Time to Stop Being Stupid About Immigration

It is at the door that we invite our friends to come in and our enemies to stay out.

 

We're watching a tragedy taking place in Afghanistan, a place where we have shed American blood for 20 years. People I love have died over there in what this administration threatens to make meaningless the cause they gave their lives for. Just a bad, the nation and the people we tried to help are being abandoned by this Administration and left to be tortured and murdered by the Taliban. Sadly we here mostly two responses among the chattering classes. (1) Profound silence and more than a little patting themselves on the back.What they're so proud of, I can't figure out. (2) Let 'em die, we should never have been there in the first place, an attitude I find utterly incomprehensible.

This confirms my belief that the devil has agents on both sides of the political debate and has had for some time. That a conservative Christian could even think that, because Biden is a senile old communist, we should just say tough luck to the translators, suppliers, teachers, families, kids and everyone who relied on us during the conflict and let the Taliban conduct a massive general slaughter just like the Communists in Vietnam did. The media and the left didn't say much about the Vietnamese Communists murdering 2 million people that cooperated with the US during the Vietnam war. And Republicans sat back and barely made a peep themselves, other than to take in a ton of refugees that managed to escape by boat or by bribing corrupt American officials.

American soldiers answer the call to fight evil - again!

Disappointingly, many of my more hard core conservative friends say, well, it's not our worry. We shouldn't have been there in the first place. Or because government officials "did it wrong", we should just get out because it wasn't done right. As if that will somehow fix things? Do you people have some kind of time machine where you can go back and correct the mistakes our Democrat friends made and somehow that will bring back the millions of dead. Germans were slaughtering Jews in 1941. Japanese were slaughtering Chinese in 1941. Were we supposed to stand by and let evil march roughshod over the world. We did the right thing then. We should do it now. If we want to abandon Afghanistan, we should at least offer a way out for those there who believed in us.

I'm kind of a fix what you can kind of guy. Sure Biden made mistakes in how he managed the pullout, especially in abandoning the country to the Taliban in the middle of their fighting season and by telling them when, where, and how we would pull out. Did our new progressive overlords forget the people who trusted us in Afghanistan - some kind of a big oops? No. I just think they don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. Progressives have this stunning ability to ignore their own inhumanity to people who trusted us. They do not learn from history. Cause and effect mystifies them. If the ideology doesn't work, it's just because someone else did it wrong. Then they go back to focus instead on navel gazing and power accumulation. It's an incredibly myopic way to look at the world. My thought is to shame them. Throw their own words back in their face. Make them face their duplicitous double standard.

Sadly, some on the supposedly conservative "Christian" side have the same ability to ignore the consequences of what we propose to do and focus instead on counting coup against the evil liberals.

It's like the border crisis. The left wants to open the borders, let the tired, the poor and huddled masses (along with the drug mules, terrorists and sex traffickers) come across unimpeded in hopes of manipulating them to one day vote Democrat. That's why they object to voter ID and election fraud prevention laws. On the other side, we get so focused on keeping out the potential Democrat voters and job-stealers (along with the drug mules, terrorists and sex traffickers) that we want to throw them all back into the horrific places they come from. 

 

Irish and Chinese railroad workers were mistreated by myopic Americans
who were fearful that immigrants would take jobs that they really didn't want.
That said, they got the job done anyway, despite the abuse.

We, conservatives, too often forget what immigration waves have done for this country in the past. Every single American's ancestors came here from somewhere else. Immigration, for however hard you argue for your opinion, is not a black or white issue. Let 'em all in or throw them all out? Incredibly, there's not much in the way of solutions offered that are not all one or the other. Me, I think we should both slam the borders shut AND open the border's doors to lots of legal immigration.

 

What I think we should do is set up English classes and American citizenship classes in embassies all over Central and South America to prepare people to come to America. We lock the border down tight to keep out the ne'er do wells. Then, we create a generous guest worker program and welcome in workers willing to learn English and about American history, culture and law. We sign them up to pay taxes, to complete the citizenship process and help them learn things like money management (banks are thrilled to teach classes in that kind of thing). We protect these refugee workers through the department of Labor and OSHA so there is no profit for corporations, agri-business, crooked politicians and others to abuse these laborers by sticking them in colonias without water, electricity and sewer services and paying them a pittance in cash and food stamps to keep them in virtual slavery.

Make refugees legal and we'll get millions of hard-working people who hate communism and corrupt government; family folk who value life, love free markets and will work very hard to establish businesses. Most will more nearly embrace Republican values than otherwise. And a rising tide, after all, does indeed lift all boats. They will build homes and buy homes. They will raise and process food and buy food. They will make things and buy things we make. They will provide services and buy services. The economy and the job market is not a zero sum game, though some of my conservative friends seem to forget that.

The reason the left opposes this type of program and votes down guest worker programs every time they come up, is that such people with this value set don't generally vote Democrat. Just check out the Cuban American community in Florida and see how they vote - solidly for Trump last time despite the election fraud. Biden is catching and sending back Cubans escaping from Cuba right now. They aren't reliably going to vote Democrat. He'd rather have the poor and ignorant and unprotected who are forced to work terrible jobs for slave wages who can be intimidated by ICE if they get rambunctious or don't vote the right way. And besides, by sending back Cuban refugees he can punish the Cuban American immigrants already here for voting for Trump.

