The Conservative Case for Trump

Phyllis Schlafly, Ed Martin, Brett M. Decker

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781621576303
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Gouvernement américain

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

CHAPTER 1

Immigration Invasion

The first thing we need to do is secure our southern border—and we need to do it now. We have to stop the flood, and the best way to do that is to build a wall.

—Donald J. Trump

It is important to be clear from the start: The prime motivation behind the Left’s support for open borders is not to welcome the oppressed or throw open the doors of opportunity to the huddled masses yearning for a better life. It is a systematic effort to reshape the demographics of the American electorate for benefit of the Democratic Party. The model is California, which, largely through immigration, has been transformed from the “Reagan Country” I well remember to the majority minority far left state it is today, where for the first time in California history, there will not even be a Republican candidate for an open United States Senate seat in November 2016. The choice will be between two liberal Democrats.

The effort to transform America started with Ted Kennedy whose 1965 Immigration Act shifted immigration away from European countries in favor of immigrants from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In doing so, he helped move immigration away from countries that shared—actually created—America’s Western values. Taking their place were immigrants who would help make a more “multicultural” America that liberals could play to their advantage.

“Liberals not only engineered this policy shift but became the chief architects of a taboo against any critical scrutiny of immigration trends and policy, always ready to apply a ‘racist’ label to dissenters,” wrote Otis Graham Jr. in The Christian Science Monitor.¹

Immigration that is in America’s national interest is one thing. Immigration that floods our welfare rolls and prisons, and that tears apart our nation’s heritage and social fabric is something else.

In the past, immigrants came to America and were grateful for the opportunities they found here, and they accepted American history as a great, inspiring story of patriots and heroes. Now, thanks to the Left, they often view American history as a racist story of “white privilege” and oppression that only big government can undo, where they are entitled to “free” government programs, and in which lawlessness can be justified against allegedly “racist” Republicans. The rioters at Trump rallies who burn American flags, wave foreign ones, and beat up Trump supporters is a vision of what America could become, all with the blessing of the Democratic Party that sees immigration, and the political correctness that prohibits us from talking honestly about immigration, as a way to transform America in the leftist direction that it wants. For decades, the American people have wanted our government to address the crisis of illegal immigration; and yet our government hasn’t, except to make matters worse by not enforcing our existing immigration laws, winking at “sanctuary” cities, expanding illegal immigrants’ access to social services, and floating proposals for “amnesty” that would grant illegal immigrants citizenship. A poll in the autumn of 2015 found that 61 percent of Americans believe “continued immigration into the country jeopardizes the United States.”² This is the majority that until now, until Donald Trump, has been left largely voiceless in our halls of government.

“A country that doesn’t control its borders can’t survive,” Trump says. “We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own.”³ That must change. Trump has a detailed action plan to address the immigration crisis which is undergirded by these three core principles:⁴

• A nation without borders is not a nation. There must be a wall across the southern border.
• A nation without laws is not a nation. Laws passed in accordance with our Constitutional system of government must be enforced.
• A nation that does not serve its own citizens is not a nation. Any immigration plan must improve jobs, wages, and security for all Americans.

TRUMP’S PLAN

Trump’s immigration plan hits the problem from all angles. His comprehensive approach includes the following initiatives:

• Build a wall along our southern border and make Mexico pay for it. He proposes that the cost can be covered by increasing existing border fees, raising the price for temporary visas, impounding remittance payments from illegal immigrants, cutting our foreign aid to Mexico, levying tariffs on Mexican products coming into our country, or by convincing the Mexican government that their paying for the wall is a condition of continuing to maintain good relations with the United States.
• Triple the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers working on the border. There are only five thousand ICE officers protecting our nation’s borders—and they are spread across all fifty states, and the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico. That is half the size of the police force in Los Angeles, but ICE is expected to handle 11 million illegals.
• Pass nationwide e-verify. This system guarantees that American employers hire only American citizens or legal immigrants.
• Mandatory return of all criminal aliens. The Obama Administration has released 76,000 aliens with criminal convictions since 2013 alone. That’s typical of an administration that seems to care little about protecting the American people. That would change under President Donald Trump, with the American government withholding visas from countries that won’t take back their own criminals.
• Detention—not catch-and-release. Under Trump’s plan, illegal aliens apprehended crossing the border would be detained until they could be sent home, no more nonsensical catch-and-release.
• Defund sanctuary cities. Trump would cut-off federal grants to any city that refuses to cooperate with federal law enforcement.
• End birthright citizenship for anchor babies.
• Enhanced penalties for overstaying a visa. Trump would address the problem of the millions of people who come to the United States on temporary visas, and stay. Trump would strengthen the criminal penalties for visa violators and complete the visa tracking system that is required by law but that has been blocked by lobbyists.

Trump has been particularly forceful with his plainspoken affirmation that illegal immigration is illegal and that, “America will only be great as long as America remains a nation of laws according to the Constitution. No one is above the law”—though liberal Democrats routinely act as if illegal immigrants are above the law and deserving of nearly every right held by a legal American citizen or resident.

