With much debate on the immigration issue centered on the southern border, it appears that a new avenue of illegal entry has opened up — across the border from Canada.
It is not Canadians from Alberta or Saskatchewan that are sneaking across the border — not very many, anyway — but rather Mexican illegal immigrants. Evidently some Mexicans have figured out that they can travel to Canada and then cross south into the United States, as that border has been largely unguarded for decades.
Four thousand three hundred and sixteen non-citizens were arrested at the U.S.-Canada border in Fiscal Year 2018. Of that number, 2,245 are citizens of Mexico. What is apparently happening is that Mexican citizens fly to Canada — where no visa is required — then enter the U.S. from that direction.
Because of this, arrests are up considerably at the Canadian border, with a 43-percent increase in 2018 over 2017 — the highest level in eight years. The highest number of arrests were in the Detroit sector, followed by Vermont’s Swanton sector. For perspective, over 400,000 were arrested at the southern border during the same time period.
Rather than call for increased border security, the emphasis by leaders of the Democrats in Congress is to call for a full pathway to citizenship of nearly three million more immigrants. In legislation announced on Tuesday, the Democrats called for making citizens out of the so-called Dreamers — mostly younger illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. Many have no memory of having lived anywhere other than America.
Because of this, the “Dreamers” make a convenient tool for Democrats and other supporters of illegal immigration to open the borders to an increasing number of migrants.
“We are not going to let Donald Trump send them back, putting their lives in peril or tearing their families apart,” insisted Representative Nydia Velazquez (D-N.Y.) Tuesday at a rally on Capitol Hill.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) chimed in, asserting, “There should be nothing partisan or political in this legislation.”
But Florida Republican Mario Diaz-Balart, who has been supportive of some legislative action on Dreamers, thinks it is partisan, and he accused Pelosi and her fellow Democrats of a “PR stunt.” Diaz-Balart argued that the Democrats were not serious about actually advancing a bill on the Dreamers, but rather were simply playing politics. “I continue to implore Democratic leaders to work with me and other Republicans on something with a real chance of consideration, passage and enactment.”
The Democrat bill does address the Dreamers, but as Diaz-Balart noted, it includes others who are not part of that group. According to the Democrat-proposed bill, a Dreamer would have had to have come into the country before age 18, and been in the country for at least four years. They could not have a criminal record, and must either have a job, a high-school diploma, or a GED. To gain full legal permanent residency — and with it, a path to eventual citizenship — the Dreamer would have to be a college student, be in the military, or have held a job for a few years.
Diaz-Balart’s complaint is that the Democrat bill throws in hundreds of thousands of more illegal aliens, presently protected from deportation by the Temporary Protected Status program or the Deferred Enforced Departure program.
President Trump actually offered permanent legal status to the Dreamers last year, combined with his request for funding of the Border Wall, and reform of the family-based immigration visas and an end to the visa lottery. Under the visa lottery, a certain number of foreigners are granted admission to the country, picked at random in a lottery-type system. But Democrats cared more about not building the wall, and maintaining the present visa lottery system and family-based immigration visas than the Dreamers they so often express concern about.
Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA, which opposes open borders, believes the Democrat bill is “unbelievably irresponsible,” dismissing it as a “massive amnesty bill.” She argued that the Democrats are “refusing to even acknowledge the crisis on our southern border.” Jenks expressed hope that the Republicans would not join them in passing what she called an “open-borders agenda.”
In her 2015 book Adios America!, conservative pundit Ann Coulter asserted that much of our present leftist trend is a result of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, also called the Hart-Celler Act. Proposed by Representative Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), co-sponsored by Representative Philip Hart (D-Mich.), and heavily promoted in Congress by Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), the bill abolished quotas for immigrants who had traditionally populated the United States. Passed during the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” the purpose of the Act, Coulter argues, was mostly to improve the fortunes of the Democratic Party by creating an ever-expanding underclass inclined to vote Democrat.
It certainly appears that the Democrats see continued immigration as the principal key to their future. Democrat consultant Patrick Reddy even boasted, “It [the 1965 immigration law] will go down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”
It may be a grand gift to the Democratic Party, but whether it is a gift to the American people as a whole is certainly debatable.
Photo: AP Images
