Tag Archives: Republicans

Illegal Immigration – The Crisis That Isn’t

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In their latest act of silliness, the angry, white mob posing as congressional Republicans are attempting to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Republicans claim Mayorkas is not enforcing US laws and therefore failed to fulfill his oath of office. Typically, when there are record numbers of arrests, one would assume laws are being enforced. But, today’s Republicans won’t let facts spoil a good conspiracy.

According to US Customs and Border Protection data, total enforcement actions by fiscal year are listed below. Fiscal years run from October 1 to September 30 of the next calendar year. Note: Donald Trump was inaugurated in January 2017 and Joe Biden was inaugurated in January 2021. Mayorkas has been Biden’s Homeland Security secretary since his inauguration.

Fiscal Year                               Total Enforcement Actions

2016                                                    690,637

2017                                                    526,901

2018                                                    683,178

2019                                                    1,148,024

2020*                                                  646,822

2021                                                    1,956,519

2022                                                    2,766,582

2023                                                    3,201,144

*Covid impacted the number of people attempting to cross the border.

Source: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics

Clearly, anyone suggesting that Secretary Mayorkas and his Homeland Security employees aren’t enforcing the law is living in Republican Fantasyland. So, what is the real problem?

Rio Grande River at Del Rio, Texas. Mexico on far side, Mexican kids swimming. River is ineffective at preventing migration.
The law

Republicans claim the Biden administration is doing “catch and release” with illegal immigrants by letting them apply for asylum. In reality, Democrats are obeying the law.

Anyone that is physically present in the US and is not a US citizen can apply for asylum. Migrants can cut a hole through Trump’s wall or swim across the Rio Grande River. Once they set foot in the US, they find a Border Patrol agent, turn themselves in and apply for asylum. Border Patrol agents photograph and fingerprint the migrants. They also run criminal background checks on them. After that, the law says asylum seekers can remain in the US and they are released. They are given a court date when they can make their case for permanent asylum.  If granted, they can eventually apply for US citizenship.

There is currently a 3-million-person (800 days) backlog for asylum hearings. While waiting for an asylum hearing, a person must wait at least 180 days before getting a legal work permit. Typically, illegal immigrants, whether applying for asylum or not, get a fake Social Security card so they can start working immediately.

Most asylum seekers lose their cases, but they are rarely deported because of staffing shortages and policies that discourage the deportation of migrants with deep roots in the United States. The “deep roots” mean that during the two plus years they waited for their asylum hearing, they got steady employment, become part of their community, married, have kids in school and so on. They may already have family in the US when they arrived.

U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar struck down rules both the Trump and Biden administrations imposed to reduce the number of people applying for asylum. Presumably, he, or another federal judge, will strike down any other attempts to circumvent the law and restrict migrants’ access to asylum.

Many migrants coming illegally into the US ignore applying for asylum. They will get their fake Social Security card and blend into the US population. Republicans claim Border Patrol agents are so overwhelmed by people seeking asylum that they haven’t the resources to pursue people just entering the US illegally and staying.

Whose fault?

Clearly, Mayorkas and Department of Homeland Security employees are enforcing the law by arresting record numbers of migrants. They are also obeying the law by releasing them into the US after they apply for asylum. Federal judges are doing their jobs when ruling that federal laws must be followed.

Bush II era border fence at Del Rio, Texas. The fence is ineffective at preventing iilegal immigration.

The big picture, for Republicans, keeping America white is a sacred quest. For them, having a large influx of non-white people coming into the US is a tragedy beyond comprehension.

Mayorkas is an easy target for congressional Republicans covering up their own failings. The real problem is the US has a broken immigration system.

Republicans had a perfect opportunity to fix this and pass new immigration laws in the first two years of the Trump administration when Republicans controlled the presidency, the House and the Senate. Unfortunately for Republicans, Trump was a weak president, and they missed their chance. Right or wrong, Democrats prioritized fixing the broken economy Trump left them and restoring the health of the nation over immigration laws in the first two years of the Biden administration.

When Republicans took over the House majority in 2023, they pledged to pass a comprehensive package of new immigration laws that year. They failed.