Donald Trump launched his campaign in June 2015 by recognizing that Mexico had sent some of its worst criminals, murderers, and rapists⁵ to live here illegally. Another truth that few politicians have dared utter is that illegal immigrants perpetrate a hugely disproportionate number of serious crimes, with the estimated 3.5 percent of the population that is here illegally responsible for 36.7 percent of federal sentences in 2014. As Caroline May reported at Breitbart. com: “Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.”⁶

But for most Americans, unaware of these statistics, a series of tragic stories in the news highlighted how Trump was right, including most especially the July 1, 2015, murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco by a seven-time convicted felon illegal alien;⁷ the July 24, 2015, rape and murder of Marilyn Pharis⁸ in her home in Santa Maria, California, by an illegal immigrant who had been arrested no less than six times in the previous fifteen months; and the July 29, 2015, murders of Jason and Tana Shane in Montana and the near-deadly shooting of their daughter by an immigrant who had been allowed into the country under our current lax immigration standards.⁹

Trump has shown the courage of his convictions. Though attacked by the liberal media and by the Left for his criticism of our broken immigration system, he has not backed down. “The countries south of us are not sending us their best people,” he has reiterated. “The bad people are coming from places other than just Mexico. They’re coming from all over Central and South America, and they’re coming probably from the Middle East . . . This flow of illegal immigrants into this country is one of the most serious problems we face. It’s killing us.”¹⁰ Trump’s bold stance on immigration has given voters the hope that something might finally be done, in a constructive way, about one of the most pressing issues facing this country.

SANCTUARY CITIES

Donald Trump’s campaign has shined a national spotlight on the growing problem of “sanctuary cities” that shelter illegal aliens from deportation. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, there are more than 350 jurisdictions in the United States that flout the law by prohibiting the arrest of illegals within their borders.¹¹ The tragedy of Kate Steinle, who died in the arms of her father after being shot by an illegal alien, in a tourist area of San Francisco, is that her death was preventable, yet officials have defiantly defended their irresponsible sanctuary policies.

It wasn’t only the city and county of San Francisco that released the seven-times-convicted, five-times-deported Mexican who killed Kate Steinle; Obama’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement let him go, too. ICE has released many thousands of criminal aliens onto unsuspecting local communities instead of returning them to their countries of origin, including 121 who were subsequently charged with murdering Americans between 2011 and 2015. According to government figures compiled by Jessica Vaughan, more than 8,100 deportable aliens (including three thousand felons) were released by sanctuary cities and counties in just the first eight months of 2014, and that number keeps growing since President Obama has ordered federal officials to lay off illegals.¹² Some 1,900 of those wrongly released aliens have already re-offended 4,300 more times, racking up 7,800 new charges including murder, violent assault, rape, and child rape.

The first local sanctuary policy was officially adopted more than thirty years ago. Since then, hundreds of cities and counties have adopted one or more sanctuary policies, such as: refusing to inquire about immigration status when making a traffic stop or other routine police work; refusing to report a subject’s unlawful status to the appropriate federal agency (now called ICE); or refusing to honor a “detainer,” which is a written request to detain a subject until ICE can deport him. Bills to stop local sanctuary policies were introduced in Congress and state legislatures, but they all wilted under pressure from amnesty advocates, such as businesses dependent on cheap foreign labor.¹³ The U.S. House of Representatives finally approved a bill last year to withhold certain federal reimbursements from sanctuary municipalities, but the promise of a presidential veto assures that even this minor reform will never become law.

Headlines proclaim that Republicans voted to “crack down” on sanctuary cities, but nothing will change unless the restrictions are folded into a mustpass appropriations bill.¹⁴ Washington, D.C., for example, remains a sanctuary city even though Congress has the constitutional power “to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever” over our nation’s capital. Local sanctuary policies protect thousands from deportation, but the real damage is done at the federal level. Policies instituted by the administration of Barack Obama have effectively given sanctuary to millions, thanks to Obama’s wholesale refusal to enforce our nation’s immigration laws. Take Obama’s November 2014 executive amnesty, which would have given legal status and work permits (including Social Security numbers) to approximately 5 million of the estimated 11 million illegal aliens. A brave federal judge blocked the work permits, but the 5 million still benefit from Obama’s decision to give them a low enforcement priority, another form of sanctuary. Obama recently extended lower-priority enforcement to several million more people, and approximately 87 percent of the illegal population—all but 1.4 million of the 11 million—are basically home free, as if the United States is now the sanctuary for the whole world.

Don’t assume that illegal immigration has stopped just because the official estimate of illegal population has remained steady at 11 to 12 million for a decade. Illegal immigration (which includes people who enter legally but don’t go home when their visas expire) continues unabated at the rate of one thousand people per day. During the first six and a half years of the Obama administration, the country took in another 2.5 million illegals. The official numbers have stayed stable by factoring in estimates of “self-deportation” where former illegals have returned across the border. Legal immigration is itself a giant factor in America’s demographic change. America accepts more than 1.1 million legal immigrants every year. The Census Bureau estimates that “net migration” will bring 14 million new immigrants to the United States during the next ten years. Shouldn’t we have some say over our demographic future, of what America is and will become? Shouldn’t we have an immigration policy that serves America’s national interests? In Europe we have seen the danger of large unassimilated Islamic communities making historic changes in countries and their future; yet we seem blind to similar changes happening here.

Of all Obama’s sanctuary policies, probably the worst is his vast expansion of refugee and asylum policies. Largely unnoticed by national media, tens of thousands of so-called refugees, mostly from Muslim countries, are being resettled all over the United States. The United States now receives more refugees than all other countries combined and plops them down in what are called “seed communities” where local opposition is not tolerated. There’s even a special federal program to combat “pockets of resistance” such as an uproar in Twin Falls, Idaho, where the U.S. gover...