Sunday, October 4, 2020

 


The Anointing of Hillary Clinton

Rick Adamson

2019.05.12







Hillary claims the 2016 election was stolen from her. See video here.  

She has a point and here is why: 

In 2008 she was a Senator from New York and a presidential candidate. A deal was cut and she conceded the race to Barack Obama. The deal involved Obama, Clinton, Chuck Schumer (Senior Senator from New York) and Harry Reid (Senate Majority Leader), among others.

The deal was that if Clinton dropped out of the 2008 race she would be guaranteed the Democratic nomination in 2016. In the meantime Obama would give her a top cabinet position-Secretary of State as it turned out. You see- 

1. Obama wanted a clear path to victory at the convention, 

2.  Chuck did not want Clinton to return to the Senate because as the senior Senator from New York he was used to calling the shots: something Clinton resisted and 

3.  Reid did not want her back in the Senate because she was not a team player.

Thus,  she was "anointed" (or so she thought) by Democratic leaders to succeed Obama.

Supporting evidence:

1.  As the 2016 presidential race began it was not certain if anyone would challenge her-after all, they knew of the "anointment."  Finally, a few relatively unknown Democrats entered the race only to withdraw shortly thereafter. 

2.  Bernie Sanders, an independent, had entered and refused to withdraw. This was a surprise to the "anointed" Clinton and party leaders so in order to fulfill their promise the Democrats rigged the DNC to disadvantage Sanders. The Democrats cheated him.

3.  Hillary tried to get Bernie to concede to her. See Clinton to Sanders: I dropped out for Obama – it was 'the right thing to do.'

            4.  Counting on the "promise" and the Democrat's obvious electoral advantage Clinton never visited Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and certain other industrial areas.

            5.   Joe Biden, the former Vice President and natural next leader of the Democrats, never entered the race.  Why,  because he knew of the "anointment."

So, when the promise failed to  come through she, understandably, felt "robbed."

And That's that! 



Sunday, February 23, 2020

The Russians are Coming!

The Russians are Coming!
Rick Adamson 02.23.2020
            
          The New York Times reported that the House Intelligence Committee [Adam Schiff's committee] received a Feb. 13 briefing  that Russia planned to interfere in the 2020 elections, including the Democratic primaries, and favored Trump.
            
          "intelligence agencies were telling Congress that President Vladimir V. Putin is presumably striving to get President Trump re-elected..." -NYT
            
          "Russia is looking to help Trump win in 2020, election security official told lawmakers" -CNN
          
          John Ratcliff (R-TX) who was in the meeting/briefing said today (02.23.2020) the reporting by NYT [and by association CNN] is inaccurate.
          
           Here they go again:

Schiff-
            
          "The President's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." -Adam Schiff
            
          In response to his comments and leaks "Adam Schiff is the one helping Vladimir Putin destabilize US democracy." -CNN

Pelosi-
           
          "All Members of Congress should condemn the presidents reported efforts to dismiss threats to the integrity of our democracy & to politicize our intel community," -Pelosi tweeted Thursday night.
            
          Really, it seems that the intel community politicized itself by leaking classified information.
          
          Also note: "Intelligence reports are as much art as science, a mixture of informants, intercepted conversations and intuition, as analysts in the nations 17 intelligence agencies try to get into the heads of foreign leaders" according to some intelligence officials. Intelligence is hardly a perfect process, as Americans learned when the nation went to war in Iraq based in part on an estimate that Saddam Hussein was once again in search of a nuclear weapon.
          
          As a result, the leaking if such reports or briefings are of benefit to no one except those (politicos and reporters) who want to use it to smear some one or to sow dissension in the American electorate.
           
          Few, if any, doubt that Russia (and probably others) interfered in the 2016 election or that they fully intend to do the same this year. After all, Russia's goal is/was to instill distrust in our elections and to sow dissension in the American electorate.
          
