Immigration – Page 3

America Is Not a Nation of Immigrants

July 14, 2018 By Pedro Gonzalez 6 Comments

America is a nation of immigrants. It’s a commonplace among the political class. Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), emergent leaders in the open-borders vanguard of the Democratic Party, never tire of saying so. Both object to the Trump Administration’s hard line on border control and have buttressed their calls for an “immigration reform” that would in effect re-open the floodgates of migrants from south of the border. The reason, they say, is that immigration is the defining characteristic of the nation.

It isn’t.

The “nation of immigrants” trope is relatively new in American history, appearing not until the late 19th century. Its first appearance in print was most likely The Daily State Journal of Alexandria, Virginia, in 1874. In praising a state bill that encouraged European immigration, the editors wrote: “We are a nation of immigrants and immigrants’ children.” In 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the Daughters of the American Revolution: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.” John F. Kennedy would later use the term as the title of a book, written as part of an Anti-Defamation League series, so it is undoubtedly objective, quality scholarship.

But in 1874, as in 1938, and even in 1958 when JFK’s book was written, America was not a nation of immigrants. The women Roosevelt was addressing were not the daughters of immigrants but rather the descendants of settlers—those Americans who founded the society that immigrants in 1874 came to be a part of.

Curiously, yet another Kennedy understood this and might have a thing or two to say in protest against the “nation of immigrants” myth, even if he didn’t quite mean what he said.

During the U.S. Senate debate of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, Ted Kennedy, young Joe’s great-uncle, promised: “our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually.” Today, with far more than a million new arrivals per year, it seems Ted’s words did not age well.

The liberal lion also promised that “the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset,” and America would not be flooded “with immigrants from any one country or area.” Yet in 2014, the number of Latinos in California finally overtook the number of whites. This, too, did not age well.

“The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs,” Kennedy assured his colleagues and fellow citizens. He was disingenuous at best. None of it worked out the way Kennedy promised in 1965.

The Emma Lazarus Myth
All of this is not presented simply to take a jab at young Joe, who is simply parroting the liberal line of the moment, but to highlight certain implicit truths—now disregarded by the progeny—in the assurances of his forebear.

If America has always been a nation of immigrants, why then did Ted Kennedy and others feel the need to reassure Americans that this nation would not be inundated by foreigners? This suggests that America was not, in fact, a nation of immigrants in the 1960s, and politicians aware of this spoke in this way to reassure a public equally aware of it and certainly unwilling to see America become a nation of immigrants.

Similarly, implicit in Ted Kennedy’s rhetoric is some recognition of the fact that mass immigration has the potential to change the country in ways that citizens might not like—such as by driving down wages and hurting native workers. Joe Kennedy, however, has suggested immigration is always a net good. Which Kennedy do we believe? (“Neither” is a perfectly acceptable answer.)

Then there is Kamala Harris. The freshman senator from California took the Independence Day holiday as an opportunity to claim the Declaration of Independence was signed by “immigrants” and performed the obligatory shout out to Emma Lazarus, who many liberal politicians believe wrote our immigration laws. Although Lazarus’ poem was added to the Statue of Liberty nearly two decades after the structure was dedicated, her belated verses became, at least to the Left, of more importance than the statue itself and the nation for which it stands. The idea of immigrants as all helpless “huddled masses” and “wretched refuse,” as Lazarus conceived, plays to the Left’s patronizing narrative of foreigners and citizen-subjects alike. But the problem with this conception of America’s immigrants, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) argued, is it’s a myth—and a bad one, at that.

“The 20 million-odd immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1910,” said Moynihan, “were not the wretched refuse of anybody’s shores.” Rather, the fiery New York liberal concluded, they were an “extraordinary, enterprising and self-sufficient folk who knew exactly what they were doing and doing it quite on their own, thank you very much.”

Moynihan was right. America’s early immigrants were, with some exceptions (such as the Irish fleeing famine), Jewish tailors, Italian masons, German shopkeepers, skilled craftsmen, and artisans. It was not uncommon for these immigrants to make their fortunes in America and remigrate, either because they had never intended to stay or were induced by hardship. Those who stayed did so because they truly wanted to be American.

Lawbreaking Carries Huge Costs
To say that most of today’s immigrants do not have the qualities Moynihan adumbrated is not racist but rather an objective statement of facts, especially when 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant—legal or illegal—use at least one welfare program per year, compared to 30 percent of native households. Immigrants from Central America and Mexico, the bulk of today’s arrivals, have the highest rate of welfare use. Accordingly, the Left has shifted its politics to dangle a generous welfare-state before immigrants and illegal aliens.

Indeed, in 2017 the combined cost of education, medical, justice, and welfare expenditures attributed to illegal aliens alone amounted to $116 billion—up from $113 billion in 2013. That figure accounts for total taxes paid by illegal aliens. Moreover, it’s worth noting that amnesty for illegals would only exacerbate this problem, because amnesty would make available to them more forms of means-tested welfare benefits, and in turn increase the fiscal drain on American taxpayers.

While exceptional immigrants certainly still do arrive in the United States, progressive policy in the form of a generous welfare state has made it so immigrants no longer need to have the qualities of which Moynihan spoke.

But were America’s Founders immigrants, as Harris claims? Perhaps the simplest answer is found in the evolution of the English language in America. The term “immigrant,” Samuel P. Huntington informs us, did not come into usage in America until the 1780s—to distinguish new arrivals from the founding settlers.

Prior to the American Revolution, the English and the Dutch, according to historian John Higham, “conceived of themselves as founders, settlers, or planters—the formative population of those colonial societies—not as immigrants. Theirs was the polity, the language, the pattern of work and settlement, and many of the mental habits to which the immigrants would have to adjust.” If the Founders were immigrants, as some have mendaciously claimed, it would have been a tremendous surprise to them, because they certainly did not conceive of themselves as such.

By 1790, the population of the United States was 4 million. With the exception of a black minority and Indians, America was 60 percent ethnically English, 80 percent British—with Germans and the Dutch making up the remainder—and 98 percent Protestant. In 1797, John Jay noted specific attributes of American identity. In doing so, Jay did not simply adumbrate what “makes an American,” but made a distinction between settlers and immigrants. These are language (English), manners and customs (Anglo-Protestant), religion (Christianity), principles of government (British).

“We must,” Jay said of newcomers, “see our people more Americanized.”

Drawing from Huntington’s exhaustive demographic research, we find that while European wars kept immigration to a crawl, the overall American population increased by 35 percent between 1790 and 1800, 36 percent between 1800 and 1810, and 82 percent between 1800 and 1820. Huntington attributes the population explosion to high birth rates and fertility rates among the native-born population.

What Immigration Numbers Really Mean
Although it should be clear by now, the Left will never admit their claim of America as an historically multicultural-immigrant society is unsupportable, because that would damage their devil’s bargain with identity politics.

