Biden Apologizes for Not Using Correct Newspeak Term for Illegal Aliens

First, 'illegal alien' is the actual term. It's a legal term (or was, until leftists purged it). There's nothing insulting about it. 'Resident alien' is also a perfectly fine term. The left often deploys the following sophistry: No human is illegal! They falsely assert that the term means that illegal aliens are somehow inherently illegal qua persons. Which makes no sense whatsoever. 'Illegal alien' is like 'illegal contractor' or 'illegal truckdriver.' Illegal aliens are foreigners in the country illegally. Illegal contractors are people contracting illegally. Etc. This is not complicated. There is, indeed, no such thing as a person being illegal qua person. Which, if nothing else were, should be your clue that that's not what such terms mean. In each case, a person is doing something in an illegal manner.

   Such bullshit isn't innocent. The progressive left has proven to be astonishingly adept at manipulating language. Its aim in cases like this is to repeatedly replace terms with negative connotations with cushier, happier-sounding terms in order to make something actually bad seem less so. 'Illegal alien' is accurate. And being in the country illegally is bad. So 'illegal alien' takes on the appropriate negative connotation. So the left then stomps its little feet and shrieks that the term is NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT. We were then told to say 'illegal immigrants.' But that's still got 'illegal' in it. So then 'undocumented immigrants.' Still not happy/dishonest enough. Next the term became just 'migrants.' See? No even mention of illegality! And heck, you can't even tell they're coming in! They may be going out. You don't know. They may just be wandering around... Recently, of course, they floated 'newcomer'... You really almost can't make this shit up.

   Other times they just insist that we follow their whimsical linguistic preferences--e.g. "people of color." Sure, it's basically 'colored people'...which sounds archaic to just about everybody...but it's different! See...it's rearranged! One is basically a racial slur, bigot! The other is the right one! The left's impressionistic linguistic preferences are to be our commands...

   Enforcing its preferences even when they don't matter, however, also serves the purpose of conditioning people to do as their told, linguistically...

   Of course, the really important thing is that we not refer to the murderers of American girls in politically incorrect terms...:

Biden on calling Laken Riley’s murderer an illegal: “I shouldn't have used 'illegal.' It's undocumented. I’m not going to treat any of these people with disrespect. Look, they built the country. The reason our economy’s growing.” pic.twitter.com/M6RVENKVWk

— TheBlaze (@theblaze) March 10, 2024

    

   And as for "they built this country"...wut?
   The left has just lost its mind. It can never come to rest on a reasonable position--e.g. the standard American view that legal immigrants are welcome, but illegal ones are not. The internal, radicalizing logic of the left pushes it ever leftward. If not defeated politically by saner movements, this internal, radicalizing logic ultimately leads to the elimination of borders, of distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, and of nations themselves. It's not like this should come as a surprise--the vanguard of the left has made it clear for a hundred years that it wants to elminate nations. The vanguard, however, translates its destructive revolutionary ends into the ooey-gooey language of empathy and inclusion attractive to the trailing edge of the movement.
   A nation that imports millions of third-world immigrants becomes that much more like the third world. Slowing accepting reasonable numbers of legal immigrants who assimilate and move toward citizenship is one thing. What the Democrats have inflicted on us is something else entirely.

[Here's a near-future leftist cause: "Non-Citizen Suffrage"]

Biden admin PC Bullshit: Nixes 'Illegal Alien'

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I don't have any commitment to the phrase, obviously, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Well, I guess I do kinda like the term 'alien'... It's kinda cool.

   The Biden admin is obviously full of PC idiots But, hey--no more mean tweets, so...worth it!

   If 'alien' were an insulting term, then there would be a problem with 'resident alien.' But there isn't. If 'illegal x' were an insulting phrase, then we wouldn't have 'illegal contractor' and 'illegal truckdriver.' But there's nothing wrong with 'illegal' and there's nothing wrong with 'alien', so it's extremely unlikely that there's something wrong with 'illegal alien.' It's not illegal aliens complaining about 'illegal alien,' anyway. It's PC/progressive activists. And their reason for doing so is that they want a less-honest term. The point, as usual, is to get us moving on an ever-more euphemistic chain of jargon. They used to prefer 'illegal immigrant,' of course. But then they thought up "undocumented immigrant"...as if they'd lost their library cards or something. Then they tried 'unauthorized'...and I don't know what it is now. Then they realized that 'migrant' was better than 'immigrant' because, hey, then you don't even specify whether they're coming in or going out... Eventually it will be Freedom Nomad or some such thing. Our old friend TVD had the best term, though: 'undocumented Democrat.'

McCarthy: Trump's Job is to Enforce Congress's Immigration Laws, Not Make Up His Own

The great Andrew McCarthy:

Go read the whole thing.

In actuality, as the above snippets from relevant Supreme Court jurisprudence instruct, the involvement of the courts in immigration enforcement is extremely limited — confined to the narrow authority Congress has vested in them. Sure, it is also the judiciary’s 

constitutional duty to uphold due process protections; in the immigration realm, though, that is not much protection because Congress decides what process is due and aliens do not have the full array of due process rights enjoyed by citizens. 