          ("Some analysts believe the Kremlin's goal is to cause maximum disruption within the United States and that it throws the support of its hackers and trolls behind candidates based on that goal, not any particular affinity for the people running."-Washington Post)
          
           I think this description is most likely the case-disruption over personality. Putin even said in a TV interview that he "did not care who won the 2016 election." I tend to believe him because foreign policy toward Russia has not changed much in decades whether under Democrat or Republican administrations. So, it probably does not matter much to Putin which personality occupies the White House.
           
           Every one knows that interested parties try to affect elections. That’s not new. We just need to understand what the foreigners did, how they did it and STOP them.
           
           And That's that!


Thursday, August 8, 2019

Culture


Culture and Common Culture
Rick Adamson
8.8.19

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly 
inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams             

  Think about these words for a moment. Do you think Americans are a moral people? Do you think Americans are a religious people?              

   If your answer is NO, and if Adams was right, our government may very well be inadequate and in need of modification.

   I think the answer is, generally, yes. But there are fringe groups who are not moral or religious. They are loud and blusterous and receive undue attention (attention that far exceeds their grievances) which results in the authorities being so attentive to their grievances that they offend the rights of the majority; so attentive to various sub cultures hurt feelings that they offend the rights of those of the common culture.

            The point is moral and religious people who make up the common culture in
America  have fewer grievances and certainly not outlandish ones. Such people, in general, are less likely to abuse the liberty and freedom contemplated by the founders. Put another way, people who do not live by a commonly accepted moral code do not function well in America-they abuse their privileges and fellow people.

 When a group of old White religious dudes formed the USA and wrote our founding documents they had in mind a general government the purpose of which was to protect and defend its members (former colonies/states and their citizens).
           
They envisioned a Nation where local civic and/or religious institutions (schools, civic clubs and churches, etc.) would thrive and contribute to the moral development of the people as well as to provide for the needs of the poor in their communities.
         
 They understood human nature and knew they could not change it; however, their new system was designed to moderate it, as far as the general government was concerned. They left the moral development of the people to the local civic institutions to which those people subscribed.
         
All went pretty well for about 150 years at which time the general government began to grow and to involve itself in the daily life of everyone.(4)
         
No doubt this reorientation was based on good intentions but, also, unintended consequences.
         
Over time, with the help of the growing general government and the hyper-active courts, the importance of these local civic institutions was diminished and their impact upon moral development retarded.  After all, once the general government assumed responsibility for moral development and the poor what need was there for the local civic organizations? Moreover, unlike the general government, a local organization might shame a person’s misbehavior: maybe shun it. Who needs that? (7)

As a result, we have evolved into a "...Nation afflicted by fads, crazes, manias, and rages; where mass murder has become all too common. This is what you get in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters.
         
Extract all the meaning and purpose from being here on earth, and erase as many boundaries as you can from custom and behavior, and watch what happens.
         
For many, there is no armature left to hang a life on, no communities, no fathers, no mentors, no initiations into personal responsibility, no daily organizing principles, no instruction in useful trades, no productive activities, no opportunities for love and affection, and no way out. This abyss of missing social relations is made worse by the everyday physical settings for everyday lives based on nothing.” (1)

          What caused this?

1.    Unbridled immigration since the mid 1960’s;  forsaking the need for careful management
2.    The welfare state (3)
3.    The court’s involvement in religious practices (2)  
4.    The general government’s involvement in every public school in America
5.    Failure to assimilate home grown minorities into the common culture
6.    Illegal immigration and a failed immigration system
7.    Birthright citizenship (6)
8.    The general government’s and the court’s preoccupation with the feelings of complainants
9.    Various economic reasons and the failure of parents to properly raise their offspring
10.                       The loss of psychiatric hospitals for which our jails are substituting (5)

The problem is:

          √  1. and 2. are incompatible,
√  2.  and 6. are incompatible,
√  2.  and 7. are incompatible,
√  2.  contributes to the problem of 5.,
√  6.  resulted in 911 and MS13,
√  3.  and 4. prohibit local schools from functioning as their community desires - including prayer and separate dressing rooms for boys and girls 
√  re 8.  feelings are not covered by the founding documents.
            