On the far right we also have our share of idiots who want to build a wall completely around the US without any doors in it at all and try to preserve everything like it is. That's stupid. An economy that doesn't grow, a nation that fails to produce new workers soon begins to fail. European population numbers are shrinking and Euro-business is pulling workers from the Middle East to fill in the dwindling pool of workers. It's a perfect example of what happens when you let your population dwindle without considering who you want to invite to come to fill in the worker shortage. Multi-ethnic cultures can work very well if the cultures share similar values.

 

I used to go to the North Texas Irish Festival
every year. I once performed there during my
abortive career as a folk singer.

I grew up in Texas where our Hispanic community is an economic powerhouse - at least those who came here legally or grew up in Texas. Our food is Tex-Mex. Many of us speak Tex-Mex or are bilingual. We share a common history. Did you know there were Latinos who fought and died at the Alamo and marched with Sam Houston. I know some of their descendants. It was a mixed race mulatto girl Texican who distracted Santa Anna while Houston was busy attacking his Army. They wrote a song about her - The Yellow Rose of Texas. Lots of Texas counties are named for Hispanic heroes of the Texas revolt. In Texas we have every sort of ethnic festival you can imagine. We have Hispanic celebrations like Cinco de Mayo. Juneteenth started in Texas. We have Polish, Czech, German, Celtic, African, Vietnamese, Irish, Native American and festivals celebrating every sort of fruit and vegetable you can imagine. We have rodeos, tractor pulls and rattlesnake roundups. We can live together peaceably if the ideologues will just let us.

By confusing border control with border closing, we're all wasting an opportunity to import hundreds of thousands of legal immigrant free-market capitalist, hard-working, pro-life, pro-family Christians. But don't get me wrong, though.Let's neither open the floodgates, nor dam the river up completely. Let's instead respond intelligently to the pressure from Latin America that is driving out their best people. We always get the good ones in these pressured migrations if we're careful. We also get some of the bad ones if we don't watch what we're doing, but with today's criminal databases, it's a lot more likely we'll catch the rotten apples. Asians and Irish immigrants built the railways. Greeks and Italians built wonderful communities and businesses. We just should have done a better job of screening out the mafiosos, though. Scandinavians and Poles built vast farms and ranches, meat-packing and food processing industries. The Scots brought a wave of engineers, metal-working industries, financial businesses and banking. The French sent waves of Huguenot shop-keepers and merchants. British refugees brought us sailors, and traders, farmers and lawyers. German refugees brought craftsmen and manufacturing skills.The west coast has vibrant Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Samoan, Ukrainian, and Russian communities. 

 

The Cinco de Mayo parade in Alpine, Texas. Now Cinco de Mayo festivals
serve up some amazing food. Don't wanna miss 'em if there's one you can get to.

A lady from Ukraine I met up here in Washington complained to me that she escaped the Soviet Union to get away from communism. She loves this country and its amazing freedoms. "Why are you fools trying so hard to become communist?" she asked, clearly frustrated with the progressive obtuseness of our Washington state government. But my friend is an example of the American phenomenon of attracting people who are as Everett Dirksen once said, "Yearning to be free." And they're hard-working to boot. We need such people. Heaven knows, we American parents have raised too many of the other sort to maintain a free and healthy economy.

Why are we not taking advantage of the opportunity to bleed off the best of Latin America and make Americans of them? I know what they'll do. They'll give the economy a kick in the pants. Many will build and operate their own America-based businesses with factories and agri-business down in Central and South America and help bring prosperity back to those blighted nations from which they came (and everyone can make a little money in trade at the same time). That's the beauty of capitalism. You let it run and everyone benefits, especially if you enforce your trade laws and don't elect politicians who will take bribes and protect just the big corporations the way a certain party has always done while accusing Republicans of what they themselves do. If we could hold power for long enough to bring in people who share conservative Christian values and teach them how much we are like each other, red states would become more powerful and Democrats would be extinct in no time.

The trouble is, Satan works both sides of the aisle and makes left wing and right wing extremists blind, stubborn and stupid. Jesus is going to have to come soon and snatch up the good folks from all over the world, scrub this planet clean and then set us all back down on the Earth made new and stand back and let humans do what humans were created to do - tend the garden, build, plant and tend to our homes and help each our neighbors. What a wonderful world that will be!

Doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something right for a change while we're here though.

© by Tom King

An Open Letter to People in Central America Who Want to Be Americans

 

First off, I do understand why you want to come here. I also worry about you. You are crossing into trouble and I want to help you. The people who are encouraging you to come to America illegally; the people who want to throw open the BACK door for you are not your friends. They have a use for you and have a long long history of racism, exploitation and even promotion of slavery. 

The majority of Central Americans fleeing to America come with firm beliefs. They tend to be 

 

(1) Pro-choice, 

(2) Pro-Family, 

(3) Pro-Christian, 

(4) Pro-free market capitalism, 

(5) Mostly one of two genders.

Is this any way to enter a new homeland.

In other words, you guys are Conservatives. You're our peeps. Hey, I've been recruiting hard to bring you over to join the folks who have long been anti-slavery, free market capitalists. America is the land of opportunity. I welcome you to the United States and would like to apologize for how Democrats have exploited you, shoved your families into colonias (basically tar paper slave labor camps without running water, sewer or electricity), and pay you next to nothing to pluck chickens, milk cows, build houses, buildings and roads and dig ditches. 