As the Supreme Court has recognized in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), the rights of aliens become more robust as they lawfully weave into the fabric of our society. The foreigner who has never entered the United States has no constitutional rights; the illegal alien at the border has nearly none; the illegal alien who has entered has marginally more; the alien on a temporary visa has still more but less than an immigrant with a green card. 

Let’s set aside for a moment the difficult cases of legal aliens the Trump administration seeks to expel because of pro-Hamas agitation. What the president, the vice president, and their staffers are mainly squawking about are deportable aliens, near the lowest end of the sliding scale of due process rights. 

Read more »

Is Facebook "Outlawing" The Terms 'Illegal Immigrant' and 'Illegal Alien'?

Maybe.

   The left has been squawking about the legal term 'illegal alien' for years. Then they started in on 'illegal immigrant', using the following absurd argument:

'Illegal immigrant' means that the very person in question is illegal qua person;

But no person qua person is illegal.

Therefore 'illegal immigrant' is naughty. 

Of course that's about as dumb as the rest of their arguments. 'Illegal immigrant' in no way entails that the person is illegal qua person (whatever that would mean).  To call x an illegal immigrant is to say that x has immigrated illegally, on analogy to 'illegal contractor,' for example. 

Honestly, the left has become a cesspool of stupid. 

They're obsessed with words, and their goal, obviously, is to insist on ever more euphemistic euphemisms until all reference to illegality is gone and we're all referring to them as "the legalest Americans" or somesuch.

From 'Illegal Alien' to 'Migrant': Why We Shouldn't Given In To Political Correctness

The legal term is 'illegal alien.' The PCs insisted--inexplicably--that it was "offensive." But, then, since almost everything is, to their mind, it's not clear why that should have mattered to anyone. Then we got 'illegal immigrant.' But immediately on the heels of that we were told it was all wrong, because "no human being is illegal." Though, of course, there's no suggestion otherwise in the term. An illegal contractor is not illegal qua person. Only qua contractor. An illegal contractor is a person who contracts illegally. An illegal immigrant is a person who immigrates illegally. No one ever honestly thought otherwise.
   But this offense is largely tactical. It doesn't have to make sense.
   Shifting to 'illegal immigrant' made it easy for progressives to shorten it to 'immigrant.' Thus easy to claim that opponents of illegal immigration are opponents of immigration--conservatives are against illegal immigrants, we're now routinely told.
   Now, of course, the immigrants are merely "undocumented"...as if they'd merely lost their library cards. And, of course, they're not even immigrants anymore--they're migrants. They move in no specific direction. Coming in? Leaving? You don't know. Perhaps they're sneaking out of the country...
   The political battle more and more seems to be between those who think we should have some immigration laws and those who think we should have none--or damn close to it. As is so commonly the case with the PC left, their shrieking about terminology is in the service of their more substantive goals. It's a jockeying for conceptual position, as when they insist that some men be referred to as women; conceding the terminological point allows them to assert, e.g., that such women should be able to use the women's room...just like any other women!
   For this and many other reasons, it's almost never a good idea to give in to PC linguistic demands.

AP Drops "Illegal Immigrants". For Stupid Reasons

Sigh.

I really hate the PC word police. They frequently demand (as if they were in a position to demand) that we change our ways of referring to people, generally do so for bad reasons, and generally propose new ways of referring that pretend to be more precise than the old ways, but are, in fact, less so.

One of my favorites was their demand that we call American Indians "Native Americans," despite the fact that most American Indians preferred "American Indians"...

"Illegal alien" is absolutely fine, and in no way derogatory, but people got their panties in a wad about it. I still use it, given that there's no good reason not to. "Illegal immigrant," they demanded, was the preferable alternative. Many of us knew what was coming next--it was just a matter of time. And, indeed, "illegal immigrant" is now on the terminology Index as well. So it has been decreed by those whose sensibilities are delicate beyond measure. So the Word has been handed down to the rest of us...

I'll be ignoring the decree...but I expect most will cave to it...

Oh, there's some made-up bullshit about why we are not to use the verboten terminology anymore. One version goes: actions are illegal, people aren't.

What utter, unmitigated horseshit.

Everyone knows what such a term means. "Illegal immigrant" means "immigrant here illegally." There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the term. There is nothing even vaguely derogatory about it. Similar terms get used all the time, and there is no suggestion that "the person is illegal." I've heard: 'Illegal gun-owner,' 'illegal pot-grower', 'Illegal truck-driver." I've also heard 'illegal midwife,' 'illegal contractor,' and 'illegal electrician.' God knows how many we'd turn up if we thought about it for a bit. None of these terms is derogatory. The meaning of each one is perfectly clear. No one has ever complained that to call someone an illegal contractor is to say that they are, qua person, illegal. Such a person is a person who illegally performs electircal work. This is not complicated.

Jesus this is some stupid nonsense.

