the families coming through the Yuma sector of the border are from Guatemala!

Bringing the violence to America – the exact opposite of asylum

With this factual background in mind, now we can appreciate how the fact that Central America is still relatively violent is actually a reason not to let these people in without first being processed off our shores. We are bringing in predominantly young males from some of the most violent countries in the world, all of which are from the same homogenous population as the “persecutors.” This is not to say all of them have been violent or will be violent when coming here, but just that there is no way to disentangle a persecuted minority from a persecuting majority as we could with, for example, the Yazidis, who are being persecuted by the Sunnis in Iraq. In that case, we could bring in the Yazidis a) because they are legitimate asylees and b) because there is no concern that we would also be bringing in the very problem they are fleeing.

Obviously, this violates the most basic solemn duty of the federal government to protect American citizens from external violence. But for all those virtue-signalers who think the job of our government is to sacrifice our security for the needs and desires of other countries, they must remember that their virtue-signaling is a vice, not a virtue for those very people. What good are we doing those peaceful migrants if we bring them in through the uncontrolled border migration in such large numbers that they reconstitute the worst elements of a place like Honduras right here in our own cities? While the gangs and drugs are killing all Americans, it is most concentrated in the communities where these illegal immigrants are living.

Liberal outlets like the Washington Post forget the irony of their virtue-signaling when they have reported endlessly on places like Brentwood, Long Island, where a predominantly Hispanic community and school were torn apart by hordes of teenagers in 2014, some of whom “had never gone to school and couldn’t read or write in any language.” They reported on MS-13 becoming a “powerhouse” and the community “changing” with the surge of Central American teens. Remember, many of those teens are now 19-23 years old.

The same outlet also reported on an “overwhelmingly Hispanic school in Prince George’s County,” Maryland, where MS-13 would “sell drugs, draw gang graffiti and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America, according to more than two dozen teachers, parents and students.” It was so bad that “most of those interviewed asked not to be identified for fear of losing their jobs or being targeted by MS-13.”

Last year, the Post did a report on an illegal immigrant woman from Guatemala who has to pay ransom to MS-13 not to be killed and how she felt she was living with the very elements she fled. She was living in the U.S. for 10 years, but things changed around the DACA surge when “MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”

The gang was almost eradicated under Bush’s 287(g) program, but DACA and sanctuary cities fueled this unprecedented surge, growing every month.

According to the Post, “The gang’s growth has been fueled by a wave of 200,000 teens who traveled to the United States alone to escape poverty and gang violence in Central America. … Nearly 5,000 of those unaccompanied minors have arrived in Prince George’s since 2012.” This parallels comments made by Geraldine Hart, police commissioner of Suffolk County, New York, that the entirety of the MS-13 crisis is because of the unaccompanied minors and that Long Island had it bad because it was “the largest recipient of UACs in the nation.”

Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich says the Lord wants us to have open borders. We know people like him couldn’t care less about Americans, but if he had a shred of compassion in his soul, he’d support Trump’s plan to only accept asylum claims in a stable and secure environment in our consulates, so we are not bringing along with them the very hellish environment from which they seek refuge. (For more from the author of “Rather Than Being an Asylum From Persecution, We Are Bringing the Persecution to the Asylum” please click HERE)

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Illegal Immigration Isn’t Just a Security Issue — It’s a Public Health Crisis in the Making

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The northern triangle of Central America is one of the most violent and impoverished regions in the world and is the prime hub for human and drug trafficking. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that bringing in hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from these countries within a few years will bring in crime, gangs, and drugs. Indeed, that is what has happened since 2014. But what is being overlooked by many, particularly those on the Left, is the strong likelihood that by not blocking illegal immigration, we are importing devastating diseases that we’ve worked hard and long to eradicate from our country.

This is how regressive progressives are. They turn back a century of indispensable health care progress and sacrifice it on the altar of political correctness.

Over the past century, Americans have successfully diminished and, in some cases, nearly eradicated certain infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, pertussis, rubella, malaria, hepatitis, polio, measles, and mumps. Over time, every American has been checked and inoculated (except for the few who refuse), and all the legal immigrants are screened for these diseases. This has been done since our first immigration laws and was a value as deeply embedded into the tissue of our immigration politics as any other issue.

