“we have to create borders, otherwise we don’t have a country”
Trump’s 2015 campaign statement remains true after a decade and (tens of) millions more illegal immigrants. It is the single most important issue.
Watching the mayhem in Los Angeles, likely spreading to other blue cities, in opposition to ICE enforcing the immigration laws, it reminds me of an article I wrote at National Review almost a decade ago, July 13, 2015.
The topic was the (then) surprising rise of Donald Trump in primary polling. I’ve been more wrong about Trump than I’ve been right, but I was right in July 2015, when I pegged his surge to fury over illegal immigrant crime.
Here’s the opening to Trump’s Lesson: Voters Are Furious about Illegal Immigration:
Donald Trump has rocketed to the top, or near the top, of the Republican-primary field by focusing on illegal immigration and border security.
Depending on the poll, Trump is garnering in the high teens of Republican voters. It might be that the high teens is the ceiling for Trump, but in a field with more than one dozen candidates dividing the voting pie, that’s enormous.
As the field narrows, Trump will have to expand those numbers if he is to win a primary, much less the nomination. But for now, Trump is in the driver’s seat, and his vehicle is the lawlessness reflected in our failure to control illegal immigration in general, and violent illegal-immigrant criminals and gangs in particular….
I then quoted what to this day may be Trump’s most famous speech lines given during his campaign announcement:
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
I went over the hyper-reaction to that speech, but pointed out how the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco was a turning point in the public mind about illegal immigration:
The murder of Steinle struck a chord like nothing else, because it came to symbolize the vulnerability Americans feel about the failure of government to protect us from people who shouldn’t be here in the first place.
Statistics about “immigrants” having lower crime rates are irrelevant, because they mix legal and illegal immigrants. One would expect legal immigrants to have low crime rates, since they are, by definition, the type of people who follow the law.
Trump clearly was not talking about legal immigrants, but about the kind of foreign “gang bangers” (a term Obama used) who terrorize everyone with impunity. The statistics on illegal-immigrant crime are staggering. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, over 36,000 illegal-alien criminals were released from custody in 2013 while awaiting deportation. Eighty-two percent of the 133,551 removals from the interior of the United States involved illegal immigrants with criminal records.
Some claim that the rate of murder and crime by illegal immigrants is no higher than for those here legally, but that’s an obfuscation. Any murder or crime by an illegal immigrant is one too many, because that person should not be in our country in the first place. [emphasis added]
That last line, by the way, was used against me when there were attempts to get me fired post-George Floyd.
And then a key portion of a later campaign speech by Trump in Phoenix:
“When I started . . . I didn’t think the immigration thing would take on a life like it has. I made some very tough statements about people flowing through, because that’s one of the things, to make our country great again, we have to create borders, otherwise we don’t have a country [italics added].”
And then the punch line of my column:
Illegal immigration and open borders have made voters increasingly angry because they reflect the growing lawlessness of society and the willingness of Republicans to capitulate to leftist identity politics. The sense that we are losing control of our own country, by the design of politicians, is creating a fury — and an opening for a politician willing to recognize that the problem poses an existential threat to our own freedoms.
If Republicans consider Trump a danger to the Republican party in the 2016 general election, then they should start by feeling the people’s pain over illegal immigration, standing with the victims, and looking in the mirror — not at Donald Trump.
The reaction from the NR readership was overwhelmingly positive. Unfortunately the comments have not carried over to its new website and are not on the Wayback Machine archive.
I remember the theme of the reader comments was to express shock that NR would run such a column since it was Never Trump, and even greater shock that I was still employed.
We are in the process after a decade and (tens of) millions more illegal immigrants of trying to ensure we have a country. It remains the single most important issue.
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There’s a long overdue reckoning since at least back to Reagan allowing himself to be conned into agreeing to sign off on the Amnesty in ’86 in return for ‘future interior enforcement and more border security’. Unfortunately just like ‘future spending cuts’ the ‘future immigration enforcement’ never arrived as promised.