 

I just wish our leftist politicians had let us create a more humane way for our friends from Latin America to become American citizens. If we could improve opportunities for you to enter legally, you could have been better protected you from coyotes, drug cartels and the perils of crossing deserts, rivers and mountains. You don't have to do that. We do have bridges and border crossings believe it or not. We should have English language schools in every consulate in Central America and citizenship classes, screening processes to weed out drug mules, terrorists and gang members, and a guest worker program leading to citizenship.

You should not have to risk death in
the desert to get here.

Please note that there are those in powerful positions in our government take money from powerful corporations and corrupt business. They do not wish you to have this opportunity but to keep you working at virtual slave wages. They will resist efforts to provide you a safe and legal means of becoming Americans. It is to their advantage to keep you poor and downtrodden and is in their interests to pretend to care about you and your children, to lie to you and to help you vote illegally for them so they might remain in power.

The truth is America has plenty of room. Many of you are Americans in your hearts practically from birth. You will make good citizens and taxpayers and you will make our country rise as have generations of legal immigrants. Generations of immigrants have fled oppressive countries and made their way to the land of the free. Each wave of immigrants has made us stronger. Sadly, this latest wave is being forced to enter via the back door, illegally making them vulnerable to manipulation and abuse. For them to do this you must be denied opportunity, freedom and even a place in the culture.

Many of us are working on a solution to this problem. 

 

It's already started.

Please be patient with us. We are working
against powerful forces both here and in Central America to prevent you from rising in the world. Conservatives believe the economy is not a zero sum game and that there is plenty of room for hard-working people to succeed.

Pray for us. We are fighting truly evil forces. God be with you all. I pray that we find a way to at once protect our nation AND bring you safely home to America.

Tom King

 

I Am Neither Anti-Immigration Nor Anti-Immigrant

I understand from certain professors in my own church that I am, to my horror, anti-immigrant. Despite no evidence to support this allegation, I am apparently damned as an immigrant hater because I didn't vote for Joe Biden.

Balderdash!

I am an admitted conservative and as everybody knows we are racists and anti-immigration. But let me tell you a secret. We conservatives are not anti-immigration nor anti-immigrant. There's a word missing in that judgment. The word is ILLEGAL! The truth is that people like me have supported legal immigration of refugees throughout our history and these immigrants have done well here. Immigrant waves have been providing this country with valuable injections of brains, energy, and innovation that have propelled the US economy to the top of the world economic heap.

There's a problem with the left's sanctimonious support for all those waves of illegal immigrants. What those of you who support open borders are advocating is, in essence, the systematic oppression of Latin Americans. Democrats when I grew up called them wetbacks. The great thing about wetbacks was that they had no legal protections. Corporate manufacturers and big farmers (you know those corporations you leftists love to hate) love wetbacks. They shove them into colonias, where they live in tar paper shacks, no running water, no electricity, no sewer, no police. They ride to work in the back of pickups to their jobs on dairy farms, rose growing farms, chicken processing plants or orange groves. They work for starvation wages, without the protection of OSHA or medical benefits. If they complain the bosses turn them in to immigration and they have to flee or be deported.

It's slavery-lite and Democrat politicians in border states make a nice under-the-table side income protecting it. The government gives them food stamps, but coyotes take pickup loads of women from the colonias to town to shop because they have no other transportation from these remote villages. The coyotes in East Texas were charging them $80 or so worth of baby formula per trip. And this was 18 years ago. The coyotes sell the baby formula to drug smugglers that use the stuff to cut heroin and cocaine. I know. I helped get a bus out to a colonia in our area of East Texas to take the ladies shopping. The coyotes didn't like it and you can imagine how long that lasted.

Transportation is another huge issue for illegals. Every year hundreds of illegals are killed when trucks smuggling dozens are left baking in the Texas sun or roll over scattering migrants like dry leaves across the highway. Five were killed in the overloaded SUV shown below.

 The system hates change. The only thing it would actually like to change is to increase the stream of illegals (undocumented workers if you prefer). The more illegals that cross the border, the less you have to pay them. Trump's stemming of the tide of illegals has caused consternation among corporations that exploit them. They're having to pay more workers minimum wage these days. I'm not anti-immigration nor anti-immigrant. I'm anti-slavery. And it's no accident that Democrats and corrupt corporations support illegal immigration. They are surely feeling relief at the sudden surge of illegal border-crossings after the Biden inauguration. The surge will supply them a steady stream of cheap labor and grateful employers will supply politicians with plenty of extra income to look the other way. 

Legal immigrants, however are protected from exploitation by the Department of Labor, OSHA, and police. Want to help immigrants? Create a guest worker program. George W. Bush tried to, but Democrats opposed it and worked behind the scenes to kill the idea all the while posing as caring about those poor immigrants and nasty old Trump putting kids in cages. Actually, it was Obama that built the cages. Trump closed that facility.

Now Biden has reopened that same facility with all the cages again, that his former boss built and filled with Latin American children. You don't hear much from the media about that for some reason. Seems it's going to be back to slavery for the easy-to-exploit illegals. Your unearned moral superiority rings hollow to me. I've seen the colonias. The poverty, exploitation, and cruelty is protected by the very people who advocate open borders and winking at the sex traffickers, smugglers, terrorists and violent gangs that hide within the stream of undocumented folks. Once again they are streaming across the border into the virtual slavery, encouraged and protected by the same party that hood-winked poor Southern whites into fighting to preserve this same sort of "peculiar institution". 

