The Bush/Obama administrations’s unconscionably lax attention to border security has permitted the influx of millions of illegal aliens over the past 16 years, changing the character of communities across the southwest and deep into the north. But President Trump’s just-begun overhaul of the system (really, a return to the rule of law) may well reveal the extent of the problem:
When President Trump ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade.
Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation, according to calculations by the Los Angeles Times. They were based on interviews with experts who studied the order and two internal documents that signal immigration officials are taking an expansive view of Trump’s directive.
Far from targeting only “bad hombres,” as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.
Gee, that’s too damn bad. But according to the new notion of civil rights, anybody who sets foot on American soil is somehow presumed to automatically be entitled to all the rights and privileges of citizenship — they’re not invaders, they’re just future overlords we haven’t met yet.
The deportation targets are a much larger group than those swept up in the travel bans that sowed chaos at airports and seized public attention over the past week. Fewer than 1 million people came to the U.S. over the past decade from the seven countries from which most visitors are temporarily blocked.
Equating these two things is ridiculous. Muslim colonizers flying in from the ummah can and should be turned away before they even board the planes. Illegals pouring across the Mexican border — many of whom are not Mexicans — have no, zero, right to announce their presence in our country by breaking our laws, no matter what their exigent circumstances. Cue the sob stories!
Deportations of this scale, which has not been publicly totaled before, could have widely felt consequences: Families would be separated. Businesses catering to immigrant customers may be shuttered. Crops could be left to rot, unpicked, as agricultural and other industries that rely on immigrant workforces face labor shortages. U.S. relations could be strained with countries that stand to receive an influx of deported people, particularly in Latin America. Even the Social Security system, which many immigrants working illegally pay into under fake identification numbers, would take a hit.
In fact, the actual number of forcible deportations will be nowhere near that number, and it doesn’t have to be. Some high-profile enforcement action, pour encourager les autres, will have a salutary effect on recent arrivals, who will quickly learn that Uncle Sucker has had an attitude readjustment. And a very public roundup of Middle Easterners attempting to sneak across into Arizona would help to illustrate this little-remarked but very dangerous problem.
But it’s typical of the leftist media to trot out apocalyptic scenarios to turn natural human sympathy into weaponized empathy, and make us doubt the morality and efficacy of our own right to cultural self-preservation.
Trump’s orders instruct officers to deport not only those convicted of crimes, but also those who aren’t charged but are believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense.”
That category applies to the 6 million people believed to have entered the U.S. without passing through an official border crossing. The rest of the 11.1 million people in the country illegally, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, are believed to have entered on a valid visa and stayed past its expiration date.
If the administration can fight off the Lawyer Left and their fellow-travelers, we’ll soon begin to get a handle on these numbers. Then — and only then — can our national conversation commence about what to do about them.
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