But what happens when hundreds of thousands are enticed to come here illegally thanks to the endless incentives? And what happens when they are coming from the most impoverished areas that are a century behind us in medical progress in terms of combating infectious diseases? Well, while we’ve made enormous strides in improving public health as a nation, we are not keeping up with our policies on immigration from even one century ago. In fact, we are going backwards.

Here is why it’s inconceivable that the recent resurgence of many diseases we thought were on their way to extinction is not in large part due to illegal immigration. We know that the countries dominating these caravans – Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras – have high rates of infectious diseases. We know that it’s not the wealthy and well-to-do citizens who are migrating here. And here’s what else we know. As I reported earlier, while we’ve apprehended hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens every year, there are hundreds of thousands of others who come in undetected without any health screening.

For argument’s sake, let’s just assume that all those who are apprehended and then released into our country are inoculated and screened before being released, pursuant to the Centers for Disease Control’s protocol. What about those we never see but are able to get in because the Border Patrol is busy dealing with the ones we are amnestying? While the data is purposely being suppressed, no logical person can deny that there’s a serious public health concern with these migrant caravans and the thousands of others who come in undocumented as a result of the border officials being overwhelmed.

In general, this is a part of even the legal immigration discussion that our political class wants to ignore. As I’ve said repeatedly, immigration from the third world is fine when it’s done responsibly and gradually, but when it’s done in such large numbers so quickly and dominates our system, we will begin to bring in all its vices. Thus, along with poverty, we will bring in diseases.

As professor of economics at George Mason University Walter Williams observed in a September column, “Data reported to the National Tuberculosis Surveillance System show the TB incidence among foreign-born people in the United States (15.1 cases per 100,000) is approximately 13 times the incidence among U.S.-born people (1.2 cases per 100,000).” Moreover, Williams cites a 2002 CDC study that shows countries that have recently taken in a number of third world immigrants are seeing a relatively high prevalence of tuberculosis among the newcomers. “Today, the proportion of immigrants among persons reported as having TB exceeds 50 percent in several European countries, including Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. A similar proportion has been predicted for the United States.”

But let’s put the debate over numbers and origin of legal immigration on the shelf for a moment. Why can’t we all agree that incentivizing illegal immigrants from countries with a high prevalence of these infectious diseases is a colossal public health risk? Illegal immigrants are less educated than their legal counterparts and are even more prone to carry these diseases, in addition to never being detected, screened, and inoculated. Whereas TB prevalence among legal immigrants in America is 15.1 cases per 100,000, which is high enough, the prevalence of TB among Guatemalans is 106 per 100,000 people, according to the CDC. In other words, Guatemalans are 83 times more likely to have TB than Americans and 7 times more likely than legal immigrants.

The Centers for Disease Control, in its 2017 report, further found that dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses are either prevalent in or endemic to the three Central American countries. They also found that malaria is “endemic” to these countries, but bizarrely concluded that the “prevalence is not high enough to justify routine screening or presumptive treatment.” They further found that these countries are at “high risk for neglected tropical diseases,” with over one million children being treated each year for soil-transmitted helminths in Guatemala and Honduras. Central America experiences at least 200,000 cases of Chagas a year, a disease that is “the most common cause of nonischemic heart disease in Central America and may cause cardiomyopathy years after initial infection.”

In addition, there are numerous other diseases for which they have no data, but it’s very likely they are endemic to the impoverished population in this part of the world.

It’s also important to remember that as bad as the health care is in these countries, “access to basic healthcare in Central America largely depends on socioeconomic status,” according to the CDC. On average, it is the most impoverished population coming here, given that we know they are coming for economic reasons, not primarily because of violence (which would, in theory, drive out the more wealthy population as well).

