Tag Archives: Immigration

Repulsive ingratitude

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From Tucker Carlson: Ilhan Omar ‘Repays Her Adopted Country’ by Attacking It as ‘Hateful and Racist’. This is part of what Carlson said:

“Ilhan Omar’s country collapsed as a child. She lived for years in Kenya in that refugee camp. She may have died there without outside help. But help came, from where? From here, America. And this country didn’t just welcome Ilhan Omar to America, we paid to relocate her family and many others from a foreign continent purely for the sake of being good people, for altruism. Because no country in history has been as generous as we are. To places we have no ties to and no obligation to, we have been kind anyway because that’s who we are. Despite her humble and foreign birth, Omar has been elected to our national law-making body. And good for her. So how does she repay her adopted country, the one that may literally have saved her life? She attacks it as hateful and racist, and for that she is applauded by the Democratic Party because they view this country as hateful and racist too.”

This is what she preferred.

“When you’re a kid and you’re raised in an all-black, all- Muslim environment, nobody really talks to you about your identity. You just are. There is freedom in knowing that you are accepted as your full self. So the notion that there is a conflict with your identity in society was hard at the age of 12.”

And she’s an anti-semite as well.

A modern libertarian discusses the problems of immigration

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This is from Gary North in the Journal of Libertarian Studies: The Sanctuary Society and its Enemies

In the United States today, the waiting period for citizenship is as short as five years. The waiting period is similar in other democratic nations. This, not the threat of economic competition, is the problem of immigration for the free society. Because the citizen authoritatively declares the law and seeks to impose it on others, he can become a threat to the free society. The problem is the moral content of his confession of faith and his possession of civil sanctions, not his productivity and his possession of economic sanctions. Mises was short-sighted here: a nineteenth-century, anti-clerical, would-be value-free analyst, i.e., a liberal. It is not the welfare state as such that creates the problem of immigration; rather, it is the confession of faith of the would-be immigrants. If their confession inherently threatens the moral and judicial foundations of the free society, then immigration is a problem, with or without the presence today of a welfare state. Freedom is based on more than private contracts. It is based on a moral vision, which includes a vision of the moral boundaries of the state.

This is the single most important issue of our time. Read it all.

You can’t tell the players without a program

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syria competing goals

This is the story as I understand it, but really I don’t understand it at all. Russia, it seems, attacked America’s anti-Assad allies in Syria who are themselves enemies of ISIS but are also the remaining forces of al Qaeda! The US can do nothing to defend its allies, not that they should be its allies, but is in any case without any genuine ability to enforce its will. The diagram above from The Wall Street Journal provides a rough guide to the various major parties and what they are seeking out of the conflict. Meanwhile Europe is submerged in new migrants from alien cultures which has changed Europe forever.

The American reaction is all spelled out here: US urges Russians to focus airstrikes on Islamic State. But in the midst of it, there is a sentence that highlights to me, and probably others, the profound lack of seriousness in American foreign policy:

“We are not yet where we need to be to guarantee the safety and security” of those carrying out the airstrikes, Kerry said, “and that is the discussion that is taking place today,” referring to the US-Russia military talks. “And it will take place even more so over the course of the next few days depending on the outcome today.”

“It’s a way of making sure that planes aren’t going to be shooting at each other and making things worse,” the secretary said in an interview late Thursday on CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Colbert is the replacement for Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. You cannot parody these people and satire is now impossible.

Not the six o’clock news

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The world changing right in front of us but virtually none of it will be mentioned in any heated way by our journalist class. This is from Drudge:

EU chief fears union will collapse…
Migrant stream shows no sign of slowdown…
Rape, child abuse ‘rife in German refugee camps’…
Poll: Most U.S. Muslims would trade Constitution for Shariah
Dem mayors ask Obama for more refugees…

It is the first story that is the oddest. It begins:

THE European Union has lost control of its borders and risks total collapse if they are not sealed, a senior Brussels diplomat has warned.

Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, warned the EU was now facing a “critical point” and that the migrant crisis hadn’t even reached its peak.

As he chaired an emergency meeting of EU leaders in Brussels last night Mr Tusk painted a bleak picture of the EU’s future, saying the 28-member bloc was on the verge of breakdown with “recriminations and misunderstanding” pitting nations against one another.

The future of free movement was at stake, he said, as the continent had lost control of its borders as well as a “sense of order”.

He added: “The most urgent question we should ask ourselves…is how to regain control of our external borders.

“Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to even speak about common migration policy.”

