Illegal border crossings are down, but immigration issues remain

 

Immigration is the movement of people into a destination country of which they are not natives, or where they do not possess citizenship, in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

Immigrating to the US is not a right; it is a privilege.

Most folks do not leave their home open to anyone with the desire to enter and live in them. They want to be sure that those they allow into their home do not want to harm them, or damage or steal their belongings.

Likewise, we must not leave the national borders open so that just anyone can come in. We have to make a determined effort to be sure that those who are allowed to legally enter America share our values, or agree to adopt them. They need to get a job and support themselves and their families, and to become true Americans.

The sloppy enforcement of our immigration laws and philosophy in recent years has produced a body of illegal aliens totaling around 11 million, according to some reports. The term “undocumented immigrants” is not appropriate for these people: Immigrants enter the country legally; these people entered the country illegally, or came in legally and over-stayed their visas.

As a result, the good people who come here for the best reasons, but are not here legally, have been overshadowed by the wicked deeds the many bad ones have committed. It’s time for that to change.

Seeing this problem clearly, unlike the previous resident of the White House, President Donald Trump campaigned on tougher enforcement of our borders and other measures to reduce or eliminate illegal entry into the U.S.

Since Trump was sworn in, good things have already started happening relative to illegal border crossings.

As reported in the Washington Examiner, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Thomas D. Homan, said that since Trump entered office, “illegal border crossings have crashed by almost 70 percent, ‘an historic low,’ arrests inside the country have jumped 40 percent and that demands for illegal criminals in local jails has skyrocketed 80 percent.”

"You can like President Trump, not like him, like his policies, not like his policies, but one thing no one can argue with is the effect they've had," Homan said. He is a 30-year immigration agency veteran, and the former chief of ICE enforcement.

Echoing that sentiment, National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd said on C-SPAN that the reduction in the number of illegal border crossers between the U.S. and Mexico is “nothing short of miraculous,” putting the reduction at 53 percent of the same period last year, all before construction of Trump’s vaunted border wall has even begun.

Judd told Fox News, “There’s a vibe, there’s an energy in the Border Patrol that’s never been there before in 20 years that I’ve been in the patrol.”

Complicating the illegal alien problem is the movement by more than 300 cities and counties to protect illegals in “sanctuary” jurisdictions. Homan said that ICE will hire 10,000 new agents and crack down on these sanctuaries. “In the America I grew up in, cities didn’t shield people who violated the law,” he noted.

While denying that ICE is being pressured to meet quotas, Homan said that ICE will focus on targeting fugitives, criminals, threats to national security, and illegals who had previously been deported and came back into the United States.

In a move that runs counter to Trump’s “America First” initiative and efforts to provide jobs for Americans, the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month increased by 15,000 the number of H-2B visas for low-wage, seasonal workers for the remainder of this fiscal year on the basis that many businesses will not be able to find enough American workers this summer.

Defenders of such policies contend that Americans will not work these jobs because they are unpleasant or because they don’t pay enough; therefore foreign workers are the best solution. However, the Center for Immigration Studies found that the average hourly pay for an H-2B visa holder last year was $12.31, roughly 70 percent above the federal minimum wage.

You would think a lot of minimum wage American workers would take that increase in pay, as well as a lot of unemployed Americans who could get back into the labor force, even if temporarily. A Maine resort town, faced with a shortage of H-2B workers, solved their problem by hiring … Americans!

Our immigration problem would not have grown to its current crisis level had past administrations strictly enforced national immigration laws. As a result, millions of people are here illegally. The bad ones are now targets of government, but what do we do with those who are generally good people, except for their method of coming to America?

Some truly just want a better life and are living a generally good, clean life. What is the best way to deal with these “Dreamers?” There is a great sentiment for providing a strict and complex path to citizenship, and deporting millions of them is virtually impossible.

Perhaps a suitable compromise can be found.

Trigger warning: Immigration problems are being discussed here

Immigration ought to be one of a nation’s primary concerns, and after the last eight years of lax enforcement of immigration law and the horrible consequences to some individual Americans at the hands of some illegal aliens, President-Elect Donald Trump faces the screaming need to make changes to the immigration process once he is sworn in, and he has stated the desire to do so.

President Barack Obama touts his record on deportations, which some say is nearly 3,000,000 illegal aliens. That certainly is a good thing, but like Paul Harvey famously provided his listeners for so many years, here’s the rest of the story.

The Obama administration did not go around the country rounding up and deporting illegal aliens, some of whom are criminals with varying degrees of violent behavior, including murder. Instead, the Border Patrol caught these nearly three million illegals near the Mexican border as they were entering the country, and turned them around to head back south. Better than nothing, certainly, but far less laudable than that for which Obama takes credit.

In the meantime, the many millions of illegals that have found their way into the country remain, many of them in self-proclaimed “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where local officials brag that they will protect the illegals – criminals and non-criminals alike – from being discovered and deported, or otherwise dealt with as federal law provides.

Like his failure to identify and correctly label radical Muslims who commit terrorism in America and elsewhere, Obama’s failure to properly address illegal immigration will forever be near the top of his lengthy failure list.

It is said, and in proper context it is true, that America is a nation of immigrants. In the earliest days everyone who came to the colonies was an immigrant, and after the colonies gained independence and formed the new nation many other immigrants came to America over the decades and did their part to build and strengthen the nation. But the idea that America still needs immigrants to make it successful and desirable is ridiculous.

American culture was established long ago, so we no longer have a burning need for immigrants for that purpose, or for any purpose. These days, with the foolish suspension of border and immigration control, largely during the term of Barack Obama, the millions of illegal aliens in the country today often weaken our country and pose threats to Americans.

Our country belongs to Americans, those of us whose families have been here for more than a few years, families that have been here for generations. Our Founders created a nation with a unique set of principles from which deep traditions were formed that have survived more than two centuries since the United States came into existence.

We have our ways of doing things – our culture – and a body of laws that evolved from that culture. Americans decide how things are done here, and those who want to come here from places near and far, and places often much different, and many far worse than America, are expected to adapt to our way of doing things.

What sense does it make to do what is required to get to America legally from countries hundreds or thousands of miles away, become a US citizen, and then maintain an allegiance to the land you wanted to get away from instead having an allegiance to America? Or to try to institute the culture of the home you left to come here? If you don’t want to adapt to our way of life – to become an American – why did you come here?

Our policy ought to be: If you want to come here, and you agree to embrace our culture and to assimilate into the American way of believing, living and behaving, and you are a good and honest person with something positive to contribute to America, you will be considered acceptable to apply for citizenship.

What we don’t need, don’t want, and must not abide is people coming here illegally, even if they do so because they truly want a better life in the US. And we also can’t allow those to immigrate here whose national allegiance lies with a country other than the United States. Be an American; accept the country as it is, not as you want it to be. Do not be, for example, a Nicaraguan that lives in America.

Every American needs to understand that there is no divine right held by citizens of other countries to come to America, either as
visitors, immigrants, or as refugees. And further understand that America has no obligation to accept people who want to come here. We can accept them, or not, as we choose.

However, America does have the right, and the obligation, to control who it allows into the country, to be sure they are fit to be here, and have something beneficial to offer us.

America became the great and wonderful country that it is through decades of honoring and sustaining its founding principles, and not by kowtowing to the demands of every dissatisfied minority group that believes its desires are more important than our heritage.