 What can be done? We need a convention of the states to convene and take back our Country. Follow this link for a handbook which describes the process: Link here.

           And That’s that!


Notes

Monday, April 22, 2019

The Paradoxes Of The Post-9/11 World


The Paradoxes Of The Post-9/11 World

By Bruce Bawer 3.20.19
 


Last Saturday night, one of the guests on Greg Gutfeld’s evening show on Fox News was a former Marine staff sergeant, bomb technician Johnny “Joey” Jones, who lost his legs when he stepped on an IED in Afghanistan in 2010.

He brought to mind a young Jimmy Stewart: winsome, modest, good-spirited, and even able to crack jokes about his missing limbs. Watching him, I thought: here is a young man who was handicapped for life because, in the wake of 9/11, he was one of those courageous Americans who agreed to risk their lives in foreign lands fighting their nation’s enemy.

But what is that enemy? The unofficial name given to the struggle by the White House under George W. Bush – the War on Terror – avoided answering that question. So, for that matter, did the official name, Operation Enduring Freedom. From the very beginning, in fact, the exact nature of the whole enterprise was swathed in a fog of euphemism and evasion.

The men who flew those planes into the Twin Towers and Pentagon were devout Muslims, obeying their religion’s holy book by slaughtering infidels en masse. The Taliban leaders in Afghanistan were also devout Muslims, ruling that nation in strict accordance with sharia law. And yet days after 9/11, even as Bush was planning the Afghanistan campaign, he told the American people that “The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.”

In the eighteen years since, the Western political and media establishment have continued to echo that lie. Jihadists have struck Bali, Madrid, Beslan, London, Mumbai, Fort Hood, Paris, San Bernardino, Brussels, Orlando, Nice, Manchester, Barcelona, and New York again – just to name a few of the deadlier and more high-profile incidents. Yet, perversely, the lie about Islam is stronger than ever. Throughout the West, schoolchildren and college students alike have been fed a picture of Islam that’s pure propaganda. Yes, one has the impression that many people are more aware of the reality of Islam than they used to be – but one also has the impression that they feel more cowed than ever into keeping quiet about it.