Concerning immigration patterns, from 1820 through 1924, 34 million new arrivals entered the United States, mostly from Europe. Throughout this period, intermittent waves of immigration were punctuated by pauses and lulls. These respites provided immigrants time to Americanize. By contrast, from 1965 through 2000, 24 million new arrivals entered the United States, mostly from Latin America and Asia, and with few if any pauses between waves. In just 35 years, America experienced nearly as much immigration as it did over a century. Nevertheless, from 1820 through 2000, the foreign-born averaged just over 10 percent of the total American population.

To claim that America is a “nation of immigrants” is to stretch a truth—that America historically has experienced intermittent waves of immigration—into a total falsehood, that America is a nation of immigrants. For the truth of the first thing to equal the truth of the other, every nation that experiences immigration may just as well be considered a “nation of immigrants.” Germans have lived along the Rhine since before Christ, yet Germany has also been swarmed by foreigners from the Middle East and North Africa. Is Germany, therefore, a nation of immigrants? A resounding nein is the answer we are hearing from Germans.

The Right Way to Live
Before America was a nation, it had to be settled and founded. As Michael Anton reiterated in response to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens: America is a nation of settlers, not a nation of immigrants. In that, Anton is echoing Samuel Huntington, who showed that America is a society of settlers. Those settlers in the 17th and 18th centuries—more than anyone else after—had the most profound and lasting impact on American culture, institutions, historical development, and identity. American began in the 1600s—not 1874—and what followed in the 1770s and 1780s was rooted in the founded society of those settlers.

“The most important fact to keep in mind when studying political changes in America is that the United States is a product of a settler society,” writes historian J. Rogers Hollingsworth.

Settlers, Anton explains, travel from an existing society into the wilderness to build a society ex nihilo. Settlers travel in groups that either implicitly or explicitly agree to a social compact. Settlers, unlike immigrants, go abroad with the intention of creating a new community away from the mother country. Immigrants, on the other hand, travel from one existing society to another, either as individuals or as families, and are motivated by different reasons; and not always good ones. Immigrants come later to be part of the society already built by settlers, who, as Higham wrote, establish the polity, language, customs, and habits of the society immigrants seek to join and in joining must embrace and adopt.

Justice Louis Brandeis would later echo Jay, declaring that the immigrant is Americanized when he “adopts the clothes, the manners, and the customs generally prevailing here . . . substitutes for his mother tongue the English language,” ensures that “his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here,” and comes “into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations.” Only when the immigrant has done this will he have “the national consciousness of an American.”

Certainly, the Left (and a great many neoconservatives, for that matter) pays lip service to the principles that constitute what we call the American Creed: liberty, representative government, individualism, and equality. The principles of the Creed are transcendent of race and ethnicity, and it is for this reason that America has the capacity to assimilate foreigners into its society in a way that is unique to the rest of the world. One can become an American in a way that it is impossible to become a German, for example.

But the principles behind the Creed are universal because they are largely abstractions. As such, they do not tell us anything about the society that actually attracts the immigrants, nor do they tell us anything about the people whose culture fostered the Creed. This is generally as far as civic nationalists are willing to go. Either out of political expediency or for fear of being condemned as racists for merely stating that this nation has an historic demographic; upon whose culture the societal scaffolding of our nation was built, and thus laid the foundations of a Creed by which all men can live.

The “crucible in which all the new types are melted into one,” said Teddy Roosevelt, “was shaped from 1776 to 1789, and our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men of Washington’s day.” These “essentials” are derived from the historic Anglo-Protestant, Middle American core of the nation, in whose culture we find the British traditions of law, justice, and limits upon government power, the English language, a legacy of European art, literature, philosophy, and music, Protestant moralism, and an ethic of self-control, self-reliance, and self-assertion.

In the Anglo tradition, Americans will find their customs, prayers, precepts, and political ideas; the bicameral legislature, the division of government powers, a legislative committee system, and so on. In the Protestant tradition, Americans find responsiveness of government to the people, their work ethic, individualism, a zeal for religious and cultural restoration, and a deep skepticism of centralized state power.

What the Multiculturalists Can Teach Us
The Creed did not appear spontaneously, it is the product of the culture of this nation’s historic Anglo-Protestant demographic. Millions of immigrants and their children attained prosperity in America because they Americanized and adopted Anglo-Protestant culture. There is no question that this is precisely what historically has been the case, and we can find affirmation in the words of the critics of Americanization.

Will Kymlicka, a multicultural theorist, argued in 1995 that before the 1960s, immigrants “were expected to shed their distinctive heritage and assimilate entirely to existing cultural norms.” This process of Americanization Kymlicka grudgingly labeled the “Anglo-conformity model.” “Anglo-conformity” is on target, and it is precisely this process that has benefitted both the nation and the immigrants who have embraced it. Moreover, there are two implicit truths in Kymlicka’s words: America was never a multicultural society, and Americanization was in full effect until the 1960s.

How effective? Prior to waves of sustained immigration from Latin America after the 1960s, the United States was a land of 200 million people virtually all speaking English.

The Left has fully rejected this older approach to assimilation as “un-American.” It is, to the Left, un-American to ask that foreigners respect our laws and, if they are so fortunate as to be admitted to this great nation, embrace the culture that made it all possible. According to the Left, America’s historic demographic is the only thing wrong with America at all, and if these native-born Americans will not acquiesce their forced obsolescence, then they should simply leave the country to make room for more “good Americans” who are not American at all. America, however, is “not the common property of all mankind,” as Anton has so correctly noted.

There are no patriots among those who have slandered or misconstrued the history, culture, and principles of this nation in an effort to subvert and destroy all that we call America. There are no patriots on the Left. America belongs to no one but Americans. It does not belong to the foreign masses of the world and it does not belong to the Left who, having rejected the American way, cannot count themselves among its patriots.

This article was originally published by the Center for American Greatness, Inc.

Correction: This article was edited slightly on July 12 to reflect that California’s Latino population overtook the white population in 2014; California did not become a majority Latino state. According to U.S. Census figures, the Golden State’s Latino population is 38 percent.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Immigration, Joe Kennedy, Kamala Harris

California Judge Blocks One, Upholds Two ‘Sanctuary State’ Laws

July 8, 2018 By Joel B. Pollak 3 Comments

A federal judge in Sacramento partially blocked one of California’s “sanctuary state” laws, but upheld two others, on Thursday.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a challenge in March against the Inspection and Review of Facilities Housing Federal Detainees law (AB 103); the Immigrant Worker Protection Act (AB 450); and the California Values Act (SB 54). Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled specially to Sacramento for the filing.

Judge John Mendez, a George W. Bush appointee, declined the state’s request in April to transfer the case to a more liberal federal court San Francisco. That was thought to be a good sign for the Trump administration’s case, but the judge ruled largely in the state’s favor Thursday, upholding AB 103 and SB 54, while blocking enforcement of portions of AB 450.

