Trump, GOP senators unveil measure to cut legal immigration

[The Nature Boy 7,659]

9 hours ago, smilesammich said:

you disagree with the transcript? as in you're not accepting it as words said and are boarding your vessel to join alex jones to find the kidnapped child slaves on mars?

You got an obsession with that Alex Jones guy 

[smilesammich 10,727]

10 hours ago, Nature Boy Flair said:

You got an obsession with that Alex Jones guy 

we go way back.

[Dashinka 24,493]

15 hours ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

Isn't this a pro-immigration site?

Pro "Legal" immigrant site.  Advising anyone to circumvent current immigration laws is against VJ TOS.

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

32 minutes ago, Bill & Katya said:

Pro "Legal" immigrant site.  Advising anyone to circumvent current immigration laws is against VJ TOS.

how about cutting legal immigration in half we can talk about that right?

[IAMX 3,055]

30 minutes ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

how about cutting legal immigration in half we can talk about that right?

What does the statue of liberty say about it? Need to check with her on the legality of that.

[smilesammich 10,727]

Quote

Claim: Net migration rates are increasing at a “record pace.”

Fact-check: The most recent numbers from the Department of Homeland Security show legal immigration was higher in 2015 than the previous two years and has been increasing each year since 2013. In 2015, 1,051,031 citizens were granted new legal permanent resident status, an increase of 34,513 people over the previous year. But this is not a record pace and does not stack up to previous fluctuations. The number of migrants to the U.S. spiked from 1.09 million in 1989 to 1.5 million in 1990, an increase of over 400,000.

 

Claim: "Every year, we issue a million more green cards."

Fact-check: This is half-true. It does not reflect the number of people coming into the U.S. each year. In 2015, the Department of Homeland Security reported issuing 1,051,031 new green cards. That being said, only about half of them, or 508,716, were issued to new residents. The rest of the green cards were given to people already living in the U.S.

 

Claim: “The reason why some companies want to bring in more unskilled labor is because they know that it drives down wages.”

Fact-check: Both the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the right-leaning Cato Institutehave found in recent studies that immigrants do not cause any sizable decrease in wages. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reaffirmed the finding that immigration does not impact wages for U.S. residents.

 

Claim: The flow of unskilled workers are “reducing pay for [unskilled labor] positions and reducing [native unskilled workers'] chance of getting those jobs."

Fact-check: Scholars have debunked the idea that immigrants lead to higher unemploymentamong the general population, with the Cato Institute claiming that "higher immigration is not associated with higher unemployment." When it comes to the unskilled or less-educated segments of the population, the research is more divided. George Borjas, a Harvard Kennedy School economist, claims that the salaries of native workers without a high school degree is reduced between 2 and 5 percent by immigrants. But the Urban Institute and others found immigrants and native workers with low levels of education are often competing for different jobs. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found new unskilled immigrants often have the most impact on jobs of other unskilled immigrants.

 

Claim: “Ultra-high-skilled workers are in the back of the line to get into the country.”

Fact-check: It was not immediately clear what Miller was referring to with this statement. The H-1B visas are typically granted to highly skilled workers. It is true that demand for H-1B visas has far exceeded the number granted by the government each year. Members of the tech industry have lobbied to raise the cap on these visas, including Bill Gates, who told Congress an increase was necessary to compensate for “a deficit of Americans with computer science degrees.” Miller said the White House hoped to prioritize skilled, merited applicants, but he did not say whether they would change the number of H-1B visas allotted each year.

 

Claim: "Over 50 percent of our households of legal immigrants today participate in our social welfare system."

Fact-check: Although he didn’t specify a source, Miller appeared to be referring to the Center for Immigrant Studies, which claimed, in 2012, that 51 percent of households headed by an immigrant (legal or illegal) reported that they used at least one welfare program during the year, compared to 30 percent of native-born households. This study has been harshly criticized, even by the right-leaning Cato Institute, which conducted a similar study and found that “low-income non-citizen adults and children generally have lower rates of public benefit use than native-born adults or citizen children whose parents are also citizens.” Under current law, legal immigrants, with few exemptions, are not eligible for most welfare benefits until they have lived in the U.S. for at least five years. In order for immigrants to receive Social Securitybenefits on a green card, they must have already worked for 10 years in the United States.

 

Claim: “Public support is so immense on this [legislation], just look at the polling data in many key battleground states across the country.”