It‘s certainly harder now to publish a frank book about Islam than it was, say, a decade ago. Prominent individuals who openly criticized the religion a few years back now either stay mum or use the word “Islamism,” which implies that jihadists are motivated by something other than Islam itself. In Britain and elsewhere, the authorities increasingly harass, and even prosecute, citizens for sharing straightforward facts about Islam on social media.
While the kind of people Hillary Clinton called “deplorables” support sensible policies, such as Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban,” that are designed to protect them from jihad (whether of the violent or “stealth” variety), cultural elites have learned to reflexively condemn such policies as “Islamophobic.” Countless ordinary Brits cheer Tommy Robinson, but has any famous person – any “respectable” figure – in that country dared to stand up for him in the face of official persecution?
Saturday before last, Judge Jeanine Pirro, whose weekly hour on Fox News airs immediately before Gutfeld’s, opened her show with a powerful editorial about the pathetic failure of the House of Representatives to properly chastise freshman Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for her repeated expressions of anti-Semitism. In the course of her editorial, Pirro made a thoroughly legitimate point: “Omar wears a hijab, which according to the Koran 33:59 tells women to cover so that they don’t get molested. Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?”
It was a perfectly fair question, based on an understanding of Islam that’s presumably not shared by the non-Muslim residents of Minnesota’s fifth district who voted for Omar last November – or, for that matter, by the Michiganders who elected Omar’s fellow Muslim Rashida Tlaib. A hijab is, quite simply, a declaration of adherence to sharia law, and sharia law is antithetical to the Constitution. This is the kind of simple (if uncomfortable) fact about which American leaders, journalists, and educators should have been honest starting on September 11, 2001. But in 2019 it’s too much truth for Fox News, which was quick to publicly censure Pirro for her statement. I criticized the network for this cowardly act. So did a number of others. But most commentators gave Fox a thumbs-up.
I assumed that Fox’s public chiding of Pirro would be the end of it; but no, this past Saturday there was no Justice with Judge Jeanine. According to reports, she’d been suspended. For how long? Unclear. President Trump wasn’t happy. “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro,” he tweeted, advising the bosses at Fox to “Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct.” Katie Hopkins tweeted: “Where is the network’s loyalty? She is the token sacrifice to placate the mob.”
What’s really being sacrificed, of course, isn’t just Judge Jeanine. What’s being sacrificed is the truth about Islam itself. It’s the stubborn refusal of the Western establishment to acknowledge this truth that has led to the absurd and, yes, tragic situation in which we now find ourselves: namely, that while the armed forces of the U.S. and its allies have been combating jihadists in Afghanistan for over seventeen years and in Iraq for sixteen years, resulting in a massive loss of life and treasure, we’ve continued to allow barely vetted Muslims to immigrate into our own countries, permitted mosques to proliferate with little or no official oversight of what’s being preached in them, voted more and more Muslims into positions of power, and shrugged indifferently while cities like Dearborn and Hamtramck turned into Muslim strongholds.
Johnny Jones lost his legs fighting adherents of the same ideology to which Ilhan Omar subscribes and that Judge Jeanine was suspended for criticizing. None of it makes any sense: if you’re going to keep the floodgates open to them at home, why send young men into battle against them abroad? Why kill them in southern Asia and vote them into Congress in the U.S.? Why wage endless wars while punishing those who correctly name the enemy?
If Western leaders had responded to 9/11 in a more sensible and consistent way, we wouldn’t have been in Afghanistan in 2010, Johnny Jones would still have his legs, Judge Jeanine would’ve been on TV last Saturday, and Ilhan Omar, who moved to America in 1995, might or might not still be living in the country, but she sure as hell wouldn’t be in Congress.
There’s no way to rewrite the past. But we can’t keep marching mindlessly down this dangerous road.

Bruce Bawer is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center and the author of “While Europe Slept” and “Surrender.” His book "The Victims' Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind" is just out from Broadside / Harper Collins. His article was in FrontPage.Mag, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Article from ARRA News Service

On the Deterioration of American Society

On the Deterioration of 
American Society

By Rick Adamson

“Civic engagement is low. Lacking connection to these robust institutions (religious organizations, cultural or hobby activities, volunteer public-service groups, social or fraternal organizations), most Americans don't even know to miss them. They don't even think they're supposed to get their support, security, and purpose from the little platoons around them. They think the federal government and national politics are supposed to provide access to the good life.
The result is Americans who expect too little from their communities and too much from a distant central power.” Timothy P. Carney
Obviously, displacement and anxiety due to globalization, technology and automation have contributed to this trend but the rapid growth of the general government has contributed immensely. Carney sites one study (in his new book “Alienated America”) that claims the New Deal usurped 30 percent of Catholic charitable giving. And I once heard Franklin Graham say that most pastors do not know how to serve their communities as a result of decades of Fed Gov involvement in the war on poverty and the welfare state.
Historically, family along with local "civic" institutions helped people develop character by setting high standards, shunning them when they stumbled and helping them when they were down. But when you have a general government providing for ALL needs there is little need for these institutions and certainly no need to conform or to be shunned or shamed. Thus character development is retarded.
Another book comes to mind: “The Road to Character” by David Brooks 2015.
It is not a book about religion, however, in an interview I heard Brooks say that most all religions [and by implication: other independent "civic" institutions] provide a framework for improving moral character.
Even our immigration laws require that a person be of "good moral character" in order to become a naturalized citizen which implies that existing citizens already have "good moral character."
This has changed as "humanism" and self promotion encroached upon what Brooks calls moral reality or self-effacement that was prevalent until after WWII.
It seems that the major issues are the difference in thinking about the role of the State and of human nature. Some on the left believe that humans have inherent capabilities to be good people and that through rational thought they can create utopia. Some on the right believe that human behavior requires moderation which is best accomplished through independent “civic” institutions. The latter was the basis of the American Revolution.
I would just ask; if humans, through rational thought alone, could create utopia, why has it never happened? And if it is true that human behavior requires moderation and there are no independent “civic” institutions who/what is to be done? State control, totalitarianism/autocracy?
It seems that we are in trouble.
And That’s that!