Obviously, we have our own problem with a small minority of people who don’t want to get vaccinated, but ultimately these new outbreaks, such as the recent measles outbreak, are originating from other countries. Certainly, even if we didn’t have illegal immigration, there’s always a risk of bringing in diseases from the cross-border travel of Americans. However, there is no denying that the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the fact that millions of illegals have come over the border this generation from very risk-prone countries without ever being screened in detention facilities because they were never apprehended. It’s simply unacceptable that our government refuses to study this issue further and consider this as a major factor when deciding policies that incentivize caravans and other invasions.

Have we become so political as a nation that political correctness will allow us to revert to the 18th-century health standards? Ironically, the Left is obsessed with creating a monopoly for the insurance cartel under the guise of promoting health care, but they seem to never care about the actual “care” part. This is why the government and the media have stifled any data on this issue and we never hear any concern about the resurgence in diseases very plausibly emanating from this gaping hole in our public health defense. One journal article from the Infectious Disease Society of America in 2009 agonized over the “ethnical concerns” that the “publication of the results would lead to increased stigmatization and discrimination of undocumented persons in the United States and to harsher measures, such as deportation, when these persons receive a diagnosis of TB.”

From our earliest colonial laws, through state regulations and our first federal immigration laws, our politicians always sought to protect this country from diseases brought in through immigration. Courts in the 1800s even ruled that states didn’t violate the foreign commerce clause by regulating the flow of ships in order to prevent those with diseases from landing on their shores (New York v. Milne, 1837).

Indeed, by creating new “rights” at the expense of the social compact right of Americans to sovereignty, we are neither more enlightened, advanced or more progressive than our forefathers. In fact, our robust knowledge about diseases and our deft ability to prevent them make our utter disregard for the public health concerns of open borders all the more regressive and benighted. (For more from the author of “Illegal Immigration Isn’t Just a Security Issue — It’s a Public Health Crisis in the Making” please click HERE)

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Obama Flashback: We Simply Cannot Allow People (Illegal Aliens) to Pour Into the United States

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As illegal immigration begins to take center stage with the 2018 midterm elections rapidly approaching, the Trump administration is grappling with how to prevent a Central America caravan of 10,000 illegal aliens from entering the United States.

Democrats, especially those running for reelection, aren’t interested in discussing the topic. They’ve been told by pollsters to avoid the issue on the campaign trail.

. . .

“People who should be here are those who come legally and we have to for the time being, enforce our borders,” Feinstein said in 1993. “I think we should enforce our borders. To have a sitaution where 40 percent of the babies born on Medicaid in California today are born of illegal immigrants creates a very real problem for the state…to have 17 percent of our prison population at a cost of $300 million a year. The illegal immigrants who come here to commit felonies, that’s not what our nation is about.”

(Read more from “Obama Flashback: We Simply Cannot Allow People (Illegal Aliens) to Pour Into the United States” HERE)

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Oh, so This Is Why Democrats Are Very Nervous About Young Latino Voters

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It’s a battle of narratives. It’s going to be a Democratic wave, or the GOP could defy history and retain its majority, albeit much slimmer in the House. The Senate is a different animal. It’s a GOP lock, with the possibility of Republicans actually entering the new Congress with 55 seats. If there is another Supreme Court nomination by President Trump, which is not out of the question, gone is the anxiety over confirmation. The GOP could lose its two moderates—Collins and Murkowski—and still confirm without any additional heartburn.

Yet, the blue tsunami could end up being low tide, and the reason for that will be because Democrats can’t get their people to the polls, especially young voters—young Latino voters to be exact. There are at least 30 House races where Latinos are a quarter of the population, but they’re not enthused to vote. As we mentioned before, this is becoming a rather big blind spot for Democrats. Bloomberg has more:

Just two weeks from Election Day, Democrats are agonizing about whether two groups of infrequent and liberal-leaning voters will turn out or dash their hopes of winning control of Congress: Hispanics and young Americans.

High turnout among Latinos and millennials is “absolutely pivotal” to the party’s prospects “and it’s of major, major concern,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “I worry about whether we as Democrats have invested in the infrastructure we need to really mobilize that vote in 2018.

[…]

…low Hispanic turnout could sink Democrats in some House races the party sees as part of its path to the majority. There are 31 GOP-held districts where Latinos are at least a quarter of the population, according to the Census Bureau, including those held by Republicans Steve Knight and Jeff Denham of California, Will Hurd and John Culberson of Texas and Carlos Curbelo of Florida. All are major targets for Democrats.

