Heather McDonald: the real risks of the Senate immigration amnesty bill

Here’s a post from the moderate Manhattan Institute about the Senate immigration bill. (H/T Doug Ross)

No border enforcement:

Mickey Kaus has demolished the Senate bill’s central claim: that it makes border security a precondition for the granting of permanent-resident status. In fact, the enforcement goals consist of empty promises; nothing actually hangs on their achievement or requires that they ever be met. Immigrant advocate Frank Sharry candidly echoed Kaus’s analysis in the Wall Street Journal: “The triggers [for obtaining green cards] are based on developing plans and spending money, not on reaching that effectiveness, which is really quite clever.”

Amnesty almost immediately:

But the legislation’s most critical amnesty comes right away, before even the pretense of beefed-up security. Illegal aliens will get their illegal status removed six months after the bill is passed upon payment of $500. The formerly illegal aliens will be allowed to remain in the country legally, under so-called “probationary status,” for ten years (while those who wish to enter the country legally wait patiently in their home countries for permission to enter).

Criminals are eligible for amnesty:

Not one amnesty proposal has ever required a clean criminal record to qualify. The current bill allows aliens with two misdemeanor convictions to legalize. Given the incessant pressures on district attorneys to accept a plea in exchange for downgrading the crime charged and to ignore most arrests entirely, it takes considerable effort to rack up two misdemeanor convictions—whether by dealing drugs, assaulting fellow gangbangers, stealing, or tagging. The bill’s authors apparently think that staying on the right side of the law is an insuperable burden and that having a criminal record is an ordinary part of being an American.

Permanent Democrat majority:

The political effects of the proposed amnesty won’t benefit the GOP, whatever the party’s hopes might be. Hispanics will not shift their vote to Republicans in the next presidential election unless Republicans promote the same big-government programs, such as Obamacare, that attract Hispanics to the Democratic Party in the first place.

Hurts the poorest Americans:

Harvard economist George Borjas has recently estimated that low-skilled American workers already suffer wage losses of $402 billion a year because of immigrant labor, a sum that does not include the costs to taxpayers of welfare paid to low-skill immigrant workers and their children. Amnesty proponents should explain how providing legal status to millions of illegal aliens will affect the job prospects of the poorest Americans.

Massive burden to taxpayers:

Reconfiguring immigration priorities is crucial, because many children of unskilled immigrants are assimilating into the underclass. They are also placing enormous burdens on the nation’s schools. California governor Jerry Brown proposes to redirect state taxpayer dollars from middle-class schools to those with high proportions of “English learners,” because Hispanic students lag so far behind whites and Asians. Most of these “English learners” were born and raised in the U.S. but are characterized as non-native speakers because their academic language skills are so low. Nationally, only 18 percent of Hispanic eighth-graders read at or above proficiency levels, according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Because of their low academic achievement (and their high rates of illegitimacy), second- and third-generation Hispanics rely on government welfare programs far more than native-born whites.

I just wanted to be clear with everyone. I am in favor of legal immigration and even automatic green cards for skilled workers – especially in Information Technology. Skilled workers who come here legally and work here for 6 years without committing any crimes should get an automatic green card. Skilled immigrants pay more in taxes than they take from welfare programs. But this immigration bill is does nothing for skilled immigrants at all. It’s targeting unskilled immigrants who have already broken the law by coming here illegally and forcing enormous costs on taxpayers. We already have a $17 trillion debt and it’s going up by a trillion every year. We can’t afford this amnesty bill.

Filed under: Commentary, Amnesty, Crime, Gang of Eight, Illegal Alien, Immigration, Welfare

Police and social workers ignored sex-trafficking, rape and abuse by Muslims

From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

The gang recruited its victims from the Oxford area between May 2004 and January last year, deliberately targeting vulnerable girls.

Some were spotted drinking or playing truant along the city’s Cowley Road, while others were chosen because they were living in care homes.

Once under their control the abusers forced the girls to have sex using threats of extreme violence.

Some were gang raped, while others were prostituted to men who would travel from all parts of UK to have sex with them.

If they did not comply they were beaten and burned with cigarettes while one girl was even branded with her abusers’ initials.

When one victim fell pregnant at the age of 12 she was forced to undergo a dangerous backstreet abortion.

Another girl was abused with a string of bizarre sex toys to ‘prepare’ her for one of the gang rapes.

Police were first alerted to the activities of the grooming ring in 2006 when a 14-year-old girl complained that she had been held against her will by two Asian men and forced to take drugs.