The wokiesta leftists want another version of the ’86 amnesty and got a bit of it via DACA and are now using intransigent refusal of Blue State/City to cooperate with Federal law, systemic law fare/judge shopping and now riots to prevent the enforcement of Federal immigration law.
Their goal is a defacto amnesty in which they clog the deportation adjudication system. The Biden Admin allowed in roughly 10 million aliens via the border and catxh/release and bogus amnesty claims plus 2 million known got aways. Add the Visa over stays and the unknown # who weren’t detected while CBP was ‘babysitting’ temporary detained aliens before their release to the interior and were looking at 15 million as very reasonable estimate. That’s in addition to preexisting 12-15 million already present.
So we either throw up our hands and say ‘it is too big a task, we just can’t do it’ (which is the d/prog goal) OR we say NOPE and round up every last Alien and very importantly arrest and prosecute every person who obstructs or impedes the lawful efforts to do enforce Federal immigration law. Sucks that it has come to the choice of surrender or go nuclear but the d/prog wokiestas brought us to this decision point. No whining when/if we choose vigorously and ruthlessly enforce immigration law nor when zero mercy or discretion is used in arresting local officials/employees, media members or plain old Citizens who choose to impede it.
No mercy
Arrest and fine the employers, the enablers, and the obstructors. Jail time if possible.
I don’t know who has done the math for the nation as a whole, but the amount of public benefits these illegal aliens are receiving is staggering.
Add to that the amount of tax money pissed away in supporting the hospitals and schools who are forced to provide for illegals who walk through the door, and we are talking mind-blowing amounts of money being diverted from our grandchildren’s prosperity to non-citizens.
Crowder on YouTube with real stats. 810,000 illegal in LA. $32 billion cost of illegals in Ca alone.
Enforcing the ‘public charge’ provisions of existing law more broadly to prohibit ANY federal funds being given to or consumed by a non US Citizen would go very long way to getting these folks out. If a State wants to spend their own taxes to fund an alien’s costs for housing, food assistance, medical.care. education? Sure go for it…BUT …gotta set up a completely separate parallel system to fund it, administer it to ensure no co-mingling of Federal program $. So they gotta go to a different set of buildings if any Federal funds directly or indirectly went into construction, operation or maintenance. Same for State Govt personnel, can’t use the same employees that are funded in part with Federal funds. Only exceptions should be LEO, Fire, Judicial, Jails and Prisons, everything else gotta have a different facility and different employees.
It’s about Amnesty and the House. Keep in mind we’ll have another census in 2030. I suspect your estimate is probably too conservative. IMO, the Democrats have likely imported something close to 15M (or more) illegals in the last 4-years…all of whom will be included in that census if they haven’t been deported. The average House District has roughly 750K-‘people,’ which is going to climb to just over 800K in 2030. This should have spelled doom for NY & California, two states that continue to lose population relative to traditionally red states. These new ‘immigrants’ will hugely impact the census which will in turn hugely impact how the next round of redistricting goes. Considering how many illegals poured into California and New York and other blue states, they’re probably going to save several seats, at least, from the redistricting axe. None of this is a happy coincidence for them.
FWIW my estimate for Illegal Alien arrivals during Biden is 15 million (10 M via catch/release + 2M known got aways + 3 M via Visa overstays and unknown # crossing undetected while CBP was babysitting the 10 M before release into interior).
Agreed on the Census and redistricting. That is part of.the d/prog wokiesta strategy. However, even with this it is still gonna be a net loss of seats CD from Blue to Red States. CA net population is going down even with illegals. In 2020 CA population was 39,521,958. In ’21 they had a net loss, in ’22 was flat and gained in ’23 and ’24. Year end ’24 CA pop was
39,461,263.
