Month: December 2019

Trump’s asylum action will help ease the border crisis

by Washington Examiner  | July 16, 2019 10:44 PM

This week, the Trump administration continued its efforts to bring order to the southern border by imposing new rules on the asylum-seeking process. This is what was needed.

On Monday, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security announced that migrants wanting to claim asylum in the U.S. must first do so in either their home country or another country before coming to the U.S. Under the new rule, anyone who crosses illegally into the U.S. to claim asylum, without having already applied from outside, would be ineligible.

Word has gotten out south of Texas that anyone hoping to flee violence or poverty in their own country need touch American soil, find a Border Patrol agent, and turn oneself in, requesting asylum. The vast majority of migrants who do this are breaking the law when they float the short distance across the Rio Grande and come ashore without authorization. But that crime is effectively canceled out the moment they say “asylum.” Moreover, 90% of the time, the asylum claim, no matter how frivolous, grants them the right to remain in the country while they await a court hearing that may not come for up to five years.

That is an abuse of American generosity intended to offer refuge for people abroad genuinely fearing for their lives and persecuted by their governments.

 

We understand why these men and women from Latin America want to be in the U.S. Ours is the land of opportunity, and many of our neighbor countries lack the capitalist economies and robust property rights needed to provide such opportunity.

But the asylum law was not supposed to be an invitation to unlimited economic migration. But that is how the law is currently functioning, with Central Americans making their way here by the tens of thousands every month. They have learned exactly how to push the system’s buttons in order to secure long-term permission to be inside the U.S., and this is why detention centers near the border are overflowing.

Congress has shown no sense of urgency to fix the problem. Democrats oppose every measure to halt or even reduce the gush of migrants crossing into the U.S., many of them deathly ill from the arduous, 2,000-mile journey from their home countries.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that the administration’s new directive violates the law and will be “swiftly and successfully challenged in court.” This, even though just last week the California Democrat signaled that she could support “initiatives” that would more or less do what the new rule does.

At a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi said, “There are some initiatives that suggest that some review of asylum-seekers’ status could be done in [their] country instead of traveling here, and that’s one thing that I think would be appealing to the administration.” She even said that it wouldn’t be a matter of having to “change the law.” This makes her new objections seem puzzling.

The White House has issued other rules for asylum-seekers crossing illegally into the U.S., such as requiring them to pay a fee and denying them work permits until their claim is approved. Some of the new directives are already in effect and some are not. Even so, it is important that the administration take every action it can to stop this law’s abuse, at least until the flow at the border reaches a manageable level.

There are too many people coming into the country at once seeking refuge. It’s straining the resources of the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It has created a crisis at the border, and it is literally putting more lives in danger. We have long called on Trump to take action on this within the law and to get Congress involved as much as he can. This action is a step in the right direction.

— Read on www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trumps-asylum-action-will-help-ease-the-border-crisis

Doug Wead on Writing an Official Record of Trump’s Presidency

AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS


The Epoch Times | Doug Wead | Dec 5, 2019

From the time that Ivanka Trump was a little girl, her father was ripping out pages of The New York Times lamenting what America’s elites—both Republican and Democrat—were doing to America, Wead said.

All this time, “he’s hoping that somebody’s going to come along and run for president and clean this up and nobody ever does,” Wead said.

Trump watched as Republican and Democratic presidents welcomed communist China into the World Trade Organization and gave China most favored nation status. They paved the way for the rise of communist China and enabled “the largest transfer of wealth in human history, outside of the Middle East, of America’s wealth to China,” Wead said.

“Imagine how much money it’s taken to pull China out of poverty. And the American middle-class has done that,” he said.

“The president knows that the decisions he has to make vis-a-vis China are the toughest decisions he will make,” Wead said. And he understands that the American people won’t fully appreciate his decisions, such as placing hefty tariffs on Chinese products, Wead said.

Untold Stories

Trump is the sixth U.S. president Wead has interviewed; he’s also conversed with six first ladies and 30 siblings and children of different presidents.