Seven months later the same girl was found by officers in an Oxford park complaining that she had been forced to perform a sex act on one of the defendants, Akhtar Dogar.

Dogar was interviewed by police but denied raping the girl and the case was dropped when the girl withdrew her complaint.

The same year another 14-year-old girl informed police she had been forced to have sex with several different men, but again the case was dropped when she became too scared to press charges.

Again in 2006 police were called to a guest house in Oxford after a man staying there dialled 999 to report that he feared a prostitute was being beaten up in an adjoining room.

When police arrived they found a 14-year-old girl cowering in the basement and complaining that had been raped and beaten.

She too eventually withdrew her complaint and the case was dropped.

Social workers also claimed they alerted police to concerns about one of the victims who regularly ran away from her care home and was often seen in the company of older Asian men.

A serious case review was announced while Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council apologised for their failure to spot the pattern earlier.

[...]The case is the latest in a string of high profile trials involving Asian gangs who have convicted of targeting and abusing vulnerable white girls.

Last May eight men of Pakistani origin and one Afghan were convicted of trafficking and raping girls in the Rochdale area.

Five Asian men were also jailed in 2010 after being convicted of grooming girls as young as 12 in the Rotherham area.

Just last week a gang of Asian men who groomed vulnerable white girls in Shropshire between 2006 and 2009 were jailed for more than 50-years.

More here from the Evening Standard:

Police and council leaders today apologised for their failings as a gang of paedophiles was convicted at the Old Bailey of serial abuse of schoolgirls while in care.

The girls, some as young as 11, were drugged, raped, trafficked and used as prostitutes while supposedly in the safe-keeping of the local authority in Oxford.

They had all been targeted because they were vulnerable, drinking and taking drugs.

The exposure of this child sex ring comes less than a year after a similar gang was jailed in Rochdale and an inquiry by a group of MPs found systemic failings in care across the country.

Last month police revealed that new evidence had emerged of abuse by 84 staff at the Bryn Estyn home in North Wales dating back to the 1960s.

Today five men of Pakistani origin and two from North Africa were convicted of more than 40 charges spanning eight years. They will be sentenced at a later date by judge Peter Rook QC. Two defendants were cleared.

The charges involved six girls between the ages of 11 and 15 who were abused over nine years in the Cowley area of Oxford.

After the guilty verdicts a fight broke out in the dock with one of the convicted paedophiles punching another who had been cleared.

The men were described by police as “predators who identified the most vulnerable girls in society and corrupted them entirely”. Police missed several chances to catch gang members before they were finally arrested.

The victims were forced to relive the horror in some of the most distressing witness evidence heard at the Old Bailey.

One after the other, the girls broke down as they described how they were groomed, beaten, betrayed and sold into prostitution around the country.

Girl D told how, at the age of 11, she was branded with a heated hairpin by a trafficker and loaned to other abusers for £600 an hour.

Over five years she was repeatedly raped by large groups of men in what she described as “torture sex”.

She was so frightened of her attacker that she refused to give evidence for fear he would hurt her again.

It was only after she was given legal advice that Girl D agreed to tell her story from a videolink from another room in the building.

Another victim, Girl A, complained of her plight to police on two occasions but no one was charged.

What caused police and social workers to avoid rescuing the white girls from the Muslim men? Well, I think if you ask any university-educated liberal, they would explain to you that charging Muslims with crimes in Western societies  is “Islamophobia”. This is what people learn in university. You can’t treat Muslims like everyone else, equal under the law, because that’s “Islamophobia”. The Labor Party, which enacted the lax immigration policies of the last decade in the United Kingdom, would tell you that those British pre-teen girls just need to be more sensitive to other cultures and stop being so racist while they are being raped.

The previous Muslim sex-trafficking gang

Here are the facts from the previous “grooming” case from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

A sex grooming gang targeted white girls because they were not part of their ‘community or religion’ said a judge as he jailed them for a total of 77 years yesterday.

Detectives are now preparing to make more arrests after they revealed they suspect up to 50 mainly Pakistani-born men took part in the abuse.

But despite the judge’s hard-hitting comments, police in Greater Manchester continued to insist that the men’s race and religion were not factors in their crimes.

Yesterday senior politicians clashed over the case – with one former Labour MP claiming police and social workers ignored complaints because they were ‘petrified of being called racist’.

With experts on paedophilia insisting street grooming by Muslim men was a real problem, Judge Gerald Clinton made it clear he believed religion was a factor.

He jailed the 59-year-old ringleader for 19 years and eight other men for between four and 12 years, telling them they had treated their victims ‘as though they were worthless and beyond all respect’.

