Why Doesn't Anybody Talk About This?

The Blaze newsletter, one of a few newsletters I get every day (more newsletters than are useful most of the time) had a story that hit a sore spot with me.  It talked about the Sinaloa area of Mexico being in open warfare as drug kingpin El Chapo's son was arrested and the city was turned into a war zone. 

A significant Mexican military force swooped into the city of Culiacan to take Ovidio Guzman into custody. The Mexican army ordered Blackhawk helicopter gunships to attack a convoy of 25 cartel vehicles – some sporting machine guns.

Mexican law enforcement was able to arrest Guzman. However, 10 Mexican military personnel and one Culiacan policeman were killed during the operation, according to Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. There were 17 police officers and 35 military personnel injured during the firefight. Authorities believe 19 members of the Sinaloa drug cartel died during the mission.

I'm gonna say a few things that I think are so obvious I don't need to go find references for.  I ordinarily look for references, but today those are going to sound like "everybody knows."  

Everybody knows there's a handful of drug cartels in Mexico and they essentially control the government.  That implies this raid might well have been one cartel fighting the others.  I've heard the Mexican military has been bought and paid for by the cartels - or maybe one cartel and they're trying to eliminate competition.

But it goes farther than that.  Everybody has seen some version of this:

Everybody has heard of the horrific death toll from cheap Chinese fentanyl and carfentil smuggled into the US.  Everybody knows the cartels make money smuggling drugs and people into the US, including human trafficking children for pedophiles.  The allegation is children are raped until they "wear out" and then are killed off.  

Everybody knows the border is wide open thanks to the bungling leadership of Biden and his pegboy, Mayorkas.  Everybody knows it's not incompetence, it's deliberate.  By design and intention.

Yeah, Brandon says the border is secure.  And pretty much everybody who lives in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the southern tip of California will laugh at him.  If the border really being secure was even in the top 100 things the administration cared about they wouldn't have done this:

Everybody also knows that Biden is corrupt as hell.  Just do a web search for the term "10% for the big guy" for cripes sake, if this is news.  Go do a web search for him getting his drug-addled son onto the board of Burisma in Ukraine.  

In light of all of these things, and more, it also seems highly likely that agencies on our side of the border are also being paid off by the cartels.  That people in our government are owned by the cartels too; profiting off this drug and human trafficking.  

How come we haven't heard one word about such an investigation?  Oh, yeah.  That's right.  The DOJ is just as corrupt as those four clowns in the above meme and the rest of the regime.  They probably make tons of money off the cartels as well.  Nobody would survive looking into this.  You can bet any body part you'd like that the propaganda media sure won't look into it.

You may heard the story earlier in the week that Trump says if he's president again, he'll go against the cartels with the full military might of the US.  

"When I am president, it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate – and just as, unlike the situation we are in today, we had a very, very strong border,"

His mistake in his first go-'round was underestimating just how total the deep state corruption was.  Sounds like the same thing despite being subject to it continuously since 2015.   

 

Turnabout is Fair Play

I ran across an interesting story in the Machine Design daily newsletter.  It pertains to H1B visas, in a way.  H1B visas are the ones that are granted typically to "hi-tech" workers with the mythology that the skill set doesn't exist in America.  You might remember the 2016 talk about Disney hiring IT workers on H1B visas, and forcing the American workers to train their replacements before being laid off.

That story turned out to be far from abnormal; it was literally the tip of an iceberg, an orgy of cronyism in which a handful of companies lobby the US government to allocate H1B visas so that they can get cheaper workers, foreign companies lobby to provide those visas to workers in those countries and displace American workers.  Meanwhile, we have national programs to push STEM education to provide graduates for jobs in the US - that are being taken by H1B visa imports.