Senate Republicans went to work to build a bipartisan consensus to pass a badly needed, improved, comprehensive set of new immigration laws. Unfortunately, Trump destroyed their work. I suspect the real reason for this is that Trump’s puppet master, Vladimir Putin, demanded Trump jettison the border deal since it included funding for Ukraine. Obviously, to Republicans, stopping the waves of new immigrants is much less important than placating their leader.

What doesn’t work. Ugly and ineffective. Migrants can use cutting torch or reciprocating saw to cut through. This is Trump era wall at DelRio, Texas.
Wire border fence, Del Rio, Texas. Road in front is for Border Patrol vehicles.
The big picture

Every time you take a bite of food, thank an illegal immigrant. If you eat away from home, thank an illegal immigrant twice. Illegal immigrants were essential in producing and processing the food. When eating out, they most likely prepared it; regardless of if you are eating at a haute taut restaurant or McDonald’s.

Likewise, when you see a completed house, apartment building or other construction project, thank illegal immigrants. The project probably wouldn’t have gotten done without them. If you check into a clean hotel room, thank an illegal immigrant. If you are Catholic and you notice extra donations helping people in need at your church, thank illegal immigrants that gave whatever they could.

People like Frugal Ron drawing Social Security payments need to thank illegal immigrants for helping keep the system solvent. Undocumented immigrants with fake Social Security cards pay into Social Security and Medicare, but are never able to get benefits. They also pay federal, state, local and sales taxes. The reality is, illegal immigrants are essential to our economy.

Illegal immigrants don’t take jobs away from white people. They take the worst jobs in the US that native born people won’t do. They may send some money home, but the majority is spent here. They buy groceries, clothes and whatever else they need. In each case they are creating jobs for the goods and services they buy.

The pie

Republican economics revolves around the fantasy that there is a finite amount of wealth in a country. This wealth is like a pie. When more people come to the table to eat the pie, that means there is less pie for everyone else.

In 1950, the US population was 148 million. In 2024, it is 348 million. If the people who espouse the fixed pie theory were right, we would have all starved to death decades ago. When the population grows, what I’ve described above happens. More workers generate more jobs as the new workers spend their money and it multiplies as it moves through the economy over and over.

Perhaps even more important, the US birthrate is declining. What this means is we have more and more people in the Boomer generation retiring and drawing Social Security and other benefits. Because of the declining birth rate (that has been going on for years), we have less working age people contributing to Social Security and Medicare. We also have a declining work force to do everything from growing food to high tech jobs. There is no better way to stagnate an economy than having a declining population. Having working age (and reproductive age) people immigrating here is like dropping manna from heaven.

The exodus

Facts are to Republicans  what wooden stakes are to vampires. The reality is “There’s a lot of people (illegal immigrants) leaving the country, and they’re leaving voluntarily,” said Mr. Robert Warren, a senior fellow at the Center for Migration Studies.

The current undocumented population has stayed relatively constant at about 10.2 million over the past several years, after peaking at nearly 12 million in 2008. This is even with the large number of new arrivals at the border.

The primary reason people are returning home is to reunite with their families. Also, the Mexican economy is improving.

Migrants used to come to the US , work for a period, return home and maybe return again. This circular migration was upended in the early 1990s as the United States introduced a spate of policies to fortify the border, erecting barriers and deploying more agents.

But the border restrictions backfired. After facing risks and paying smugglers to cross the border, undocumented workers stayed in the United States, rather than coming and going.

“Most of them never wanted to stay. We gummed up the works when we militarized the border,” said Douglas S. Massey, an immigration scholar at Princeton. “They spent longer and longer time (in the US) and had families.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/undocumented-immigrants-exodus-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.RU0.QPSD.LqXkFTDY4TqV&smid=url-share

The problem

Republicans perpetuate the myth that immigrants are taking jobs away from white people. They also perpetuate the lie that illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native born people. And, there is always the claim that these brown and Black skinned immigrants are “illegal”. We should invite some Native Americans into this conversation and get their views on what an “illegal immigrant” is.

Republican policies are driven by their racism. If the illegal immigrants were blonde haired, blue eyed white people, this article wouldn’t be necessary.