Experts had predicted SB 54 would be upheld and that AB 450 would be struck down, but had also predicted that AB 103 would be unlikely to survive.

DOJ spokesman Devin O’Malley provided a comment via e-mail to Breitbart News, calling the ruling on AB 450 a “major victory,” but expressing disappointment in the court’s ruling on AB 103 and SB 54:

When they passed SB 54, AB 103, and AB 450, California’s political leadership clearly intended to obstruct federal immigration authorities in their state. The preliminary injunction of AB 450 is a major victory for private employers in California who are no longer prevented from cooperating with legitimate enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws. While we are disappointed that California’s other laws designed to protect criminal aliens were not yet halted, the Justice Department will continue to seek out and fight unjust policies that threaten public safety.

In his ruling, Judge Mendez wrestled with the question of whether the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause barred the state’s attempts to restrict federal enforcement of immigration laws within the state. The judge also considered whether the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reserved California’s right to deny assistance to the federal government as it sought to enforce immigration laws.

(His decision only affected the application of DOJ for a preliminary injunction against the state’s effort to enforce its sanctuary laws; the final merits of the case are still yet to be decided later in the legal process.)

With regard to AB 103, under which California subjected federal immigration detention facilities to state inspection, Judge Mendez held: “The Court finds no indication in the cited portions of the [Immigration and Nationality Act] that Congress intended for States to have no oversight over detention facilities operating within their borders.” The specific federal contracts for the operation of the facility, the judge further reasoned, “demonstrate that California retains some authority over the detention facilities.” In allowing the state to review the condition of federal facilities, the judge wrote, the law did not allow the state to do very much at all: “For all its bark, the law has no real bite.” Other provisions of the law, Judge Mendez, created no real conflict with federal law.

In considering AB 450, which prevents private employers from cooperating with federal immigration law enforcement officials voluntarily, Judge Mendez found the task of balancing state and federal authority more difficult. “The Court finds AB 450’s prohibitions on consent … troubling due to the precarious situation in which it places employers,” he wrote. “Irrespective of the State’s interest in protecting workers, the Court finds that the warrant requirement [of AB 450] may impede immigration enforcement’s investigation of employers or other matters within their authority to investigate.” However, he added that state and federal law did not necessarily conflict: “Congress has not expressly authorized immigration officers to enter places of labor upon employer consent, nor has Congress authorized immigration enforcement officers to wield authority coextensive with the Fourth Amendment.”

Ultimately, Judge Mendez blocked AB 450’s monetary penalties on employers who comply with the federal government, because he found such fines violated the Supremacy Clause “under the intergovernmental immunity doctrine,” which prevents states from discriminating against the federal government or those residents who choose deal with it. He also blocked enforcement of a provision of the California law that prevents employers from voluntarily re-verifying the immigration status of employees.

Finally, on SB 54 — the most controversial of California’s “sanctuary state” laws — Judge Mendez declined to agree with DOJ. He upheld a section of the law preventing the state from assisting the federal government by providing the release dates of illegal aliens detained by state and local law enforcement. According to Judge Mendez, the state law did not, in fact, conflict with federal law, which he interpreted as merely requiring the states to provide the citizenship status of detainees.

Judge Mendez later added: “California’s decision not to assist federal immigration enforcement in its endeavors is not an “obstacle” to that enforcement effort … refusing to help is not the same as impeding.” If it were, the Tenth Amendment would be meaningless, he suggested. Congress had not specifically indicated a “clear and manifest purpose to preempt state law” in the relevant federal immigration laws.

Judge Mendez also accepted the state’s argument that helping the federal government enforce immigration law would hurt public trust in local law enforcement, and hence local public safety.

The judge concluded:

This Court has gone to great lengths to explain the legal grounds for its opinion. This Order hopefully will not be viewed through a political lens and this Court expresses no views on the soundness of the policies or statutes involved in this lawsuit. There is no place for politics in our judicial system and this one opinion will neither define nor solve the complicated immigration issues currently facing our Nation.

…

If there is going to be a long-term solution to the problems our country faces with respect to immigration policy, it can only come from our legislative and executive branches. It cannot and will not come from piecemeal opinions issued by the judicial branch. Accordingly, this Court joins the ever-growing chorus of Federal Judges in urging our elected officials to set aside the partisan and polarizing politics dominating the current immigration debate and work in a cooperative and bi-partisan fashion toward drafting and passing legislation that addresses this critical political issue. Our Nation deserves it. Our Constitution demands it.

Neither California Governor Jerry Brown nor Attorney General Xavier Becerra had commented on the ruling by Thursday afternoon.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

This article was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: AB450, Department of Justice, Immigration, Sanctuary State

Massive Immigration Protest Takes Over Downtown Los Angeles

July 1, 2018 By Joshua Caplan 20 Comments

Demonstrators flooded downtown Los Angeles on Saturday to protest against the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

#LIVE: AIR7HD over large crowds of protesters at #FamiliesBelongTogetherMarch, rally in LA https://t.co/TxMSbU2x41 pic.twitter.com/MAkKnj6rXJ

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) June 30, 2018

Thousands of demonstrators, along with a handful of high-profile celebrities, lawmakers, and activists, participated in the Families Belong Together-Freedom for Immigrants March, demanding border agents reunite separated immigrant children from their parents who illegally crossed the Southern border.

Armed with signs that read, “Children are not criminals,” and “compassion has no border,” demonstrators began protesting outside Los Angeles city hall at 11:00 a.m.

Thousands oppose immigrant families being separated during a protest rally in front of Los Angeles City Hall #FamiliesBelongTogetherMarch #photography #trump #usa @ladailynews #nikonusa #leica pic.twitter.com/GGih1bNQVG

— Keith Birmingham (@photowkb) June 30, 2018

Thousands oppose immigrant families being separated during a protest rally in front of Los Angeles City Hall #FamiliesBelongTogetherMarch #photography #trump #usa @ladailynews #nikonusa #leica pic.twitter.com/mDrG5M4uLY

— Keith Birmingham (@photowkb) June 30, 2018

Big crowd here in Downtown Los Angeles as thousands protest against the separation of immigrant children from their families. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/D0sACazem1

— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Journalist) June 30, 2018

Grammy award-winning singer John Legend and his wife Chrissy Teigen participated at the event and urged demonstrators to do more than protest the Trump administration’s immigration policies on social media.

Singer John Legend just sang his new song "Preach" to protesters in Los Angeles. Before that, he said: "You can't just talk about it or tweet about it. You've got to do something." pic.twitter.com/xMvt3uOCfq

— Veronica Rocha (@VeronicaRochaLA) June 30, 2018

I just love her RT @latimes: Chrissy Teigen at the Families Belong Together March: "I'm incredibly proud to be a daughter of an immigrant." https://t.co/Rn2v2ln5ls pic.twitter.com/9f0TuPeKMm

— V!CK (@its_VICious) June 30, 2018

“You can’t just talk about it or tweet about it. You’ve got to do something,” said Legend.