(Read more from “Oh, so This Is Why Democrats Are Very Nervous About Young Latino Voters” HERE)

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In Just 17 Months, Illegal Alien Family Units Increased by 960 Percent (!!!) at the Border

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There are a lot more than roughly 14,000 people seeking to invade our border.

The American people are rightfully concerned about the brazen “caravan” of invaders headed for our southern border and fully expect that it will be stopped at all costs before it reaches our border, not in our courtrooms. However, we must not lose sight of the likely 800,000-strong quiet invasion at a less public level that is crossing our border this year.

Brand new data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should mobilize Trump and Republicans to not just focus on the caravan but on finally stopping the broader invasion in its entirety.

The big picture of FY 2018 border data

According to CBP, roughly 400,000 illegals were caught sneaking in between our points of entry in FY 2018. Another roughly 125,000 presenting themselves at the port of entry in FY 2018 were deemed inadmissible. The fact that the overall numbers increased by 106,000 from FY 2017 is enough of a concern, but several other data points are even more concerning. The trajectory and the nature of the border crossings are what should really worry us.

First, it’s important to remember that border agents will tell you that the U.S. typically apprehends only 50 percent of those who illegally cross the border. That means that there were likely close to 800,000 people who crossed the border last year not at our points of entry. As such, it’s not just the several hundred thousand illegals that were released into our population after being apprehended that should concern those who care about their communities and schools. What is more concerning are the people we never apprehended, who most likely, are more dangerous than the ones we did apprehend. As Brandon Judd, president of the Border Patrol Council, explained on my podcast several months ago:

The criminal cartels are pushing them [the family units] in front as “the sacrificial lambs,” forcing me to use my resources to take them into custody, so that they can then cross the dangerous criminals right behind them. And we play into their hands by continuing to humanize the way things are happening on the border.

Just from a drug crisis standpoint, the hundreds of thousands of undetected illegals coming in every year – thanks to the faux sympathy over “families” – is terrifying. As the LA Times wrote in a recent report, “Chinese companies send fentanyl in small quantities to dealers in the United States or Canada, but ship the drugs in bulk to criminal cartels in Mexico.” Then what happens? “The cartels then mix the synthetics into heroin and other substances, or press them into counterfeit pills. The product is then smuggled across the border.”

The president is signing a series of “opioid bills” today, all of which fail to recognize this premise as the main cause of the 72,000 annual deaths.

Illegal immigration is all tied to our own self-immolating incentives

The next data point that should concern us is the trajectory of the increase, which is unfathomable. While the overall numbers aren’t higher than they were during Obama, that is because the numbers dropped to a once-in-a-generation low during the first few months of Trump’s presidency just based on the perception that he’d enforce our sovereignty. Since illegals saw that nothing changed, the numbers surged beyond belief. A total of 16,658 family units were caught between the points of entry in September, a new record and a sharp spike from the previous months. In total, 161,113 family units were apprehended this year. Remember, only 1.4 percent of the family units apprehended last year were deported so almost all of them remain in our communities, along with the nearly half a million others who were never apprehended! And this is growing every year.

As you can see from this graph, the number of illegals surged 220 percent since the lowest point of the border invasion in April 2017 and 50 percent since last September. What is most remarkable is that the number of family units apprehended has gone up by 960 percent since last April and 280 percent since last September. The numbers spiked 55 percent since this past July when our bipartisan political elites shilled for the invaders and lamented the “separating of families” rather than the harm caused to American families. If you just isolate the family unit apprehensions to those caught between the points of entry, the numbers increased by 85 percent in just two months! And as Mark Dannels, the head of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, told me yesterday, “the numbers have not plateaued and are still surging throughout October,” at least in Arizona.

Notice how illegal immigration dropped after the initial rise when Trump implemented the zero tolerance policy earlier this year? Yes, it’s all about incentives.