Morality and immigration

“Do onto others as you would have them do onto you”, is the motto moral people live by. Separating children from their legally asylum-seeking parents, warehousing the children hundreds of miles away from their parents and deporting parents without making any effort to reunite families is something none of us would wish on ourselves. Yet, this was a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Note: The Trump appointed Department of Homeland Security Inspector General found at least 348 cases where the Trump administration forced migrant parents to leave the US without their children. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/watchdog-says-u-s-forced-deported-parents-to-leave-kids-behind

Likewise, forcing people legally seeking asylum in the US to stay for months in squalid, overcrowded camps in Mexico where rapes, murders, assaults and robbery were commonplace is also immoral. Both the Trump and Biden administrations used these camps, until Judge Tigar ruled they were illegal.

From a lifetime of being raised with and living and working around Republicans, I’ve learned the great majority believe non-white people are inferior. In many cases, aren’t fully valued as human. This is the definition of racism.

It explains how people that consider themselves moral can justify treating people of color like livestock by putting them in inhumane tent camps and separating families.

It is strange that a party that espouses their devotion to Jesus Christ would ignore His frequent admonition to “be kind to strangers”. (“Strangers” in the Bible are people from other countries.) When Republicans must choose between Christianity and their racism, Jesus always loses.

Summary

Donald Trump claims, “Immigrants are destroying the blood of our country!” Personally, I think a perpetual liar with a record of whoring, payoffs to his sex partners, two divorces (so far), an illegitimate kid, a rape conviction, a fraud conviction and facing 91 felony charges is more of a threat to “destroying the blood of our country” than 10.2 million illegal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants are one of the US’s greatest strengths. They take jobs nobody else wants. They spend their pay in the US and create  jobs. They send their kids to school so they can add even more value to our future economy; just like other immigrants have done for generations. All along, they are paying federal, state, local and sales taxes, Social Security and Medicare taxes. Republicans try to take this strength, using fear and propaganda, and rebrand it as a crisis. Don’t let them get away with it.


The Problem With Science

Science is non-partisan. This make it problematic for many people. Unfortunately, folks of all political stripes take published research that agrees with their worldview and hold it up as justification for their long-held beliefs. Published research that doesn’t fit, well that is just bad science.

This attitude makes it impossible for the aforementioned people to learn and change. In a world where knowledge is power, this is bad for them and for the rest of us.

Before going further, it is important to acknowledge that there is dishonesty in research and publication. It is also true that if you look hard enough, you can find some research to prove almost any viewpoint.  Rather than throw our hands in the air and proclaim that all is hopeless, we can eliminate most problems by only relying on peer-reviewed published research in journals that have been around a long time. You can google a journal to find out if it has been around awhile or is simply a newer publication that will publish anything for money.

University, wisconsin, science, bascom hall, research
The University of Wisconsin, one of the world’s leading research and science institutions.

It is important to focus on the forest, not the trees. For example, I can reliably state that the vast majority of climate based research tells us that our global climate is getting warmer, that polar ice caps are melting, ocean levels are rising, these changes are caused by people and the continued consequences are life altering. Are there outlier researchers disputing these findings? Absolutely.

I can also reliably state the vast majority of research tells us  conventionally produced food in the United States is safer now than it ever has been and is the world’s safest. Is there outlier research disputing this? Absolutely.

What seems to exasperate all this is that some people want to believe the outlier research so badly they pay exorbitant fees to get one of these researchers to tell their group of like-minded people what they want to hear. In other cases, authors go after the mass market with books proclaiming alarmist bad science and rake in millions. The problem with all this is that the din of outlier science drowns out the overwhelming amount of peer-reviewed, published research.

The hypocrisy of misusing science

This gets ridiculous when people wave the banner of climate based science yet decry the safety of conventionally produced food (including GMOs). Published research for climate science and food safety each had to pass the same rigorous review processes in prestigious science journals. The hypocrisy is rampant in promoting the validity of one type of research while decrying the other. Either you believe in science or you don’t. You can’t pick the one you want to believe in and discard the other if equal rigour went into both fields of research. And yes, the opposite holds true for those who passionately defend the research on food safety and condemn the vast majority of climate research.

Science destroys the racist myths that defines today’s Republican Party. Most studies find white children’s IQ’s roughly one standard deviation higher than black children. However, when white and black children with the same family income levels and home environments are compared, the IQ differences disappear.

Likewise, published research in criminology journals document significantly longer prison sentences for black men than white men in the same court rooms for similar crimes and similar criminal backgrounds. Athletes that knelt during the national anthem used their platform to highlight these studies and other abuses in the criminal justice system. Republicans did everything possible to change the debate from unequal criminal justice (where they couldn’t win) to patriotism.