It was that same party of the KKK, Jim Crow, Poll Tax, lynchings and segregation which fought for a hundred years to keep minority peoples oppressed. We on the right don't hate immigrants. We hate the massive corrupt system that lures desperate people here into the modern version of plantation slavery. By the way did you know that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration? He even deployed union farm workers to the border to turn back illegals because they undercut his efforts to win a living wage for farm workers. So how about checking that moral high horse at the door and work with people who actually care about refugees? Democrats won't help of course, because legals tend to work hard, succeed as business owners and become Republicans. Most are escaping the various socialist tyrannies in the old world. Illegals, they figure, can be kept down, kept ignorant and forced to be dependent. Oppressed people are more likely to vote as they are told, which explains why Dems want to give them the vote.

© 2021 by Tom King

A Working Solution to Illegal Immigration

Colonia living - the reality of unchecked illegal immigration.

I wrote a blog a week or so ago about how Jesus' version of the Golden Rule was more pro-active than any of the earlier versions.  Suddenly, I was getting comments about how I couldn't be in favor of the Golden rule if I didn't criticize Donald Trump for "ripping children from their loving parents" over the illegal immigration thing. 

So how in the world did this get to be about immigration? If they're challenging my view of the Golden Rule, I've been absolutely consistent about that. I have repeatedly stated my position on the immigration issue. And I have expressed my disgust with our leaders and their policy of putting kids in detention facilities behind chain link fences and bars, I actually worked with groups that sought to create safe places for kids separated from incarcerated parents. We wrote grants and created plans for how to handle children when their parents are arrested. 

I might ask my critics, what have they done about the situation?  I actually have long ago expressed my concern about the situation with undocumented children.............way back in 2014 under the previous administration!  It's a shame that we had to get ourselves a TV celebrity president in order to get anything done to correct the problem. My previous comments were likely unsatisfying to my leftist friends. If you guys don't recall my speaking out on the subject, you haven't read much of my stuff. I can appreciate it that I didn't trash the President as my leftist buds wished me to do. I find that even presidents can't wave magic wands to instantly cure every ill of the nation. I do NOT want to have a president who can do that anyway. Too much scope for misuse of power by such a "Dear Leader".  

Compassion of the sort Jesus asks, takes a lot more than the right sort of political rhetoric and unearned moral superiority. It takes time and effort right where you live. I've helped feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal broken spirits of abused and mentally ill children, provide resources for disabled people to live independently, teach children with learning disabilities, care for seniors with age-related disabilities and provide transportation resources for transportation-challenged seniors and low-income families and individuals.  Did that for four decades so far. I don't remember Jesus saying that making rude remarks about any non-progressive/Democrat that gets elected President of the United States was one of His commandments. I think he did the right thing closing off undocumented immigration. It strangles the wage-slavery racket and THAT is a good thing

So, why not go after the farmers and Tyson Chicken and other employers who hire them for cheap wages? Why not correct the Social Security, Drivers License, and other such vetting systems that are already in place in order to better detect forged ID’s? Why not remove the ability to make money if they aren’t in the proper status? Ants don’t come in droves unless you leave the sugar bowl out and open. That is something Trump has been touting since the campaign trail. He knew of this caravan a month before they arrived. What did Trump or Sessions do to fix the systems currently in place....nothing much yet. But if you pay attention, you know that changing government policy and practice moves at a glacial pace so the slowness of change should not be terribly surprising! 

So far, Republicans have talked a lot about border security, but so far not much has been done by the right, except tout a fuzzy idea that Mexico is gonna pay for their wall.  I am disappointed in them for their continued waffling on that. One liberal friend tried to accuse Republicans of being behind the exploitation of illegals, despite their having consistently been in favor of tougher illegal immigration enforcement. Another asked, "Why do you suppose Allis Chalmers or John Deer haven't come out with some kind of celery or strawberry combine by now?" hinting that evil Republicans were suppressing this technology. Baloney! The only reasons a machine pushed around by a tractor can't pick delicate vegetables is because it's not yet cost effective (too much waste of the crop) and the technology for that kind of picking just isn't there yet. We still need human pickers. We just ought to pay them what they are worth for doing it is all I'm saying. 

And the "What would Jesus do?" argument doesn't hold. Christ would definitely NOT continue a policy that results in Hispanic laborers living in squalor and fear and THAT is exactly what "catch and release" policies of the past have done.  We need to close the border hard. Then, and only then we can deal with whatever needs to be done about undocumented workers and refugees so that they are documented and need not live in fear and subjugation on company plantations.  

Okay, NOW YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU GUYS ON THE LEFT WOULD DO ABOUT THAT. The president has already addressed the family separation issue. How about closing the border and a decent guest worker program for farm laborers and such. The companies and farmers that need such workers should have to sponsor their guest workers. After all they are the ones making all those vile profits off of undocumented workers. Of course, supporting such a system would likely cost a whole bunch of politicians a whole bunch of campaign funds from those businesses that profit off the illegal immigration status quo.

Now I will close by kindly asking my leftist buddies to stop telling me I never offer any solutions to the problem.  Note:  This is a solution.

