Oh What Has Become of My Country: America’s Disgrace, Shining Light It Ain’t

Trump caved, even though incredibly 29% of the American people supported the program of taking kids from their parents according to a Quinnipiac Poll. The poll is fascinating in that 55% of Republicans approve it. That to me is shocking. Those most supporting this cruelty are non college educated white men over 50.

One person commented: “Two polls are out on Trump’s policy of separating families of illegal immigrants. Both show it is historically unpopular. @QuinnipiacPoll: 66% oppose – 27% supp (-39% margin)@ipsosus 56-27 (-29% margin). For context, these numbers are lower than any major bill in past 30 yrs.”

On Wednesday Trump announced he was changing his policy of separating children from their parents while sitting at a table surrounded by Republicans from Congress. I was amazes when Senator Lamar Alexander in reminding us of prior president’s actions noted: Nixon’s trip to China, Ronald Reagan’s to the Berlin Wall “in Moscow.” I hope that was just one of those elderly moments and he didn’t believe that.

Trump stated the immigration problem has been going on for forty or fifty years and he is finally fixing it. I have to scratch my head as one whose grandparents were immigrants to understand how immigration is a problem. We now have record low unemployment and a good economy and that has to be in part due to the immigrants who have come here, legally and illegally, over the past fifty years. The other day I heard a Trump supporter tell how Americans cannot get jobs because the “illegal immigrants” are taking them. I figured the guy was writing from Moscow or the former Petrograd because everyplace I go I’m seeing “Help Wanted” signs.

The separation of family’s first brought up by Trump’s chief of staff former Marine general John Kelly and firmly defended on Tuesday by his protegé Kirstjen Nielsen was always a Trump program. When I heard how it was put in effect as a deterrence the idea that no mother or father would want their kids taken from them so by taking their children we can stem the flow of people coming to America I thought of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal for dealing with Irish babies.

Just recently we learned that there is a place where Trump sends the babies and toddlers his government steals. They are called Tender Care Shelters. It seems they are like homes for tiny orphans. I read that orphanages were eliminated back in the 1950s or 1960s.  Ah, I said, that must be the time Trump thought America was great and he’s again instituting things from those days. Are the Mouseketeers still available?

In Trump’s cave,  without admitting he was doing this. He blamed past administrations for putting this problem on his shoulder. I thought he ran for the office and got the job with Russia’s help.

He went on to say he was going to solve the problem by signing an executive order later on Wednesday forbidding the separation of families (something he said he couldn’t do the other day saying only Congress could solve the problem) . He also said he was forced into doing what he did by the Flores decision of the Supreme Court (more on that in another post) even though no previous president found that required him to do it.

It really boiled down to Trump’s hand being forced by the worldwide condemnation of his policy to take kids from parents. Sit back and imagine reading about another country doing this and tell me what you would think of it. Think how no other country has ever done this except perhaps Nazi Germany. Think how President Reagan said: “I believe that Americans in 1980 are every bit as committed to that vision of a shining “city on a hill,” as were those long ago settlers.”

 

24 Comments

  1. Wa-llahi! Why not take over a hotel full of rich bourgeois tourists, and, hold them ransom for the safe treatment of the kids, and, babies, held by the Feds? C’mon you Zapatistas serve them up some of heir own medicine. When you see an appropriately wealthy gringo, kidnap that SOB. Guerreros de Guatemala, the quyet sung phong!

  2. There are 2.7 million minor children in America who have a parent in prison or jail. Thus our government (judiciary/criminal justice system) daily separates children from parents by sending parents to prison. Sad, but necessary in most just trial instances. Moreover, there are about 500,000 children in Foster Care in America, many for years, sadly. There’s a lot of work to be done in America keeping families together. In the 1960s the illegitimacy rate was one in forty births. Today it is one in three births. A lot of children are growing up without a mother or father.
    “Crocodile tears” describes the Leftist cant. A recent magazine article (National Geographic, Smithsonian, Time . .I forget) showed the tremendous decline in the number of persons arrested crossing the border since 2000 till today. A flood has become a trickle as migrants understand they will be apprehended or turned away. In the early 2000s to mid-2000s the floodgates of illegal immigration were opened wide.