On one side, we have national programs to convince US kids to major in STEM programs to produce the "next generation of scientists and engineers" while on the other hand we import these H1B visa holders to fill the very jobs we're trying to get American kids to prepare for.  Don't forget the workers who were in those jobs, were replaced by H1B visa holders, and are now either unemployed or underemployed.  The Fed.gov is creating unemployment and misery for generations to come.  It's easy to understand Gates, Zuckerburg and those CEOs: the more of these H1B visas the Fed.gov allows, the more they can suppress wages and the more candidates they can choose from.  It's, unfortunately, also easy to understand the Fed.gov; they get money from Cognizant, Wipro and the like.  In the case of our administration, already concerned that Americans have too much of the world's wealth, it's even easier to see a motivation to send that wealth overseas. [Note: this is from 2016.  SiG]
 
So while it's true that the illegal immigrants hold down wages for low end jobs (how could they not?), and conservatives rightfully try to change that, we also have the wages of hardware and software engineers, as well as IT workers and other STEM careers being held down by the H1B visa industry (again, how could they not?).

With that background, this week's Machine Design story shows the shoe on the other foot.  Foreign companies are hiring engineering talent out of the US. Is it possible the big picture might be engineers from low income countries move into the US (on H1Bs) while US engineers move overseas on whatever the equivalent law is there? 

However, the skilled job market is growing. Deloitte —an audit, consulting, and financial advisory company—published that 3.5 million manufacturing jobs will become available from 2015 to 2025, and about 2 million of them will go unfilled due to a skills gap.

“Getting people interested in these careers is challenging—especially young people,” says Bruce Hamm of the Manufacturers Association of Central New York (MACNY). “Historically, over the last few decades, we’ve had so much manufacturing leave New York because of offshoring; we were one of the rust belt states. The fact that modern manufacturing has changed the whole equation hasn’t penetrated to the public, the schools, the kids, or the parents for that matter.”
....
Germany, a strong economic and engineering powerhouse, failed to find 1.1 million skilled workers and professionals in the third quarter of 2017. In an economic upswing, there is a shortage of young talent to meet the high demand for labor. Now German companies are urgently looking for talent from all over the world.

While Germany is an “economic and engineering powerhouse”, the other country they specifically mention is New Zealand.  The Kiwi projects they mentioned are major construction projects, not systemic growth in their engineering sector. 

Still, the US is 4x the population of Germany (total population, not engineers) and 67x the size of New Zealand, so Germany could make a dent in the US job market but it's hard to imagine New Zealand could.  I don't really imagine a large percentage of people want to make that sort of migration, anyway.  (Wait... I might have to think about New Zealand.)  The US still has the (alleged, reported) shortage of high-skilled workers that leads to trying to import (and grow new) engineers here.

A published report from the Public Policy Institute of New York State Inc. states that, “While shortages in professional skills were most pervasive, employers reported that STEM-specific skills and qualifications were the toughest to find. Almost a quarter of executives reported ‘high difficulty’ finding candidates with the necessary scientific, engineering, and technical skills. Half reported moderate or high difficulty finding candidates skilled in using technology, and close to 30 percent reported moderate or high difficulty finding candidates with other STEM skills such as data analysis and applied math.

My summary is that it's interesting but probably not a big influence.  Engineering salaries are among the few percent that have held up well over the last 40 years.  Will that trend last?  Some of you know what I'm going to say: “prediction is difficult, especially about the future”.

Germans Investigate Drugging Population to Accept Immigrants

It's one of those "you can't make this stuff up" kinds of stories.  German and American researchers want to use the hormone oxytocin, a female hormone said to foster nurturing and bonding between mother and child - "turning mothers into moms", to make Germans less hostile to the Muslim immigrants invading their country and raping their wives and daughters. 

A group of researchers from Germany and the United States claims to have found at least a partial cure for xenophobia, a much heralded accomplishment in the wake of a historic migrant crisis that has swept more than 1.7 million Muslim refugees from the Middle East and Africa into Europe’s cities and led to fissures in social cohesion that some predict have sewn the seeds of civil war.

It's not exactly clear how this would be accomplished; whether everyone would have to be dosed with oxytocin on camera or in a monitored facility, but the study is more "proof of concept" than a plan of how to implement it.

According to the researchers, the hormone drug oxytocin administered in combination with peer influence caused people inclined to have “negative attitudes” toward migrants to actually want to reach out and help them.

“Researchers have shown in a new study that the bonding hormone oxytocin together with social norms significantly increases the willingness to donate money to refugees in need, even in people who tend to have a skeptical attitude towards migrants,” the study concluded.