He added: ‘I believe one of the factors which led to that is that they were not of your community or religion.’

But he branded outbursts by some of the men claiming the prosecution was racially-motivated ‘nonsense’, telling them they found themselves in the dock because of their ‘lust and greed’.

The gang raped and abused up to 47 girls – some as young as 13 – after plying them with alcohol and luring them to takeaways in Heywood, near Rochdale.

Detective Inspector Michael Sanderson, of Greater Manchester Police, said none of the convicted men had ever shown ‘the slightest bit of remorse’.

The keeping of sex slaves is sanctioned by the Qur’an.

What’s interesting about this case is that the police knew about the ring years before, but refused to prosecute:

A victim of the ring said she was ‘let down’ by police and the Crown Prosecution Service because the issue of Asian gangs grooming young white girls was ‘unheard of’ at the time.

The girl, who was 15 when she was targeted by the gang, reported the abuse to police in August 2008 but the CPS decided not to prosecute because they did not believe a jury would find her ‘credible’.

After reporting the abuse she suffered for four more months at the hands of the gang and continued to be forced into having sex by her ‘friend’ – a teenage girl who was acting as a pimp for the men.

She said the problem got ‘worse’ after telling the police.

‘I felt let down. But I know that they (police) believed me… but… because they said to me at the end that something should have been done but the CPS just would not – what’s the word? – prosecute is it?

‘It’s like, then, in 2008 it weren’t really heard of… Asian men with white girls.

‘It was just unheard of. I’ve never heard of it. Now it’s going on everywhere. You think of Muslim men as religious and family-minded and just nice people. You don’t think… I don’t know… you just don’t think they’d do things like that.’

The girl, now 20, only escaped the gang in December 2008 when she fell pregnant and moved away. She was then made to wait until August 2009 for the CPS to tell her they were not taking the case to trial.

She called the men who abused her ‘evil’ and said she hopes they pay for their crimes.

‘They ripped away all my dignity and all my last bit of self-esteem and by the end of it I had no emotion whatsoever because I was used to being used and abused daily,’ she said.

‘It was just blocked out, it was just like it wasn’t me any more. They just took everything away and I just think hopefully they’ll pay for what they’ve done.’

Under the policies of the UK Labour Party, the police had all been fully trained in multiculturalism and political correctness. Some groups favored by the secular left are above the law and cannot be persecuted, even when they rape little children. We can thank Harriet Harman and her ilk for this. We can even thank her for the immigration policies that created isolated communities that do not respect the laws and values of Western civilization, and Judeo-Christian values in particular.

But that’s not all. Think about what the feminism promoted by the Labour Party achieves. The feminism embraced by the Labour Party under Harriet Harman had one goal. To destroy the institution of marriage and eject fathers from the home. Men were to be replaced with government handouts and welfare payments. Under the rule of the Labour Party, illegitimacy has skyrocketed while marriage has declined. The UK government literally pays women to have children out of wedlock – children who will grow up fatherless. IVF is taxpayer-funded under the NHS.

When women do not have to care about whether a man is a good provider, they can have sex with any man – whichever one they like, based on the unwise standards of the culture. But men who have not been carefully picked by women to be husbands and fathers do not stick around. Who is left,then, to protect the girls who are born without fathers to raise them? No one. This is the end result of feminism’s attempt to destroy the traditional roles that men play in the home: protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. Government programs, politically correct social workers and welfare checks are not a substitute for a father.

Filed under: News, Diversity, Egypt, EHRC, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Harriet Harman, Human Rights Commission, Immigration, Immigration Policy, Islam, Libya, Lynne Featherstone, Multiculturalism, Muslim, North Africa, Pakistan, Pedophilia, Police, Political Correctness, Rape, Religion Peace, Sensitivity Training, Sex Slavery, Sex Trafficking, Torture

New York Times editorial blames Americans for Boston Muslim terrorist attack

Mark Steyn takes a look at it in his National Review article. (H/T Doug Ross)

Excerpt:

Eight-year-old Martin [Richards] was killed; his sister lost a leg; and his mother suffered serious brain injuries. What did the Richards and some 200 other families do to deserve having a great big hole blown in their lives? Well, according to the New York Times, they and you bear collective responsibility. Writing on the op-ed page, Marcello Suarez-Orozco, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and Carola Suarez-Orozco, a professor at the same institution, began their ruminations thus:

“The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.”