“I know that opening up Twitter right now feels like it can be a horror show, so much of the news is shocking and maddening and depressing,” the singer added. “I think some of us have a strong temptation to just disengage, but we can’t. We can’t do that. I can’t do that. I have to do something.”

The rally featured multiple speeches from activists from open-borders groups, including Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

In her address to rally attendees, CHIRLA’s Melody Klingenfuss introduced herself as “undocumented, unapologetic and unafraid.”

“We will not stop until all the families are judged by the content of their character and not the possession of a legal piece of paper,” Klingenfuss said.

The open-borders activist then led the crowd in a chant against the President —”Trump, where’s your heart!?” they shouted.

Leading California lawmakers, including Sen. Kamala Harris, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti and Rep. Maxine Waters fired up the crowd with pro-immigration speeches.

Thousands here for #Immigration rally/march. #FamilesBelongTogether event. @CBSLA #CBSLA pic.twitter.com/HXFza17QF6

— Greg Mills (@GregMillsTVNews) June 30, 2018

“If you are pro-family, you cannot separate families,” Garcetti told demonstrators. “Mr. Trump, do your job. ICE, do your job.” “We’ve got a message for the White House,” the mayor added, “We care, and so should you.” Harris told attendees that today’s protest against the administration’s immigration policies represents “an inflection moment.”

We know we are better than this! #FamiliesBelongTogether pic.twitter.com/JzHJ8SwMV5

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) June 30, 2018

“This is a moment in time that is requiring us to look in a mirror and ask a question, and that question is, ‘Who are we?’ I believe the answer is `We are better than this,’” the 2020 hopeful said.

California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Sen. Kevin De Leon, Secretary of State Alex Padilla and members from the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Women’s March LA Foundation also participated in the event.

Organizers for the march says an estimated 55,000 people attended the Los Angeles protest.

JUST IN: Organizers of the #FamiliesBelongTogether protests estimate 55,000 people rallied in Los Angeles, second only to Chicago which they estimate had over 60,000 attendees. pic.twitter.com/NvlGY1qV4W

— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Journalist) June 30, 2018

The Los Angeles rally was one of 700 demonstrations taking place across the county this weekend.

“Other #FamiliesBelongTogether Southern California rally locations include Pasadena, Irvine, Malibu, Laguna Beach, Carlsbad, National City, Ramona, San Diego, Palm Springs, Moreno Valley, Riverside and Temecula,” reports NBC 4.

This article was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Donald Trump, Immigration, Los Angeles

Moderate Republicans Have Been Conned Into Supporting Antonio Villaraigosa: The Most Hard-Left Gubernatorial Candidate in History

May 30, 2018 By Steve Baldwin 9 Comments

Photo courtesy Center for American Progress Action Fund, flickr

There are very important reasons why we should unite behind Cox. First, it’s about voter turnout in November. The top of the ticket always affects voter turnout so a ballot with no Republican at the top could suppress our turnout by enough to cause losses in many races down-ticket. Indeed, liberal strategists claim California is key to winning back the house and they’re hoping to flip at least five congressional seats. If that occurs, Pelosi becomes speaker, the Dems will impeach Trump based on phony Russia collusion allegations and the Trump agenda will come to a screeching halt. Moreover, there are important propositions on the ballot that will be affected by a low GOP turnout. Furthermore, we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of Cox winning in November. Yes, that would be a major upset, but then again, no one thought Trump would win and it’s entirely possible that Californians may be finally realizing they’ve had enough of big government, high unemployment, high taxes and open borders.

This is why it’s shocking to see so many moderate Republicans like Reed Hastings, Jim Cunneen, Meg Whitman, Richard Riordan and others come out in support of Antonio Villaraigosa. Like many moderate Republicans, they are not thinking about the larger political picture nor do they seem to be aware of the long-term goals of the left. Nothing new. And they are playing right into the hands of the left who have launched a campaign to attack Cox in order to end up with two Democrats on the November ballot so that GOP voter turnout in November is affected. If Cox didn’t have a chance of placing 2^nd, why then are the Democrats, and their moderate Republican front groups, spending millions attacking him?

We also need to keep in mind that California is key to the anti-Trump resistance and they must keep the governorship in order to maintain its role as the lead resistance state. California is providing taxpayer-financed legal work to oppose many of Trump’s initiatives, particularly having to do with immigration. It’s all part of the left’s long-term strategy to legitimatize the idea that illegal aliens have the right to vote and to delegitimitize the idea that a nation needs borders and citizenship to govern effectively or to govern at all. The money and power California is providing to the resistance movement rests largely upon maintaining control of the governor’s house. The attack on American sovereignty, the concept of citizenship and the rule of law have always been targets of the left, but never did they imagine they would be able to con a few powerful moderates into supporting their dark agenda.

One PAC, headed by wealthy GOP moderates such as Reed Hastings and Eli Broad, and also funded by former New York liberal Republican governor Michael Bloomberg, is sending out numerous mailers full of falsehoods about Cox. The mailer is sponsored by a group called “The California Charter School Associate Advocates.” I’m sorry, but the CCSAA doesn’t represent all charter schools; in fact, I don’t know any charter schools who are CCSAA members and I was the leading advocate of charter schools when I served as the chairman of the Education Committee in 1994. Nor is CCSAA operating in any kind of democratic fashion. There wasn’t any kind of vote by charter school leaders to endorse Villaraigosa and to engage in phony attacks on John Cox. CCSAA is mostly a play-thing for a handful of politically naive moderates who don’t even know they’re being used.

Indeed, the idea that Villaraigosa is some kind of education reformer, as implied by CCSAA, is bunk. The entire time I served with Villaraigosa, he never broke ranks with the education unions. Not once. Indeed, in his past, he worked as a consultant for the California Teachers Association (CTA) and served as an Area Representative for the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), two radically left unions which have never supported any education reforms whatsoever. Nor was Villaraigosa anywhere to be found when the battle to create and expand charter schools was fought. Only now, decades after all the key charter bill battles were fought, is Villaraigosa claiming to be a charter school supporter all along. Is Hastings and his crowd really that stupid to think that after a lifetime of promoting the union line, Villaraigosa will be an education reformer as governor?

California remains near-last in the country in math and reading scores and has been there for decades. The turning point was in the 1990s when the teachers unions basically became so powerful and entrenched that the system reached the point of no return. It may be too late for any serious reform to ever occur. The only reforms that would have mattered would have been to infuse the education system with private funding and entrepreneurs by use of a voucher system, but Villaraigosa opposed all such efforts.