The experiment was to give a group of 100 subjects 50 euros and have them donate to either other Germans in need or to the immigrants.  Those who were generous to the immigrants were given oxytocin and donated more.  Those who were less generous to the immigrants were then dosed with the oxytocin, but that didn't change the amount they donated.  Only when they were given oxytocin and allowed to see how much the pro-immigrant group donated did they increase their donations to the immigrants - hence the reference to "oxytocin together with social norms".  

People who had “negative attitudes towards migrants” were not affected — but, when they were shown how generous others had been towards migrants in combination with the drugs, they “donated up to 74 per cent more”.

In my mind, it's kind of reminiscent of Nazi medical research like that done by Josef Mengele, giving people drugs to see if they'll do what the state wants them to do.

James Simpson, a journalist who has also written extensively about the dark side of refugee resettlement, was taken aback by the study.

“This reveals a deeply entrenched official agenda to push refugee resettlement at all costs and thoroughly discredit any and all opposition to it,” Simpson told WND. “It reinforces my belief that official Germany is carrying out the Russian plan to take over Western Europe using the refugee crisis to create chaos. Chancellor Angela Merkel is the Russians’ agent-in-place – a member of the East German Communist Party before coming to the West who inserted herself into West German politics by pretending to be a pro-West moderate leader.”

Like I say, you just can't make this shit up. 

Maybe "A Clockwork Orange" was more prescient than we thought.  

It's OK If Migrants Rape Me; I'll Heal, Says Teen Czech Girl Scout

On the far side of the Atlantic, the debates in the scouting community are a bit different than here in the Collapsing States of America.  On our side, we debate whether people should use bathrooms that match their "factory standard plumbing fixtures".  In Europe, they're actually debating whether Europe survives.  Even if they don't know it, as is the case with this young girl.  PJ Media tells the story.  

This past May Day, much ado was made about one Czech Scout, Lucie Myslikova, who dared to confront a Neo-Nazi demonstrator while wearing her scouting uniform. Google the event and you’ll get a slew of headlines about the teenager who “Stood Up to the Far-Right” and the photo of the “girl standing up to a skinhead” that went viral.

The media went into full-tilt fawning mode.  A schoolgirl crush on a schoolgirl, if you will, and emphasized that angle, not the discussion itself.  It's such a dramatic image!  That'll sell us some magazines!!

But what were the girl scout and the "Neo-Nazi" actually talking about?  It becomes a bit harder to find out than you might think.

What, exactly, was she discussing with the skinhead? “The nation,” “borders,” and “migration.” The details of the discussion were quickly brushed aside by Western media anxious to highlight the image of a young woman confronting an adult male—something Fortune was so impressed with that they spun it into a montage of photographs of women staring down men at political rallies across Europe.

It turns out, you need to read French to find out.

If you want to know what she actually said, you’d have to translate an article that appeared in the French language publication the Paris Match. There, buried in the last paragraph, is a quote from the exchange between the Scout and the Neo-Nazi regarding immigration. When the Neo-Nazi asserted the teen would be “violated by those she defends,” Myslikova replied, “Even if something happened to me, the physical wounds always end up healing.”

It's hard to be that naive, but I'll cut her some slack for being a child.  She has clearly never heard of nor seen someone who was killed by the "physical wounds (which) always end up healing".  It's a stunning ignorance of reality in the name of some globalist's diversity agenda.  The European death wish in one sentence.

A girl wearing a Scout uniform willingly acknowledged that she could be raped by an immigrant, something that is happening to women across Europe in record numbers. Then, she essentially reasoned, I’ll get over it, and the Western world lifts her up as a hero. She justified rape in the name of political discourse. A Girl Scout opened herself up to sexual assault for the sake of her political beliefs.

France may have voted for their perceived lesser of two evils, but what they did is ensure that the Islamization and subsequent destruction of Europe will proceed unabated.  About eight or ten years ago, I heard Mark Steyn saying if an American wanted to go see the great capitals of Europe, they had about five years before the trip would be meaningless.  I think he got it pretty close.  Yes, there are one or two bright spots in Europe, but the Dark Ages are descending.