Return of the Sowell Man



Return of the Sowell Man

By Loyd Billingsley




The best economist is black, and he’s back in the battle.sque rutrum. “Even the best things come to an end,” wrote Thomas Sowell in a December, 2016, column headlined “Farewell.” At the age of 86, the great economist had decided to stop writing his column and “spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.” Since then, Sowell has been rather quiet, but current political trends have prompted him to re-emerge.
“Socialism is a wonderful sounding idea,” Sowell recently told Fox Business. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous.” A former Marxist, Sowell began to see the difference between reality and rhetoric. “When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing in the neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that that’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.”
Those who wonder who this guy is might take a cue from NBA great Charles Barkley, who in 2000 quipped that “the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.” As it happens, the best economist is also black, and his name is Thomas Sowell. He dropped out of high school and served as a photographer in the Marines during the Korean War. He was the first in his family to attend college and earned a BA from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago.
The Hoover Institution scholar has probed the world of ideas in books such as Basic Economics, Economic Facts and Fallacies, and Wealth, Poverty and Politics. He is also the author of The Economics and Politics of Race, Ethnic America, Affirmative Action Around the World, and the 1985 Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. Sowell’s conservative economics and criticism of affirmative action have drawn vicious attacks from the left.
Columnist Carl Rowan compared Sowell to Vidkun Quisling and NAACP general counsel Thomas Atkins called him one of the “house niggers” on the plantation. Lani Guinier, a Clinton nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, even questioned Sowell’s blackness. The economist, who was raised in Harlem, does not generally respond in kind, but he was justified to say “I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.” Sowell also kept on writing thoughtful, well-researched books such as the 2013 Intellectuals and Race, more relevant than ever with leftists smearing all rivals as racists.
Sowell shows how supposedly “progressive” intellectuals championed eugenics out of fear of the “inferior” races. For progressive sociologist Edward Ross, black Americans were “several million of an inferior race.” Madison Grant, a progressive activist educated at Yale and Columbia, penned The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called his “bible.” Author Jack London, a socialist, held that “the inferior races must undergo destruction, or some humane form of economic slavery is inevitable.”
On the correlation between skin color and intelligence, Sowell quotes a tenth-century Muslim scholar who charged that Europeans grow paler the farther north you go, and that the “farther north the more stupid, gross and brutish they are.”
In the view of the current “race industry,” whites who outperform blacks are simply unjust beneficiaries of past discrimination. Likewise, Asians who outperform blacks and Hispanics are beneficiaries of “privilege.” Sowell shows how diversity dogma generally ignores discrimination against Asians and Jews, high achievers despite centuries of persecution in many countries.
At the same time, the intellectuals of the left “pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong, or with what catastrophic consequences for millions of other people.” That dynamic was on display in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where socialist Bernie Sanders chose to celebrate his honeymoon, and the Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and Cuba, an all-white Stalinist dictatorship. The American left championed them all, and they now keep the faith as Venezuela’s socialist regime starves and oppresses the people, who flee by the millions.
Sowell, who turns 89 this year, knows that socialism is guaranteed to wreck America. He is troubled by the fathomless ignorance of “rising star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrat socialists. The great economist may be back in the fight, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, but unlike Victor Laszlo, Sowell is not sure we will win this time.
With willful ignorance, intolerance and bad ideas on the rise, Sowell has “a great fear that, in the long run, we may not make it.” On the other hand, as he said in his 2016 “Farewell” article, “let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.”
To that end, everybody should get to know Thomas Sowell, whose books on economics, race and affirmative action, should be part of high-school and college curricula across the nation. If we are going to have a better present and future, as Sowell explained on Fox Business, everybody will have to “test ideas against facts.”