We should start taking bets one what the arbiters of PC terminology will decree to be the Permissible Terminology here...

I'm going to guess:

Differently Legal Americans.

But perhaps:  Citizens In Potentia...

It's really too bad that time is wasted on such nonsense, too bad that people knuckle under to it, and too bad that it will, inevitably, just alienate people on the right who are, sadly, somewhat more sensible than those on the left in this respect. And harder to push around. Pushing mindless, ungrounded pieties on them (not to mention the rest of us) does absolutely nothing positive. This is little more than an attempt to score points in the debate by arbitrarily changing terminology in a way that de-emphisizes the fact that the relevant people are here illegally.

Really, really, really stupid and off-putting in my book.

Illegal Aliens? Undocumented Democrats? Or What?

There's nothing inherently wrong with fiddling with terminology in these ways. There are problems, however. I'd say the following...though I can already tell you that I'm not going to spend enough time on this to end up with parallel construction in the items...:
One preliminary point:
It's a little weird that so much attention is given to working out exactly which term most accurately describes people in the country illegally...when the press then goes on to repeatedly say 'immigrant' (unmodified) when discussing illegal immigrants. The very most important distinction in this discussion is repeatedly blurred...in a way that obviously favors the left. I think this is the kind of thing that conservatives have in mind when they say that the "MSM" has a liberal/left-wing bias. Even phantom inaccuracies in terminology that is out of favor on the left can be cited as grounds for insisting that everyone must change how they speak; but even the most glaring inaccuracies can be ignored if ignoring them benefits the left.
Anyway. As for these terminological battles:
[a] The left does entirely too much of this stuff. It produces an ever-shifting panoply of terminology. There's simply too much of this sort of thing. It's become comical. At some point we get to ignore it.
[b] They're dogmatic and otherwise loony about these ever-changing terminological fashions, and tend to insist that any deviation from this week's preferred terminology is bigotry. (This is in keeping with the left's weird obsession with language.)
They pretend that they are aiming for accuracy. However:
[c] I don't think I'm going way out on a limb when I suggest that their primary goal is tactical/political. Terminology chosen by the PC left is intended to spin (or "frame" as they like to say) issues in a way favorable to them.
[d] Accuracy is used as a stalking-horse, but is a criterion only when it serves their political goals. When it doesn't, accuracy is ignored, bad arguments are deployed, etc. etc. (e.g. 'African-American,' was never a synonym of 'black'; the "no person is illegal" argument is just dumb (see e.g.; 'illegal contractor').)
[e] Although the feelings of the relevant group are also given heavy weight--and should be--that only goes so far--especially when they can be manipulated by academic/activist fashion. Groups should probably be given some latitude with respect to the terms that we use to refer to them...but it's not clear that you can make a term rude or bigoted just by declaring it so. There is nothing at all wrong with 'Oriental,' nor with 'American Indian'--but they were turned into Bad Words largely, apparently, by the whims of activists, not by a genuine antecedent aversion among the relevant groups. Especially in the context of constant PC attempts to micro-manage language, the line's got to be drawn somewhere.
   There's nothing terribly wrong with 'illegal alien,' as the Obama administration noted. I actually think that 'alien' is better than 'immigrant', because the latter seems to indicate that such a person is here to stay...which is...exactly what the left wants, no? Anyway, it's an attempt to assimilate illegal "immigrants" to ordinary, legal immigrants. Again, per the Obama administration arguments, I don't think 'illegal' is that bad either, even if it's a bit inaccurate. But I don't care what we use, so long as we settle on something that isn't too inaccurate / politically slanted and isn't too insulting to ordinary members of the group. We can't let activists and activist academics run the terminological debate, because those people are nuts.
   I still think our old friend TVD's "undocumented Democrats" is freaking hilarious, I must admit.
   Anyway. It's really hard to have an honest debate with this kind of crap muddies the waters.

A Day Without (Illegal) Immigrants

   So, was "a day without immigrants" (the name) another attempt to blur the legal/illegal immigrant distinction? That's how I took it...but you know me. I thought it was, in substance, supposed to be a way to offer evidence for the common claim that the U.S. can't run without illegal immigrants doing jobs that the rest of us don't want. If so, then it would be accurately called "a day without illegal immigrants," obvs...but I took it that the secondary aim was to further blur the relevant distinction.
   Wikipedia (as of today) says it was:

...to demonstrate the importance of immigration...and to protest President Donald Trump's plans to build a border wall and to potentially deport millions of illegal immigrants. The strike called for immigrants not to go to work, to avoid spending money, and keep children home from school. People took part to show the importance of immigrants to the economy and also to protest possible racial profiling of U.S. citizens by immigration enforcement.

