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Open borders advocates enraged #168104
09/18/2018 11:53 PM
09/18/2018 11:53 PM
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ConSigCor Online content OP
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Trump administration sets refugee cap at 30,000
Open borders advocates enraged

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Monday, September 17, 2018

The Trump administration said it will admit no more than 30,000 refugees next year, the lowest cap in history, making good on a presidential promise and enraging immigrant rights activists, who said the U.S. is shirking its global duty.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cast the level — one-third lower than the 2018 ceiling — as a needed pause while the country gains a handle on security risks and deals with some 800,000 people already in the U.S. with pending asylum cases.

“The ultimate goal is the best possible care and safety of these people in need, and our approach is designed to achieve this noble objective,” Mr. Pompeo said.

The 30,000 level is only a ceiling, and the actual number could go even lower. Indeed, this year’s cap is 45,000, but with just weeks to go before the end of the fiscal year, the government is on pace to accept less than half that number.

Critics including refugee advocates and congressional Democrats have called this year’s pace abominable and were dismayed with next year’s number. They said it’s a major retreat from the Obama era, when the State Department set a 110,000 ceiling for the final year.

“Quite simply, this decision will lead to innocent people dying,” said Rep. Eliot L. Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He described the decision as “a heartless betrayal of American values.”

Activists said the decision is particularly troubling given the scope of international need. The United Nations categorizes more than 25 million people as refugees.

“This decision is not informed by the global need, nor by America’s national security and foreign policy priorities. And it will not only harm refugees, whose lives are at risk, but also America’s interests abroad and at home,” said Betsy Fisher, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project.

Accepting refugees has been deeply controversial in the U.S. President Obama’s move to raise the cap in his final years drew a feverish backlash from security analysts and was part of the impetus for President Trump’s campaign promise of a travel ban.

American officials say criticism of the U.S. is based in part on a game of semantics.

Other countries term all foreigners seeking humanitarian protections to be refugees, but the U.S. breaks them down into two categories. Refugees are those who apply from outside the U.S., and asylum-seekers are refugees who manage to reach American soil and then apply.

When viewed that way, the U.S. will accept 280,000 asylum-seekers next year in addition to the 30,000 refugees, Mr. Pompeo said.

He said the U.S. is already struggling with 800,000 asylum petitions pending in the system. The backlog was built up as a surge of people from Central America lodged asylum claims. In previous years, they would have been classified as illegal immigrants and quickly deported.

When refugees and asylum-seekers are counted together, Mr. Pompeo said, the U.S. is “the most generous nation in the world.” He said hundreds of thousands of people granted Temporary Protected Status while their countries recover from earthquakes, hurricanes, war or disease should be counted as part of America’s humanitarian efforts.

“Some will characterize the refugee ceiling as the sole barometer of America’s commitment to vulnerable people around the world. This would be wrong,” he said.

The refugee program came under intense scrutiny in the final years of the last administration, particularly after Mr. Obama said the U.S. would start taking more people from Syria amid that country’s civil war and threats from the Islamic State.

Defenders of refugees say they are the most vetted of any foreigners the U.S. admits.

But security analysts said there was no way to be sure of the identity of people attempting to enter from places such as Syria, where the U.S. didn’t get cooperation from the government and where the chaos made it impossible to check back stories.

In Mr. Obama’s final full year overseeing refugees, the U.S. took in more than 12,000 from Syria and nearly 10,000 more from Iraq.

In the current fiscal year, the U.S. has admitted just 60 from Syria and 132 from Iraq.

Mr. Pompeo, in announcing the lower refugee numbers Monday, pointed to security concerns.

He said one person with ties to the Islamic State managed to sneak in as a refugee from Iraq. Other refugees have managed to conceal criminal backgrounds in their refugee cases, he said.

“The American people must have complete confidence that everyone granted resettlement in our country is thoroughly vetted. The security checks take time, but they’re critical,” the secretary said.


"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861
Re: Open borders advocates enraged [Re: ConSigCor] #168118
09/22/2018 09:44 AM
09/22/2018 09:44 AM
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 19,714
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ConSigCor Online content OP
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ConSigCor  Online Content OP
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Ivy League Study: Illegal Population is 22 Million, Double Estb. Estimate

21 Sep 2018

The population of illegal migrants is roughly 22 million, or twice the establishment estimate of 11 million, say three professors from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The shocking estimate will force establishment politicians and pro-migration advocates to recalculate the estimated impact of the huge illegal population on wages and salaries, on crime rates, welfare consumption, rental and real-estate prices, productivity rates, and the distribution of job-creating investment funds to coastal vs. heartland states.