In his interviews with the presidents, he says the only common denominator was that they were all great listeners.

“When I found that with Trump, I was surprised because on TV, you only see him talking, you don’t see him listening,” Wead said. “My whole perspective on the president changed immediately when I met him.”

During one of Ivanka Trump’s interviews with Wead, she told him, “he is really very compassionate.”

Wead details in his book: “All her life, even in her teens, Ivanka would be called into his office, where he would tear off a piece of the morning newspaper and say, ‘Ivanka, find this person.’ It might be a person whose apartment had burned, destroying everything he had owned. Once, it was a young woman whose father had been murdered in the Bronx, and prosecutors would not make the arrest.”

Ivanka eventually found the woman, who had been left impoverished, and her father offered to help her and give her a job, Wead wrote.

One of America’s most shameful secrets was the many U.S. hostages held abroad, Wead told The Epoch Times.

Previous administrations had failed to secure their release.

“I’ve spoken with the families of these hostages. Democrat, Republican—they don’t care. They had loved ones that they cared about who were beheaded and who were tortured and raped,” Wead said.

“They were told by the American government, keep quiet,” Wead said. He says the rationale was that if they increased the publicity surrounding a hostage, it would increase the value of the hostage, and make it harder to free that person. And more Americans abroad would likely be imprisoned to blackmail the United States.

“There was this period of darkness, a shameful period where nothing could be said about the hostages,” Wead said.

“If it’s your son or daughter, your only hope is the federal government. And they won’t keep you informed? They won’t tell you what’s going on? They won’t let you use your money or your abilities to try to bring them home?”

Trump “was outraged by that,” Wead said. Since taking office, he has successfully freed 22 hostages.

Trump refused to offer money in exchange.

“He did the reverse: We’re taking their money, and we’re going to squeeze them until they let them go” was his rationale, Wead said.

In his book, he highlights the case of Pastor Andrew Brunson, who had been imprisoned in Turkey for alleged links to the Gülen movement, a designated terrorist organization in Turkey. The government in Ankara had produced no evidence, so Brunson couldn’t refute any of the charges against him.

The Trump administration made several agreements with Turkey to secure Brunson’s release, but the Turks backed out of them, Brunson told Wead later in an interview.

Trump pressured Turkey by putting sanctions on two of its officials, doubling tariffs on steel and aluminum from Turkey, and engaging Congress and the European Parliament to exert pressure as well. The Turkish lira tumbled, and on Oct. 12, 2018, Trump welcomed Brunson and his family to the White House.

Trump “brought the Turkish economy to the brink over one man, and he got him home,” Wead said.

Death Threats

Before the book was published, Wead said he began receiving death threats against him and his family from different IP addresses in an attempt to stop him from releasing his work.

“They named my family members and details about their life that would only come from a great deal of research,” Wead said.

“These are unusual times,” he added.

Wead believes the anti-Trump resistance wanted to impeach Trump as soon as he won the election.

“So it had nothing to do with Russian collusion, because that came later; it had nothing to do with the phone call to Ukraine because that came later,” Wead said.

“The national media and the establishment,” are still reeling from the humiliation that U.S. voters didn’t vote how they were told to, Wead said.

As Wead highlighted in his book, Trump’s victory defied all expectation: “He had been opposed by Hollywood, academia, Wall Street, and the national media. Every living president, Republican and Democratic, had voted against him. Two-hundred-and-forty newspapers had endorsed his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nineteen had supported him. Billionaires had voted against him 20 to one.”

In addition, right after the election, economist Paul Krugman wrote, “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

But contrary to the predictions of economic fallout, the economy boomed, and now boasts more than 7 million job openings.

“That’s the entire population of the state of Indiana in unfilled jobs,” Wead said.

Wead said Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner—who plays a much larger role in the Trump administration than people think—once remarked to Trump that it was thanks to the media’s total fixation with the Russia collusion narrative that the Trump administration was able to deregulate.