The point of all this is that if we spent as much time learning from well done published research as we do fighting it, we would all be better off. Having a certain level of skepticism is a healthy thing. Letting one’s emotions, prejudices and long-held paradigms over-ride good science is not a healthy outcome.

Not all unpublished research is bad. This website in particular uses a great deal of research that only appears here. Frugal Ron cites data sources and often provides formulas so readers can access the data, do the math themselves and reach their own conclusions. Transparency is the key in cases like this.

Epilogue

On a personal note, to head off accusations of Frugal Ron’s own hypocrisy, this author acknowledges he has read the research detailing the very negative consequences of sugar consumption and acknowledges the research’s accuracy. Frugal Ron, knowing it is impossible for him to die young, will continue pouring maple syrup on his pancakes, drinking orange juice and occasionally eating ice cream. Frugal Ron respects the research on sugar, accepts the ramifications and chooses to ignore it.


Abortion Industry and Republicans

The abortion “industry” and Planned Parenthood have to rank near the top of nonsensical issues today’s Republicans rail on. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines industry “as a distinct group of productive or profit-making enterprises”. This is the antonym of anyone offering abortion services.

Following the Donald Trump fiasco about punishing women that get abortions, we are told that the real murderers are the abortion industry doctors that entice young women to kill their unborn babies for their doctor’s profit. While the reality is, abortion doctors are providing a low-cost service for women with few alternatives.

Yet, Republicans have to invent an “industry” to personify greed rather than admit that the real driving force for women getting abortions is that it is a last resort to end a pregnancy they don’t want. We might also add these women are in a better place to make their decisions than a large, intrusive liberal government is to make it for them.

And, about the doctors enticing women to kill their unborn babies for their own profit, according to salarygenius.com, the average yearly salary for an “Abortion Doctor” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is $86,433. The average yearly salary for an “Ob Doctor” in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is $108,942.  An abortion doctor has the same degree and qualifications as an obstetrician, yet makes $22,500 less per year. These are the most poorly paid money grubbers in existence.

Aborted plans

The infamous Planned Parenthood videos Republicans love to hate capture Dr. Amna Dermish  affirming a $50-60 fetal specimen reimbursement charge to research laboratories.  Yet, Nasco, a highly respected Wisconsin company that has sold laboratory specimens to schools for decades, charges $89 for a (euthanized) 16-23 inch long skinned cat.

Why is this important?  Because David Daleiden, the organizer of the videotaping effort to prove Planned Parenthood broke the law, needed to prove the organization sold fetal tissue for a profit. A Texas grand jury disagreed and refused to charge Planned Parenthood.

Daleiden and an associate, posing as representatives of a fake tissue procurement company, made a big mistake using a fake ID to gain access to Planned Parenthood in Houston, Texas. In Texas, knowingly using a fake government document if  the intent is to defraud or harm another is a second degree felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Instead of charging Planned Parenthood, the grand jury charged Daleiden and his associate.

The point of all this is simply that here is another example of the fantasy world Republicans need to belong to if they are going to justify their agenda. Who cares if the facts show there is no such thing as an abortion industry? Even though Planned Parenthood was cleared of all charges and three Congressional investigations costing $hundreds of thousands found no evidence of the sale of fetal tissue for a profit, Congress and a number of Republican controlled states voted to cut off their funding.

Planned Parenthood's fancy digs.
Planned Parenthood’s fancy digs.
The real anti-abortion agenda

Republicans who say they want to end abortions and at the same time slash Planned Parenthood funding are illogical or have a hidden agenda. The non-profit Planned Parenthood provides low or no cost contraceptives for the women at highest risk of unwanted pregnancies. Published research over and over reaffirms that making contraceptives more available is the most effective way of reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

If lowering abortion numbers is not the real driver of the anti-abortion Republicans, then what is?  Maybe their real goal is punishing women having sex for reasons other than procreation? Deprive them of legal and safe abortions and force them to have the child as a punishment?

Cutting off Planned Parenthood’s distribution of contraceptives fits in this pattern. The only people needing contraceptives are those not intending to produce children. In a misguided way, depriving them of contraceptives might stop them from having sex. Perhaps, there is more to the Republican abortion industry  than meets the eye.