Then there is socialized medicine, with my friend and former roommate, former Assemblyman Jim Cunneen, telling me he supports Villaraigosa due to his opposition to Senate Bill 562, a bill that would allow the state to take over all health care at a cost of $200 billion – an amount larger than the entire state budget. Any idiot could have seen that there was no way the state could afford that bill, so opposing SB562 was really not a profile in courage. But voters need to know Villaraigosa does not oppose socialized medicine, just that particular bill. He says so himself on his own campaign website. He states that “our priority should be to achieve universal health care in California by expanding the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare]… .” I guess no one told the moderates, but Villaraigosa over and over says “we must – and will – protect the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and work towards universal care.”

The moderates seem to be completely ignorant of Villaraigosa’s record. One of the most serious state budget problems is the state pension system in which hundreds of thousands of state employees are benefiting from a system far more generous than comparable private systems. Villaraigosa claims to be a champion of pension reform but he refused to vote for the one bill that could have averted the current crisis. When Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian offered a bill in 1996 that would, as he stated, “permit all jurisdictions (including cities, counties, special districts and school districts, not just the state employer) to offer a 401K type of defined contribution plan,” it would have saved state and local government millions of dollars and prevented the chronic state budget crisis that we are now constantly dealing with.

Indeed, Villaraigosa has voted for every tax increase he’s ever encountered and will advocate for more tax increases as governor. But he’s always been a big government advocate; for crying out loud, he used to be the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, Local 3230. The moderates point to the fact that Villaraigosa had to cut spending as Los Angeles mayor, when the budget, due to all the liberal social programs and its out-of-control pension plan, was way out of balance. But he didn’t have a choice; balancing the city budget is required by law and Villaraigosa did not have all the budget gimmicks he relied on in Sacramento to hide millions of dollars. Unlike the state budget, the Los Angeles budget is very straight forward.

But to regard Villaraigosa as a fiscal hero is preposterous. As mayor, he spent millions of federal dollars intended for city services on renovating a million-dollar yacht owned by the city. He also gave massive raises – some as high as 25% – to the city’s 22,000 employees during his tenure. And not just once. There is little doubt that as governor Villaraigosa will increase the size of government and sign into law all kinds of new taxes. This is why he will not sign the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to not raise taxes. John Cox has. With the state already suffering from one of the highest tax burdens in the country, his policies will further devastate the state’s economy and chase more business owners out of state. Perhaps Mr. Hastings can explain to the voters exactly how Villaraigosa’s big government policies will help the state economy.

Indeed, none of this should surprise anyone who knows Villaraigosa’s political background. He has spent his entire life as a professional leftist agitator and was even president of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU where one of his actions was to sue cities that tried to ban the poor gangbangers from city parks. He supports open borders, strengthening California’s status as a “sanctuary state” and, as he has made clear, will look for ways to further defy federal immigration law, even if it means jeopardizing the safety of Californians by refusing to release – or even detain – illegal aliens involved with criminal activity. Already, it is costing California’s welfare, education, health care and criminal justice systems tens of billions of dollars to handle the 3 million illegal aliens already here. More troubling, though, is that by maintaining California’s sanctuary status, as Villaraigosa will, it sends a signal to millions south of the border to cross the border. Illegal aliens are bankrupting the state but Villaraigosa does not care because he believes illegal aliens have all the rights citizens have. Just ask him.

Indeed, Villaraigosa’s history of involvement with radical Hispanic separatist groups is perhaps the most troubling part of his background. As a student, he was president of MEChA at UCLA, a Hispanic supremacist group that calls for the re-annexation of the Western United States to Mexico. It regards California as an “occupied state” and calls for the “physical liberation of our land.” Not kidding. MEChA rallies always feature racist and violent language. He was also chairman of the United Mexican-American Students (UMAS), founded by Eliezer Risco, a communist revolutionary trained by Castro’s thugs. He also wrote for Sin Fronteras (Without Borders), a vicious, anti-American, open borders propaganda organ for the Hispanic separatist movement. Villaraigosa gave angry hate-filled speeches at rallies in opposition to Prop. 187, which simply required all state programs to benefit only legal citizens.

The California Coalition for Immigration Reform issued a statement claiming that “Mr. Villaraigosa’s participation at the Latino Summit Response to Proposition 187 in January, 1995, placed him among those activists who harbor anti-American sentiments and beliefs bordering on sedition.” He also participated in the “Marcha de Libertad” march on Washington in 1996, again, organized by the Hispanic separatist movement. This march called for free education, health care and welfare for all Latinos, regardless of citizenship. This rally also featured revolutionary banners and signs featuring statements such as “Get off our land.” Villaraigosa actually spoke at this hate rally and again called for more “rights” for all Latinos, regardless of citizenship.

Indeed, I watched Villaraigosa spend many hours in Sacramento trying to figure out how to give more “rights” and benefits to illegal aliens. He was the author of the bill that gave illegal aliens the “right” to obtain driver’s licenses, which, of course, made it easier to obtain welfare benefits and to register to vote. His long involvement with Hispanic separatist groups, his advocacy for illegal aliens his entire career and now his support for the “resistance” movement that forces California’s law enforcement community to not cooperate with the federal government on immigration policies, make it clear that his loyalty is to his race first and to his country second. He is not fit to be governor.

Just think for a second. If John Cox was president of a white separatist group, spewed racist rhetoric at KKK rallies and spoke about breaking away, say, southern states for a white separatist nation, would the media have covered it? Of course they would have. But no one in the media will ask Villaraigosa questions about his past involvement with hate groups. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Now it’s time for the voters to speak.

Steve Baldwin is a free lance writer based in San Diego, a former member of the California States Assembly and former Executive Director of the Council for National Policy.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Affordable Care Act, Antonio Villaraigosa, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, John Cox, Steve Baldwin, Travis Allen

CA Democrats Pushing to Give Illegal Adults Full Health Care Benefits

May 23, 2018 By Tony Lee 8 Comments

California Democrats are reportedly pushing to give full healthcare benefits to illegal immigrant adults, which would mean that the Golden State not only may have to raise taxes but will also be a magnet for even more illegal immigrants.

According to a Monday Politico report, state Senator Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) is leading the charge by reportedly arguing that “California needs to be a laboratory for social change by taking the lead on progressive causes.”

“We are trying to address the fact that, whether you like it or not, our undocumented community needs the care, and we are paying for it anyway,” he reportedly said.

Politico points out that California Democrats are trying to extend the state’s Medi-Cal program this legislative session to nearly 1.2 million illegal immigrant adults who would qualify for it, and “companion bills in the state Assembly and Senate” have already “passed their respective health committees with party-line votes.”

The cost to expand Medicaid coverage to adult illegal immigrants in California is reportedly projected to cost $3 billion annually.

California Governor Jerry Brown, who extended Medi-Cal coverage to illegal immigrant children in 2015, has not commented on the pending measures but “is required by law to sign or veto bills passed this session by Sept. 30, just five weeks before the midterm elections.”