Even with Biden era open borders agenda CA today has a lower population than in 2020. Same basic trends hold for other big Blue States like NY, IL. IOW the Blue States will still see a projected loss of 6 +/- CD to Red States. The illegal alien pop growth in these Blue States is what keeps the shift from becoming more like 12-15.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t max deportations. Nor does it mean we sit back and don’t work to keep Congressional Majorities and very importantly the WH. Really need to keep control of the Executive Branch in order to control personnel and policy at the Census. As wokiesta leftist ideologues are pushed out they can be replaced by modest civil servants in the true sense who will follow the law and clarifying WH policy on conducting an accurate Census.
The missing piece of the redistricting element is for Congress to act to modify the Voting Rights Act and put into Federal Statute that each CD within a particular State must be drawn to include an equal # of US Citizens +/- 10%. This doesn’t impact apportionment among the States. What it does is upend the practice common in Blue States of having some CD with 60% US Citizens and a neighboring CD with less than 30% US Citizens. The knock on impact makes it harder to sustain the ‘majority minority’ CD when coupled with the other requirements like compactness, avoiding crossing natural terrain features like a river or a political boundaries like County/Municipal lines.
Finally there’s gonna be a ‘push’ factor in dealing with illegal aliens. Not just potential deportation but removing eligibility for Federal programs. Cut off the welfare gravy from Uncle Sugar while simultaneously hitting workplace enforcement and staying here becomes tough without any income or income support programs. Then there’s the fun part of Federal prosecution for State/Local officials who violate Federal law by allowing ineligible illegal aliens to be included in some of these programs today, some programs are already ‘off limits’ to illegal aliens by existing statute but the Feds haven’t made a huge issue of it yet but they could and based on this past week probably will.
My rule of thumb in reference to government numbers, is to double any published number and add 3 (hundred, million, billion, whatever), to come to anything close to accurate.
We need an amendment to the Constitution that says only citizens are counted towards redistricting and the assignment of Representatives, that only citizens can vote in federal elections, and that only citizens can vote in their respective States’ elections.
As a drill sergeant of mine might have said, this nonsense must be ceasted.
End asylum and the entire thing collapses.
Their entire justification for keeping them here is their fraudulent asylum claims and DEMAND that they all be given a ‘hearing’ in a system that wasn’t designed for even a fraction of the tens of millions clogging it.
No more asylum, period, for any reason, is the only solution.
At minimum make asylum claims required to be filed in a US Embassy/Consulate before arrival in the USA with very narrow exceptions for a set of very specific circumstances that must all be fulfilled and requiring the Sec State to personally review and approve each individual case and report on this transparently to Congress. No delegation by Sec State and if he doesn’t do it within 30 days of application the application is automatically rejected and the applicant deported….which will be easy b/c the applicant is required to be in detention pending a determination. Make it a completely plenary power and non justiciable. Either this or as you state eliminate the claim entirely.
True words then
True words now
when the elites get “bothered”
thats when change occurred
normally they need not care b/c they can fly to different parts of the world and have their street armies keep the rest of us in check
BUT RICH ORANGEMAN WAS THE OUTCAST OF THAT CLIQUE
he mingled and was sincere about it
not just smiling face
and that sincerity paid off in 2016 2020 and then 2024 with a group of people who for different reasons
had no choice but to embrace him
black males with money..tired of the dems tax the wealthy to death
and some blcks who saw “their” money turned over to gangs that didnt rep them
hispanics who despised what those who shared their culture but not the values
and last but not least
WEALTHY DEMS who couldnt just fly off to europe who also had turned their continent into no go zones
but none worse than what these CA /nyc leftists actually had to see and worse
step through on their own doorsteps
viva la trump
I think we should stop ALL immigration for a period of 10 years.
Anyone here illegally after a date certain will receive a mandatory 10 year prison sentence without parole.
Employers that hire illegal aliens will forfeit their businesses entirely, pay a one million dollar fine per illegal plus a ten year sentence.
And the next time we have an outbreak like we had in LA it’s live ammo right from the start.
Sheriff Pete is in town.
Add anyone found here illegally will never ever be allowed in legally.
Nor will any of their family – use that chain immigration tactic in reverse. If you’re breaking the rules you doom your entire immediate family to never coming here.
