National Emergency? What Emergency?

By Hank Silverberg

The government is partially shut down, the stock market is on a roller coaster, and the President thinks the 1,954 mile border between the U.S. and Mexico is totally open and we are being invaded. That, he says, is a "National Emergency." He has even hinted he may bypass Congress and use that declaration to take money from the Department of Defense to build a border wall.   

With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at this so called "National Emergency." The overall economy may be slowing down a bit, and that could be a concern. But the stock market’s volatility may have been created by an unstable global market tied somewhat to a series of punitive tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration. The President’s incessant tweets criticizing the Federal Reserve Board over raising interest rates has increased investor's anxiety.

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Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Russia and China are playing the Currency Devaluation game as the U.S. keeps raising interest rates. Not acceptable!

8:31 AM · Apr 16, 2018.

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The second part of this so called "National Emergency," the government shutdown, comes from the inability of the President and his minions in the GOP controlled Senate to compromise on a border wall. They refuse to remove the concept from legislation to fund the government. So those two parts of the so-called “National Emergency” were created by the President himself.

The obsession over the wall is based on faulty information, and Mr Trump's own stubbornness to admit he is wrong. The Department of Homeland Security, including the current leadership, says there are about 12 million people in the United States who came here illegally. That represents just 3.5 percent of the total U.S. population, and 75 percent of them have been here more than ten years. Those statistics are from the government, not immigrant groups or those who oppose the morality of a border wall.  

Those figures have stayed relatively the same over the last few

years, and if you look deeper into government statistics, the flow of so-called “illegals” has gone down over the last decade. About 303,000 people crossed the southern border illegally in 2017, way down from a 1.6 million peak in 2000. More than 16 thousand agents are patrolling the southwest border, almost double the number in 2000. This is an indication that better patrolling may be cutting down on illegal immigration without a wall. There is already a security fence on 654 miles of the U.S. /Mexican border, mainly in urban areas.

In the last four years the border patrol has uncovered 75 tunnels built UNDER fences and buildings. They were used by drug smugglers, not immigrants. But they prove the ineffectiveness of such walls against the sophisticated and real threat at the border, organized criminals, not families with children who are often fleeing drug cartel violence in their native countries. We should be using those border patrol agents to stop drug smugglers, where there has been some success, and the human traffickers who take advantage of the downtrodden. Instead, the current administration has increased efforts against families and children.   

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/

Some more government statistics.  In 2016, when Barack Obama left office, the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States was at its lowest level in a decade. And those same statistics say Visa overstays are now an increasingly significant share of illegal immigration. That means someone who legally enters with a Visa simply stays in the country when their Visa expires. A wall would not stop any of those people.

I could cite many more statistics, including the over 600 thousand DACA participants, immigrants who were brought into the country by their parents illegally when they were young children. They have grown up in this country.  But it’s clear the so-called “crises” at the southern border is no worse, and maybe a bit better, than it was a decade ago and certainly does not constitute an invasion.  

 Mr. Trump has also used some high profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants as another reason for building the wall. But again, the numbers say that is more fear than reality. A study conducted by the "Sentencing Project" has found that in the 18-54 age group, who commit most of the crimes in this country, about 1.53 percent of the native population have committed crimes, while only .85 percent of undocumented immigrants fit that category--a much lower rate. While high profile cases like the recent murder of police Corporal Ronil Singh, in Newman, California, by an illegal immigrant are tragic, such crimes committed by illegal immigrants occur at a much lower rate than the rest of the population. Crime in general in the United States is trending downward, and singling out immigrants of any kind as contributing to a spike in crime just doesn't go along with the facts. 

 https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Immigration-and-Public-Safety.pdf

I have written before how important immigrants have been to the growth and history of this country. Before 1921, the United States did not have general laws against immigration. If you got here, you could stay here, with a few exceptions. That’s one reason two thirds of ALL current residents in the United States are no more than four generations removed from their immigrant ancestors.

https://hanksilverberg.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-nation-of-immigrants-by-hank.html

The first laws were passed because of unsubstantiated fear. For example, in 1875 Congress passed The Page Act, which excluded criminals and prostitutes. But it also prohibited Chinese Contract laborers from entering the country.  It was a reaction to the thousands of Chinese who came here to build the transcontinental railroad, which continued as a major national economic engine well into the 20th century.    

(The "Pens" at Ellis Island  in New York Harbor
where immigrants were screened between 1892 and 1943)

The first major effort at restricting general immigration came in 1921 when a yearly quota of 350,000 immigrants was specifically aimed at people coming from eastern Europe. These were mostly Poles, Jews, Russians, Hungarians and others who had been uprooted by World War One. You can find a good timeline here: https://infoplease.com/us/immigration-legislation.

Again,  unsubstantiated fear about disease, poverty and crime was the motive.

If you look at the statistics and then examine the rhetoric coming from the White House and some in Congress, then history is repeating itself. Drastic restrictions on immigration in the past did little to stop the Great Depression or to end it. They may have actually contributed to World War Two and the Holocaust by encouraging repression of minorities or the displaced in other countries around the world.

Before you fall for the rhetoric of blaming the illegal immigrants for your own troubles, take out the family photo album and look at the photos of your grandparents or great grandparents, or great- great- grandparents. What would your life be like had they been kept out of the U.S., and what would the United States look like now? Some of you will argue of course that your ancestors came here legally. But how many of your ancestors came here as refugees from war or political or economic turmoil in their native countries? The answer is millions.

The Trump Administration's policy is not just to build a physical wall to keep people out. It is a policy of exclusion of anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of who should be an American.

 https://www.us-immigration.com/us-immigration-news/us-immigration/new-bill-proposes-massive-restriction-on-legal-immigrants/

They are also working on new laws to make it harder to immigrate to this country  LEGALLY as part of the so called “America First” policy. 

 This effort is as cruel and un-American today as that first law against Chinese laborers was in 1875.  

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