Just sayin'

© 2018 by Tom King

False Equivalencies, Logical Fallacies and Memes That Work "Too Well"

A friend posted this complaint about the plethora of memes defending President Trump's immigration policies, particularly putting immigrant in protective custody of DHS while their parents are being processed. Note I didn't use the words "atrocity" or "humanitarian crisis" as my leftist friends do. My friend claims that every one of the memes he's seen uses a "false equivalency" logical fallacy as "proof." This approach, he says, has become the go-to method of influencing public opinion. People simply pass these memes along with no regard as to whether or not the information is factual or misleading. And the frightening thing, he says, is that it seems to be working!

Yes, it is frightening that the left can't make this horrible situation stick to Trump. The trouble with my friend's argument is that the false equivalencies that I have seen are heavily on the rabid anti-Trump side. The media and Democrat side would have you think that suddenly Donald Trump started ripping children from their parents for no reason other than to be mean. This is not true. 

Here's why:

(1) The policy was started under Bill Clinton and expanded under Obama. Bush tried to close the border and create a guest worker program, but neither party was having it.

(2) It was a good policy to place kids in custody of DHS (which does the same thing if American parents are arrested). Trump started processing illegals as misdemeanor offenders. You don't leave kids in detention facilities with adults who may be smugglers, sex traffickers, drug mules, cartel enforcers or terrorists. It's not safe and ICE doesn't have enough family-friendly facilities to handle the surge of illegals.

(3) The kids are only kept until the parents are processed and then they are reunited and returned to their home countries. I think it's that "returned to their home country bit that's causing the Democrats to have the flutters.

(4) The hyperbole about kids whose mothers are in Mexico and the kids still in the states? That kind of thing happens when you write a phone number on the kid's forehead and send him across the border alone or you bring a whole undocumented family across illegally and can't prove the kids are even yours. Sometimes kids are over here along because Mom never crossed the border in the first place but came alone or with a "friend" or was abducted by traffickers. That's one of those things where you need to know the rest of the story. I know ICE agents and they aren't cruel people. 

Children of illegals thrown into "jail".  This was 2015 in
California. Want to guess who was president and
over the ICE at the time. Want to guess. I'll give you a
hint:  Big ears, goofy grin, wants to fundamentally change
America? How did that work out for you anyway?

(5) One reason kids get separated from "parents" is because they are "undocumented" and DHS is reluctant to reunite kids with adults who may not actually be their parents. An immigration attorney in Texas just got through sending out the word through the Associated Press that if you have a child with you, ICE won't prosecute you. She just encouraged drug mules, cartel enforcers, terrorists, sex traffickers and such to grab a random child before they cross the border to protect themselves from prosecution.

(6) ICE is overloaded because after 8 years of catch and release under Obama, Trump is talking a border wall. Illegals are rushing the border to try and get across before he builds a wall. That's why the facilities for detaining illegal immigrants are overcrowded and inadequate.

(7) If you want to talk about false equivalency, check how many of those pictures of kids behind chain link were taken back in 2014 under the Obama Administration. The mainstream media did a spate of investigative reports on ICE separating kids from their parents and tried to pin it on the GOP. The stories died very quickly when the blame didn't stick with Republicans but started to fall on President Obama. Obama "solved" the problem by transporting illegals and their kids north and deeper into the US and then releasing them with instructions to come back for "processing" later. Guess how many showed up with their kids to be processed.

(8) Trump is being blamed for a problem he inherited from Obama. And the left is busy wailing about Trump refusing to take responsibility and that conservatives are blaming Obama. Takes a lot of nerve when Bush blaming got so bad under Obama that it became a joke that every time Obama had a problem he would blame George Bush for it. Sad really.

(9) The left is mad at Trump now because he's announced an Executive Order to "handle the problem" of separating kids from incarcerated parents. Have you read the order? There are all these phrases like "as far as possible"; loopholes salted into the thing that leave the President and ICE free to continue incarcerating parents and putting the kids under the protection of DHS as they should be. That's an old Democrat trick to issue some fine-sounding paperwork to make people feel better and then leaving yourself an out to do what you want. Trump learned that when he was a Democrat.

(10) Democrats like Chuck Schumer are advising Democrats to oppose any attempt by the House and Senate to deal with the problem, lest it make Trump look good. That's the real humanitarian issue here. Immigrant kids being used to try and unseat a President and to seize political power.

Colonias in America - no water, sewer or electricity.

This is about memes alright, but it's not the relatively tepid memes defending Donald Trump that are the worst offenders here. I'm sick of the exploitation of the misery of those seeking to escape the horrors of life south of the border. We could do something but the political parties are too busy struggling for power.

Actually President Bush had the answer but he couldn't get either party to come together on the solution. The solution is simple and powerful and frees illegals from what is virtual low-wage slavery her in the US.

(a) Close the border tight. Until we stem the flow, we're fighting a losing battle.

(b) Create a guest worker program. If we need workers for jobs Americans won't do, let's make a legal way for them to come over and do those jobs.

(c) Register illegals already in the country. If they're obeying the law and willing to work put them in the guest worker program. If not, deport them.

(d) Make companies, farms, dairies and others which depend on migrant labor pay a fair wage, taxes and it should at least reach minimum wage for even unskilled labor. That takes care of the whole "jobs Americans won't do" argument.

(e) Close the colonias and arrest the people who profiteer off the fear and isolation illegal immigrants face trying to dodge ICE. If we make them legal through a guest worker program you solve the problems that promote poverty, crime and disease in immigrant communities. Once they are no longer illegal, they are protected by the American justice system from exploitation.