    We can develop and deploy human law enforcement programs to protect our borders from illegal entrants . . . .as some noted, we have Asylum Programs in place . . .perhaps we need more of them to more quickly decide the fate of families and individuals.

    Lastly, with 4% unemployment, the only folks calling for more unskilled workers are those who want to suppress wages . . .it seems to me.

    • Bill:

      The question is separating children from parents not parents from children as you seem to suppose. Those children with a parent in jail obviously have a parent or close relative out of jail who offers comfort and support. And I suggest there is a difference between those in prison and those seeking a better life.

      Illegitimacy seems to be an old term. I didn’t think it was in common use especially since many single women who are fairly well off choose to have a child so I’d be reluctant to call the illegitimate. Then again you must know: “The birth rate for unmarried women has actually gone down 14 percent since its peak in 2008.” Now under whose presidency did this peak take place – not Obama’s.

      The decline is an economic one. You will note the flood has just recently begun under the present administration. By the way stop buying into propaganda – no one is trying to suppress wages. No one who wants a job in this environment is prevented from getting one. That 4% unemploymnet rate includes all those immigrants who have come to the country over the last several decades. With the plethora of help wanted signs the idea of suppressing wages if a Fox imagined argument.

  3. Thanks all commentators. I learn a lot from you and appreciate your insights and fact-based opinions.

  4. Will they be welcome in Massachusetts? Plenty of room.

    http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/22/mexican-candidate-immigration-speech/

  5. There are 12.000 children who are in these shelters or centers. 10,000 were not separated from their parents by the US but by their parents who sent them across the border alone. The remaining 2,000 have been separated from their parents because of an Agreement for Judgment the Obama administration entered into, barring children from being detained with their parents for more than 20 days. Even Trump’s new order providing for children to be detained with their parents is dependent upon getting a stay of that judgment. The Obama policy was then “Catch and Release” under which immigrants traveling with children caught after illegal entry were released upon a recognizance to appear in court later. Those appearance have a 97% default rate. Trump ended this policy and started a “zero tolerance” policy, arresting and holding all adults caught after illegal entry. Because of the court order children may not be held with their parents.
    The alternative – and the real purpose of all the hysteria – is to release everyone who is caught entering the country illegally.

  6. John King McDonald

    * Voters’

  7. John King McDonald

    When it is politically convenient to decry Trump voter’s MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN slogan as a Redneck slam on an America that has always been Great, heave away. Now, you lie blithely on today’s politically convenient latitude that has America not being so Great .

    We await the next shift in the wind !

    DEPLORABLE

  8. For fans of the”boo-hoo picture” politics of anti-Whites there is one that you missed. Go to Google Images and search for Justin Lee of Wuxom, MI for a kid who has been separated less than two weeks ago from his parents at age 14. He is proudly wearing his football uniform. Sadly he will not be reunited ever with the family that loved him. He was run down while riding a bicycle by an illegal from South Of The Border, a border liberals refuse to recognize. He is dead. But he was White, likely Christian, so who cares. The Fake News cartel did not feature the story.

    The contrived concern for children separated from their parents did not exist when the policy was in full force under Obama. I guess it is attaching the Trump brand that makes it unacceptable, not the policy. It is OK when when Obama enforced the Clinton [1996] Law. The gushing tear faucet will again be shut off if a Democrat is elected.

    As for America needing workers because of Help Wanted signs justifying turning a blind eye to illegal immigration, what do Democrats have against a labor shortage driving up wages? Nongovernmental workers have not had a real pay increase since the floodgates of immigration were thrown open by illegal and legal means. The percentage of the economy going to labor has decreased while that of Wall Street balloons.