Fact-check: A Gallup poll conducted last January found only 36 percent of U.S. adults were dissatisfied with immigration and wanted less of it. White Americans were twice as likely to want less immigration. But the poll also found that the number of Americans who were satisfied with immigration levels was up to 41 percent, compared to 30 percent the year before. By a large margin, 72 percent said “immigrants take jobs Americans don’t want, compared to 18 percent who said immigrants take jobs U.S. adults want.” In a Pew Research Center poll in January, 77 percent of respondents supported a goal of stricter policies to prevent people from overstaying visas and 58 percent supported a goal of increasing deportation. The same number, 58 percent, supported encouraging "more highly skilled people from around the world to live and work in the U.S."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fact-checking-white-house-adviser-stephen-millers-controversial/story?id=49015930

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

47 minutes ago, IAMX said:

What does the statue of liberty say about it? Need to check with her on the legality of that.

is the statue of liberty one of the mods?  

[CaliCat 3,957]

7 minutes ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

is the statue of liberty one of the mods?  

 

Isn't it ironic that most people who want to immigrate to America are not familiar with Emma Lazarus' poem? 

[smilesammich 10,727]

8 minutes ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

is the statue of liberty one of the mods?  

the statue of liberty is like, so cosmopolitan.

 

Quote

 It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph.”

Why does it matter? Because it reflects a central premise of one key element of President Donald Trump’s constituency—a premise with a dark past and an unsettling present.

So what is a “cosmopolitan”? It’s a cousin to “elitist,” but with a more sinister undertone. It’s a way of branding people or movements that are unmoored to the traditions and beliefs of a nation, and identify more with like-minded people regardless of their nationality. (In this sense, the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine might have been an early American cosmopolitan, when he declared: “The world is my country; all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”). In the eyes of their foes, “cosmopolitans” tend to cluster in the universities, the arts and in urban centers, where familiarity with diversity makes for a high comfort level with “untraditional” ideas and lives.

For a nationalist, these are fighting words. Your country is your country; your fellow citizens are your brethren; and your country’s traditions—religious and otherwise— should be yours. A nation whose people—especially influential people—develop other ties undermine national strength, and must be repudiated.

One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.

What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation. As Foreign Policy put it in 2014:

“The new theme of Russian politics [is] the conflation of loyalty to the Kremlin with patriotism. It says much that dissidents at home, from journalists failing to toe the official line to protesters on the streets, are castigated either as outright ‘foreign agents’ (every movement, charity, or organization accepting foreign money must register itself as such) or else as unknowing victims and vectors of external contamination — contamination, that is, from the West, whose cosmopolitanism and immorality Putin has come to see as an increasing threat to Russia’s identity.”

That same notion has characterized the politics of the former Soviet bloc. In Hungary, the president of its Parliament has repeatedly denounced his political opponents as “people without a country,” loyal only to values like freedom, contemptuous of tradition and religion. Its prime minister, Viktor Orban, has openly advocated for “illiberal democracy” and launched a campaign against the Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. In Poland, the reigning Law and Justice Party sees the nation besieged by dangerous influences. An article last year in World Press succinctly summarized the situation:

“In the party’s propaganda the country is in ruins, its economy robbed blind by international capital, while the foreign ownership of some newspapers and other types of mass media outlets made Poland into a colony, infecting Poles’ minds with rootless cosmopolitanism. … What is at stake is Polish Christian national values that must be protected at all cost, namely the linguistic and religious homogeneity of the country. Only Poles should reside in Poland, and a proper Pole must be a Polish-speaking Catholic.”

In one form or another, such sentiments have been at play in the politics of the Netherlands, Germany, France, and (in less blatant form) in the Brexit vote in Great Britain last year.

And they undergirded much of Trump’s campaign. One of its central premises was that “globalists,” regardless of ideology or party, were undermining American interests—by bringing low-skilled workers to our shores, by building factories in other lands, by letting international financial institutions grow rich while hollowing out American cities and towns.

“We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon,” Trump said in his inaugural address. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be—always—America First.”

To be clear: Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller would angrily wave away any suggestion that they are echoing the sentiments of anti-democratic political movements, much less anti-Semitic dog whistles. But there is no evading the unhappy reality that to label someone a “cosmopolitan” carries with it a clear implication that there is something less patriotic, less loyal … someone who is not a “real American.”

So maybe the next time Miller wants to duel with an obstreperous reporter, he might consider going back to “elitist”—that’s a real homegrown insult.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/08/03/the-ugly-history-of-stephen-millers-cosmopolitan-epithet-215454

[IAMX 3,055]

2 minutes ago, Il Mango Dulce said:

is the statue of liberty one of the mods?  

Its the law of the land. 

 

[Amica Nostra 4,803]

6 minutes ago, CaliCat said:

 

Isn't it ironic that most people who want to immigrate to America are not familiar with Emma Lazarus' poem? 

is she Venezuelan ?