He appeared to lay much of the blame with Germany, accusing Chancellor Angela Merkel of exacerbating the problem by sending the signal to desperate Syrians fleeing their war-torn homeland that Germany had no limit on the number of migrants it would accept.

It’s not “the EU” that is on the point of collapse but European civilisation. The narrowness of the perspective is what gets me, not to mention the madness of Merkel’s policy of open borders. Do they have any idea at all what they are doing?

Two articles on immigration

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As everyone knows, open borders leads to a more harmonious happier more contented and prosperous world. Here are two articles published today that you might therefore read to confirm your views on how bizarre those who oppose immigration are. One is from the US by Ann Coulter. The second is from Australia by Peter Baldwin.

First Ann, whose article is titled, Useless Idiots. You’ll have to read the article for yourself to see who she means, but she really does go over the top.

The second is titled, Migrant crisis: Europe must close borders to refugee influx. An obvious hysteric with no credibility. You’ll again have to read the article for yourself to see just how off the planet he is.

AND LET ME JUST ADD THIS: Of course I’m a migrant and so the last thing in the world I would be against is migration. I was, however, amongst that first tranche in 1975 who needed a migrant’s visa to move to Australia from Canada. This entailed an embassy official to come down to Toronto from Ottawa for an hour-long interview to which he brought a professor of economics from the University of Toronto to ensure themselves that I was up to the mark for teaching at the College in Bendigo. This is what I understand about migration. The country decides on who comes and who does not, and they also decide on how many in any given year, and they ensure as best they can that the migrant is likely to become a productive member of the community. However, what I do not accept is people just wandering in as they please where the host country does no sorting and assessing. That I don’t get, which is why I was very keen to ensure that the boats were stopped, as was most of the country. These are not fine distinctions, but the very minimum requirement if we are to remain a nation state in a world of other nation states.

YOU CAN NOW ADD A THIRD ARTICLE TO THE TWO ABOVE: This is from that nitwit Mark Steyn who never quits talking about migration and demographics. This one is called The Emperor’s Moral Narcissism which even comes with a photo showing a crowd of sensible people holding up a sign reading “Refugees Welcome”.

“The unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry”

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For the first time in ages, Peggy Noonan has written a column that is right on the money: The Migrants and the Elites. In it we find this:

The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good.

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular.

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder.

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry.

But it did change our attitude to gun ownership

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From Andrew Bolt, Of all the absurd analogies offered by the wilfully blind:

George Megalogenis, who has written a book and produced a documentary linking Australia’s economic success to its immigration program, said … the recent spate of terrorism-related arrests should not affect Australia’s attitudes to Muslim migration any more than the Martin Bryant massacre should affect mainland attitudes towards Tasmania.

It truly is an absurd analogy. Rightly or wrongly, we completely changed our gun ownership laws because of this one unique instance. Whether it did or did not make us safer, that was the premise of these changes. Our immigration program ought to at least not make us less safe on our streets, or when we go off to an ANZAC Day parade.

And for what it’s worth, the article Andrew was referencing was titled, Five million visas into Australia this year likely to set new records. Immigration is a good thing, generally agreed upon by all, if the numbers are increasing at a moderate rate so that migrants can be assimilated into our way of life. These are the necessary characteristics of migrants that we can agree on:

“If a nation’s immigration programme is well crafted and targeted, and migrants enjoy high levels of economic participation, as distinct from high levels of social exclusion and welfare-dependency, immigration has beneficial impacts in terms of growth in the demand for goods and services; increases in national income, and living standards; improved labour participation; expansion of the economy’s productive capacity; and growth in household consumption and public revenues.”

Every migrant comes at a substantial cost to the economy which is only repaid slowly over time and will only do so if they are productively employed. The kinds of migrants we should do everything we can to keep out are precisely those with “high levels of social exclusion and welfare-dependency”.

Open borders idiocy

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If you would like some idea of why I will never count myself a libertarian, here is one of the most important. This is a newsletter from the CIS titled, Open the Borders.

March 16 is unofficially ‘Open Borders Day’, drawing attention to the moral and practical case for more movement of people across national borders. It refers to the presumption that people should be able to move freely – the burden of proof lies on those who favour restrictions.

Apart from the ever-present issue of asylum seeker and refugee policies, and stoushes over 457 visas, immigration policy largely flies under the radar. This a positive by-product of a relatively bipartisan consensus on immigration benefits, but also means creative thinking in this area is lacking.

There has been a largely unremarked shift in the government’s rhetoric. Michael Pezzullo, secretary of the Department of Immigration, Customs, and Border Protection, (the delineation of these three functions is indicative) has said mass migration is a mission “long accomplished”, describing the department as a “gateway”, and emphasising the border.