(f) Cut off all aid to nations sending their surplus populations north until they stop it. Let them participate in the guest worker program and let them receive an economic boost from the money that guest workers send back to their countries. The money will got to poor families rather than being filtered through corrupt governments that take 3/4 of all aid money to cover "administrative costs" so that only the tiniest trickle ever gets through to the people it's intended for.

East Texas colonias look like this. Rose growers, dairies, and
chicken plants send pickups to bring the men to work.

I worked for 40 years with kids, adults, the disabled, seniors, poor families and immigrants - illegal and otherwise. I saw the conditions in the colonias firsthand, the exploitation of illegals by chicken processors, rose growers, farmers and dairymen (all good Democrats contributing regularly to their congressmen, senators and such to buy protection for illegal immigration and what amounts to slaver labor and exploitation of illegals).

The Democrat party claims to have undergone this big change back in the 60's and renounced white supremacy and slavery utterly. I don't see it. They just changed their tactics for keeping minorities enslaved and on the plantation. I saw too much over the past 4 decades to buy the memes about Democrats being for the working man. I served during the time the Democrats were in power in Texas and watched the rise of the Republicans. Things got better under Governor Bush and his successors, let me tell you. And like with Trump, the Democrats ran the most shameless disinformation campaign trying to discredit the GOP in Texas that you ever saw. I was part of efforts to disrupt the Democrat good old boy networks and for a time I had to check under my truck before I started it up in the morning to see if there were any funny wires under there. I was warned. 

Don't kid yourself, the movement behind leaving our current system
in place is about cheap labor and keeping migrant workers living
in fear of ICE in order to keep them submissive to the bosses.

Democrats, I found in my years working in human services, are about accumulating power above all else. They will tell you it's all about having the power to "make things right". But they never do. Things always seem to get worse. Too many country club Republicans, though, have become afflicted with the same lust for power and are afraid to do what's right lest it cost them an election. Shame on them too.

It's time someone really helped these people for a change. I just don't hold out a lot of hope. Slavery is too handy a tool for hanging on to your wealth and power. And I am here to tell you, that what unrestricted illegal immigration is all about is virtual enslavement of minorities, particularly Hispanic "undocumented" immigrants. The term "undocumented" is kind of revealing. If they aren't documented, you don't have to pay them much and they can't complain because ICE might catch them and send them back to where they were starving or being murdered in their beds. The workers may earn a pittance for their very hard labor, but they are still slaves in my books.

That's the humanitarian crisis. Remove the fear and create a legal means for refugees to cross the border and you'll solve the problem. The trouble is, if you remove the fear, you remove the necessity to vote Democrat and if you're a good Catholic or Christian and a documented worker so you don't have to be afraid of ICE, you might just vote for a party that shares your family and Christian values, opposes abortion, disapproves of gay marriage, promotes religious and family values and espouses greater opportunity to rise in the world if you are poor.

No wonder Dems support catch and release. It keeps the fear in place and makes it easier to keep "undocumented" workers down on the farm and subservient.

© 2018 by Tom King

Hooray for Friedrich Trump!

Friedrich Trump

Historian finds German decree banishing Trump's grandfather!

 

So screams the headline in the British Tabloid, the Guardian, a news agency of the caliber of a World News Daily, National Enquirer or the New York Times. The Guardian is breathlessly reporting that a "historian" has discovered that Donald Trump's Grandpa Friedrich Trump (or Drumpf if you believe other "historians"), was banished from Germany for failing to do military service. My Democrat friends have been quick to gleefully point out that, "The apple doesn't fall from the tree." Apparently this is some kind of counting coup thing, a quaint tribal custom they have apparently learned from Elizabeth Warren's Native American tribe.

Are you people kidding? First of all, Friedrich had already left Germany for America in 1885 and simply forgot to de-register for the German draft. When he tried to re-enter Germany, they wouldn't let him in because his draft notice had come back unanswered because Trump was off in Alaska running a bordello for gold miners by all accounts. So the story goes flat there and the spinning of the story gets immediately filed in the "fake news" box by anyone who actually reads the whole story all the way to the end and not just the headline.

Besides, back then, all the best people were being kicked out of Europe and Asia - from all of the Old World countries for that matter. The "civilized" countries were getting rid of their troublemaker and these independent thinkers were drawn to America like moths to the flame.

 

And another thing. Weren't these same guys trying to Trump-shame the President, also the very little Ikes who have been telling us ad nauseum that we need immigration to improve our workforce? And the answer is, "Of course we do!" And Friedrich Trump came here LEGALLY. That's the point isn't it? Legal immigrants have never in our history been as welcome as they are now. We are robbing the world of excellent doctors, engineers, computer programmers and scientists right and left. What hard-working oppressed person wouldn't want to come here. It's why we've succeeded as a nation. We take in the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free and we make them into energetic, wealthy, independent individuals who are, in fact free! As Bill Murray so eloquently put it in his famous speech in the movie "Stripes", "We're Americans. We've been kicked out of every decent country in the world! We're Mutts! That's what makes us great!"

 

The truth is that the German Army was an instrument of oppression at the time. The fact that Grandpa Drumpf refused to serve in that organization and left his native land forever is a point in his favor to my way of thinking.