Hawaiian District Court Stops Trumps Travel Inconvenience Ruling

U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson also said Hawaii would suffer financially if the executive order blocks the flow of students and tourists to the state and concluded that Hawaii is likely to succeed on a claim that the ban violates First Amendment protections against religious discrimination.

Ohs noes!  The Muslim ban lie again!!   I think Michael Ramirez handled that argument pretty well.

Seems like such an effective ban on muslims when you look at it that way.  Why, it must be inconveniencing something like 1/1000 of the possible muslim immigrant population.  How dense does one have to be to see that as an attack on a religion? 

Watson was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2012 and is currently the only Native Hawaiian judge serving on the federal bench and the fourth in U.S. history. He received his law degree from Harvard in 1991.

An Obama appointee from Harvard?   That's like the density of a neutron star.  

Immigration, Legal and Otherwise

A rambling summary of thoughts on immigration. 

It always seemed to me that one of the most common things you'd ever hear conservative commentators say about immigration is, "I'm not opposed to legal immigration, I just think we need to control who comes in".  Common variants are "... I just think we should know who's coming in", and "how do we know people with horrible diseases aren't coming in?", but the "I'm not opposed to legal immigration" phrase was pretty constant.

I'm not sure I'm still OK with that.  I've been drifting lately.  Let's start with the second clause, which absolutely still fits.  That one's easy.  I'm still completely opposed to people sneaking across the border, whether Mexican, Canadian or OTM.  DREAMers?  By all accounts, they're a small percentage of the problem.  Fix the big problems and the little ones can be handled as exceptions if needed.  (Basing your entire policy on the little exceptions is like saying we're going to allow unrestricted abortion up to the moment of delivery because of the 0.01% from "teenage girls raped by their uncles"; it's statistical idiocy). 

I was always willing to say legal immigration is fine, but I'm beginning to have second thoughts about that.  For years, Ann Coulter has been pointing out that Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Immigration Act dramatically changed the population entering America.  Before this law, the US let in fewer immigrants in general, and the ethnic makeup of those immigrants was more like the population that came into the US at Ellis Island in the beginning of the 20th century.  My own grandparents, on both sides, came into the US there.  The Ellis Island immigrants were mostly European.  It's simply undeniable that from our nation's founding through the mid 20th century, Americans were primarily from European stock and from a religious and philosophical view America had much in common with Europe.  Since the 1965 act, European immigration has gone down while immigration from the rest of the world, and particularly from Latin America has surged.  It has changed American culture and is one reason for the slide to more dependence on the state we see.

Specific influx predictions that were made seem tragicomic today. Senator Robert Kennedy predicted a total of 5,000 immigrants from India; his successor as Attorney General, Nicholas Katzenbach, foresaw a meager 8,000. Actual immigration from India has exceeded by 1,000-times Robert Kennedy's prediction.

Senator Hiram Fong, R-Hawaii, calculated that "the people from [Asia] will never reach 1 percent of the population." Even in 1965, people were willing to admit that we have a reasonable interest in not being inundated by culturally alien foreigners, and it was considered acceptable to say so on the floor of the Senate. Try that today, even as a supposed conservative! (Asians currently account for three percent of the population, and will swell to near 10 percent by 2050 if present trends continue.)

The only remaining Congressman who had voted on the 1920s quotas, Representative Emanuel Celler, D-New York, insisted, "There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians or Africans entering this country." Today, the number of Asians and Africans entering this country each year exceeds the annual average total number of immigrants [from all countries] during the 1960s. [Square brackets added - SiG]

Yet the largest ethnic shift has occurred within the ranks of Hispanics. Despite Robert Kennedy's promise that, "Immigration from any single country would be limited to 10 percent of the total," Mexico sent 20 percent of last year's immigrants. Hispanics have made up nearly half of all immigrants since 1968. After a 30-year experiment with open borders, whites no longer constitute a majority of Californians or residents of New York City.

Then there's the not so small matter of qualifications to immigrate into the country.  If you want to emigrate to Australia, or Canada, or pretty much anyplace, you need to show that you'd be a valuable addition to that society.  That's fine.  Why shouldn't a country's immigration laws be established to favor people who will add to the country's talent and contribute to improving the country, instead of being a drain on it?  Why would a country willingly take in people it would need to support on public assistance?  Besides recruiting new voters, that is.