Oh, also, any children born here and claiming citizenship, ALSO lose their ability to do chain immigration.
No to prison. Deport them. Prison is three hits and a cot at our expense.
Meh, put them into makeshift detention facilities in the Mojave desert or better yet in Alaska near the Arctic. Let them chop wood for heat and if they refuse or fall short of sufficient firewood to last the winter….sucks to be them.
if they commit a violent crime put them in jail here then deport them
otherwise they go to their home country and get sent right back here
You get my vote.
Protection is the fundamental driving force behind the establishment of government and the ceding of personal liberty to it .If government is not going to protect its citizens, then there is absolutely no reason for government.
We must create real men.
the black matriarchy wont allow it
The professor’s mention of Kate Steinle reminded me of something I wrote in 2015:
The Left thinks draconian gun laws would be justified if they “saved only one life.” But when their policies cost lives it’s no big thing – it doesn’t deflect them from their policy trajectories a single arc minute.
As we can see today, this remains true. The deaths of innocents does nothing to deflect them from their “open borders” policy. They really don’t care about deaths, or at least they don’t care about those that they can’t use to promote their agenda.
Because they have something much greater in mind, and you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. In the view of true believer Progs, those deaths are martyrs to the cause of utopia.
Claiming Jan 6th was an insurrection…..
By those standards are we in the second American Civil War?
These riots will end voluntarily or not, if the California governor withholds taxes from the U.S. Federal Government he will be arrested immediately, but the American people have just witnessed something that can’t be unseen and it reflects horribly on the Democratic Party.
The only taxes he can withhold are those withheld from the pay of state employees, and even in that case I doubt the state payroll department would obey such an order from him.
He could, conceivably, also write some executive order that says “CA businesses no longer have to withhold federal taxes from paychecks.” He might even get the CA legislature to try and pass a law. But, yeah, it would probably go nowhere in a hurry.
And, if he got even a single federal judge to back it up in anyway, he would be shooting himself right in the ho-hos, and all the Dems when they regain power.
Employees sign a W-4 form, authorizing the employer to withhold federal taxes from the employee’s pay. If the employer withholds those funds from the federal government, the employee is still on the hook for the taxes. I imagine that if Newsom decided to follow through on this threat, the State would have to stop withholding from its workers in order to avoid putting them in the bind of having to pay income taxes and already having had those monies withheld from them. If they then have to pay out of pocket, the State will then have to refund all the monies withheld and not forwarded to the US government.
It would be a shit show to no effect.
I should add that the employer is under no obligation to withhold taxes, even when the employee has authorized them to do so. The W-4 gives the employer permission to withhold taxes, it does not require them to do so. Payroll could definitely stop withholding. What may be problematic is withholding taxes from employee’s pay and then not forwarding the monies to the feds, because the withholding is authorized by the employee with the understanding (an implied agreement, if not required by law) that the monies will be forwarded to the feds for the employee.
Messing with payroll like that could get you in a lot of trouble as a business.
Dems can try anything they want leading up to 2026 and 2028 but Newsome, Bass and the other Dems reactions siding with illegals over Americans, traveling to a foreign country to demand the return of their criminal and attacking Trump for protecting people with the NG and Marines is nothing they can memory hole. That picture in the lead to the this story will not go away.
Newsome suing the Administration over the NG deployment arguing in essence for the people of LA to be left at the mercy of illegal criminals when they refuse to protect them was icing on the cake.
Yep. This looks an awful lot like an attempt to create a ‘Ferguson Effect’ re interior immigration enforcement in CA and other big Blue States. In essence to create the impression that riots and disorder will arise from those efforts to enforce Federal immigration laws to deter the WH from enforcement. We see direct statements from several d/prog on this and many other d/prog and legacy media insinuate the same.