The Howard era approach – where a deterrence narrative for asylum seekers sat comfortably alongside a welcoming attitude to immigrants – appears to be going out of fashion.

Due to the budget pressures outlined in the Intergenerational Report, which can be ameliorated by higher levels of immigration, a substantial restriction in immigration policy is unlikely. But it’s also worth asking why, then, scant attention is being paid to it outside the government’s latest plan to crack down on 457 visas.

Given the government has had much success in negotiating freer movement of goods across borders, it could also be successful in negotiating freer movement of labour, particularly with countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and United States, in a manner similar to the arrangement with New Zealand. The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has expressed interest in the idea.

The Productivity Commission has suggested changes to visa conditions to make it easier for live-in au pairs to stay with a family longer than six months, and another suggestion involves allowing Indonesian women to live and work in Australia as nannies, as a partial solution to the problems plaguing childcare.

These are the kind of innovations that could revitalise discussion around immigration policy. It shouldn’t continue to fly under the radar.

There is, as it happens, not a single good economic reason for opening our borders, with the positively worst one of all some kind of Keynesian demand-side stimulus idiocy. There are no other good non-economic reasons for open borders either. Here we find the CIS lining up with Obama on possibly the single most important issue the US is facing. Immigration should be selective and the immigrant should be assessed very carefully by the country to which application is being made. Showing up on the border and asking to be let in should ensure someone is put at the farthest end of the back of the queue. Immigration may yet sink the West beneath a tide of newly arrived migrants who have no marketable skills and care nothing at all for the value system of the West.

Ann Coulter on immigration

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It is not racist in any way to want your country to have sensible immigration laws to ensure that you are monitoring who enters your community and to ensure that one’s way of life is not undermined by an inability to cope with rapid increases of people from a different cultural background. Just because someone wants to come to your country to live does not mean you have to let them. When I think of the interviews I had to go through back in 1974 to migrate to Australia, the attitudes some people have today only make me laugh. And I had two university degrees and was coming to fill a job at a university that could not fill a lecturer’s position in economics. Boy were those the days! This is the always-sensible Ann Coulter discussing ‘DON’T SUCK UP’ ON IMMIGRATION in which she notes that even migrants to the US may not be all that keen on open migration either.

Columnist and author of “Never Trust a Liberal Over 3-Especially a Republican,” Ann Coulter argued that the Republican Party shouldn’t “suck up” on immigration during an interview on Saturday’s “Huckabee” on the Fox News Channel.

“Don’t suck up on things like amnesty and by the way, when I said that, you have the beautiful illustration in this one campaign, a wonderful new Republican Senator, Cory Gardner (CO), had just in a debate said something I’d consider a suck up and I don’t really want to attack a Republican I love. But he was attacking Udall for not pushing amnesty hard enough. Well, then after I said ‘this isn’t going to work, this is so stupid,’…then he came out with exactly what Republicans should be doing. And that is as Romney said, we will appeal to Hispanics the way we appeal to everyone by saying we are the party that offers opportunity and freedom from regulation and we won’t pass stupid bills like Obamacare that pay for abortions’…that totally worked” she argued.
She added “this idea that recent Hispanic immigrants want a huge wave of illegal immigrants to compete with them for the same jobs and drive their wages down, is silly. The Democrats are trying to persuade Republicans to fall for this so that the Democrats get more voters. But, I note, that when Obama was appealing for the Hispanic vote, he didn’t talk about amnesty in his Spanish language ads.”

Coulter also expressed faith in the new Republican Senate to push good policies, stating “everyone keeps saying, particularly on our side, ‘yeah, it was great and now the Republicans better not blow it. And I don’t think they will, I think [Sen.] Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is smart about this. But, I would like to warn the Tea Partiers there, do not expect the first bill to be a complete repeal of Obamacare that’s not the way Republicans should be playing this. They should send up a small piece, a small piece, things that are so overwhelmingly popular…that when and if, and probably when Obama vetoes it, the newspapers are going to have to report what Obama just vetoed. And people will say ‘wait a second, illegal aliens are getting earned income tax credit benefits?’”

You should go the link as well and listen to Ann speaking with Mike Huckabee, and I particularly liked his “President Oblivious”. There will be lots more of this in the days, weeks, months and years to come.

A parable on immigration

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The core of our Judeo-Christian teaching on kindness to strangers:

The Parable of the Good Samaritan

25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”

27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”

29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’

36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

And when the man who was attacked by robbers had recovered, the man from Samaria would feel very hard done by if the man he had saved then turned around and attacked him.