Friends, there's a new sheriff in town, and his name is Trump. The President has decided to shut down the government to force the Democrats' hand -- and hopefully secure funding for a border wall. Hallelujah! It's about time. I wish President Trump well. In my latest article, I outline some of his bold moves at the border, and I suggest some additional measures that would help to defeat the scourge of illegal immigration. Enjoy! (P.S. Special thanks to Jack, whose fondness for Hispanic lingo helped to inspire the title.)
Trump is Proving to be One Tough
Hombre at the Border
After some
indecision, President Trump has decided to roll the dice and embrace
a government shutdown in order to put pressure on Congressional
Democrats to fund a “Great Wall” on the border with Mexico.
Bravo, President Trump!
Conservatives and
patriots have watched with consternation over the past two years, as
Trump has repeatedly given way on the issue of wall funding. The time
has now come for Republicans to put up or shut up. As Trump observed
himself, upholding the sovereignty of our nation, and protecting the
safety of the American people, is the first responsibility of any
elected official. Thus, adequately fortifying our porous border with
Mexico ought to be a no-brainer for any Congressman. Since,
unfortunately, quite a few Congressmen lack the necessary brains to
realize this, their hands must be forced. So be it. It is high time
that an American President showed the mettle to take this battle on.
The
media's reaction to a shutdown is predictable: they will spin it as a
calamity caused, as per Chuck Schumer's latest trademark sound bite,
by a Trumpian “temper tantrum”. Walls are dumb, the press will
say, and Trump is wasting everyone's time, since the Democrats will
never
vote for a wall. The obvious rejoinder is...Trump clearly believes in
the necessity of a wall, as do many of his core supporters. We shall
see whether a day, or a week, or a month, or a year, of partially
disabled government is enough to bring Democrats to the negotiating
table, but they will
crack, sooner or later. If in the end that means meeting President
Trump halfway and voting for slightly less than $5 billion for the
wall, that would be vastly better than nothing.
Those
who believe in border security should be thrilled that President
Trump is finally going to the mat for a wall. The good news doesn't
stop there, however. This week the U.S. also agreed with Mexico that,
in future, those traveling through Mexico to apply for asylum in the
U.S. will stay in
Mexico
while their claims are being processed. This is a huge win for the
Trump administration. What it means is that Mexico will bear the
burden of housing and caring for these migrants (no doubt subsidized
by the U.S.), but more importantly these opportunistic gate-crashers
will be denied, both in the short-term and in the long-term, what
they most want: entry into the United States. After all, going
forward, how many poor Central Americans will make the trek to the
U.S. border if they know that at the end of it they face a long spell
in a Mexican detention camp, followed by a likely refusal of their
asylum application by U.S. authorities? Very few indeed.
Imagine just for a second, though, that Hillary Clinton had been
elected in 2016 instead, and she had welcomed every self-described
“refugee” at the border with open arms, continuing President
Obama's policy of “catch-and-release”, which gave these mostly
phony asylum-seekers immediate gratification: the ability to work and
live in the U.S. Trump's new agreement with Mexico constitutes a
strong deterrent to illegal immigration and to fraudulent requests
for asylum. The Democratic “plan” for the border, though, would
have encouraged greater and greater flows of migrants/refugees, and
thus by now America's cities would be overflowing.
We
can't, of course, rule out the possibility that Mexico will balk, or
that some grandstanding federal judge will try to block President
Trump's brilliant new deal with Mexico with a national (or
international) injunction, but on the face of it Trump has, at a
stroke, torpedoed the raison d'être of
the “caravan” system. The end of the road for most migrants will
now be in Tijuana, instead of Los Angeles. The American people can
breathe a huge sigh of relief.
Despite all these positive signs about President Trump's seriousness
about defending our border and our sovereignty against the tide of
illegal immigration, there is still more to be done. A wall will not,
by itself, prevent all illegal crossings, nor will it stop people
from coming to the U.S. as tourists or as students and then choosing
to stay here. What will put an end to these forms of illegal
immigration is strong sanctions on U.S. employers who hire
undocumented workers. The Trump administration has so far not moved
as aggressively as it should in this regard. Millions of U.S.
businesses continue to scoff at our labor and immigration laws. There
still exists no better way to disincentivize illegal immigration than
by depriving illegal aliens of work opportunities. Despite the
carping this will engender from corporate America, it is in the long
run the only way that illegal immigration can be defeated.
Secondly, our country has, as I have noted before, strong laws
prohibiting the harboring of illegal aliens, and which make it a
felony to aid or encourage illegal immigration. Democratic
politicians and various “pro-immigrant” advocacy groups are
violating these laws with impunity and have been doing so for years.
Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice followed standard operating
procedure in such cases – that is, it assumed that Democrats and
liberals are above the law. There is no reason why the Whitaker or
Barr Justice Department should act with similar fecklessness. On the
contrary, it is high time that illegal immigration's enablers and
apologists should face the music.
With President Trump's help and guidance, the United States is about
to turn the corner on the issue of illegal immigration. We are about
to control our border with Mexico for the first time in decades.
Let's not stop there, however. Let's control the homeland as well,
by making it a place where employers, politicians, and activists
alike respect our immigration laws, and where crime does not pay.
Dr.
Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred
and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com.
He appears weekly on the Newsmaker Show on WLEA 1480.