Being an engineer, I've been aware of H1B visas since the mid-80s.  They were just a fact of life and didn't really stand out as something to be alarmed about until I started hearing stories like last fall's, that Disney was bringing in H1B visa holders to replace their American citizen workers, and require the Americans to train their replacements.  That was outrageous, but as I started looking around, I was disappointed to hear that kind of behavior isn't uncommon.  Not at all uncommon.  As you might expect, whenever there are big piles of money, usually being sat upon by the corpulent Fed.gov, the situation turns into an enormous orgy of cronyism. 

Cognizant, Wipro, Infosys, and Tata all profit by supplying foreign workers to American companies via the H-1B visa program and almost all the workers are Indian. Wipro, Tata, and Infosys are Indian companies and even though Cognizant is in New Jersey, over half their workers are Indian and 64% of all H-1B Visas go to Indians.

Cognizant alone spends millions of dollars lobbying politicians on immigration policy; nearly $3,000,000 in the last two years. A look at Cognizant’s lobbying and contribution numbers show the bipartisan nature of the push for comprehensive immigration reform. They cover the table, supporting both Democrats and Republicans. On one hand, one of their lobbyists is Heather Podesta, the powerful Democrat known as the “It Girl” of Washington. On the other hand, they were big donors to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Why are companies like Cognizant spending so much on lobbying? It’s simple business: they make a lot more on the H-1B Visa program than they spend on lobbying.

On one side, we have national programs to convince US kids to major in STEM programs to produce the "next generation of scientists and engineers" while on the other hand we import these H1B visa holders to fill the very jobs we're trying to get American kids to prepare for.  Don't forget the workers who were in those jobs, were replaced by H1B visa holders, and are now either unemployed or underemployed.  The Fed.gov is creating unemployment and misery for generations to come.  It's easy to understand Gates, Zuckerburg and those CEOs: the more of these H1B visas the Fed.gov allows, the more they can suppress wages and the more candidates they can choose from.  It's, unfortunately, also easy to understand the Fed.gov; they get money from Cognizant, Wipro and the like.  In the case of our administration, already concerned that Americans have too much of the world's wealth, it's even easier to see a motivation to send that wealth overseas. 
 
So while it's true that the illegal immigrants hold down wages for low end jobs (how could they not?), and conservatives rightfully try to change that, we also have the wages of hardware and software engineers, as well as IT workers and other STEM careers being held down by the H1B visa industry (again, how could they not?).  The law of supply and demand is the only thing you'll find outside of hard science class that rises closest to the character of physical law. 

Indian IT exporters.  HCL was a contractor to Major Avionics Corporation before I retired, so I've worked with a handful of those guys.  They're probably still there.

So where does this leave everything?  I'm still opposed to illegal immigration; no change there.  But I'm also increasingly unhappy with legal immigration.  That process needs to be reformed.  Well, at least the H1B visa program needs some serious reformation to get rid of the cronyism.  There might be aspects of immigration that work properly, but considering who's running it, I doubt that. I have no problem with shutting down both until we fix them. 

Spinning Wheels

Couldn't finish what I wanted to do, except for one little task, upgrading to Tails 1.6.  I rarely use Tails, but it's there on a thumb drive hanging where I can grab it if I need to bug out and can't take computers, along with a bigger thumb drive full of things I'd like to have.  And if you've never heard of TAILS - The Amnesiac Incognito Live System - or TOR - The Onion Router, go here.  

My main project for the day was to get my Raspberry Pi running.  Unfortunately, it only has HDMI video output and I don't have a monitor available with an HDMI port.  Everything is standard VGA.  The topic of doing that conversion is really an FAQ, I just didn't check the monitors I have available.  I was looking forward to getting that little thing booted up and seeing what it's like.  Now it's looking like next weekend at the soonest.

I did get a lot of busy work done that was overdue, so it wasn't a complete waste of a day.