[...]How hard would it be for Americans to be less inadequate when it comes to assimilating otherwise well-adjusted immigrant children? Let us turn once again to Mrs. Tsarnaev:

“They are going to kill him. I don’t care,” she told reporters. “My oldest son is killed, so I don’t care. I don’t care if my youngest son is going to be killed today. . . . I don’t care if I am going to get killed, too . . . and I will say Allahu Akbar!”

You can say it all you want, madam, but everyone knows that “Allahu Akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here.” So, once you’ve cleared the streets of body parts, you inadequate Americans need to redouble your efforts.

It’s our fault that this happened. We didn’t supply Mrs. Tsarnaev with enough welfare money. We need to spend more on public schools and free health care and food stamps. At least, that’s how the left views it. That’s how the Obama administration views it. They would never deport people like the Boston bombers, because that would be “intolerant”.

Victor Davis Hanson explains how far the United States will go to avoid deporting welfare-collecting criminals:

Deportation is now politically incorrect, sort of like the T-word “terrorism” which the administration also seeks to avoid.

[...]Why were the Tsarnaevs granted asylum in the United States – and why were some of them not later deported? Officially, they came here as refugees. As ethnic Chechens and former residents of Kyrgyzstan, they sought “asylum” here from anti-Muslim persecution – given that Russia had waged a brutal war in Chechnya against Islamic militants.

Yes, the environment of Islamic Russia was and still can be deadly. But if the Tsarnaevs were supposedly in danger there, why did the father, Anzor, after a few years choose to return to Dagestan, Russia, where he now apparently lives in relative safety? Why did one of the alleged Boston bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, return to Russia for six months last year – given that escape from such an unsafe place was the very reason that the United States granted his family asylum in the first place?

[...]What, exactly, justifies deportation of immigrants of any status? Failure to find work and become self-supporting? Apparently not. The Tsarnaev family reportedly had been on public assistance. This is not an isolated or unusual instance.

[...]Should those residing here illegally at least avoid committing crimes and follow the rules of their adopted country? Apparently not – given that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a skilled boxer, was charged in 2009 with domestic violence against his girlfriend. His mother, Zubeidat, also back in Russia now, was reportedly arrested last year on charges of shoplifting some $1,600 in goods from a Boston-area store.

Meanwhile, skilled immigrants who come to this country and work for decades without getting so much as a speeding ticket can just go back where they came from. We don’t want them – we need to deport them. They are “bad” immigrants who need to go back where they came from. We want the welfare-collecting terrorist immigrants, instead. Like Mrs. Tsarnaev. She is a “good” immigrant who needs to be fast-tracked to permanent residency and citizenship.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security continues to ignore real terrorism and claim that white male gun owners are the real terrorists in their training material. Just like the FBI claims that pro-lifers are the real terrorists in their training material. The Obama administration isn’t serious about national security.

Filed under: News, Amnesty, Bombing, Boston, Crime, Criminal, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Refugee, Terrorism, Welfare

Two Muslim immigrants arrested in Canada for Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist plot

Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Afghanistan

The CBC reports on a blockbuster story from Canada. (H/T Blazing Cat Fur)

Excerpt:

Canadian police say they have arrested two men and thwarted a plot to carry out a major terrorist attack on a Via passenger train in the Greater Toronto Area.

In a press conference that followed an exclusive report by CBC’s Greg Weston, police named the two accused as Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, of Montreal, and Raed Jaser, 35, from Toronto. They have been charged with conspiracy to carry out a terrorist attack and “conspiring to murder persons unknown for the benefit of, at the direction of, or in association with a terrorist group.”

The two men arrested are not Canadian citizens, police said Monday, but would not provide any details about their nationalities.

The RCMP accused the two men of conspiring to commit an “al-Qaeda-supported” attack.

Police said the two accused were getting “direction and guidance” from al-Qaeda elements in Iran. There was no information to suggest the attacks were state sponsored, police said.

Chief Supt. Jennifer Strachan said the two suspects watched trains and railways in the Greater Toronto Area. There was a specific route targeted, not necessarily a specific train, Strachan said, although she declined to reveal which route was allegedly being targeted.

“We are alleging that these two individuals took steps and conducted activities to initiate a terrorist attack,” she told reporters.

The two men are expected to appear at Old City Hall courthouse in Toronto tomorrow.

With Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the helm, the Conservative Party majority gets the job done again!

Too bad Harper is not in charge down here. Democrats think that only married, Bible-believing small business owning Tea Party conservatives who served in the Armed Forces can be domestic terrorists. They think that William Lane Craig is more likely to be a terrorist than KSM. That’s what they believe.

