Democrats’ open-border trickery: gaming the Census

Betsy McCaughey Feb. 20, 2024

New York is Migrant Central — the No. 1 destination in the country for illegal border crossers — and it’s no accident.New York’s Democratic politicians benefit from the deluge.

The more migrants come here, the more congressional seats and clout in the Electoral College New York is able to maintain.

Elon Musk spelled it out on Twitter this month: “Most people in America don’t know that theCensus is based on a simple headcount of people (including illegals) not just citizens. This shifts political power and money to states and Congressional districts with the highest number of illegals.”

The busloads coming in from the southern border offset the moving vans exiting the city carrying New Yorkers in search of better places to live.

Migrants are actually helping protect Democratic members of Congressfrom losing their districts as the city’s population shrinks. New York City lost 400,000 residents in the last three years.

They’re being gradually replaced, explains cityComptroller Brad Lander, by a wave of migrants dependent on the city for shelter, food, health care and everything else.“I don’t actually consider it a crisis. To me this is the next wave of people becoming New Yorkers,” he says.

Lander apparently is unbothered that taxpayers are being replaced by people who consume services instead of paying for them. But it’s not sustainable.

Too much spending is one reason New York City’s financial condition worsened over the past year, earning it an F grade in Truth in Accounting’s latest fiscal-watchdog report.

The Big Apple rankedworst of the 75 biggest municipalities. Undaunted by this fiscal decline, New York pols offermore benefits to incentivize migrants to come. Gov. Hochuladded cash welfare for asylum seekers in May. Mayor Adams recently announced debit cards loaded with up to $1,000 a month.

The administrationclaims the cardswill enable newcomers to buy culturally appropriate foods to replace the prepared meals they’re already handed free of charge.Truth is they can use the cards to buy anything they want or possibly take out cash at an ATM.

Topping it off, far-left City Council politicians — who now have the clout to override the mayor — arepushing to eliminate Adams’ 60-day limit on shelter stays.

State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigalis doing the same in Albany, calling time limits “arbitrary and inhumane.” That’s insane. What other city even guarantees shelter? How can New York guarantee it indefinitely to everyone from around the globe?

Department of Social ServicesCommissioner Molly Wasow-Parktold a forum last month to plan on “a probably nontrivial numberof undocumented immigrants who are going to need long-term assistance from the city.” What could possibly explain burdening the city like this?

Partly it’s the Democratic Party’s confiscatory ideology: squeeze taxpayers to give as much as possible to the needy.But there’s raw political self-interest at work, too.

Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-Brooklyn) told a 2021 hearing onHaitian migrants that she wants them so she can hold on to her seat. “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.”

In July 2020,President Donald Trump ordered the Census to subtract the number of undocumentedimmigrants from the headcount, saying, “States adopting policies that encourage illegal aliens . . . should not be rewarded with greater representation in the House of Representatives.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James sued.The case went to the US Supreme Court, but the justices ducked it, leaving the decision to the future.

Now Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) and others have introduced legislation to exclude illegal immigrants from apportionment.

The bill won’t pass in the Democrat-controlled Senate, but Hagerty got to the point: “While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities,desperate Democrats are backfilling the mass exodus with illegal immigrantsso they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes for the presidency.”

That’s the cynical reality here in New York, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles. As more and more migrants arrive, these cities spiral downward.

Migrant gangs raid stores and terrorize pedestrians, shelters overflow, schools struggle to accommodate migrant children, and city services are cut to pay for it all.

Your quality of life be damned.

https://nypost.com/2024/02/20/opinion/democrats-open-border-trickery-gaming-the-census/

Biden’s new border plan shows ‘I can’t do anything’ was always a lie

Mark Krikorian Feb. 20, 2024

The White House has just proven that Republican objections to the Senate border deal were right all along.

In a leaked preview of next month’s State of the Union address in Axios, “a source close to Biden” (i.e., a top White House staff member) has revealed that President Biden is considering the “bold move” of issuing an “executive order that would dramatically stanch the record flow of migrants into the Southwest.”

So he really did have the power to do this, just like the GOP said!

It was just last month that Biden claimed “I’ve done all I can do” to stop the border crisis. In pushing for the terrible Schumer-Lankford bill, he said, “If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now.”

We all know that Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory,” but can he really have forgotten that he always had this authority and chose to effectively open the borders instead?

No, the problem is not the president’s cognitive decline, real as that is — rather, it’s an administration that’s been lying for three years, and has finally realized it has a political problem.

Shortly after kick-starting the border crisis, the president said the immediate jump in illegal immigration was perfectly normal: “It happens every single solitary year.”

Recently impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has repeatedly assured Congress and the public that the border was secure, even as his agency has released close to 3.5 million illegal aliens from its custody into the country (while millions more scurried past overwhelmed border agents).

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has assured us, “The president has done more to secure the border and to deal with this issue of immigration than anybody else. He really has!”

The administration’s lies on immigration have been so brazen, so gigantic, so frequently repeated— and the results so catastrophic — that this last-minute PR move before the election won’t work.

The whole reason for the “bipartisan” Senate bill was to have it rejected by Republicans, so Democratic candidates could shift blame for the border crisis to the GOP. But if the president can just stop the mass infiltration of our border on his own, as Republicans have been saying for years, then the whole rationale for a rushed border bill evaporates.

The leak about the president’s plans didn’t specify what the possible executive order would say, but the president has always had the authority, under Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” any time, for as long as he wants, if he judges that letting them in “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

But he doesn’t even have to take such a “bold move” — he could simply undo some of the 500-plus immigration actions he’s taken over the past three years to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get in and stay.

He could, for instance, detain border jumpers (as he’s required to do by law) instead of letting them go.

To show how dramatic Biden’s border vandalism has been: In December 2020, the Trump administration’s last full month in office, Border Patrol released 17 illegal border jumpers; in December 2023, Biden’s policies resulted in the release of 191,142 — 11,000 times more illegal migrants let loose.

Or Biden could pressure our neighbor to the south to restart Remain in Mexico. Or he could restore the safe-third-country agreements that President Donald Trump had negotiated with several Central American countries.

He could even allow ICE agents to do their jobs again, reversing the policies that have resulted in a 67% drop in deportations of criminal aliens.

Whatever Biden’s going to do, he’d better do it soon.

January saw close to 6,000 illegal immigrants a day at the southern border, down from the almost unbelievable 10,000 a day in December but still six times more than President Barack Obama’s DHS secretary said would overwhelm the department’s ability to control the border.

Each day the president delays doing something to reverse the disaster he’s caused at the border represents thousands more illegal immigrants released into American communities.

Unless that was the point all along.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

(Admitting he constantly lies, he’s lying again, he will not stop the flow. Its a bait and switch.)

https://nypost.com/2024/02/20/opinion/bidens-new-border-plan-shows-i-cant-do-anything-was-always-a-lie/