So that seems to indicate that it it was primarily about illegal immigration.
   Needless to say, that could be wrong...but blurring that distinction has been one of the left's general strategies on this issue, no? I mean, they tend to be jargon-mongers, and the point of much of the jargon is tactical (e.g. 'microaggression,' 'transwoman,'). PC terminology does not aim for accuracy. Their insistence that 'illegal alien' had to be replaced by 'illegal immigrant' made it easy to fudge the legal/illegal distinction by simply using 'immigrant.' (I rather expect that the new preference for 'migrant' ultimately aims to blur the distinction between coming and going. Then they could, for example, characterize the U.S. as regulating migration, suggesting that we don't let people leave. Anyway, I predict that'll be part of some future phase of all of this: lumping the U.S. together with e.g. the U.S.S.R. as a nation that "inhibits free movement of people" or some such thing.
   OTOH, many on the left do think that the right is anti-immigrant generally...and Trump has given them some ammunition with the attempted "Muslim ban"...but I doubt that this is what's up. I think it's the other thing.
   For the record again--and I don't think one should really say things like this, because it plays into the hands of the left by, basically, apologizing for a view that requires no apology--I'd love to be able to take in everyone who wants to come here. I long for the days when we could tell the world to give us its tired, its poor, and its huddled masses yearning to breathe free... But that's no longer possible. To think it is is as much a fantasy as thinking that we can remake the world so that everyone is happy where they are. It's just not in our power.

Twitter Blocks Use Of Term 'Illegal Alien'

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   Which is, of course, the legal term for people in the country illegally. There's nothing at all "hateful" about the term. The PC left wants to put us on the euphemism treadmill, insisting that we keep switching to more and more innocuous-sounding terms. Which is why it's actually important to keep using the original term, I suppose. I've let myself slip into saying "illegal immigrant"...but I probably need to go back to 'illegal alien.' These terminological fads/tactics are typically driven by activists, anyway, not by the rank-and-file members of the groups referred to.
   [What I wanted to carp about here was actually this: this is what happens when these people start pushing speech bans; it's never actually just the worst of the worst. It always creeps toward a ban on all un-PC speech.]

A 2014 CBP Use-of-Force Report that Puts the MN ICE Shooting if Renee Good in a Whole New Light(?)

Came across this late last night, and it immediately did a lot to change my view of the shooting. The most relevant part:

The dishonesty from the MSM on this has been...well...par for the course actually, so I'm not sure why I even bring it up. Oh, right: but: even ignoring all the dishonest descriptions of the orientation of the front wheels and so on...the ICE officer does seem like he's placing himself in front of her car. Right in front of the car. And, as a friend pointed out to me last night: he switches his phone to his left hand. Now...of course that could be a standard thing for an officer to do if he fears violence is a threat. In fact I suppose I'd be surprised if it weren't. It could also be: preparing to do something you already planned to do. Draw your firearm, not to put too fine a point on it. ... After she hits him, he seems to say "fucking bitch--which the Daily Beast eyerollingly refers to as "a vile slur"...jeez, you can't even make this stuff up. Now, if somebody hit me with his/her car I'd likely call him/her a fucking bitch...and much worse. As should you. So I took that to be a natural reaction, especially under the charged circumstances. LEO aren't obligated to be nice in their narrative asides. But, the same friend pointed out: it could also indicate pre-existing animosity.

   Now, Ms. Good's wife was taking trash before the incident. She was trying to provoke a reaction. But that's just what these people do. And the things she was saying were bush league I've heard so much worse from these lunatics (I've probably watched 20 hours of video of anti-ICE rioters/"activists"). "Go get some lunch big boy" is a Midwest mom version of the things these lunatics say to officers. And, of course, it's part of the job to ignore even the really vile stuff...though in some cases I think it maybe should count as a mitigating circumstance. But certainly not in this one. The woman's attitude is gross. She knows (or at least is certain) that she's safe. So she can talk big at no cost. But, again, nothing compared to other things I've heard from such folk. Entry-level moonbat trashtalk.

   Again, as Friend pointed out: it's clear neither of these women were hardened criminals. I'd add: they're suburban moms doing Civil Rights movement reenactment theater. OTOH, a vehicle is a weapon, and it really did plausibly look like that's how she was going to use it...but...it wasn't obviously how she was going to use it... And if the officer weren't standing right up on the bumper, he wouldn't have gotten hit and might have been able to evade. So one important question--which neither I nor anyone I've read even imagined might be necessary to ask--is: was he standing where he was in order to have an excuse for shooting the driver?

   Furthermore: he drew his gun fast. Fast enough that, the first time I saw the video I thought: Damn, that was fast. Now, again, there's more than one explanation of that.

   Also: the officer was recently got 30 stitches after being dragged 300' by an illegal alien resisting arrest--and basically using his car as a weapon. That raises a lot of questions itself. It may well be an excuse for being on high alert (e.g. switching the phone to the left hand)...but..if the incident goes to his mental state: shouldn't he have been, say, at a desk until he had psychologically recovered? Isn't the worst possible situation that the actions of an illegal alien causes an American LEO to shoot an American protestor??

   And if he did intentionally put himself in front of the car as an excuse, this seems to indicate vindictiveness rather than fear. Not fear, anyway.