And speaking of spinning wheels, the Independent (UK) is reporting that there is a steady flow of the Syrian refugees flowing into northern Norway on bicycles.  (Note the article is from August 31, when I imagine conditions were more hospitable in the arctic regions of Norway).  They explain that the Storskog border post between Norway and Russia is not open to pedestrians, and passports are checked for people on foot or in cars but not on bicycles. 

Norway's The Local reports:

The Storskog border station -- just two hours drive from the Arctic City of Murmansk in Russia's far north -- is Norway's only legal border crossing with Russia.

According to border agreements, it is illegal either to cross the border on foot or to give someone without papers a lift, a problem Syrian refugees have sidestepped by using bicycles.

Could it be a silly legal loophole?  They'll check your passport if you're in a car, but won't even try to stop a bicycle?   What's next?  Anyone on a skateboard can come into the country?  Anyone on a hang glider? Who would think that they don't check the documents of someone coming across the border, just because they're on a bicycle?  Note that it doesn't say they're using the bikes to cross elsewhere, like using an off road bike to cross away from the official border crossing. 

Shifting back to the Independent: 

Refugees are reportedly using bicycles to cross the Arctic border into Norway to exploit a legal loophole in the country's immigration controls.
...
Police Chief Inspector Goeran Stenseth said 151 people had crossed this year near the northeastern Norwegian town of Kirkenes, 2,500 kilometres (1,550 miles) northeast of Oslo, most of them during July and August.

The Daily Mail posts this picture of what it says are refugees on bikes that are obviously much too small for them, and report that many don't seem to know how to balance themselves.  Stolen kids' bikes?  Someone making some money rounding up (stealing) kids' bikes and selling them to the refugees? 

Sometimes I just have no words...

Srsly, Obama?

So Organizing for America, the perpetual campaign organization, posted this picture about tonight's amnesty speech to the Twitter:

Srsly?  Strengthen our economy?  By bringing in a large supply of workers to compete for what few jobs there are and hold wages down? 

How large a supply?  Reporters at the Daily Caller say the number will equal all of the jobs created since 2009.  Which means those new immigrants will probably go directly on the public dole. 

Sense of Events posted a link to this IJR piece on who pays for everything in this country, and who will pay for the new immigrants being on the dole.  

I'm thinking this action will make the top quintile's bar go up and the lower quintiles' bars go down. 

To the extent our immigration system is "broken" as he always says, it's because they don't enforce the laws.  Our tax system is truly broken; it's a system Stalin would be proud of. 

The "I" Word

I'm going to venture into a topic I've never gone into in depth, immigration.  I'm rather sick of being accused of being a hater and racist simply because I oppose open amnesty and open borders, but I really don't care anymore.  I know where my heart and motivations lie.

What got me thinking about this is the ongoing clash of civilizations in Europe.  We see the mass immigration from mostly Muslim countries in Africa, the Mideast and Asia flooding Europe as we see mass migration from Latin America in the US.  Europe is on fire, with the riots and burnings in Sweden going into their sixth day - and when the news reports it's because of "youths", you have to work to determine they're primarily Muslim youth.  The only new aspect of the riots in Sweden is that they're in Sweden - rioting and burning cars is almost an annual summer sport in France.  An increasing number of European nations now have "No Go Zones" where local Muslim populations scare the police out and the governments have given up control by default.  Most European "soft socialist" states have an underbelly of Muslim youths that haven't - and won't - assimilate into their new cultures.  Cap that with incidents like the murder of an off-duty British soldier by Islamic extremists this week and you can see an ascendant Islam taking over the European continent if the Europeans don't wake up in time.

Let me detour to say that if this short overview is offending you because you view Islam as a "Religion of Peace", or you think Islam and Christianity are comparable, or you think I'm racist for saying this, you are simply ignorant.  Don't be upset, ignorance is curable, it's stupidity that's not curable.  Go spend a day or two reading the history at Gates of Vienna.  Read about Geert Wilders and what he's gone through.  Read about the murder of Theo Van Gogh.  I could go on all day.
 