Political and health analysts are reportedly astounded that Democrats are trying to extend healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants before this year’s important midterm elections, reportedly saying that the measure would give Republicans in California relevance “they would never have before” in an election cycle in which House races in California could decide which party controls Congress.

Paul Ginsburg, director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy, told Politico that the proposal would be “fiscally very dangerous” and Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford physician and health economist, suggested to the outlet that such a plan would have to be paid for with tax increases.

Bhattacharya also pointed out the obvious—giving full healthcare coverage to illegal immigrant adults will make California, which is already an official “sanctuary” state, even a greater magnet for illegal immigrants.

The illegal immigrant who murdered Kate Steinle, for instance, told authorities that he came to San Francisco after being previously deported five times because he knew San Francisco was proudly a “sanctuary city.”

“If you make a program like this available, undocumented workers in other states might be attracted to California because of this,” Bhattacharya, the Stanford physician, reportedly said.

This article was originally published by Breitbart.com/California

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: Health care, Immigration, Jerry Brown, Medi-Cal, Ricardo Lara

Yes, NPR: Illegal Immigration Does Increase Violent Crime

May 15, 2018 By Pedro Gonzalez 5 Comments

As members of an alien caravan beat their fists at the gates, the experts provide the rationalization for inviting them in.

John Burnett wrote last week for National Public Radio, “four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems.” But Burnett curated studies that conflate much and misinform plenty.

My favorite among the four is Alex Nowrasteh’s Cato Institute study, because you could tell Burnett pulled it from the top of a pile he kept on hand for just such occasions, to convince Americans that the decay they’re witnessing in their communities is actually “cultural enrichment.”

The Cato study selectively sources data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (TDPS), and it notes that what we’re reading is the “[a]uthor’s analysis” of that data. In other words, Nowrasteh presents data in a way that suits his ends. Data analysts, like those in Cato’s salon, have an interest in producing specific results. Or as one data analyst says, “they know the results the analysis should find.”

Nowrasteh’s study claims that among 952 total homicides, “native-born Americans were convicted of 885 homicides,” while “illegal immigrants were convicted of just 51 homicides.” Setting aside the fact that those 51 killings — like all crimes committed by illegal aliens — were completely avoidable, a few other questions come to mind.

First, how many of those “native-born” convicted killers were anchor babies? That is, how many of those convicted killers have parents who entered the country illegally? How many arrived through chain immigration?

That is a fair question, considering Latino gangs recruit heavily from kids as young as 10 years old, and the fact many of these immigrants come from countries with some of the highest homicide rates in the world.

Mexico is the most dangerous conflict zone in the world outside of Syria, with some Mexican states more deadly than Afghanistan. Looking at mass shootings since 2000 that have left at least four people dead, we find that first and second-generation immigrants account for 47 percent of all such shootings. The anchor baby question, when considering the pervasiveness of the violent narcoculture in Latin America (that we now import), is valid.

Second, “convicted” is an operative word. The Cato study only takes into consideration killers who were caught, properly identified and convicted.

Consider that Kate Steinle’s killer was not convicted either of manslaughter or murder. He committed the crime, but he wasn’t convicted. In fact, there was confusion over the killer’s identity as he used 30 aliases, had been deported five times, and committed seven felonious crimes. Federal authorities stated his name was “Jose Inez Garcia-Zarate,” but the criminal alien left a trail through the “immigration system and criminal courts for nearly a quarter of a century as Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez and Juan Jose Dominguez de la Parra,” to name just two others.

Texas has porous borders and it’s a sad fact that illegal aliens enjoy the luxury of moving relatively freely across the border, whether for trafficking operations or simply for the purpose of avoiding Mexican authorities. A sizable number of illegal aliens work with drug cartels that operate within the United States. Some of them are killers.

“In 2009,” writes Steven A. Camarota for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), “57 percent of the 76 fugitive murderers most wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were foreign-born. It is likely however that because immigrants can more readily flee to other countries, they comprise a disproportionate share of fugitives.” How many of those were illegal aliens?

In fact, an internal Texas Department of Public Safety report revealed that between 2008 and 2014, 177,588 illegal alien defendants were “responsible for at least 611,234 individual criminal charges over their criminal careers, including 2,993 homicides and 7,695 sexual assaults.” Maybe the Texas authorities didn’t trust Cato with the good stuff. Or maybe Nowrasteh didn’t ask.

One thing is certain: the more substantive TDPS report paints illegal immigration in a much less favorable light than does the report selected by Cato and promulgated by NPR.

But the TDPS report also comes with a glaring caveat. “The 177,588 criminal aliens identified by Texas through the Secure Communities initiative only can tag criminal aliens who had already been fingerprinted,” writes J. Christian Adams, a former U.S. Justice Department employee.

“That means that the already stratospheric aggregate crime totals would be even higher if crimes by many illegal aliens who are not in the fingerprint database were included,” Adams concludes.

Cato, then, is misinforming Americans and perhaps hoping that no one looks below the surface of Nowrasteh’s study. This is not surprising as Cato emphatically endorses open borders, or as I prefer to call it, civilizational suicide. Thus, Burnett chose this specious source because it aligned with his cosmopolitan prejudices. Neither is a good look for a NPR.

A second study Burnett highlighted reports on “50 states and Washington, D.C., from 1990 to 2014 to provide the first longitudinal analysis of the macro‐level relationship between undocumented immigration and violence.” Assuming crime statistics are accurately reported, it stands to reason that if we look at immigration nationwide, lumping all “undocumented immigrants” into the same pool, things might not appear as bad as they actually are.

Crime statistics, however, aren’t always accurately reported — remember that Steinle’s killer won’t be reported as a homicide conviction. Although crime has decreased nationwide, it has risen in certain cities and counties. A “macro-level” glance might miss that.

In counties like Los Angeles, which has a high concentration of illegal aliens, authorities don’t have the best track record when it comes to accurately reporting crime, prompting investigations every now and again. Nevertheless, Los Angeles County has also seen crime rates increase, while they have fallen elsewhere across the nation.

Echoing Burnett, Steve Lopez writes in the Los Angeles Times that concern over sanctuary policies and tying immigration to higher crime rates is baseless. He maintains that it is a bigoted political formula and not much else. Lopez invokes Wayne Cornelius, a UC San Diego professor emeritus, “who has studied immigration for decades,” and “said there is no correlation between sanctuary cities and crime rates.”

Neither Burnett, Cornelius, nor Lopez understand why “14 Southern California cities and two counties have passed ordinances, and in some cases filed lawsuits,” against state sanctuary laws. After all, say the experts, sanctuary policies don’t protect bad guys; and noncitizens—specifically illegal alien Latinos—are less likely to engage in crime than the “native-born” population anyway.

