Immigration

The rapid takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban has potentially dire consequences for Afghan women and children. The Islamist group was able to commandeer sophisticated US weaponry and other military equipment during our poorly-planned troop withdrawal. And so Americans have been primed to cheer the arrival of planes carrying thousands of Afghan refugees, who we are told would otherwise be executed by the Taliban, into the United States. But what are the long-term consequences of rapid refugee resettlement? Could this present a risk to national security? How will this effect Americans economically or culturally?

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700. Find yourself in a motorcycle accident suffering the inconvenience of losing your cerebellum and all that other gooey stuff spread like jam over the interstate? Don’t worry. The medics will find an intact nostril and will determine that you tested 'positive for COVID’. What remains of you will be transported to a hospital where management will file a claim and get 15 percent more on their government reimbursement because you 'died from’, or at least with COVID. There are exceptions, of course.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.

The Biden administration has repeatedly refused to take its self-created border crisis seriously. Last week, they sent Vice President Kamala Harris to Guatemala and Mexico to address the 'root causes' of the recent surge in migration, one of which she identified as 'climate change’. Harris promised to throw more money at the problem and laughed at the idea that she should go to the border and see the crisis firsthand. Today, the White House sent out a press release insisting that they are taking serious action on what they call the 'border challenge’. The email starts out with a couple of factual whoppers. It claims that 'the trend of border apprehensions in May is a reduction of individuals (unique encounters) and families below the peak in 2019’.

Vice President Kamala Harris embarked on her first foreign trip since taking office this week — and quickly proved herself to be as empty as the faces on the royally-iced cookies she handed out to reporters on Air Force Two. President Biden's 'border czar' traveled to Guatemala and Mexico in a futile attempt to solve an autogenic crisis and insulted the intelligence of each country's leaders and the American people along the way. It seems even Harris's plane knew the disaster that would unfold if she made it to Central America, developing a 'technical issue' to keep the Vice President grounded. Unfortunately for all of us, she was undeterred, switching planes to continue on her journey.

President Biden told NBC at the end of last month that the border crisis is ‘way down now; we've now gotten control’. At first glance, this is preposterous. The number of border arrests in April was a 21-year high, at more than 178,000, with more than a third of all arrests being families or unaccompanied minors. To get a sense of the scale, President Obama's Homeland Security secretary, Jeh Johnson, has said that 1,000 border arrests a day 'overwhelms the system’ — in April, daily arrests averaged nearly 6,000. Does that sound like a border that's under 'control’? But President Biden's seemingly absurd comment isn't simply another in his endless series of gaffes.

The Biden administration has twice extended the deadline for federal employees to volunteer for months-long deployments at the US-Mexico border, undermining the White House's attempts to downplay the recent severity of the migrant crisis. In a Department of Defense bulletin sent Friday and obtained exclusively by The Spectator, staff were informed that the deadline to apply to the Health and Human Services (HHS) volunteer program to assist with the influx of unaccompanied migrant children had been extended from May 7 to May 21. The deadline had previously extended from April 26 to May 7.

The Biden administration is asking US Department of Agriculture employees to abandon their day jobs and volunteer for months-long stints at the US-Mexico border, despite repeatedly insisting that the influx of unaccompanied minors has not reached 'crisis' levels. The USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) offered employees an 'informational unaccompanied minors' session last week 'to learn more about volunteer detail opportunities for employees', according to an email obtained by The Spectator. Volunteers would be responsible for working directly with migrant children to interview them for their legal cases and help connect them with adult sponsors residing in the United States.

Joe Biden won’t go to the border, but the border is coming to him. The Northern Irish border, that is. On Wednesday, Biden, Kamala Harris (pronouns: she/her) and Nancy Pelosi marked St Patrick’s Day by talking with Irish politicians from both sides of their border. Afterwards, the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, thanked Pelosi for her ‘continued support’ on Brexit. It’s bordering on the ridiculous. Biden’s administration refuses to admit that it has a moral and humanitarian crisis on its southern border, but it makes time to create problems on the border between two close allies, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The administration insists it isn’t taking sides on Brexit, but the truth is that it already has.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

Whew! If not now, when? As Ronald Reagan asked in another context. Maybe — as those of us closer to the situation; e.g., Texans, view it — not for a period stretching to the crack of doom. Democratic whips tell leaders of their party’s would-be juggernaut, ready to ride those vicious Republicans into the moist soil of Washington DC, that the votes just plain aren’t there. New strategies may be pursued — for instance, passing the plan in chunks, instead of as a single, sizzling dish. The trouble is that the Biden plan, whose aim is to sweep illegal immigrants and asylum into the American system with scarce thought for potential consequences, is seen as enjoying stunted appeal. Why would that be?  One obvious answer is that — like the $1.

While Donald Trump appears to have lost the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s agenda of populism focused on the working class and putting America first won, well, bigly. Contrary to the Democrats’ claim that Joe Biden’s razor-thin win gave them a mandate, the only mandate America’s voters gave this year is that they want more Trumpism. To wit, the swing of roughly the same number of voters in a handful of states by which Trump won in 2016 is the gap of Biden’s win. Going forward, Republicans must focus on maintaining that sentiment and fight off attempts by NeverTrumpers and Establishment Republicans to throw Trumpism out with Trump.

Suburban women are understood to be one of the most crucial demographic groups in the presidential election on November 3. Many pollsters currently predict that President Donald Trump will lose due to his unpopularity with that category of voters. But have the Democrats really reclaimed the suburbs? Or are there more likely Republican voters than the polls suggest? The Spectator tracked down a series of so-called ‘closet Trump’ voters, women from the suburbs who would never publicly voice their support for the President for fear of recrimination in their social circles. These are their stories.ArizonaI voted for Trump in 2016, and I absolutely cannot wait to vote for him again in 2020. The President has lived up to every expectation I had of him.

What does Stephen Miller really want? His immigration obsession has shaped some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive policies, and he has clawed his way from speechwriter to senior policy adviser. But is his dream a restrictionist immigration agenda or, as sources close to the White House tell me, the pursuit of power, not policy? Is he taking Lady Macbeth’s advice and playing ‘the innocent flower’ to mask ‘the serpent under’t’? Miller is a true believer in the Trump agenda: they say he even praises the President in private. That might explain his survival in an administration with a turnover rate higher than that of a cheap motel.

After a string of broken promises, policy disappointments and sinking poll numbers, the populist wing of the Republican party knows who is to blame. It’s the President’s son-in-law, the prince of the administration, Jared Kushner. ‘Trump has a Jared problem,’ is how one conservative activist who works with the White House on immigration puts it. ‘Jared is a total fuck-up. Everything he touches turns to lead.’ Others groan about ‘four more years of Jared’ should the President be re-elected in November. Various sources in, or connected to, the administration are stunned by the amount of power Kushner wields.