What’s also disturbing is that this border surge, unlike the one in 2014-2015, is across the entire southern border, not just in the far-east Rio Grande sector. Although in raw numbers, the overwhelming plurality still came through the Rio Grande sector this year, UAC apprehensions did not increase since last year while family units increased by a “modest” 27 percent in the busiest sector. Contrast that to Arizona where family unit apprehensions increased in the Tucson and Yuma sectors by 143 percent and 140 percent respectively. Apprehensions were also up sharply in the other Texas border sectors as well as in San Diego.

Furthermore, the number of family units coming at the points of entry spiked 84 percent since FY 2017, which tells us that they are trying to get caught and surrender themselves thanks to catch-and-release policies in place.

Finally, it’s important to point out that the overwhelming majority of the increased flow was from just one country: Guatemala. While in previous years, the migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala was more uniform, this year the migration from Guatemala outpaced the other two by far. Why? As ICE’s Phoenix field director Henry Lucero said, “On the news in Guatemala they are saying that you can get a work permit if you’re in a family, if you’re coming with your child, and that you’re going to be released.”

Again, it’s all about incentives.

Try to imagine for a moment the ill effects it has on our community to bring in hundreds of thousands of predominantly male migrants from the most violent, impoverished countries directly linked to the smuggling routes of drugs and gangs? Talk about an issue to win over suburban mothers.

Imagine if Trump were to call Congress back into session and Senate Majority Leader Sen. McConnell, R-Ky., and House Majority Leader Rep. McCarthy, R-Calif., for once, would actually speak with as much passion as he does on the issue. Then, indeed, there would be a red wave. (For more from the author of “In Just 17 Months, Illegal Alien Family Units Increased by 960 Percent (!!!) at the Border” please click HERE)

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Trump Draws a Line With Democrats Over the Migrant Caravan. Will the Rest of the GOP Step Up?

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There are just two weeks left in the midterm campaign season, and President Donald Trump is on a mission to make illegal immigration the defining issue of the campaign. As many as an estimated 10,000 people are migrating from Central America, through Mexico, and toward the United States, and Trump has pledged to “stop the onslaught.”

He’s squarely accused Democrats of refusing to work with Republicans on immigration reform and exacerbating the coming crisis on the southern border.

The president has rightly declared this marching caravan to be a matter of national security. Violent criminal drug cartels take advantage of asylum-seekers, demanding fees to smuggle them across the border and using them to traffic drugs into the United States. The country’s backlogged court system and overcrowded detention facilities ensure that many of the migrants arrested for crossing the border illegally are released into the country and disappear, unless they resurface to commit a crime.

But will the president’s championing of this issue trickle down to Republican campaigns for Congress?

The problem for Republicans echoing Trump’s demands for border security and attacks on the Democrats is that under the leadership of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the GOP declined to have a fight on immigration policy before the midterm elections. Republicans refused to attach needed reforms to any of the must-pass spending bills. If they had done that, they would have been able to corner the Democrats on their open-borders radicalism and force them to choose between their unpopular ideology and shutting down the government. The last time Democrats were given that choice, they picked ideology over common sense, and it backfired on them.

Instead, Republicans punted on the issue, voting to fund the government without a fight and kicking the issue past the election. Now McCarthy has introduced a stand-alone bill to fund the wall, but everyone knows that cannot pass. So how are Republicans going to run on immigration reform and border security when voters just watched them surrender on both fronts this year?

If they are allowed to keep the majority, the message needs to be sent from day one after the election that the Republicans will change the way they do business in Washington D.C. How do they do that? Start by defending Trump’s constitutional and statutory authority to repel the migrant caravan attempting to invade the U.S. border. Next, pledge to force a change in House leadership because of Congress’ failure to keep promises to repeal Obamacare, cut spending, secure the border, defund Planned Parenthood, and drain the swamp.

Use the midterm elections as an opportunity to reset Congress, refocus the agenda to accomplish President Trump’s priorities, and prepare to run in 2020 on achievements accomplished because Republicans fought to keep their promises. (For more from the author of “Trump Draws a Line With Democrats Over the Migrant Caravan. Will the Rest of the GOP Step Up?” please click HERE)

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