   Counterpoint: I think I'd rather be 1' in front of a threatening vehicle than, say, 10' or 20' in front of it. At 1' I'd expect to be knocked out of the way or to be able to jump onto the hood...at 15'...maybe run down or two broken legs... But here we need some expert judgment, not dumbass bloggy speculation.

   Bottom line: my needle was previously moving a bit more toward Defensible Shooting. Now it's moving significantly toward Indefensible Shooting.

   It's a tragedy. I'm sad that Ms. Good is dead. She thought she was doing the right thing. She was brainwashed by the demented left--a movement that cloaks its insanity in weepy, weaponized emotion and loony literary-theory gobbledygook. And this is exactly what the Movement left wanted: a martyr. They don't care about Good, the person. They wanted to manufacture another George Floyd. One of their main goals is and has long been to train their useful idiot followers into martyring themselves. This is ideal for the left (or it would be if only Good hadn't been white. That's a small suboptimality).

   As for the officer; there are good and bad LEOs. This guy may be a bad one--one of those guys attracted to law enforcement for the wrong reasons.  Or not. We don't know. Mostly, these guys are normal people like you and me: different mixes of good and bad on different days. Rational. Irrational. Calm. Angry. All the things. The officer in question does a hard job--a job that has to be done if the nation is to survive--and he has been seriously injured in the line of duty in exactly this kind of situation. These guys are demonized by the left, including that part of the left that buys ink by the barrel. Part of the left's strategy is to say and do insane, infuriating, repulsive things to LEOs, putting as much psychological pressure on them as they can--one reason being: to make them snap.

   So, well, maybe it worked this time.

   Or maybe not.

   I don't know.

More On Trump's Threat To Dump Illegals On Sanctuary Cities

Same argument.
Still seems to me like a shitty, Trumpesque thing to do...though I'm not exactly sure why.
OTOH, I think the "sanctuary" stuff is nuts, I wish it were illegal, and I agree that the outrage on the left makes it clear that its adoration of illegals is not entirely sincere.
And:

The Mayor Oakland, California, Libby Schaaf, who made news last year by tipping off illegal alien criminals to ICE raids, shared her sentiments, which are common among the left. About the Post story, Schaaf said it was “(a)n outrageous abuse of power — using human beings to settle political scores. Our President wants to punish everyone; those who seek sanctuary in our country and those who provide it.”
   Schaaf went so far as to call the idea “illegal, immoral, undemocratic, and racist,” though didn’t explain how. Granted, no one wants to move to Oakland, but how it’s racist remains a mystery.
   In her local TV appearance, Schaaf repeated the standard lie that illegal immigrants “actually makes our city better and safer.” If that were so, why is she so outraged? Shouldn’t this idea be greeted with tickertape parades? Oakland isn’t exactly a safe city, the opportunity to reduce crime by importing people with higher moral character than the average American should be a net-plus, right?
   The truth is illegal immigrants are a net drain on society. These aren’t people with PhDs and piles of seed money looking to create the next great start-up, they’re largely people who can’t speak English, with little to know education; many are illiterate in their native language. They will become the servant class for the liberal elite and their wealthy donors. More importantly to the left, they will be dependent on government.

   Of course such "sanctuary" places might argue that they will be overrun--that this will bring too many illegals to their area. That's not a weightless response, if true. But I'm skeptical.
   We bring in an astonishing number of legal immigrants every year, and unwillingly take in an astonishing number of illegal ones. It is permissible to have reasonable immigration restrictions. And it is reasonable to insist that people come into the country legally. We want to help refugees from violence--and we do. But we can only do so much. And there are other countries where they could go. We have to draw the line somewhere. It is daft to declare that your city, county, or state won't cooperated with immigration enforcement. Trump's Trump. But--as seems to be more and more common--his Trumpian looniness seems outweighed by the looniness of the other side.

Crackpot Illegal Alien Policy Idea

I've already said this, but:

I wonder whether it'd be feasible to:

[1] Let blue states do what they want with respect to illegal aliens.

[2] Have some provision for red states to sue blue state is illegal aliens cross over into them.

This would the advantage of protecting states' rights--the blues would be free to have all the illegals they want--while still protecting red states and their citizens.

   Not that I think this would work (nor that it's that good of an idea) because I don't.

   But...for it to even be considered, we'd have to change the rules on Congressional apportionment. Illegal aliens shouldn't count.

Something There Is That Doesn't Love a Wall

I've been wondering of late how I became a racist reactionary fascist. Well, I mean I sort of know: it has something to do with thinking that people who come into the country illegally generally, y'know, shouldn't. Come in illegally that is. I was, among other things, informed by a guy on the teevee yesterday that the term 'illegal alien' is exactly as morally reprehensible as the N-word (a word, you'll note, that I can't even usually bring myself to mention, let alone use). I've got nothing against legal immigrants, and, truth be told, I'm almost always pleased to meet 'em. As far as I know, I'm not a bigot. As far as I know, I'm pretty much a radical anti-bigot.