So way to go Grandpa Drumpf! An honorable man escaped from a dishonorable country. He never launched mustard gas at anyone. He never rolled over a peaceful neighbor country in a tank. He never raped a French girl. If you ask me Grandpa Friedrich was fortunate to have got out of that appalling country when he did. Germany was fast becoming an evil place. One might even call it a "$#!+hole" (to coin a phrase that Democrats can't prove the president ever said).

Just sayin'

© 2017 by Tom King

If You Don't Have an Accent, You Ain't Speakin' English!

 

 

There's a meme going around about how the poster is an immigrant who is accepted because they are white and "don't have an accent". It's supposed to make us feel guilty about being white, of course because we "notice" people's accents if they are foreign or ethnic. Well, I'm here to tell you that if you don't have an accent, you ain't speakin' English. The truth is that everybody has an accident. Even TV broadcasters borrow their artificial accents from the American Midwest. Someone evidently decide that the people in the middle should be considered as having the average American language style. Now they teach this style of English at all the nice liberal journalism schools.

Sometimes I think God chose English for America's predominant language. After all, English is adept at absorbing the words of other nations and cultures and make them their own. Every language has words for things that other languages don't have. Unlike French which constantly obsessed with making itself pure, if English speakers see a word they like, they just steal it. English vocabulary is stuffed with words from everywhere in the world - thanks in large part to the fact that England was a sea-going empire and set up shop worldwide. Exposed to the local languages, the servants of the British Empire borrowed them at will - especially words for the various types of food they encountered.

 

All this word borrowing from impossible languages like Celtic, French, Latin and German, makes spelling English words a nightmare. Still, it also makes the language wonderfully adaptable.English speakers can say things that people have to spend paragraphs to say in other languages. There are probably a few foreign words it might take us a couple of sentences to translate, but that's only because we haven't borrowed them yet. Be certain we will. We may not have invented it, but schadenfreude (pleasure in the misery of others) has become a surprisingly popular sin in the English-speaking world.

I suspect that English has more and varied accents than any other language in the world. We're also a mobile race (and by race I mean a multi-cultured people united by a common language of sorts). We carry our speech patterns everywhere with us. Visit Newfoundland and you'll find a deep Irish culture. New York City has as many accents as it has boroughs. Television has spread the Valley Girl speech pattern into corners of every high school in the nation. It's become sort of the lingua franca of blondes. And as a Texan, most people can identify me by my speech, especially if I'm tired or have been talking to family members back home on the phone.

 

Our most recent presidents from FDR on, all had accents from New York, Missouri, Kansas, Massachusetts, Texas, California, Midwest, Georgia, TV broadcaster standard, Massachusetts, Arkansas, Texas, West Coast, and now New York standard. We don't notice the accent so much here because they come from all over. We simply assign the accent to the person the way we identify Obama's ears, Trump's hair and Hillary Clinton's dumpy wild-eyed hysteria.  Accents, at least in America, do not mark you the way they do in England or Germany. There is no high or low English. It's simply English and it always has an accent.

So anybody who doesn't have an accent is trying too hard to be something he or she can never be - an unaccented American. We all carry around in our voices, the echoes of our ancestry and our home. You know, I quite like it that way. It's very American.

© 2017 by Tom King

Jesus was not a Refugee!

The latest liberal meme out there is that Jesus was a Refugee. The message is that if Trump does his executive order on stopping immigration from Muslim countries, we might be turning away someone like Jesus and that would be mean.
 
But Jesus was not a refugee. Refugees flee from danger and distress. Jesus did not flee Heaven to come to Earth. He is nothing like a refugee. He came here deliberately to rescue the refugees of Earth. 

Jesus stands at the gates of Heaven and will choose which of us may enter in. The nice thing is that He knows who really wants to be there and who will tear it down if allowed in the gates. Jesus does flawless extreme vetting. It's harder for us humans because we cannot read the human heart. All we can do is background checks.

© 2017 by Tom King

The Need for Immigration Triage

FDR turned away German Jews seeking asylum prior to WWII.
Are we going to repeat that shameful episode?

I'm hearing a lot of pushback from the left over Trump's policy of placing a priority on admitting Christian refugees from places like Syria, calling it a "religious" test for admittance. It's no such thing anymore than it is a policy of excluding people by nationality. After all, we wouldn't have imported large numbers of Germans or Japanese or even Italians during WWII. And folks, we are at war with ISIS. It's just that they've declared war on us and our past president kept pretending they hadn't.


Prioritizing Christians from Syria would be rather like putting a priority on Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide by Hutu forces. Would liberals have complained that it was a "racial" test? It's no such thing. It's saving the people who are in the greatest danger and making sure you don't "rescue" the very people that want to slaughter them. 

And don't tell me there's no risk. A Coptic Christian from Egypt was beheaded in New York by a Muslim jihadi from Egypt. We've seen Muslim extremists come to the States and carry out honor killings against American Muslim girls. Just one incident like this is too many. 

We need a common sense immigration and refugee policy. What we have now is muddle-headed chaos based, not on the threat to refugees, but on the immediate past president's need for virtue signaling. People are dying. We can help. Saving Christians isn't about a religious test. It's triage. It's like if a boat sinks and rescuers start plucking the drowning people out of the water first and THEN going around to pull out the people wearing life jackets. It's a needs test, not a religious test. Christians are being murdered and persecuted because of their religion. How hard is that to understand?