If you don’t believe Lopez, take it from Cornelius. He received the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor bestowed upon foreigners by the formalized narco-kleptocracy Mexico calls a “government.”

To understand how unethical and fundamentally obscene this narrative is, a look at California’s history with sanctuary policies, crime, and immigration might be instructive.

City of Angels

The beginnings of sanctuary can be traced back to a 1979 Los Angeles memorandum stating: “Officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person. Officers shall neither arrest nor book persons for violation of title 8, section 1325 of the United States Immigration code (Illegal Entry).”

California progressives, in their brilliance, decided to adopt sanctuary just as the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, was coming onto the scene — although other Latino gangs were already entrenched in California.

Born in the barrios of Los Angeles in the 1980s, the membership of MS-13 was comprised of “refugees” from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. This is relevant, considering the origins of the migrant activists demanding asylum from the United States today.

As a token of their appreciation to the United States, these foreigners formed the rank and file of one of the most vicious gangs in the world. It didn’t take long for the Mexican Mafia, or “la eMe,” to incorporate MS-13 into its Latino gang alliance, a coalition that came to be called the “Sureños.” More than a dozen gangs, including Hezbollah, Los Zetas, the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Gulf Cartel, all operate under the Sureños alliance.

In 2007, federal agents discovered businesses in Los Angeles that were peddling cocaine and counterfeit designer clothing in a front operation run by the Mexican mafia that financially benefited Hezbollah.

Between 1990 and 2000, the Latino population of the United States increased by 63 percent—from 22 million to 35 million. Suffice to say, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was overwhelmed. So were prisons. More to the point, this wave of mass immigration meant more recruits for Latino gangs.

Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather Mac Donald recounts how a “confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater.” The 18th Street Gang collaborated with la eMe “on complex drug-distribution schemes, extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every day in L.A. County”; and the gang “has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.” As early as the 1990s, Latinos were importing narcoculture to the United States.

“In 1997, the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of their deportability,” writes Mac Donald. “They included 1,198 aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.”

Mass immigration also brought with it a violent prejudice all too well known in Latin America: vitriolic hatred directed at blacks.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that in the 1980s when Highland Park in Southern California it “fell heavily under the control of the Mexican Mafia . . . eventually becoming fundamentally racist as a result.” As deceptive and dishonest as it often is, even the feverishly leftist SPLC couldn’t deny what was happening, because doing so would mean denying the plight of one of America’s protected minority groups for the sake of another.

Still, none of this seemed troubling enough to cinch up the border at the time. By 2000, “nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born,” Mac Donald writes. She adds that the L.A. County Sheriff also “reported in 2000 that 23 percent of inmates in county jails were deportable.”

Considering how difficult it is for minorities to be convicted of hate crimes, it is impressive that not only did Latino illegal aliens bring crime, they brought prolific amounts of hate crime the likes of which put the Klan to shame. By 2007, 75 percent of Highland Park residents were Latino, while just 2 percent were black.

Latinos developed a singular reputation for carrying out coordinated hate crimes that defied national trends. “Researchers found that in areas with high concentrations, or ‘clusters,’ of hate crimes, the perpetrators were typically members of Latino street gangs who were purposely targeting blacks,” the SPLC reported.

Los Angeles became home to random “racially motivated crimes” perpetrated throughout “the 88 cities of Los Angeles County by the members of Latino gangs.” Among these Latino gangs were “the Pomona 12 in the city of Pomona, the 18th Street Gang in southwest Los Angeles, the Toonerville gang in northeast L.A., and the Varrio Tortilla Flats in Compton.”

But the violence from Latino gangs against blacks wasn’t limited to Los Angeles. The same SPLC report notes that “six members of a Latino gang in Carlsbad, California, were arrested and charged with hate crimes for allegedly hurling racial slurs at a black teenager—who police said was not a gang member—while kicking and punching him.”

Meanwhile in Fresno, California, two Latino gang members “were convicted of attempted murder in what police described as the random hate-crime shooting of a 41-year-old black man.” Police reported that “the shooters used racial epithets and told the victim, ‘We don’t like your kind of people on our street.’”

The viciousness of Latino gangs was matched only by its pervasiveness. Although different in some respects, Latino gangs shared two common characteristics: hatred toward blacks and ranks augmented with illegal aliens thanks to porous borders.

Citing U.S. attorney Luis Li, Mac Donald noted that the “leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about 60 percent illegal in 2002.”

The Cycos gang was controlled by a member of la eMe, an illegal alien, who ran the gang from prison, “while serving time for felonious reentry following deportation.” By 2004, “95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide [in Los Angeles] (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target[ed] illegal aliens,” and as many as “two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) [were] for illegal aliens.”

To argue, as Burnett, Lopez, and Cornelius do, that “there is no correlation between sanctuary cities and crime rates” is to offer a bad joke. But the litany of Latino gangs goes on, while the intelligentsia preaches tolerance to the communities that have been terrorized by this nightmare.

In 2009, 147 alleged Varrio Hawaiian Gardens members—that’s a Mexican gang—were indicted “on charges ranging from racketeering to kidnapping and attempted murder.” These crimes, said U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien, were motivated by “explicit racial hatred.”

The scale at which these gangs coordinated and mobilized against blacks was terribly formidable. In 2012, la eMe “put the word out for Hispanic street gangs to stop battling each other, to ‘focus on getting the blacks out’ of their territories,” writes Eva Knott, citing a police gang specialist.

The violence hasn’t stopped, and neither have the lies about sanctuary or illegal immigration.

In 2016, the “Eastside Latino gang tried to firebomb black families out of a community the suspects claimed as their own,” to “get the nigger out of the neighborhood,” federal authorities said. One firebomb landed in a room where a mother had been sleeping with her baby, but the family managed to escape.

The George W. Bush Administration made some headway in dealing with Latino gangs, but Democrats during the Obama era enabled them to replenish their ranks. Under Democratic Party leadership, California enacted a plan to release 13,500 inmates every month to reduce overcrowding, including those sentenced for “stalking” and “battery.” Early release of “nonviolent, low level prisoners,” coupled with ICE field offices being directed to cease arresting gang members for immigration violations or minor crimes, meant Latino gangs could resupply their numbers. This happened at the same time that California made it even harder for immigration authorities to apprehend and deport illegal aliens. Indeed, from 2015 to 2017, California denied 3,348 ICE detainer requests.

“Progressive” policing meant preventing federal authorities from screening thousands of dangerous aliens, when one in four “MS-13 gang members arrested or charged with crimes since 2012 came to the U.S. as part of the Obama-era surge of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC).”

Jessica M. Vaughan, director of policy studies for the CIS, reports that “ICE officers were no longer permitted to arrest and remove foreign gang members until they had been convicted of major crimes.” This resulted in gang arrests plummeting, “from about 4,600 in 2012 to about 1,580 in 2014.”