IMO there’s too much imagery of violence, abuse and attacks on LEO, arson, looting for this to work. We see the d/prog wokiestas handing out US Flags to try and reverse the damage done PR wise in the first few days with what appears to be illegal aliens waving foreign flags as they march in an coordinated way to create violence and havoc on US Streets. It has the trappings of an invading army or at least an invading foreign group(s) hell bent on using illegal and violent means to overthrow existing US law….some less charitable folks might describe that as an insurrection or invasion and if those same folks happen to hold the lawful power to use military force to quell the insurrection or repel the invasion to protect US Sovereignty and uphold our Constitutional Republic so much the better.
Remember, though, the NG and Marines are not there to protect the people of LA. They are not putting down the riots. They are merely protecting federal buildings and personnel, and enabling their enforcement of federal law.
Trump was very smart, IMO, to limit them to that. It allows Angelenos to continue to suffer at the hands of the very people Trump is trying to remove, while demonstrating how he is trying to protect them while not treading on state’s rights.
When the people of CA start demanding Newsome do something to protect them, he will fold like a cheap suit rather than face recall.
as true as that might be
as soon as some pos launches a projectile at them
we are either a bill clinton led somalian team
or
a maga
True but they are protecting ICE agents and the mob is attacking ICE agents and buildings. They won’t be able to help themselves
BTW, they have caught the guy who was hurling Molotov cocktails at police. Surprise! He is an illegal alien
Trump’s statement is always transcribed as “they’re rapists.” I believe it should be “their rapists.” That’s an entirely different interpretation.
Oh, you mean “Democrat rapists”?
BTW, while I do think there’s an attempt to influence the census, and some drive to add these folks to Dem voter rolls, most of the illegal alien influx has been in order to make the above statement untrue. Most of the effort is intended to create a cultural cascade that will overwhelm Americanism in two ways: resistance to government and resistance to globalism.
Americans are naturally anti-globalist. “America is the greatest!” “No Frog/Chinaman/Russkie is gonna tell ME what to do!”* “US out of the UN; UN out of the US!” Those sentiments are huge, across both parties. To break that (and, thereby, allow the globalists to take control) they import people who do not believe in American Exceptionalism and have no allegiance to America, anyway. (If you can just go back and forth across borders when the mood suits you, you have no allegiance to either country, really.)
Progressives started breaking the American resistance to Big Gov’t 100 years ago, and have had a great deal of success. But they can’t seem to get over a critical mass boundary of some sort. Way too many of us still buy guns and are happy to give the finger to folks in Washington, DC. And too many voted for Orange Man Bad. (Yeah, some of their progress might have gone backwards in the last 5 years.) But if you import a bunch of third-worlders, who are inherently pro-Big Gov’t, you lower the bar for that critical mass.
(* The individualism inherent in America First is the same as in anti-Big Gov’t. It comes down to, “Who are to tell me what to do?”)
no way
Both parties are not for the getting the UN out of the Usa business
over the past decade or so UN interference in america has been quietly/and not so quietly allowed
they have dictated anywheres from utilities bill forgiveness by tax funded utility companies to
(as I think you know) THE WHOLE DEMVID19 push to shut down and keep america shut down,agenda
We already HAVE borders, we just need to ENFORCE them.
This is Trump’s Pearl Harbor! He either crushes this rebellion now or we have lost our country. If it means calling out the entire US military, so be it! As it stands at this moment we are only a united States on a map not in reality. If this is allowed to grow, cites will become foreign nations within states and states will become foreign nations within our borders. We will become Africa and have tribal conflicts with no ruling power to stop it. Do it now President Trump even if means you are vilified!
OT: can anyone tell me what that picture is from? My daughter is positive that the only people causing violence in LA are the cops/national guard/marines, and everything is peaceful roses until instigated by the vile government goons. And every picture of something negative about the goons is from a different time and/or place.
The picture at the top of this article had its meta data scrubbed. The file contains no time nor location data.
Thanks for checking for me. However with some more searching after taking a break, I tracked it, or at least other photos of the same rioter, down to indeed taken in LA on the 8th or 9th by a Getty photographer.
Anyone rioting under a foreign flag should be treated as a foreign invader.
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