I don't know what to do about the illegal immigrant problem. I don't even really understand it. But I'm concerned about it and I'm inclined to think that something probably kinda sorta ought to be done. I'm rather more concerned with doing something to slow illegal immigration in the future than I am about doing something about folks who are already here. Yes, I'm worried about rewarding people for breaking the law and all that, but in this case I guess I'm not currently inclined to be very worried about that, and not right now anyway.

Right now I'm sort of thinking about fixing the leak in general and about the fence issue in particular. Among people with whom I usually tend to agree, remarks about a fences, covertly referencing a fence along the Mexican border, have become a kind of punchline. "Maybe we should build a fence" seems to have come to mean something like "Maybe we should do something stupid, evil, and reactionary." Like "Maybe we should stone them," or "Maybe we should consult the Maleus Malificarum."

So here's my question. It's not: why is building a fence a bad idea? Nor why won't building a fence work? Nor anything like that. It's rather: why is building a fence evil and reactionary?

Is it that restricting illegal immigration is somehow intrinsically evil? Because that's not obvious to me. I mean, as I've said before, I'm perfectly willing to reform whatever's wrong with the rules governing legal immigration if they're unjust.

Is it something about the symbolism of a fence? Or a wall? If the same ends could be effected by legislation would that be non-evil/non-reactionary?

Nolan Rappaport: "Immigrant Advocacy Groups Shouldn't Be Opposing Trump's Raids"

link

   The Republicans won't support a legalization program until illegal immigration is under control — and that can't happen without unrestricted interior enforcement.
   The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) established a legalization program that granted lawful status to millions of undocumented aliens.
   The legalization program in IRCA was based on a bi-partisan, wipe-the-slate-clean deal: Legalize the undocumented aliens who are already here in return for enforcement and border security measures that will prevent a new group of undocumented aliens from taking their place in five or ten years.
   But the 2.7 million aliens who were legalized under its provisions in the late 1980s and early 1990s were replaced entirely by a new group of undocumented aliens by the beginning of 1997. Its strongest enforcement provision, employer sanctions, was not fully implemented, and the border was not secured.
   The Republicans have not forgotten IRCA.
   When the Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) objected to it because he thought it repeated the mistakes that were made with IRCA by not adequately addressing interior enforcement.
   ... President Barack Obama focused his immigration enforcement program primarily on aliens who had been convicted of crimes in the United States or who had been caught near the border after making an illegal entry.

   During his administration, once an undocumented alien succeeded in reaching the interior of the country, he was home free. It was extremely unlikely that he would be deported unless he was convicted of a crime.
   In addition to being a pull factor that encouraged illegal immigration, this made border security more difficult by providing a strong incentive for aliens to persist in attempts to make an illegal entry.
   Controlling alien admissions is a core element of state sovereignty. The Supreme Court has held that Congress has absolute authority to control immigration by establishing laws governing the admission, exclusion, and deportation of aliens.
   This authority is meaningless if the laws that Congress passes are not enforced in the interior of the country.

Andrew Sullivan Is Exactly Right About Immigration, Illegal And Legal

In my current opinion, Sullivan is exactly right below:

   But somehow the courts have decided that you qualify for asylum if there is simply widespread crime or violence where you live, and Ramirez was also going to use that argument as well. A government need not persecute you; you just have to experience an unsafe environment that your government is failing to suppress. This so expands the idea of asylum, in my view, as to render it meaningless.
   Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. As climate change worsens, more will rush to claim it. All they have to do is show up.
   Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained at the border making an asylum claim. This year, about a million Central Americans will have relocated to the U.S. on those grounds. To add to this, a big majority of the candidates in the Democratic debates also want to remove the grounds for detention at all, by repealing the 1929 law that made illegal entry a criminal offense and turning it into a civil one. And almost all of them said that if illegal immigrants do not commit a crime once they’re in the U.S., they should be allowed to become citizens.
   How, I ask, is that not practically open borders? The answer I usually get is that all these millions will have to, at some point, go to court hearings and have their asylum cases adjudicated. The trouble with that argument is that only 44 percent actually turn up for their hearings; and those who do show up and whose claims nonetheless fail can simply walk out of the court and know they probably won’t be deported in the foreseeable future.
   Immigration and Customs Enforcement forcibly removed 256,086 people in 2018, 57 percent of whom had committed crimes since they arrived in the U.S. So that’s an annual removal rate of 2 percent of the total undocumented population of around 12 million. That means that for 98 percent of undocumented aliens, in any given year, no consequences will follow for crossing the border without papers. At the debates this week, many Democratic candidates argued that the 43 percent of deportees who had no criminal record in America should not have been expelled at all and been put instead on a path to citizenship. So that would reduce the annual removal rate of illegal immigrants to a little more than 1 percent per year. In terms of enforcement of the immigration laws, this is a joke. It renders the distinction between a citizen and a noncitizen close to meaningless.
   None of this reality was allowed to intervene in the Democratic debates this week. At one point, one moderator tellingly spoke about Obama’s record of deporting ” 3 million Americans.” In that bubble, there were no negatives to mass immigration at all, and no concern for existing American citizens’ interests in not having their wages suppressed through this competition. There was no concession that child separation and “metering” at the border to slow the crush were both innovated by Obama, trying to manage an overwhelmed system. Candidates vied with each other to speak in Spanish. Every single one proposed amnesty for all those currently undocumented in the U.S., except for criminals. Every single one opposes a wall. There was unanimous support for providing undocumented immigrants immediately with free health care. There was no admission that Congress needed to tighten asylum law. There was no concern that the Flores decision had massively incentivized bringing children to game the system, leaving so many vulnerable to untold horrors on a journey no child should ever be forced to make.
   What emerged was their core message to the world: Get here without papers and you’ll receive humane treatment while you’re processed, you’ll never be detained, you’ll get work permits immediately, and you’ll have access to publicly funded health care and a path to citizenship if you don’t commit a crime. This amounts to an open invitation to anyone on the planet to just show up and cross the border. The worst that can happen is you get denied asylum by a judge, in which case you can just disappear and there’s a 1 percent chance that you’ll be caught in a given year. Who wouldn’t take those odds?
   This is in a new century when the U.S. is trying to absorb the largest wave of new immigrants in our entire history, and when the percentage of the population that is foreign-born is also near a historic peak. It is also a time when mass immigration from the developing world has destabilized liberal democracies across the West, is bringing illiberal, anti-immigration regimes to power across Europe, and was the single biggest reason why Donald Trump is president.
   I’m told that, as a legal immigrant, I’m shutting the door behind me now that I’ve finally made it to citizenship. I’m not. I favor solid continuing legal immigration, but also a reduction in numbers and a new focus on skills in an economy where unskilled labor is increasingly a path to nowhere. It is not strange that legal immigrants — who have often spent years and thousands of dollars to play by the rules — might be opposed to others’ jumping the line. It is not strange that a hefty proportion of Latino legal immigrants oppose illegal immigration — they are often the most directly affected by new, illegal competition, which drives down their wages.
   I’m told that I’m a white supremacist for believing in borders, nation-states, and a reduction in legal immigration to slow the pace of this country’s demographic revolution. But I support this because I want a more successful integration and Americanization of immigrants, a better future for skilled immigrants, and I want to weaken the populist and indeed racist movements that have taken the West by storm in the past few years. It’s because I loathe white supremacy that I favor moderation in this area.
   When I’m told only white racists favor restrictionism, I note how the Mexican people are more opposed to illegal immigration than Americans: In a new poll, 61.5 percent of Mexicans oppose the entry of undocumented migrants, period; 44 percent believe that Mexico should remove any undocumented alien immediately. Are Mexicans now white supremacists too? That hostility to illegal immigration may even explain why Trump’s threat to put tariffs on Mexico if it didn’t crack down may well have worked. Since Trump’s bluster, the numbers have measurably declined — and the crackdown is popular in Mexico. I can also note that most countries outside Western Europe have strict immigration control and feel no need to apologize for it. Are the Japanese and Chinese “white supremacists”? Please. Do they want to sustain their own culture and national identity? Sure. Is that now the equivalent of the KKK?

   Again: glad to see others catching up and recognizing that progressives are on a trajectory toward de facto open borders--and that this would be, basically, the end of the USA. Like Sullivan, I support our generous legal immigration policies--though I am inclined to think we'd be better off throttling back on the numbers a bit. I'm way willing to change my mind on that--it's just my current, relatively ignorant, inclination.
   The most important point is: here as everywhere else, the left has suppressed rational discussion by automatically labeling anyone who dissents from the most extreme leftist position a racist. This has to be crushed. It's likely what has led to the left's headlong rush to the left: no progressive can long resist the pressure to move to the leftmost position, as anyone anywhere else is called the magic 'r' word. So long as this general tactic/tendency is permitted to succeed, we are guaranteed to plunge over the leftward cliff to disaster.

The Success of Trump's Border Policies

Via Instapundit:

🚨 HOLY SMOKES! The success of Donald Trump’s border in one image.

Migrant crossings at the insanely dangerous Darien Gap:

2022: 248,284
2023: 520,085
2024: 302,203
2025: 2,941 (!!!)

It’s a decline of nearly 100%.

The Gap is located between Colombia and Panama; it’s a… pic.twitter.com/8RAU3JDbYW

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 15, 2025

What won't be reported: there is a corresponding decline in rapes and deaths.

Migration is not compassion. It's an evil that has been perpetuated by our government and the UN. pic.twitter.com/XoaxuHwcMr

— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) November 16, 2025

The most important thing here is preservation of American sovereignty and thwarting of the left's efforts to destabilize the nation, challenge our right to control our borders, and undermine the rule of law and the importance of citizenship.

   I basically never mention the benefits of border control to illegal aliens and aspiring illegal aliens themselves because I consider that a cheat. It's playing the left's game of weaponized compassion. Arguments about the good of the aspiring illegals themselves are basically beside the point. My position would not change significantly even if illegals were entering the country without risk.