© 2017 by Tom King

There Are Quislings Among Us

Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling certainly did not intend to add his name to the lexicon of several languages. He certainly didn’t intend to be stood up against a wall and shot. He was just a “conservative” trying to get ahead. He started out okay, organizing famine relief to Russia in the early 20s while working for the Norwegian government. He even attacked leftist office-seekers but failed to garner much support for himself and his party. Then opportunity smiled on Vidkun and the Germans invaded Norway. Quisling made an unsuccessful coup de’ tat attempt in 1940, but the Germans didn’t support him. Instead they made him a puppet head of a puppet government during the Nazi occupation, which satisfied his political ambitions, albeit for a brief time only ending in the afore-mentioned firing squad.

Quisling was notable chiefly for his opportunism, taking the easy path to power when he saw the opportunity. His lackluster career as a Nazi puppet seems to indicate that Vidkun’s heart wasn’t really in it, but like the old saying goes, “any port in a storm” and Quisling quickly tied up at Hitler’s docks. Other, more principled Norwegians opposed the Third Reich. Many lost their lives in what more practical Norwegians like Quisling saw as a losing cause.

Better to be with the winners, right? Today, we have an angry electorate that is tired of feeling like a nation of losers, failures and all around bad people whose president has gone to virtually every nation we’ve been attacked by and defended ourselves from and apologized to them for our actions – actions like feeding their poor, propping up their economies, defending them from enemies. That sort of thing. They're mad and looking for someone to blame.

And along comes a fast-talking “businessman” who claims to be one of them – a true red-blooded, free market capitalist, who knows just what we need to do to fix all their problems and end their shame. We need to throw out all the Mexicans and Muslims and build a wall and make them, not us, pay for it. We have somehow managed to choose a Quisling for ourselves; someone with just enough bluster and swagger to impress the masses and just enough “flexibility” to win over the bully boys on the progressive left. The anti-immigrant rhetoric creates a nice “enemy within” so that the weak-minded can line up behind their bully candidate and demonstrate their anger without risking anything personally. You see they have a bully who is going to “take care of it” for them.

Trump (or as I call him “He Who Must Not Be Elected”) wants to run out all the “Mexicans”. This smarmy New York liberal knows nothing about it. He hasn’t haven't seen the colonias in East Texas like I have. No running water, no sewers, no transportation, living in cardboard shacks. There are a couple of dozen of them and it is shameful that they exist. Nobody really knows they are there. They only see the men lined up on the corner of Beckham and Line Street, waiting to be underpaid for a hard day’s off-the-book manual labor. They haven’t seen the fat cat "businessmen" pontificating about the illegal immigration problem, while getting rich off the labor of those illegals.

It makes me sick to see these guys masquerading as good Republicans or good Democrats (whoever’s on top at the time - they don't care). All the while they keep these people poor and downtrodden and do everything to make sure that if you are an illegal, you have no way to get ahead; only to barely stay alive and keep working for the bosses.  Then, like our current pretender to the throne, they try to hide their sins behind the banner "Christian conservative" while doing precisely what progressives have been doing all along - protecting the wealthy. It’s the same noxious strategy of “managing” the lower classes and keeping them in line.  That's why I call them quislings. They certainly aren't Republicans in the traditional sense.

I got in a lot of trouble with that lot back when I was doing stakeholder initiatives back in East Texas trying to get some kind of fair shake for what was basically a slave labor force for rose growers and chicken processors. The so-called “Christian conservative" bosses were doing exactly what they were doing when they were Democrats before Republicans took over the Texas legislature. They were doing what their Confederate ancestors did. They use the government to protect their "peculiar institution". No matter that it’s little more than legalized enslavement of Mexican refugees.

Personally, I've always thought that if we wanted to cream the Democrats and put an actual free market conservative small government in place, we should become much more vocal advocates against the abuse and mistreatment of Hispanic immigrants. After all, we share their values - their work ethic, their sense of family, anti-abortion beliefs, religious beliefs and desire for opportunity in the free market. If, instead of embracing quisling imitation conservatives as our leaders, we started using the free market and our basic Constitution-guaranteed freedoms to do what is right, I think we could turn immigrants (legal or otherwise) into Republicans, the Democrats would make sure to slam the border shut faster than you can say, "Midnight emergency appropriations bill."

Besides, isn't freeing slaves from their Democrat/Big Government oppressors what the Republican Party was created to do?  And if you, just then, felt a surge of hatred toward illegal immigrants, then you’re probably not a Christian conservative. Jesus asked us to carry the gospel into all the world and specifically we are told to "Set the captives free." If we did that, made a concerted effort ot set free the illegal immigrant population and to make them one with us, you’d see a powerful force injected into the conservative movement – a force that would, with our help, turn and fight the drug cartels, the terrorists and invaders that threaten our country. Because then, to the horror of our Democrat friends, they would become Americans; flag-waving, God-fearing, free market capitalist Americans. They are already predisposed to be with us anyway, given the values they cross the borders with. They were looking to find the land of opportunity. Why not use that? After all, "All’s fair in love and war," they say. 

So why aren't we, for the love of God, using the twin powers of love and liberty to recruit soldiers to fight in our war against oppression and tyranny? Don't think it will work? Well I'm from Texas and I know for certain sure that there were "Mexicans" at both the Alamo and San Jacinto fighting shoulder to shoulder as Texians united. Why not again? Of course, we first must eject the quislings from amongst us. They're not helping us anyway.

Just one man’s opinion.

© 2016 by Tom King