I have to share Blazing Cat Fur’s headline for this “Canada: Muslims Fear Backlash Over Latest Thwarted Terror Plot – Linked To Amish Division Of Al Qaeda“. He also points out that the Canadian chapter of CAIR is urging the Canadian government not to pass national security legislation.

Blazing Cat Fur is the place to be for the latest news from Canada. Best Canadian blog.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the Canadian media will try to blame this on the Amish, or whatever the Canadian equivalent of the Tea Party is. They can’t bring themselves to believe that they made a mistake by ratcheting up unregulated immigration from Muslim countries in order to move their country to the left. Bringing in skilled immigrants who learn English is one thing, but bringing in radical extremists is something else entirely.

Filed under: News, Al Qaeda, Al Qaida, Al Quds, Canada, Chiheb Esseghaier, Conservative Party, CSIS, Diversity, Greater Toronto Area, GTA, Homeland Defense, Immigrant, Immigration, Iran, Islam, Middle East, Montreal, Muslim, National Security, Ontario, Political Correctness, Raed Jaser, RCMP, Religion of Peace, Stephen Harper, Terrorism, Terrorist, Toronto, Via Rail

Is the economic recovery real or illusory?

The Obama administration has poured about $6 trillion of borrowed money into this economy over the last four years. Has this resulted in a growing economy, or is the economy slowing down?

Take a look at this must-read editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

The Great Recession is an apt name for America’s current stagnation, but the present phase might also be called the Grand Illusion—because the happy talk and statistics that go with it, especially regarding jobs, give a rosier picture than the facts justify.

The country isn’t really advancing. By comparison with earlier recessions, it is going backward. Despite the most stimulative fiscal policy in American history and a trillion-dollar expansion to the money supply, the economy over the last three years has been declining. After 2.4% annual growth rates in gross domestic product in 2010 and 2011, the economy slowed to 1.5% growth in 2012. Cumulative growth for the past 12 quarters was just 6.3%, the slowest of all 11 recessions since World War II.

[...]February’s headline unemployment rate was portrayed as 7.7%, down from 7.9% in January. The dip was accompanied by huzzahs in the news media claiming the improvement to be “outstanding” and “amazing.” But if you account for the people who are excluded from that number—such as “discouraged workers” no longer looking for a job, involuntary part-time workers and others who are “marginally attached” to the labor force—then the real unemployment rate is somewhere between 14% and 15%.

[...]The number of Americans unemployed for six months or longer went up by 89,000 in February to a total of 4.8 million. The average duration of unemployment rose to 36.9 weeks, up from 35.3 weeks in January. The labor-force participation rate, which measures the percentage of working-age people in the workforce, also dropped to 63.5%, the lowest in 30 years. The average workweek is a low 34.5 hours thanks to employers shortening workers’ hours or asking employees to take unpaid leave.

When we borrow massive amounts of money and spend it today, we should expect to see some sort of return for all of that spending. But it turns out that when government does the spending instead of private citizens and private industry, then much of the money is wasted on nonsense that doesn’t create jobs and grow the economy. The numbers we have today put this point beyond dispute.

The Obama administration has been failing skilled immigrants for the past four years, as well:

When employers can’t expand or develop new lines because of the shortage of certain skills, the employment opportunities for the less skilled are also restricted. To help with this shortage, the administration’s proposals for job-training programs do deserve support. The stress should be on vocational training, postsecondary education and every program that will broaden access to computer science and strengthen science, technology, engineering and math in high schools and at the university level.

But the payoffs from these programs are in the future, and it is vital today to increase the number of annual visas and grants of permanent residency status for foreigners skilled in science and technology. The current situation is preposterous: The brightest and best brains from all over the globe are attracted to American universities, but once they get their degrees America sends them packing. Keeping these foreigners out means they will compete against us in the industries that are growing here and around the world.

This administration prides itself on being “pro-immigration” but they actually favor giving citizenship and voting privileges to millions of people who do not have marketable skills, who cannot speak English, and who disrespect the law by coming here illegally. The administration wants those people to become citizens because those people will vote Democrat. Meanwhile, skilled immigrants with advanced degrees in math, science, engineering and technology can just clear out of the country. They can learn here and work here temporarily, but eventually they have to go home. There are no green cards or naturalizations for skilled immigrants – they have skills, and they may be tempted to do nasty things like vote Republican. Democrats don’t want any of those independent, hard-working immigrants in this country. They are too hard to control and too hard to lie to.

Filed under: News, Debt, Deficit, Employment, GDP, Government Spending, Government waste, Immigration, Jobs, Labor Shortage, Recession, Shortage, Skilled Immigration, Trillion, Unemployment