I believe it was in 2003 - maybe somewhat earlier - that a friend pointed me to Pat Buchanan's book "The Death of the West", and I see it has been revised as of 2010.  It's quite an eye-opening read.  If "Demographics Are Destiny", western civilization is in for a really rough century.  At least since the second World War, the West has been living a pattern of declining birth rates and expanding social structures.  The pattern has been that as child mortality dropped, and birth control became widely adopted, women worked more outside the home, bringing more prosperity, which led to families getting smaller because there wasn't as much need to have large families to ensure some children survived.  It has been said prosperity is the best birth control.  As families got smaller and became more mobile, elderly grandparents were less able to depend on family to help them; that was accompanied by an expanding state social structure.  As Western families get smaller and birth rates drop below replacement rates, tax revenues go down (all other things being equal) making the expanding states impossible to maintain just when they're most needed.  To solve that paradox, Western societies have almost all imported immigrants.  It has not necessarily turned out to be a smart strategy.

I refuse to spend much time on emotional arguments, like how hateful it is to deport children of illegal aliens who were dragged here and grew up in the US.  We're talking a couple of percent (at most!) of the immigrant problems.  I'd gladly say let them all stay if we fix the parts that are downright broken.

We need to close our borders.  Look at a map or a globe: what defines a nation?  It has borders that separate it from other nations, borders that define where different laws and cultures are in place.  Those borders need to be managed and controlled, just like every other nation on the face of the earth manages its borders.  Compare US immigration policy and enforcement to Mexico's or any other place.  We are orders of magnitude more welcoming of immigrants of all types.  And please don't give me this "but we're a nation of immigrants" line.  All nations are nations of immigrants and all have been made up by the movement of peoples between nations.  Who isn't a nation of immigrants?  Myanmar?   And besides; immigrants that came over a hundred years ago - like my grandparents on both sides - are demonstrably different than today's immigrants.  The immigrants from Ellis Island a hundred years ago didn't have a government handout system to fall back on.  They either made it based on their own hard work or they didn't survive here and went home.

We need to know who is coming in and control that.  This all I really want.  We should know if an immigrant really is a farm worker, and not a Hamas operative.  

Who says we can't be selective about immigrants we allow into our country?  Why shouldn't we choose immigrants to make our country better?  What moron came up with the idea that we allow everyone in that walks across the border?  Most countries in the world will make sure that at least you're not bringing in communicable diseases, but we apparently don't even do that, and get outbreaks of tuberculosis (and other diseases) in our country.  Sounds like a smart idea to me.  Who's more valuable to our country: a construction worker from Guatemala or a Ph.D. Engineer from Spain?  They're both Hispanic so don't start on that; don't you think the Ph.D. might contribute more to GDP?  A lettuce picker from Tijuana or an M.D. from Germany?  Look, I know we're neighbors with Mexico and Canada, while Europe is much farther away.  Maybe we should have a closer arrangement with them; fine, as long as we know who's coming in.  But the high ratio of Latin American immigrants to Europeans isn't because they're not interested in coming, it's because the 1965 Immigration Law made it harder for Europeans to come here.  I say we should use immigration to make our country a better place - give preference to professionals and high achievers from any place on earth, not to low achievers just because they're our neighbors.  If the intent of allowing the people into our country is to improve the demographics and increasing tax revenues to support the aging population, you want the higher achievers.  If you don't care about improving the country but want a voting demographic that will deplete the country faster, and loyally vote for whomever gives them handouts, you want the low achievers.  I think that shows how the system is running. 

But the biggest reason I'm opposed to the status quo is that it's immoral to treat immigrants the way we do.  We make people from Asia or Europe go through years of process and hassle to get here legally, while ignoring the millions who just walk into the States and into virtual slavery.  Illegal immigration is the 21st century version of slavery.  By denying them legal status and legal entry into the country while encouraging them to come with tons of incentives, we're perpetuating a system of abuse of the workers that come here.  Corporations seem to be more than happy to pay them less than legal citizens, and we creating an underclass that can be taken advantage of.  The majority are under-educated compared to Americans, so they have 50% higher rates of poverty.  They represent the vast majority (over 70%) of the increase in the uninsured.  They use welfare programs at almost twice the rate of born citizens (173%).  (Source, Census data excerpted here)  The biggest problem with the immigration system we have now is that it's morally bankrupt and wrong.  We're creating a slave class in the name of keeping our lettuce cheaper.  It's not worth it.