Vaughan also notes the “location of these MS-13 crimes corresponds with locations of large numbers of UACs who were resettled by the federal government.” MS-13 gang members have been apprehended after entering the country by claiming they were refugees “fleeing the violence in El Salvador.” Indeed, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen last month warned Congress that gangs like MS-13 “recruit young children, they train them how to be smuggled across our border, how to then join up with gang members in the United States.”

This is the insanity that sanctuary, mass immigration, and inability to enforce border security or immigration laws have wrought.

The Politics of Propaganda

Between 2005 and 2012, the Los Angeles Police Department incorrectly classified 14,000 assaults as minor offenses, “making the city’s crime rate look significantly lower than it really is.” Josh Sanburn reports that the LAPD routinely classified aggravated assaults as “simple assaults,” therefore artificially reducing the city’s numbers for violent crime.

“We know this can have a corrosive effect on the public’s trust of our reporting,” said Assistant Chief Michel R. Moore, who oversees the LAPD’s system for tracking crime. “That’s why we are committed to . . . eliminating as much of the error as possible.”

Then, the LAPD did it again. The department “misclassified nearly 1,200 violent crimes“ in 2014, “including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies.” That’s not exactly an inconsequential clerical error. With this correction, the rate of serious assaults during that time would have been around 14 percent higher than what the LAPD reported, while overall violent crime would have shown 7 percent higher. This problem is “systemic,” according to a San Fernando Valley LAPD captain.

Capt. Lillian Carranza says “the department’s systemic pattern of under-reporting certain crime statistics” isn’t just skewering crime data, “it affects the way we deploy resources, the support we get from federal grants, and in my case and in my officers case, who gets the support of discretionary resources and who doesn’t.”

Carranza said she found errors “in categorizing violent crimes that were never fixed” that resulted in LAPD “under-reporting violent crime for 2016 by about 10 percent.” Carranza said she believes “staff members may have falsified information,” or “cooking of the books . . . in order to get promotions, accolades and increased responsibility.”

Progressives love to bash cops, but they avoid connecting the dots between underreporting serious crime and violent crime, with regions where illegal aliens are concentrated appearing safer than they are.

Why should Californians assume Los Angeles is the only city obfuscating the truth about sanctuary policies, immigration, and crime? California is the state, after all, where Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, an outspokenly progressive Democrat, tipped off illegals to an ICE sweep, claiming a “duty and moral obligation as mayor to give those families fair warning when that threat appears imminent.” She had a duty and moral obligation least of all to American citizens, it seems.

Oakland also happens to be one of the least safe cities in America.

CityRating reports Oakland’s violent crime rate in 2016 as higher than the national average by 259.04 percent, higher than the California average by 220.13 percent. Oakland’s property crime rate was higher than the national average by 129.96 percent, higher than the California average by 120.75 percent. Further, CityRating reports an overall upward trend in crime based on “data from 18 years with violent crime increasing and property crime increasing,” and based on this trend, “the crime rate in Oakland for 2018 is expected to be higher than in 2016.”

When Mayor Schaaf refuses to enforce the law, she contributes to Oakland’s growing crime problem.

Still, why do people like Krishnadev Calamur claim that “[s]tudy after study after study” show “[i]mmigrants largely commit crimes at a lower rate than the local-born population”? Calamur says those “numbers are true even of the children of immigrants.”

Because “study after study after study” conflate the children of immigrants whose parents entered our country legally holding a postgraduate degree, like many Nigerians do, and the children of Latino gang members, whose parents entered the United States illegally. Both are second-generation, both are lumped together, but they are not the same. Sometimes, these studies even conflate legal and illegal aliens.

“Fact Checker” Salvador Rizzo writes for the Washington Post, “every demographic group has its share of criminals, but the research shows that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the U.S.-born population.”

“Fact Checker” may not be an appropriate title for Rizzo.

Like Calamur, Rizzo argues, “most of the available data and research say immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born population.” But a closer look at Rizzo’s narrative is instructive of other common misinformation tactics.

First, Rizzo makes no distinction between legal and illegal alien crime statistics, when lumping the two together will obviously give a better impression of illegal alien crime alone.

Second, in later immigration “fact checks,” Rizzo uses data that excludes non-violent crimes committed by illegals, such as identity theft, racketeering, arson, most property crimes, drug and alcohol-related crime, grand theft, counterfeiting, fraud, and so forth. Human trafficking involves dangerously transporting vulnerable people, often women and children, against their will, but this offense can be labeled “non-violent.”

Suffice to say, Rizzo’s fact-checking is extremely misleading.

A look at U.S. Sentencing Commission data from 2016, pertaining to 67,742 felony and Class A misdemeanor cases, shows noncitizens accounted for 41.7 percent of all offenders. Further broken down: noncitizens accounted for 72 percent of drug possession convictions, 33 percent of money laundering convictions, 29 percent of drug trafficking convictions, 23 percent of murder convictions, and 18 percent of fraud convictions. Commission data doesn’t report on state and local prisons and jails, but the Government Accountability Office does.

The GAO found that among 251,000 criminal aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, these criminal aliens were arrested 1.7 million times, for nearly 3 million combined offenses. Fifty percent had been arrested at least once for assault, homicide, robbery, a sex offense, or kidnapping—around half had been arrested at least once for a drug violation. The GAO consistently reports the number of noncitizens (legal and illegal aliens) constituting 25 percent of the federal prison population. That slice of the pie would require noncitizens to commit crimes around three times the rate of citizens.

Not only do these data show 7 percent of the population accounts for one-fifth of all federal murder convictions, but when Rizzo excludes non-violent crimes, he clearly excludes a staggering lot. Thus, Rizzo deliberately avoids confronting a mountain of data that directly contradicts his narrative.

Like Burnett, Lopez, Cornelius, and Calamur, Rizzo is willing to deny that communities have been and continue to be violently afflicted, while criminals have been given sanctuary, just because it satisfies his liberal paternalism. Minorities must be shielded from criticism, even if that means offering up the very principles that attracted them to this country, particularly those of justice and the rule of law, on the altar of progressivism. …

Click here to read the full article from American Greatness

Pedro Gonzalez, a writer based in California, is a Mount Vernon Fellow of the Center for American Greatness.

Filed Under: Top Stories Tagged With: ICE, Immigration, LAPD, Los Angeles, NPR, Pedro Gonzalez

America Is Not a Nation of Immigrants

California Judge Blocks One, Upholds Two ‘Sanctuary State’ Laws

Massive Immigration Protest Takes Over Downtown Los Angeles

Moderate Republicans Have Been Conned Into Supporting Antonio Villaraigosa: The Most Hard-Left Gubernatorial Candidate in History

CA Democrats Pushing to Give Illegal Adults Full Health Care Benefits

Yes, NPR: Illegal Immigration Does Increase Violent Crime

Recent Posts

Connect With CPR On Twitter