“The cutting of regulations could have been big stories. Instead, they were blind to what we were doing, and we were able to jump-start the economy,” Kushner told Wead.

In writing his book, “What I wanted to do was get accurate stories, real stories down on paper—truth on paper,” Wead said.

“I told Ivanka, you know, in 100 years from now, there are still going to be books written and dramas performed about the Trump family. But whether they’re viewed hatefully as the Borgias or as the Medicis or as grandly as the Kennedys or the Rockefellers or some great family, all of that depends on what is written and said about them now,” he said.

“Not the hearsay, but the primary sources.” American Thought Leaders is an Epoch Times show available on Facebook and YouTube.

That was his instinct:

You’ve got a problem with somebody? You call him. And that’s what he did with Kim Jong Un.

Doug Wead, presidential historian

I told Ivanka, you know, in 100 years from now, there are still going to be books written and dramas performed about the

Trump family.

Doug Wead, presidential historian

President Donald Trump shakes hands with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un before a meeting at the Sofitel Legend Metropole hotel in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 27, 2019.

SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

Trump is winning on Immigration

The Monitor | COMMENTARY | Scott Martelle

Trump winning on immigration

Two down, one to go.

Federal judges in three separate circuits issued injunctions — two nationwide, one limited to the 9th Circuit — against President Trump’s pending “public charge” rule, which would make immigrants ineligible for green cards if they sign up for certain public benefits.

On Monday, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., joined fellow jurists in the San Francisco based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in lifting injunctions after the federal government persuaded them that it likely had the legal authority to adopt the new restrictions.

That leaves the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is mulling an appeal of a nationwide injunction issued in October by a district court in New York City, as the last barrier.

The lower court decisions hinged on complaints by immigrant advocates and several state attorneys general (including California) that the government violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act by adopting an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that exceeded its authority under immigration law. But two appellate courts now say the government likely had the authority to do what it did.

Even if that is true, that doesn’t make the new rule good policy. Much like the government’s effort to require potential immigrants to prove they could cover anticipated health care costs (that also has been held up in the courts), the public charge rule is clearly aimed at reducing the number of poor people admitted to the country and increasing the ranks of the wealthy. You know, fewer people from those infamous “s—-hole countries” in Africa, South American and the Caribbean, and more from wealthier nations in Europe, such as Trump expressed favorite, Norway (good luck with that, as my colleague Paul Thornton once pointed out).

In typical fashion, the White House used the Monday decision as a point of attack.

“The 4th Circuit’s lifting of the lawless nationwide injunction imposed against the administration’s public charge immigration regulation is a major step forward

for the rule of law,” the White House said. “It is our hope that the 2nd Circuit will, like the 9th and 4th Circuits have already done, lift the meritless nationwide injunction a New York district court has imposed against the rule so that it can be enforced, consistent with the plain letter of the law, for the benefit of all citizens and lawful residents of this country.”

But the “public charge” rule is not a benefit to all. It makes life tougher for people who have already immigrated and who are hoping to be joined by their families — allowed under decades of U.S. policy — and it counters our national economic interest.

As The Times editorial board wrote in September when the proposed rule surfaced: “The government estimates that the new regulations would negatively affect 382,000 people, but advocates say that is likely an undercount. And the rules would keep people from coming to the country who economists say are vital for the nation’s future economic growth. President Trump’s xenophobic view of the world stands in sharp contradiction not only to American values, but to the nation’s history. We are a country of immigrants or descendants of immigrants, and as a maturing society we will rely more and more on immigration for economic growth. Research shows that even those who start out in low-wage jobs, and thus are likely to get some financial help from the government, often, over time, learn or improve skills that move them into higher income brackets and help the overall economy.”

So in the administration’s efforts to reduce immigration of all stripes, it continues to push policies that appease Trump’s narrowing base while working against our collective national interest.

Scott Martelle is a member of the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board.

Martelle