   Furthermore, the "immigrants" themselves judge the costs of the trip to be worth it. Pointing to the costs doesn't really matter much without mentioning the benefits--and the fact that the people taking the risks think it's worth it. They themselves judge that the arduous trip is worth the risk...to sneak into the epicenter of world racism and terribleness... If only they had taken some courses in American universities, they'd see what a hellhole this is, and not be tempted to come...

   Finally: I, like most conservatives so far as I can tell, am not angry at your average, otherwise law-abiding illegal alien. I understand why they've done what they've done, I sympathize, and I would absolutely do the same myself were the tables turned. And they'd have--or should have--the same position I have now were the tables turned. I sympathize with them like I sympathize with poor people who shoplift to improve their lot. Doesn't mean that I think we should ignore shoplifting laws.

   This is another crucial case illustrating the crazification of the left. Conservatives continue to have the same, sane view that everyone had...before the left went nuts: legal immigrants are welcome; illegals are not. Twenty years ago, when I was still a Democrat, I called it, and virtually no one believed me: the Dems had already begun saying more and more things that sounded like they were on their way to a veiled open-borders position. And here we are. Well...we were already here 5-10 years ago. Now the blue team believes that it's wrong to stop people at the border and wrong to deport them once they're here. Which is tantamount to open borders. Which position will inevitably lead to the collapse of the nation.

   And our problem is nowhere even near Europe's problem.

   But, hey...better for the West to collapse than for people to think you might be racist! And what about those poor people...aw... Why can't you just be nice? Emotions emotions sympathy tears quavering voice emotions... See?

   However...

   Trump's policies do have benefits to the migrants themselves...even if they don't matter much to the arguments. And, of course, that's good.

Jason Stanley & David Beaver: "Snakes, Invaders and Other Fighting Words"

Wow, this is weak.
Not going to waste a lot of time on it, but:
   [1] The post hoc fallacy makes a prominent appearance: "We know from history that acts of genocide, ethnic cleansing and terrorism have been preceded by periods in which political and social movements employed such rhetoric." The suggestion of causation is clear.
   [2] There's no effort to distinguish the (effects of the) more properly rhetorical stuff from the (effects of the) more properly informational stuff: describing someone as a 'gang-member' is not, ordinarily, an especially rhetorical move; it could be false, but it generally aims to simply be descriptive. Its rhetorical content is fairly minimal. Furthermore, superpredator theory may be false (or not... Does anyone deny that some people meet the definition?), but, again, false description has to be distinguished from misleading rhetoric. (If that distinction can't be maintained, then the authors have no thesis, for one thing.) The same goes for the case of the Bush campaign's anti-McCain efforts in South Carolina in 2000: that had little or nothing to do with anything rhetorical; it was the (dis)information that was important ("McCain has an illegitimate child.")
   [3] Note prominent, unsupported, hand-wavy empirical claims: "Politicians’ descriptions of young black men as “thugs” and “gang members” in the 1990s helped transform the United States into the country with the world’s highest incarceration rate." Did it? Then produce proof of it. (To some extent this is [1] again.) Also: "Calling immigrants “invaders” has the effect of connecting practices one would employ against hostile intruders to immigrant groups." [my emphasis]. Does it? Then cough up some empirical evidence to that effect. Oh, wait...it "has the effect of"..."connecting"...and what does that mean, pray tell? Does it cause violence? Or does it merely "connect"? Very weasely...
   [4]  The empirical evidence they do give involves reference to single studies of alleged very temporary behavioral changes. And these types of studies, IMO, are particularly likely to be debunked as the replication crisis unfolds.
Read more »

McCarthy: Trump-Appointed TX Judge Voids Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

Ok.

I like getting rid of illegal alien gangsters...but I also like due process.

Also I don't like liking or not liking legal decisions on the basis of liking or not liking their conclusions...

McCarthy says it's a good, well-researched decision, and:

To repeat what I’ve argued before, the administration would be better off abandoning the AEA and deporting TdA members based on the State Department’s designation of TdA as a terrorist organization. The administration would still have to afford due process — that is an ineliminable part of the legal system. But the proceedings could be expedited.
Again, the problem with immigration enforcement is not that federal law is too burdensome for the government. It is that the government went too long failing to enforce the law, and Congress has not provided sufficient resources to deal with the resulting backlog, which has reached crisis levels.

5600+ Illegal Alien Criminals Arrested in VA Since February

It's yet another measure of how nuts the Dems have gone that they're even opposed to deporting criminal illegal aliens.

Awesome Illegal Alien Tells the Truth About Illegal Immigration While Basically Standing on the Border

After he's here for a while he'll learn that you're not supposed to say this stuff:

NEW: A Turkish man who crossed into Jacumba, CA illegally w/ a group of other Turkish men told me he paid $10k to a cartel, & expressed shock at how easy it was to cross the U.S. border with no resistance, telling me Americans should be “worried” about security & who is crossing. pic.twitter.com/Qb1a9BiDuV

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) May 23, 2024