    Usury reigns.

    I want to see more Help Wanted signs. More. And more, until wages are forced upwards. That cannot happen with open borders.

    I want to see Deplorables making so much money that they will be able to raise children at an American standard of living with hope of an even better future. Millions of happy cheerful little towheads, not being killed by hit and run illegals. If that makes me a Racist, I glory in it.

    Livable wages, higher wages, and lots of White Christian babies instead of stagnant wages, high unemployment and subsidized replacement of American citizens by brown babies. Let me rephrase that: Vote Trump Republican or vote Feinstein Democrat. [See Senate Bill 3036 that all Democrats and only Democrats and two Independents have sponsored]. The choice is yours. See you in November.

  9. Notice how Matt and all the liberals now wail about this separating of parents from children when this program has been going on full throttle under Bush and 8 years of Obama and nary a peep from the Dems or Leftists.

    What’s happened to common sense, fairness and objectivity on the Left?

    A friend taught me the virtue of “acceptance” a long ago: when we were asked what we should do about the whirling Dervishes, he said, “Let them whirl.”

    Let the hypocritical Dems, libs and lefties wail!

    And this huff and puff comes from a prosecutor who has recommended sending how many criminal parents to jail, separating children from parents?

    Please Libs, spare us the feigned woe-is-me malarkey.

    Otherwise, have a nice summer.

  10. “By international treaty, asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first country they reach. In these cases, coming from Guatamala and Honduras, that’d be Mexico.”

    Honduras does not border Mexico.

    • Well, whatever the first country is. The point is, as we all know, is that this has been going on for years . . .1997 consent decree is almost 20 years before Trump took office . . .and look how the Dems, Leftists and Libs wailed about that consent decree for all these years

      • Its just a geography lesson, Hill Billy.

        By the way, malarkey, like axe, is accepted without the E.

        • John King McDonald

          Malarkey is always unacceptable !

        • Hillbilly is one word. Just a heads up. Used as an insult is nothing new. Actually, it isn’t an insult at all. Ask the miners how easy they had it. Educate yourself on the coal mine wars and the Miners’ Angel. Margaret Harris Jones. Better known as Mother Jones. “The most dangerous woman in America.”

          Sticks and stones.

          Have a nice day. 🙂

          • Hill Billy is not one word when referring to someone named Bill from Savin Hill. I’m surrounded by real Hillbillies down here in Virginia. They know stuff and are proud of every last speck of coal dust they have sucked in.

          • John King McDonald

            Sanctimony served with a smiley face and a nursery rhyme. How passive aggressive of you, Simon Pure .” Savin Hill Billy ” is a respected participant in all semantic hijinks on this blog. If you choose to participate by snark, then so be it , unfortunate, but hey. But don’t make a fussbudget of yourself. We already have Khalid !

    • Thanks for the correction. That makes it worse. They have to go through several nations to get to the US border.

      • And I have been through several of those nations. In good times and bad they are not fun. I can’t imagine trying to cover distance through that terrain. And if you chose to try it in a boat, good effin luck. I went from southern Belize up to The Yucatan around 70 miles off shore back in the days of LORAN and it was not an easy task. There is a hell of a reef out there.

        Considering conditions I have seen is some Central American countries and what I have heard from those that have come here and have become citizens, what is happening down along the border is a day at the beach compared to the conditions they are fleeing from.

  11. There are 9 US consulates & one US embassy in Mexico where non US citizens can apply for asylum without ANY risk of being separated from their kids.

    By international treaty, asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first country they reach. In these cases, coming from Guatamala and Honduras, that’d be Mexico.

    The current problem stems from a 1997 consent decree under the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that spells out how the government has to handle children at the border. These children have to be separated from a parent once the parent is arrested because children can’t be put in jail or incarcerated — nor should they be. The Trump administration cannot simply ignore the law.