Thursday, July 17, 2014
From: Gary L. Bauer
BREAKING NEWS: World Instability Grows
A Malaysian passenger jet crashed today near the Ukrainian/Russian border. Israel has launched a ground operation into Gaza.
Border Math
The left is losing the PR war over immigration. Public opinion and the political landscape have shifted tremendously in recent weeks. Gallup reports that “immigration/illegal aliens” now tops the public’s list of the most pressing issues confronting the country. Other polls show overwhelming opposition to Obama’s immigration policies.
In an attempt to regain control of the narrative, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson told senators yesterday that over the past three weeks apprehensions of illegal immigrants are down from 1,600 to 700 PER DAY.
By itself, that tells us nothing. We know that far too many Border Patrol agents are babysitting and changing diapers. Perhaps that is why apprehensions are down.
But let’s do the math. Using Johnson’s figures, until three weeks ago 1,600 illegal immigrants were being apprehended at the border every day. 1,600 x 30 days = 48,000 illegal immigrants apprehended in a month. 48,000 x 12 = 576,000 illegal immigrants apprehended in a year.
That’s just the number of illegal immigrants who were caught. We don’t know exactly how many slipped through. Assuming the Border Patrol apprehends half of them, then half a million illegal immigrants may have entered the country.
Now the administration claims that just 700 illegal immigrants a day are being caught. That’s still 21,000 illegal immigrants captured each month, 252,000 in a year — and again that’s just the number who are apprehended.
Here’s some more math. Senators were also told that “caring for young migrants” is costing taxpayers “an average of $200 per child per day.” $200 x 30 days = $6,000 a month, $72,000 per year, per child. For perspective, the median household income in America is about $51,000. It’s $39,000 for Hispanics and $33,000 for blacks. I’m sure all those families would love to be able to spend $200 a day on their own children!
Whose Champion?
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with President Obama at the White House yesterday to express their opposition to any legislation that speeds up deportations. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), one of the most vocal pro-amnesty advocates in Congress, said this when he left the White House:
“We had an emotional meeting, but emotional in the sense that we were connected. We asked [Obama] to be our champion, we asked him to be a hero to our community, and he responded to us as a champion and as a hero…”
What we need is a president and elected officials who want to be champions for all American families!
This week Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) sent a letter to every member of Congress warning that President Obama was planning to dramatically slow or stop deportations of illegal immigrants. Sessions wrote that such a move would result in “an executive nullification of our borders as an enforceable national boundary. …creating the very open-borders policy explicitly rejected by Congress and the people.”
He’s right. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 59% of likely voters say that “the primary focus of any new immigration legislation passed by Congress should be to send the young illegal immigrants back home as quickly as possible.” Just 27% say it should be easier for them to stay.
Border Security Is National Security
Yesterday I addressed the compassion aspect of this immigration crisis. Today I want to consider the national security perspective.
We already know that Hezbollah is all over Latin America. Border Patrol agents are finding Korans, prayer rugs and Urdu dictionaries along the border. We just ran through the math regarding how many people are coming in every day.
Imagine if five are terrorists and suppose only three get through. In a year, 1,000 terrorists could be spread out all over the country, courtesy of the U.S. government.
This is not a hypothetical exercise, my friends. Just consider what Ronald Colburn, former national deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol, recently told National Review Online:
“All of the good that was done after 9/11 up to now has been reversed singlehandedly. …What this situation on the border is doing is growing the haystack, is adding clutter, so that those dangerous needles get through because we’re tied up capturing, instead, juvenile children from Guatemala and El Salvador.”
By the way, this surge of children crossing the border didn’t start last month. Back in January the administration sought a vendor to escort 65,000 unaccompanied children from the border to shelters throughout the country.
In our 24/7 instant information culture, how did our free press miss this one? Why wasn’t that vendor notice news in January?
There is speculation that the administration kept a lid on the crisis as long as it could in the hope that the House would move on the Senate’s quasi-amnesty bill. But this massive wave of illegal immigration highlights just how porous our borders really are. Border security and our national security must come first!
Boehner v. Obama
Yesterday the House Rules Committee heard testimony from constitutional law experts on Speaker John Boehner’s resolution authorizing a lawsuit against President Obama’s abuse of executive power. One of the experts testifying in favor of the lawsuit was left-wing law professor Jonathan Turley.
For the record, Turley voted for Obama and has advocated in favor of polygamy. Yet he also respects our Constitution, the rule of law and our system of checks and balances. Here is a portion of Turley’s testimony:
“Our system is changing in a dangerous and destabilizing way. …The rise of a dominant presidency has occurred with relatively little congressional opposition. Indeed, when President Obama pledged to circumvent Congress, he received rapturous applause from the very body that he was promising to make practically irrelevant.
“The president’s pledge to effectively govern alone is alarming but what is most alarming is his ability to fulfill that pledge. When a president can govern alone, he can become a government unto himself, which is precisely the danger that the Framers sought to avoid in the establishment of our tripartite system of government. … Our system was designed to withstand enormous pressures and change. What we are witnessing today is one of the greatest challenges to our constitutional system in the history of this country.”
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