“Even the best things come to an end,” wrote Thomas Sowell in a December, 2016, column headlined “Farewell.” At the age of 86, the great economist had decided to stop writing his column and “spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.” Since then, Sowell has been rather quiet, but current political trends have prompted him to re-emerge.
“Socialism is a wonderful sounding idea,” Sowell recently told Fox Business. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous.” A former Marxist, Sowell began to see the difference between reality and rhetoric. “When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing in the neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that that’ve ruined a really good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well.”
Those who wonder who this guy is might take a cue from NBA great Charles Barkley, who in 2000 quipped that “the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black.” As it happens, the best economist is also black, and his name is Thomas Sowell. He dropped out of high school and served as a photographer in the Marines during the Korean War. He was the first in his family to attend college and earned a BA from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago.
The Hoover Institution scholar has probed the world of ideas in books such as Basic Economics, Economic Facts and Fallacies, and Wealth, Poverty and Politics. He is also the author of The Economics and Politics of Race, Ethnic America, Affirmative Action Around the World, and the 1985 Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. Sowell’s conservative economics and criticism of affirmative action have drawn vicious attacks from the left.
Columnist Carl Rowan compared Sowell to Vidkun Quisling and NAACP general counsel Thomas Atkins called him one of the “house niggers” on the plantation. Lani Guinier, a Clinton nominee for Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, even questioned Sowell’s blackness. The economist, who was raised in Harlem, does not generally respond in kind, but he was justified to say “I don’t need some half-white woman from Martha’s Vineyard telling me about being black.” Sowell also kept on writing thoughtful, well-researched books such as the 2013 Intellectuals and Race, more relevant than ever with leftists smearing all rivals as racists.
Sowell shows how supposedly “progressive” intellectuals championed eugenics out of fear of the “inferior” races. For progressive sociologist Edward Ross, black Americans were “several million of an inferior race.” Madison Grant, a progressive activist educated at Yale and Columbia, penned The Passing of the Great Race, which Hitler called his “bible.” Author Jack London, a socialist, held that “the inferior races must undergo destruction, or some humane form of economic slavery is inevitable.”
On the correlation between skin color and intelligence, Sowell quotes a tenth-century Muslim scholar who charged that Europeans grow paler the farther north you go, and that the “farther north the more stupid, gross and brutish they are.”
In the view of the current “race industry,” whites who outperform blacks are simply unjust beneficiaries of past discrimination. Likewise, Asians who outperform blacks and Hispanics are beneficiaries of “privilege.” Sowell shows how diversity dogma generally ignores discrimination against Asians and Jews, high achievers despite centuries of persecution in many countries.
At the same time, the intellectuals of the left “pay no price for being wrong, no matter how wrong, or with what catastrophic consequences for millions of other people.” That dynamic was on display in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where socialist Bernie Sanders chose to celebrate his honeymoon, and the Soviet client states in Eastern Europe and Cuba, an all-white Stalinist dictatorship. The American left championed them all, and they now keep the faith as Venezuela’s socialist regime starves and oppresses the people, who flee by the millions.
Sowell, who turns 89 this year, knows that socialism is guaranteed to wreck America. He is troubled by the fathomless ignorance of “rising star” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrat socialists. The great economist may be back in the fight, like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, but unlike Victor Laszlo, Sowell is not sure we will win this time.
With willful ignorance, intolerance and bad ideas on the rise, Sowell has “a great fear that, in the long run, we may not make it.” On the other hand, as he said in his 2016 “Farewell” article, “let us hope that we can learn something from the past to make for a better present and future.”
To that end, everybody should get to know Thomas Sowell, whose books on economics, race and affirmative action, should be part of high-school and college curricula across the nation. If we are going to have a better present and future, as Sowell explained on Fox Business, everybody will have to “test ideas against facts.”