And here's the Townhall version:
https://townhall.com/columnists/nicholaswaddy/2018/12/22/trump-is-proving-to-be-one-tough-hombre-at-the-border-n2537955
And here's the Townhall version:
https://townhall.com/columnists/nicholaswaddy/2018/12/22/trump-is-proving-to-be-one-tough-hombre-at-the-border-n2537955
Dr. Waddy: Gads, Ditto, Ditto, Ditto. Our President is courageously ( try enduring the calumny directed at him, at the age I share with him), with far more resolution than any of his predecessors. He IS an hombre, for sure.
ReplyDeleteHear hear! Talk about "withering fire". If I were him I think I might give up television altogether for the sake of my sanity...
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: He can take it; his principled and dutiful gutsiness puts MINORITY Leader Schumer in an even more disgraceful light than that he deserves for his childishly malevolent and yet again characteristic"temper tantrum" expectoration. Meanwhile, I must redirect my attention to the proper construction of complete sentences.
ReplyDeleteJack, syntax and grammar are overrated! Just ask the rising generation. They're, like, showing us the, like, way, you know?
ReplyDeleteThe "temper tantrum" line is getting old, I must say, but it's clearly the party line, and the media will happily amplify it. "Respect" has apparently gone out of style.
Dr. Waddy: I have noticed a certain relaxation of rules I was taught (eg. never start a sentence with "but" or "and" ; never put a comma before "but" or "and" and that grammatical faith is an indication of willed intellectual integrity). However, having derived whatever such writing skill as I employ from lacksadaisical imitation alone and not bitter study, I admit my lack of authority in this.
ReplyDelete"Respect" from the morally, historically, murderous and often logically detached left? Never; they are a cancer or an infestation of rats which must be dealt with in summary and objective resolution lest we allow them to overwhelm us.
But of course you are right, and wise, Jack! (There, I violated two grammatical rules in one sentence -- ha!) Writing is all about conventions, when you think about it, and conventions change, so I think it's wise not to become too attached to the "rules" of one's childhood. On the other hand, not all innovations are positive, and sometimes it's worthwhile to oppose them, e.g. if many youngsters had their way nowadays, capitalization would go the way of the dodo bird.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Well thought on and expressed with piquant wit! Surely an aversion to any evolution of the "common" usage disdained by the elect in say, 1550, would have kept the glorious English language confined in early Elizabethan conventions ( I would not entirely regret that; I love the elegance of exposition in that time). The '60's, however, witnessed a wholesale recoil from time honored standards, including those of proper composition and expression with restraint and taste. I saw it first hand when I returned to college in 1972 and saw papers written in pencil on torn out notebook paper turned in to a Professor of Oxford Doctorate and intimacy with Gandhi. That would have been unthinkable in 1965. He may well have excused it and I cannot gainsay him in any way but the undergraduate leftist inspired presumption was shocking and reprehensible.
ReplyDeleteI like Commentary very much in large part because of its consistently high standards for writing. I'm reading a history of the journal now written with skill equal to that routinely found in Commentary. That account is fascinating and is a credible account of an aspect of U.S. postwar intellectual life which had much importance (the violently impelled revulsion to Marxism experienced by those who once embraced it, but much more too). The title is Running Commentary: the contentious magazine that transformed the Jewish left into the neoconservative Right, by Benjamin Balint.
Sounds like a fascinating read, Jack! The Left's disenchantment with Marxism was indeed a very important development in late 20th century Western Civilization. Thank heavens those Russkies were so obtuse. They had the Western intelligentsia in the palm of their hand, for a while, until they blew it (special mention for Uncle Joe here)...
ReplyDeleteCertainly one can debate which rules and writing conventions ought to be followed, but it seems to me that the drift of leftist language policy is that there ought to be NO rules, except that the old ways of white males are inherently wrong. So much avant garde literature these days is unreadable, except to those steeped in left-wing drivel.
Dr. Waddy: Ditto and that inspires me to think that the present leftist infested day will prove to be a bizarre and ultimately discredited interlude in the yet continuing advance of Western Civilization. (Think, perhaps, the Puritan age in Britain?) In committing their drivel to print or electronic storage, airily presumptuous leftists provide much evidence to enable their eventual complete discreditation.
ReplyDeleteThat their screed is virtually unreadable is the predictable consequence of their summary and contemptuous dismissal of the cumulative intellectual integrity in the West they so naively and irresponsibly disdain.
Dr. Waddy: The Soviets in the 20's and 30's, humans after all, did nonetheless manage to inspire shameful support from a now completely discredited portion of protected and insulated Western intelligensia ( they were "shocked by the Hitler-Stalin pact - shocked you see). Nonetheless, heroic Russian (not Soviet) triumph over the Nazi monsters lent his sociopathic rule yet another pass from the frivolous American left and in the office of Professors to the Baby Boomers they infected the largest generation in U.S. history. The onerous effect of that is manifest to this day.
ReplyDeleteTrue, Jack -- being wrong is no great barrier to being widely believed to be right, unfortunately. I'm reading a fascinating book about life in the Soviet Union in the 70s and 80s, and the contradiction between Soviet idealism and Soviet reality could not be more stark. That lends itself to a prediction: the surest way to get leftists to give up on their airy-fairy ideals is to give them total power. Peace, equality, and justice will be forgotten double-quick.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Subsequently and historically, I think the best way to disabuse leftists is, (if you can manage it, a good punch in the mouth.)
ReplyDeleteHa! Sounds like a good way to get hauled in front of an "Obama judge", if you ask me...
ReplyDelete