The higher illegal population estimate helps explain why Americans’ wages and salaries have risen so little amid apparently record-low unemployment rates, and it also undercuts companies’ loud demands for yet more immigration of foreign workers, consumers, and renters.

The population estimate also raises the political and economic stakes of any amnesty legislation. In 2014, public opposition blocked the bipartisan, establishment, media-boosted Gang of Eight bill, which claimed to offer an amnesty to just 11 million migrants. Currently, advocates for a ‘Dream Act’ amnesty claim it will provide green cards to roughly 3 million sons and daughters of illegal immigrants.

The new estimate also bolsters President Donald Trump’s demand that reluctant GOP and hostile Democratic legislators fund a border wall.

“Our purpose is to provide better information,” said Jonathan Feinstein, an economics professor at Yale. In a video statement, he defended the estimate from likely critics, saying it is an expert analysis, not a political project:

This paper is not oriented towards politics or policy. I want to be very clear. This paper is about coming up with a better estimate of an important number, and we are really trying in this paper to keep away from making any statements about how that could or should be used. It is just a paper to help the debate be organized around some better information, which in my opinion is a good thing to do. I think the debate should always be centered around the best information we can develop.

The academics expected their techniques to show the population is smaller than the consensus estimate of 11.3 million. “Our original idea was just to do a sanity check on the existing number,” said Edward Kaplan, operations research professor at Yale. “Instead of a number which was smaller, we got a number that was 50 percent higher. That caused us to scratch our heads.”

Operations research is a skill that extracts accurate estimates from scraps of data. It began in World War II when academics were enlisted to help track Nazi U-boats and weapons-production. For example, the academics used scraps of information to conclude that the Nazis produced 270 Panther tanks in February 1944. After the war, captured factory data showed the production of 276 Panthers in that month.

“We have a conservative estimate that the number is at least 16.7 million,” said Edward Kaplan, an operations research professor at Yale. The study used “over 1 million scenarios accounting for all of the variability in the various parameters that we need for this model [and] on average, we’re estimating something like 22 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.”

The study says:

The figure [below] also shows our conservative estimate of 16.7 million in Red, and the most widely accepted estimate heretofore of 11.3 million in Blue on the far left. We note that this last estimate is for 2015, but should be comparable since both the estimates based on the survey approach and our modeling approach indicate that the number of undocumented immigrants has remained relatively constant in recent years. Finally, the mean estimate of 22.1 million is shown in black in the center of the distribution.

The new estimate uses new sources of data, such as the fingerprints of migrants caught at the Mexican border, said Mohammad Fazel‐Zarandi, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In contrast, the current estimate of 11.3 million is based on the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. “It’s been the only method used for the last three decades,” says Fazel‐Zarandi.

The illegal population is higher than expected because more migrants crowded into the United States during the cheap-labor policies of Presidents’ George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, the researchers said.

The inflow leveled off in 2008 once the economy crashed when millions of new migrants and poor Americans were unable to pay their rising mortgage costs.

The existing population of illegals tends to decline as many die of natural causes, or return home, or get “Adjustment of Status” to become legal residents. But the population is being kept level because new migrants — especially foreigners who overstay their visas or who migrate from Central America — offset the natural decline.

The Yale study goes up to 2016, and so does not offer 2017 and 2018 numbers. Many new migrants are overstaying their visas and sneaking across the borders, but President Donald Trump has tightened border defenses against overstays and border-crossers.

The Yale study complements the Census Bureau’s new estimate of the nation’s population and workforce. The bureau concluded the nation has been enlarged by 44.5 million legal or illegal immigrants, plus 17 million children of legal immigrants. Together, the new estimates conclude that the nation’s has a record-breaking foreign-born population of 55 million migrants.

That number is roughly 16.9 percent of the population, or roughly one person six living in the United States.

The study does not examine the number of illegal white-collar workers. That calculation is difficult because academics have not even counted the number of resident white-collar visa-workers, such as L-1 and H-1B visa holders. Breitbart News estimates that U.S. companies employ roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers in jobs that are sought by U.S. college graduates.

Four million young Americans will join the workforce this year, but the federal government will also import 1.1 million legal immigrants, and allows an army of at least 2 million blue-collar and white-collar visa-workers to work U.S. jobs, alongside asylum-claiming migrants and illegal aliens.

Overall, the Washington-imposed economic policy of economic growth via immigration shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white-collar and blue-collar foreign labor.

That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. The policy also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions. Immigration also pulls investment and wealth away from heartland states because investment flows towards the large immigrant populations living in the coastal states.



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"The time for war has not yet come, but it will come and that soon, and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard." Gen. T.J. Jackson, March 1861

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