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Immigration


Immigration

By Rick Adamson
8.17.18




Historically, the vast majority of past legal immigrants changed their values, 
not America’s, when they came to this country. They came here to become 
American, not only in terms of language, citizenship, and national identity, 
but also in terms of values. Similarly, the vast majority of illegal residents came 
for work and returned home when the work was done.

They came to pursue the American dream; one of freedom and opportunity.


What happened?


Well,  everything changed in 1964-5. The Immigration and Nationality Act 
of 1965 (the Act), also known as the Hart–Celler Act, changed the way 
legal immigrants were selected by ending the National Origins Formula 
that had been in place in the United States since the Emergency Quota Act 
of 1921. The focus became skills of immigrants and/or their family relationships 
with U.S. citizens and residents (chain migration). 

Here is an article entitled "The Legacy of the 1965 Immigration Act."


Further, in 1964 President's Johnson's "Great Society" began with the war 
on poverty pursuant to which welfare policy changed drastically, e.g., for the 
first time food stamps were made available along with Federal aid for K-12 
education of the poor, etc.


The result? Rapid increases in the foreign born population. Here is a 
summary:
√  Between 1960 and 2016 the number of foreign born residents (1) of the 
Country increased by approximately 33,000,000 people and represented 13.5 
percent of the population (a total of about 43.7 million- which is four times 
the number of any other Country).(2)
√  The average growth rate of foreign born residents for the five decades 
between 1960 and 2010 (after the Act) was 34 % (the average Growth for the 
five previous decades (1920 -1960) was a negative 6 %).
√  Historically legal immigration amounted to approximately 250 thousand 
per year but since the Act was passed it it has averaged over 670 thousand 
people per year. In 2016 1,184,000 people obtained lawful permanent residency. (3) 
This is in spite of the finding by a study which concluded that 400,000 
is about the right number. Funny, without chain migration (the ability 
of a skilled-much needed immigrant-to sponsor family members without 
regard to their skills) the 1.2 million would be approximately 400,000.
√  Many of those coming for work have decided not to return home due to 
the newly created welfare State which includes citizenship for children born 
on U.S. soil, children's education, school meals and welfare for poor children 
(if citizens) of foreign born residents, etc.
We are a country of immigrants and immigration is important. But smart 
immigration policy would dictate that the levels be managed so as to fulfill
the Country's needs for workers, and perhaps other legitimate purposes, 
but so as not to harm our existing citizens. Such purposes do not include 
intentionally changing the composition of the electorate for political reasons.


Mass immigration is fueling unprecedented population growth which 
depresses the wages of poorer Americans, overcrowds our schools and 
strains our already fragile environment.


Today's immigration is extremely costly. Unlike previous eras of 
immigration, today's immigrants are 50 percent more likely to use welfare 
than native-born Americans. Providing for the needs of immigrants costs 
American taxpayers as much as $20 billion a year. We cannot provide 
high quality education, healthcare, and retirement security for our own 
people if we continue to bring in endless numbers of poor, unskilled immigrants. 
America is still working to meet the challenge of assisting our own poor 
and disadvantaged; mass immigration compounds the problem and 
impedes efforts to raise the standards of living for all.


And That’s that!


For more of this subject click here.


Notes:
(1)  The term "immigrants" (also known as the foreign born) refers to 
people residing in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth. 
This population includes naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents 
(LPRs), certain legal nonimmigrants (e.g., persons on student or work 
visas), those admitted under refugee or asylee status, and persons illegally 
residing in the United States.
(2)  https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested-statistics-
immigrants-and-immigration-united-states
(3)  https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2016/table1